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| Topic Started: Wednesday, 25. April 2012, 23:47 (535 Views) | |
| James | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 18:07 Post #31 |
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James
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Which brings me to ask a question. I have little or no knowledge in the technical side of music but do love the sound - including Mozart. Come along a bit from the old Irish country , which I still like , by the way, and still appreciate the old country woman who, for the life of her, could not understand why "Galway Bay" was not accepted as a right for the Irish nomination to the "euravision song contest" - Ah those were the days ! However the point I want to be educated on is this (1) A great composer will compose a piece of music with a certain emotion or theme in mind. (2) Many will say that you must understand what was going through the composers head when composing in order to appreciate the piece . (3) However, on the receiving end, many will be drawn to tears by the sound and from their own experience without any knowledge of the composers feelings. The transmitter and the receiver are on different wavelenghts - but the sound overides both. How then does one interpret music sound to say it has overtones of say "freemasonary" in it for example. Can this be done or is it part of the study of music. Or perhaps the libretto does that and people assume the sound must do the same. I can also appreciate Gerry's point that terrible lyrics may be accompanied by brilliant musicians. But can music be interprated purely on the composers side - if you follow. Way off topic but interested ( in passing only so as not to gat off topic) in opinion of those with some knowledge. James Edited by James, Saturday, 28. April 2012, 18:14.
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| Gerard | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 18:19 Post #32 |
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I am not an expert but do love music. I would say this was not really possible. One could make a case that in cultural terms certain music sounds were associated with certain things but that is only a cultural association. Easily dissociated and meaningless to another culture. The music stands by itself. One of the joys of music is that the hearer interprets it in their own head. Lyrics is a different matter. Gerry |
| "The institutional and charismatic aspects are quasi coessential to the Church's constitution" (Pope John Paul II, 1998). | |
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| James | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 18:24 Post #33 |
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James
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Thanks Gerry, |
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| OsullivanB | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 19:29 Post #34 |
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James, many books have been written about the questions you ask. The earliest writer I know who took such questions seriously is Plato. Let me try a few examples to illustrate my thinking about it. We have almost certainly all heard Handel's anthem "Zadok, the Priest". If we heard it without being able to distinguish the words (which is often the case with choral music, many of us would recognise it as an exhilarating, joyous, outburst of sound. If we hear the words, we might get to a second level of meaning. That would depend in part on our familiarity with the Old Testament and perhaps the way in which language is used in the King James Version. If we know (or perhaps remember from 1953) that it was sung at the Coronation, that might add a further level or even further levels of meaning, patriotic and/or personal. If we know that it is sung at the moment of anointing, that may add yet a further level(s) of appreciation, patriotic and/or religious. If we know that it was composed for the coronation of George II, that might add a level of historical understanding. If we know that it has been sung at every coronation of an English monarch since that one in 1727m something more may be added to the experience. An understanding of the technical qualities of the composition amy take us to yet a further level, probably of admiration. (If nothing else, it always brings home to me that for music of the period you can't for my money beat the sound of trumpets). To move to another realm of musical experience, when I hear the last three Beethoven piano sonatas, I think they stand as proof (if there were no other) of the existence of God. That music could come from nowhere else. I find them even more astonishing when I recall that Beethoven never heard a note of them, due to his complete deafness by the time he composed them. Moving on once more, for a prolonged look at what sublime eternity may be like, I find nothing closer than the slow movement of the Schubert string quintet. Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps was written for the very unusual (though not unprecedented) combination of piano, clarinet, violin and cello. It is a remarkable piece of music in its own right. But I think the experience of listening to it is much enhanced by the knowledge that it was written in 1941 in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and first performed out of doors in the rain before an audience of fellow prisoners and their gurads. The reason for the unusual combination of instruments is that those were the perfomers amonghis fellow prisoners. In each case, the primary value of the music is the piece itself, but the more you know about at least some aspects of the context the grreater the opportunity for an enriched musical experience. Finally, an atheist listening to a great Dies Irae (say that by Verdi, probably an unbeliever) will have no chance of having the same experience as a Catholic (assuming the Catholic understands the words or at least the gist). I could go on and on. In painting a great painting yields much more to someone with than someone without an understanding of the iconography. That is especially true of religious paintings, but to tke a secular example what could one make of Picasso's Guernica without knowing what happened there and why he painted it? |
| "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer | |
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| OsullivanB | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 19:32 Post #35 |
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As for The Magic Flute, the music given to Sarastro is plainly in the realm of spiritual mystery. |
| "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer | |
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| Gerard | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 19:43 Post #36 |
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Bernard, But it is all subjective is it not? It is what the hearer interprets. I doubt very much that Beethoven would speak to me of God or Heaven, and the eternity you experience would probably bore me so much that it did feel like an eternity. (The Classical and Romantic periods are not my thing - Baroque is) Gerry |
| "The institutional and charismatic aspects are quasi coessential to the Church's constitution" (Pope John Paul II, 1998). | |
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| OsullivanB | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 19:51 Post #37 |
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Handel's pretty Baroque, and I spent most of my post on him. I understood James's question not to be whether messages were built into music for automatice reception, but whether meswsages intended by the composer could be received by listeners (not necessarily all listeners and certainly not people who don't even listen). Most composers compose for an audience that knows the context in which they are hearing the work. In other words they are speaking to the listener in a language which is taken to be a common language. If you don't like Classical or Romantic music, then, of course, you won't hear in Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert what an admirer does. But that is no more useful than me acknowledging that I would get nothing at all from a Schiller or a Goethe play performed as written, since I don't speak or understand German While there will always be an element of subjectivity, that subjectivity can only be brought to the experience if the language of the experience has been learnt. However, fascinating though this is, perhaps we should go back to the topic at some point. |
| "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer | |
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| OsullivanB | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 20:00 Post #38 |
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That has led me to a question that I find very interesting and which has never occurred to me before. In Latin "liber" the noun means book (so, through Italian, libretto, a little book, "library" etc.). "Liber" the adjective means free (so, eventually we get "liberals", "liberty" etc,). I wonder how the two identical stems came to have such different meanings. If anyone knows, I'd really like to be told. I have a huge authoritative Greek-English dictionary, which would be likely to infrom me about such an oddity if it were in that language, but my comparable Latin volume was destroyed in a flood, and is very expensive to replace. |
| "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer | |
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| OsullivanB | Saturday, 28. April 2012, 21:04 Post #39 |
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Talking of the question of subjectivity, is the response to the message of Jesus subjective? If not, why doesn't everyone answer it? |
| "There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance - that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Herbert Spencer | |
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3:41 PM Jul 11