BEST SCORES OF 2008

You can take the boy out of editing...



To me any piece of music that needs to be explained to be appreciated isn't worth having been composed in the first place.

Of the top scores I've chosen this year and judging by what I think I know of your taste, the only ones I would recommend (that you haven't heard) are The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, Afrika and Defiance.

I said I appreciated it MORE, not that I appreciated it for the first time.

Hmmmm...

Actually, what you are saying is a widely accepted consensus for modern music criticism. Phillip Glass made a comment on the subject in his biography (which I haven't read myself) through recalling his student days at Juilliard and attending new music concerts. People would come confused out of the concert venues assuring one another of that "its actually better than it sounds".

But your notion depends on whether or not music can be "explained" in the first place, which I believe it can't. Even our most advanced poetry or elaborate metaphoric methods of naming our inner life and feelings can't come close to "explaining" music, whether the music in question is the simplest of folk songs or contemporary "avant garde". I'm sure many agree with this theory, because if it were possible then what on earth would we need music for in the first place? In the words of Leonard Bernstein, music "names the unnamable".

But this does not dismiss the art and value of music critique or music analysis. Through a verbal rationalisation of our concerns for the art we are first and foremost manifesting our own philosophy, but at the same time challenging and (potentially) broadening that of others. It is a means of education, the continuing school of life. We are never fully educated and should always be open to new impulses. In my previous post I was not attempting to "explain" any artistic value within the piece, I was describing the "structure" and thereby acknowledgeing a change of direction in the composer's musical thinking. The fact that I also expressed and shared my own appreciation of the piece is the inevitable result of how music is a subjective experience by nature, and intranslatable to matters of psycological truth.

However, I do agree with your notion to a certain degree. During the middle of the previous century many serialists believed that their compositional methods alone valified their results. In other words, that the means justified the ends. This way, the music would need to be studied to be appreciated. But even then the appreciation was often based on a graphical perception of the score itself, and not through direct interaction with its "musical" result. Which brings us to the subject of program music, or film music for that matter.

The question of whether music is compatible with an extramusical content or context, or whether it exists purely in its own right. The notion "music that needs to be explained to be appreciated isn't worth having been composed in the first place" could suggest that all music concieved to unyieldingly follow an already existing audiovisual content (film music), and that is in need of an extramusical explanation to create the illusion of coherence and manifest structural intention, isn't worth having been composed. The notion could certainly implicate this outcome, but depends on the interpreter's viewpoint towards the nature of program music itself.

Wow, the paragraphing must have really done the trick then!

(steal all you want, but you should know many of the things I write are free interpretations of things I've first read elsewhere, f. ex. "Rethinking Music" by Cook/Everest)

Musical analysis of a piece of music, or a study of the social and personal background of the person that wrote it, the reason it was written for and also in the context of the social and historical background at the time of the composition and its influence upon the very piece, can open horizons on the same piece of music you've been listening all along, that you'd never imagine.

But as everything in life, it requires balance. If you write a musical piece only to live on paper and via complex mathematical analysis or score sketches (as noted above in a previous post by Mark) just for the sake of this or if you over-analyze musical pieces just for the sake of deep examination, you might kill it and whatever meaning it has behind it as well.

Yeah, Stop Loss is far better!

Pah! Go back to your Haslinger!
(Hey, it's catching on! )

'Cause of ....... ?

(choose one or combi)

Lolcats
Loljuicybabes
simply girls
insanely VAST number of travels
maintitles
programming
website-building
booze
looza
Martijn

?

Most defenitely this one. One of our most problematic members. His lolcats obsession is beyond everything I've ever seen.

Martijn, thank you for your sincere reply and well founded arguments. You should know that my previous post was initially meant as an act of self defence, in that I felt slightly offended by the fact that your earlier post seemed to have been aimed at my comments on Williams' "Adventures of Mutt". But during my philosophical rabbling I ended up broadening the subject matter quite a bit further than I had intended. Still, I would like to address some of the assertions and questions you raise concerning my previous post.




I certainly understand the logic of what you are saying, but disagree with it wholeheartedly. In my somewhat idealistic way of thinking, any act of creativity is artistic. Whether it be writing a novel, composing a symphony, or comparing the art of writing a novel to that of composing a symphony. In my mind these are all inspired by the same needs for creative expression.




My unwise and confusing employement of the term "psycological truth" came to me by intuition (in lack of a more specific way to verbalize my opinion) after having recently read, and found myself partially disagreeing with, an excerpt from Susanne Langer's "Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling":

"Since art is an objectification of feeling, whereby men have percieved and recognized its rhythms and complexities and scope since time immerorial, it is not unreasonable to expect some formulation of psychological basic facts to come from art."




Exactly, and I believe this is somewhat related to the heteronomous concerns for musicology Demetris was expressing.




To illustrate this next point, I'll use the animated series "South Park" as an example:

In the first season of South Park, the character Kenny was consistantly being "killed off" in every single episode, to then be brought back in the next without any explanation. This is of course, a joke. But then, in one particular episode as we are closing towards the end and Kenny hasn't "died" yet, the character Cartman expresses his concern for "something missing", "something not being complete". Kenny is shivering of fear and characteristically hides himself in his hood. Then the end titles begin and he lifts his arms up in the air in celebration and yells "woo-hoo!"

My point here is that in order to understand and appreciate that particular joke, one needs to be aquainted with the gereral formula most episodes of South Park are based on.

Likewise, in a classical concerto, there are both variations and deviations towards structural formula that can not be percieved or appreciated without an aquaintance to the framework and history of that particular form. For example, in the last movement of Mozart's 27th and final piano concerto in Bb flat major, the soloist's cadenza ends conventionally through a trill on the dominant chord (this obligatory trill has the practical function of hinting the orchestra to get ready to start playing again), but then surprisingly continues into a recapitulation without the presence of the orchestra!

Here, Mozart is fooling us. He is wanting us to believe that the cadenza has not yet ended, and that the inevitable reappearance of the orchestra is yet to come. But then he continues to cleverly insert faint, pianissimo string chords four bars later, as if to say "haha - I fooled you!"

This is a kind of musical joke one can nor percieve or appreciate without an aquaintance to the form and history of the genre. Perhaps it is only a minor curiosity for the listener compared to the musical richness of Mozart's masterpiece at large, but the fact remains that extramusical considerations often do in fact contribute to the shaping of a listener's musical experience - in that it can provoke comparisons, and help stimulate thought and reflection about the work in question.

These extramusical considerations could also be of an either personal, sociological, or even political nature. The formalistic philosophy of that there is an absolute distinction between art and the world at large, and that art is comparable only to the "universal" element or "devinity" itself has for the most part been abandoned in modern musicology for a more realistic approach. However, this is an enourmous subject that unfortunately deserves more elaboration than I find myself capable of providing at the present time.




For the record I am in complete agreement with you here. As I already explained, the assertion you are questioning depends on how one interprets the very nature of program music. Whether it's extramusical content functions merely as a curiosity for the listener compared to the unique possibilities of vivid metaphorical expression music alone is in posession of - or if it is in fact crucial to the experience that one establishes context between the two mediums. I believe both cases are possible.

Interesting points. I too believe (like Mark) that both cases are possible. I haven't yet concluded whether Martijn is actually dismissing completely the possible enhancement of the overall experience caused by any extra-musical meta-data, or if he's just diminishing its value, but i want to ask him this:

We all listen to the same things in completely different ways, based on personal musical database, experiences, age, cultural / religion and personal background etc etc. Furthermore, a musician listens to the same piece even more differently and the same goes for a musicologist, who's often on a different level than both the musican and the casual listener.

Would you suggest that the musical knowledge of the operation, usage and musicianship behind a / the musical instrument(s) a musician possesses don't actually enhance his perception and his overall musical experience, on a different level than the average listener?

On the other hand, would you suggest that the knowledge behind the form of the piece, the era it was written in and the musical era / style it is classified in, the composer who wrote it and the piece's background and structure don't actually further enhance and change the musicologist's perception and overall musical experience?

Forget the musicologist, I would hope that much information would alter anyone's perception of a piece of music! (Unfortunately, it's only the musicologists - hence their title - that are likely to have that sort of information.)

Great spin-off discussion, guys. I really don't want to intrude at this point, other than to - in usual fashion - point to two FSM threads I did that touch on some of these issues - which may or may not be of interest to you:

From January 24, 2007:

Extra-musical associations

...and an earlier one from December 21, 2001:

Extra-musical that affect your listening