Something to say

[some guy]

I found the following remark on another thread, and since my response to it really belongs over here in Music Philosophy, I've opened up a new thread to accommodate it. (I've put a note in that other thread, so people there can come right on over and bash me here if they like.)

music should have something to say that the listener can relate to

I hear this comment a lot. And it passes, more often than not, without question.

But what does it mean? "...have something to say" is a highly questionable metaphor that implies that music can communicate like language. But what, to get down to specifics, is Grieg's Lyric Suite saying? Or Mendelssohn's fourth symphony? Or... But you get the idea. Any particular piece of music can be "saying" numerous things to different people at different times. (I was recently in conversation with someone who described the early, lyrical violin concerto of Nielsen's as "edgy and harsh.") A piece can mean different things to the same person at different times, for that matter.

As for "can relate to," that's so obviously a matter of training and experience, I'm surprised anyone has the temerity to use it as if it were some sort of touchstone. Well, not really surprised. Appalled. Yeah, that's the word. Someone whose listening has been confined to the Romantics, say, is going to find even such pleasant and charming music as Schoenberg's hard to take. And Cage's Cartridge Music will probably strike that person as not even being music. Someone who listens regularly to Merzbow and Keiji Haino is going to find Schoenberg's most harsh and acerbic serial pieces rather, well, pleasant and charming.

So who could the hypothetical "listener" in that quote actually be? Nobody? Everybody? Or is it not some sort of semantic sleight-of-hand? You really mean "me," when you say that, but since "me" doesn't have quite the weight of "everyone," you say "the listener," and then it appears, unless some smart aleck like me questions it, that you have stated a universal truth. You've done nothing of the sort.

[reith]

Hoping I don't offend the poetic among us, the statement as you've expressed it is vacuous verbiage but ok as small-talk. I suppose it sounds good in a discussion over the contraversial when there's a suspicion of trivia. Or when you're with someone at a party and there's an awkward silence so the other person can nod and smile.

People could use the same statement of television, fine art, film, prose and poetry, in fact, anything that is.


Unforunately music that I can "relate to" in quasi-linguistic terms rarely reaches the mainstream so while it can say something to me it may well speak gibberish to others.

However, I'm not sure about the statement "Music should have something to say..." Why? My little tracks played as the background to an art show a year ago weren't meant to say anything. They just had to fit.


cheers,
reith

[drb967]

I will back track and quote Andy here as this was the original comment I was alluding to:

"to me, instrumental music has to always say something. or else...what is it doing? there is some work out there that seems to try it's best to say nothing comprehendable."


As a composer one should consider an intended audience, for me, personally I do not think it should require and IQ of 180 nor years of training to 'reach' anyone. Granted the 'vocabulary' of any given work is a construct of the composer's culture, training and experiences. I can at an intellectual level appreciate the compositions of 20th century music (for lack of a better term meaning to encompass the expansion of tonality or atonality typically used in music categorized in that "genre"), my grandfather, however, having very little education in general, much less in music specifically would have little or no appreciation for it, nor would he be able to relate to a raga. In reverse someone steeped in the culture of the raga would probably not be as readily reached listening to Bach. Or to use a "pop music" comparision: One that has always listened to country music often has a hard time listening to rap - even if the one listening to country all of the was raised only a city block from the one that is 'rapping';the culture they were raised in maybe much the same but flow of the music form itself just seems unaccessible to them.

We could play semantics with the language about who the "listener" is, be it the composer, one individual, or be it the world at large. To me the "listener" is whomever the piece speaks to a that time, I've listened to works that said nothing at all to me, only to find later (through "training and experience") that something was discernable there that I missed. I do not expect everyone to be able to connect with what I write, but I also do not expect them to be among the 'elite' (those with years of training and with large 'musical vocabularies').

As someguy stated the same piece may say something to someone at one listening and quiet something else at another hearing. That is the reason it is called art- it is all subject to interpretation- if it were constantly the same to everyone it would be like a technical manual dry and lifeless, yet always constant. And reith I would dare say the pieces you wrote for the art show 'fit' because to you at least they were 'saying something' about the art on exhibition- at least on some level, even if they were for the background they music still set a 'tone' (no pun intended) for the atmosphere of the viewing.

[Andy]

Originally Posted by some guy

...have something to say" is a highly questionable metaphor that implies that music can communicate like language. But what, to get down to specifics, is Grieg's Lyric Suite saying?

well let's see...in this example...what did the composer himself say in publishing...(originally for piano in 1891 later orchestrated...)

Lyric Suite

1. Shepherd’s Boy
2. Norwegian Rustic March
3. Notturno (or Nocturne*)
4. March of the Dwarfs (or Trolls*)

obviously intending to say something...no? they all convey images of real and fantasy things and ideas to me... prejudiced by the titles...for sure...but we the 'audience' had no influence over the title nor the works themselves... just an example... the composer imagined the setting...and wrote away...as some of us do.

andy

[chckn8r]

Great thought and discussion!

I don't know if a composer *should* have an obligation to say anything through their music. As it's been alluded to, music will have different meaning for different people.

I see music as a language and a way to communicate, but in a very divergent manner. It's not like spoken/written word or mathematics where (for the most part) they are convergent communication mediums in that the originator intends a specific message and it gets (to some level of success) interpreted accurately by the recipient.

As Andy pointed out, the insertion of titles on music works focuses any intent the composer wanted to convey, but the specifics will all be different depending upon the listener. Take for example, Beethoven's Pastoral - if it were not for Disney's Fantasia, do you think you'd have thought of a fairie landscape when hearing that work? We also don't know if Big Lou even intended that kind of imagery, but it was something that someone at Disney studios "heard" through that music.

Sure, the composer can intend to invoke a feeling / emotion and even paint a scene or story with their music - perhaps helping with a title or even accompanying the music with lyrics/poetry, but as to conveying an exact message, short of getting video to accompany the music, there's not much control a composer has on what the audience will uniformly experience.

Cheers, D

[Andy]

Originally Posted by chckn8r

Great thought and discussion!
Sure, the composer can intend to invoke a feeling / emotion and even paint a scene or story with their music - perhaps helping with a title or even accompanying the music with lyrics/poetry, but as to conveying an exact message, short of getting video to accompany the music, there's not much control a composer has on what the audience will uniformly experience.
=Cheers, D

of course...

therefor they write... we are free to interpret what we hear and transport it wherever we please... in spite of the composers intent. the wonderful thing about music to this humble one, at least.
great discussion....

andy

[some guy]

chkn8r!

I seem to have seen that handle somewheres else... in another forum long away and far ago. Anyway, chkn8r (if that IS your real name), you bring up, as you often do, a very intriguing notion about communication which finally reminded me of something that's been hovering just out of reach ever since I started attending these music forums, and that is something I read by Northrop Frye back in my literary past about meaning. Northrop Frye, for those of you who weren’t studying literature back in the 70s, was an eminent Canadian literary critic.


In The Educated Imagination, he observes that when many people "encounter poems, or even pictures, they treat them exactly as if they were intended to be pieces of more or less disguised information. Their questions are all based on this assumption. What is he trying to get across? What am I supposed to get out of it? ... Why couldn't he have written it in a different way so I could understand him?" He could easily have said "or even music" too, in which case one of the questions could have been "Where is he going with this?"

Of course, no one thinks that music is conveying information. But many people think it's trying to tell stories or describe scenes or express emotions.

For that, I have another zippy comment from Mr. Frye, where he's talking about the difference between "literary and other kinds of writing."

"If we're writing to convey information, or for any practical reason, our writing is an act of will and intention: we mean what we say, and the words we use represent that meaning directly. It's different in literature, not because the poet doesn't mean what he says too, but because his real effort is one of putting words together. What's important is not what he may have meant to say, but what the words themselves say when they get fitted together."

Now there is nothing in music to correspond with words. Not the pitches, not the harmonies, not the rhythms. Nothing. There are a few patterns and shapes that we've assigned meanings to, so we can say of a piece that it's martial or circus-like or soulful or dance-like, but those qualities can hardly be said to inhere in the vibrations. Everyone of course thinks "waltz" when they hear a three-four rhythm with a strong downbeat and two weak upbeats. But must there not have been a time when that was not so? I wonder. And there's always those pieces that include words...

Even so, many people seem perfectly willing to start the mental cameras rolling whenever music plays, relegating musical values to the servitude of a soundtrack. Music for them is merely the catalyst (albeit a very strong and very reliable catalyst) for daydreaming. Perhaps certain trends in the twentieth century never seemed to catch on with the concert-going crowd because there was simply no material in them for drifting off in a cinematic haze. Certainly there's more to music than that!!

The composer's job, I submit, is putting sounds together, sounds that in and of themselves mean nothing, or nothing like what words mean, but sounds that can have powerful effects nonetheless. If a composer has any goal besides making good sounds, surely it should be to pull people out of themselves, to give them something beyond their comfortable and familiar emotions and feelings.

[reith]

Originally Posted by some guy

chkn8r!
In The Educated Imagination, he observes that when many people "encounter poems, or even pictures, they treat them exactly as if they were intended to be pieces of more or less disguised information. Their questions are all based on this assumption. What is he trying to get across? What am I supposed to get out of it? ... Why couldn't he have written it in a different way so I could understand him?" He could easily have said "or even music" too, in which case one of the questions could have been "Where is he going with this?"

I see no problem with this if true. Does it even matter? This is surely a product of culture. People generally like to rationalise the unknown, feel more secure if they can itellectualise...put words to phenomena. I differ. Whether just me I don't know, but I tend to let it happen if it strikes me at all (beyond what's implicit in the title) and if the artist/composer wishes to overlay words in a programme note. Or a critic or musicologist tries to foist his view on me so I always check the author of the note before I read it.

However, the need to try to communicate beyond words has never been in doubt. The extent to which it works will always be debatable. At the simplest level it does. Someone screams...people recognise alarm and prick up their ears.

In a discussion (with no one famous) I had to agree that for about 99% of what needs to be said, words are useless. This is about expressing sensations/experiences. I say "I've got a toothache" but no one else can know exactly what my toothache is like. My best hope is that others have had toothaches with attendant discomforts.

Given a compulsion to express something deeply spiritual, words are useless. Of course, some poets/writers seem to work magic here, and great. For a composer, there's a faint hope that various musical devices exist in the culture to trigger responses parallel to those driving the composer (who may not be fully aware of his intent). Then, the composer's assumptions could be wrong. No matter, the listeners' experiences will individually differ but might fall within some sort of common ground. Minor keys sound sad, solemn or angry to most people depending on how the music proceeds.

People compose. Some write the equivalent of wallpaper; some want to express deeper insights about themselves, their reaction to their environment. Sometimes it's a catharsis, something they have to get off their chest and some feel impelled to present it to an audience...in which case the listener may 'pick up' something, perhaps not what the composer 'felt' but something all the same. If it's a sensation with which the listener is unfamiliar (or takes him out of his comfort zone) he might try to rationalise or dismiss his response.

Of course, no one thinks that music is conveying information. But many people think it's trying to tell stories or describe scenes or express emotions.

For that, I have another zippy comment from Mr. Frye, where he's talking about the difference between "literary and other kinds of writing."

"If we're writing to convey information, or for any practical reason, our writing is an act of will and intention: we mean what we say, and the words we use represent that meaning directly. It's different in literature, not because the poet doesn't mean what he says too, but because his real effort is one of putting words together. What's important is not what he may have meant to say, but what the words themselves say when they get fitted together."

I think I see what he's getting at but I don't agree 100%. By will and intent, we write what we mean but whether a reader extracts that meaning 100% is debatable, which one supposes is why legal documents can get so complicated and so often depend on prior understanding of context.

Even so, many people seem perfectly willing to start the mental cameras rolling whenever music plays, relegating musical values to the servitude of a soundtrack. Music for them is merely the catalyst (albeit a very strong and very reliable catalyst) for daydreaming. Perhaps certain trends in the twentieth century never seemed to catch on with the concert-going crowd because there was simply no material in them for drifting off in a cinematic haze. Certainly there's more to music than that!!

But if the composer's inspiration was a scene, a mood, a story that he translated to music, isn't this conversion back a suitable response (even if the exact details of scene or story don't accord)?

The composer's job, I submit, is putting sounds together, sounds that in and of themselves mean nothing, or nothing like what words mean, but sounds that can have powerful effects nonetheless. If a composer has any goal besides making good sounds, surely it should be to pull people out of themselves, to give them something beyond their comfortable and familiar emotions and feelings.

Except that in basic terms we're talking entertainment here. Some people like adventure, some like to be dragged from the familiar. Other's don't. In fact, some will turn to experiences that reinforce their comfortable lot about which they may actually know very little. The popularity of soaps tends to suggest this.

Nice discussion.

[chckn8r]

Reith & Some Guy - nice dissertations

SG - I generally use the same nick on different boards, so you may have seen me elsewhere. It originates from a co-worker a few years back - usually said with your best Arnold voice.

I don't really know where to jump in on your posts - it'd take me a couple of days to dissect all the quotes and such.

From a listeners standpoint, when listening to music, I don't see anything wrong with imagining scenes, smells, experiences, what have you, with music. Everyone will experience music in different ways and on different levels. Sometimes I get cheezed at myself for being too analytical when listening to music and not letting it evoke what it may.

It's the same with watching films and TV - I can't just watch them without analyzing what the music composer has done to support the film... sometimes missing important plot developments!

Music has been described as "the language of emotion". Although it's never been definitively proven as such, I think there is some basis to that position. Being a film composer, I'm required to supplement a visual medium with a soundtrack that essentially evokes emotion - whether it be evident or non-evident on screen. Music is a very powerful and manipulative tool - you can very easily change the meaning, pacing and intention of a scene in a film with it. If you have a chance to see a film before and after music has been applied, you'll begin to appreciate how much the soundtrack, combined with the other elements of the film add to the experience.

Yes, I do understand that writing music for film is different from writing a stand-alone work in that you're essentially writing music "to spec". It's a collaborative effort with the director of the film to try and interpret his or her emotional intent with each cue.

Now, if on the odd occasion that I actually get to write music for myself, I can't say that I always sit down with an intent to communicate something. Sometimes, yes, I attempt to evoke some sort of response with the music, but the stimulus may be simply a groove, melody, chord progression, etc. that catches my fancy and it gets built from there. I write the music that sounds good to me and if it is enjoyed by the listener, then that's great. What the listener feels or thinks is their own to enjoy.

I don't see what we do as composers as a "job" - there's no directive to uphold or parameters to stay within - we write because we enjoy what we do. Sometimes, it's with a purpose, sometimes not... it's art. If one wants to attach a deeper meaning to the work - whether it be the composer or the listener - then I see nothing wrong with that.

To boil it down, I don't think a composer or a listener is "supposed" to do anything with respect to creating or consuming music.

Cheers, D

[fundrazor]

Reading this thread has communicated something specific to me which I am sure is highly individual but nonetheless valid and true for all that. I found myself thinking about Dead Poets' Society and the foreword to the poetry textbook!

I'm also still trying to come to terms with the concept of "an eminent Canadian literary critic". Contradiction in terms surely?