# Does music evoke mental images for you? Or is it just itself? Or a bit of both?



## Steve Wright (Mar 13, 2015)

I've been hugely enjoying getting to know Bruckner's 4th Symphony - even more so since learning its programmatic elements, all knights, castles and derring-do. 
I know that sounds a bit corny but those images come to me vividly while listening - particularly the 3rd Movement with its heroic brass fanfares, evoking knights on a forest hunt or (depending on what you read) a mediaeval joust. 




Other evocations for me? For some reason the second, slow movement of Brahms' 4th always suggests an evening trip across a large lake, with lights from lakeside houses twinkling in the gloaming. 




Where does that come from? A novel I've read, an experience... not sure.
Then there are the obvious ones, designed as such, like Schumann's Waldszenen.

Other music I adore, but get no particular images from - e.g. Dvorak 8, Schubert 9, Beethoven 7.

So, do you see mental images when listening to music? Or just revel in the music in and of itself?


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

I've never been able to understand associating music with things that aren't music. I'm able to listen to, enjoy, study, explain, practise, play and rehearse music without any non-musical images or narratives popping into my head. When I learnt the piano years ago my teacher asked me to come up with a story to fit to the music. I was stuck. I could never be convinced that anything other than the music itself could express itself adequately and allow me to interpret it successfully. I find it all very distracting honestly.


----------



## Steve Wright (Mar 13, 2015)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I've never been able to understand associating music with things that aren't music. I'm able to listen to, enjoy, study, explain, practise, play and rehearse music without any non-musical images or narratives popping into my head. When I learnt the piano years ago my teacher asked me to come up with a story to fit to the music. I was stuck. I could never be convinced that anything other than the music itself could express itself adequately and allow me to interpret it successfully. I find it all very distracting honestly.


Very interesting, and I have an inkling that many on here will agree with you - the music is glorious enough on its own without having associations tacked onto it. 
And I can certainly see the wisdom and rightness of that. I can only say that the mental images that come into my head during, e.g. Bruckner 4 don't, I think, lessen the purely musical pleasure I derive from it. Perhaps they even increase it.
Must be lots of fascinating insights into how different brains work, latent in all this...


----------



## Heliogabo (Dec 29, 2014)

Well, last saturday I went to a concert, the first piece was Sibelius´s Valse triste, which didn´t was a new work to me. But when I heard it, I tought for the fist time: "this is like dancing with death". That´s the image that came to me, a dance with death. At the end of the concert, when I read the program notes, I learned that, as a matter of fact, Sibelius wrote that piece for a theatrical score, and precisely for a scene where a woman dances with death before dying. I was really surprised and touched by this experience.


----------



## superhorn (Mar 23, 2010)

You cannot divorce music from the extra-musical . This is impossible . Many works do not have specific programs , but they certainly have expressive character, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with people saying they evoke certain thoughts and images in their minds .
Even Stravinsky ,w ho famously insisted on the purely abstract nature of music, wrote some graphically illustrative music, particularly in The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring . His mus9ic contradicts his claims . 
Of course, the same work may evoke different perceptions in the minds of different people , but there is nothing wrong with this .


----------



## D Smith (Sep 13, 2014)

superhorn said:


> You cannot divorce music from the extra-musical . This is impossible .


Well, it's not impossible for me, sorry. I just finished listening to Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto performed beautifully by Joyce Yang and there were no pictures or images associated with it, just glorious, uplifting music, food for the soul.


----------



## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

I am often a visual thinker. With music the visions are usually abstract, like gestures of light hanging in the air or of someone waving a pen light in a long exposure photograph, the wavy lines sort of following the up and down path of the notes. There is not much in the way of color, so no synesthesia for me. 

Occasionally if the music is haunting enough, I go all Lovecraftian and picture surreal alien plains or lost crystal cities where unknown sirens call from just over the horizon luring me into times undreamed of. I think I have posted stuff about this before. The piece has to be really special in order to evoke that mental state.


----------



## KirbyH (Jun 30, 2015)

This is going to sound a bit (alright, perhaps a lot) out there but the second movement of Mahler's Second Symphony has always reminded me of sailing.

Everything starts out calm and tranquil, nice, easy, breezy - and then a storm comes up and tosses the boat about as the music builds, and then everything calms back down.

Go figure.


----------



## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

This is partly an individual matter. For some people, perceptions in one sensory mode readily suggest images in another sensory mode. For others there seems to be no tendency toward this. But music itself can be more or less suggestive of visual or other nonmusical images. As the sonic vocabulary of music expanded in form, harmony and orchestral color, composers exploited the pictorial suggestiveness of music more and more, and in the 19th century explicitly programmatic music, intentionally evocative, became quite popular, while even much music from that period without an explicit program sounds as if it might have a hidden one, or at least an extramusical source of inspiration. 

I can't recall getting any visual stimulus from any of Haydn's symphonies, despite charming nicknames like "military" and "the hen," but I find it impossible to listen to Beethoven's "Pastoral," Mendelssohn's "Scottish," or Berlioz's "Fantastique" symphonies without strong visual impressions more specific than their mere titles might suggest. To my ear, Berlioz and Wagner, more than any other composers, opened up music's capacity for extra-musical suggestiveness, and few composers who followed them up until the Neoclassicism and 12-tone works of the 20th century resisted that tendency. Brahms and Bruckner were probably the most notable examples of composers who upheld the validity of "absolute" music, and even their music, partaking of the sounds common to music of their time, is bound to summon some extramusical associations for those susceptible to such.

Ultimately we all react to music's sounds in our personal ways, regardless of the intentions of the composers. If "la Mer" doesn't suggest the sea to us, no one ought to tell us we're wrong - and if it does, no one ought to tell us that we should "just hear it as music." What music "is" has as much to do with the listener's experience of it as it does with putting sounds together, and when sounds are put together there's no predicting what can happen in the listening mind.


----------



## ArtMusic (Jan 5, 2013)

ComposerOfAvantGarde said:


> I've never been able to understand associating music with things that aren't music. I'm able to listen to, enjoy, study, explain, practise, play and rehearse music without any non-musical images or narratives popping into my head. When I learnt the piano years ago my teacher asked me to come up with a story to fit to the music. I was stuck. I could never be convinced that anything other than the music itself could express itself adequately and allow me to interpret it successfully. I find it all very distracting honestly.


Try Beethoven's symphony #6. Simple.


----------



## Morimur (Jan 23, 2014)

When I was younger I would very often associate music with specific imagery. Now that I am older and slightly less ridiculous (I hope), I just focus on the music itself — no need to imagine dumb ****.


----------



## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

If there is an obvious program, then it does; mostly it doesn't seem to.


----------



## Scififan (Jun 28, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> This is partly an individual matter. For some people, perceptions in one sensory mode readily suggest images in another sensory mode. For others there seems to be no tendency toward this. But music itself can be more or less suggestive of visual or other nonmusical images. As the sonic vocabulary of music expanded in form, harmony and orchestral color, composers exploited the pictorial suggestiveness of music more and more, and in the 19th century explicitly programmatic music, intentionally evocative, became quite popular, while even much music from that period without an explicit program sounds as if it might have a hidden one, or at least an extramusical source of inspiration.
> 
> I can't recall getting any visual stimulus from any of Haydn's symphonies, despite charming nicknames like "military" and "the hen," but I find it impossible to listen to Beethoven's "Pastoral," Mendelssohn's "Scottish," or Berlioz's "Fantastique" symphonies without strong visual impressions more specific than their mere titles might suggest. To my ear, Berlioz and Wagner, more than any other composers, opened up music's capacity for extra-musical suggestiveness, and few composers who followed them up until the Neoclassicism and 12-tone works of the 20th century resisted that tendency. Brahms and Bruckner were probably the most notable examples of composers who upheld the validity of "absolute" music, and even their music, partaking of the sounds common to music of their time, is bound to summon some extramusical associations for those susceptible to such.
> 
> Ultimately we all react to music's sounds in our personal ways, regardless of the intentions of the composers. If "la Mer" doesn't suggest the sea to us, no one ought to tell us we're wrong - and if it does, no one ought to tell us that we should "just hear it as music." What music "is" has as much to do with the listener's experience of it as it does with putting sounds together, and when sounds are put together there's no predicting what can happen in the listening mind.


Thanks for that astute and valuable reflection. I think you are spot on.

Speaking personally, Images often spring spontaneously into my mind when I listen to certain works and they vary enormously. Some are purely abstract--others more concrete.


----------



## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

ArtMusic said:


> Try Beethoven's symphony #6. Simple.


I like the piece very much, a brilliant piece of music. What's your point?


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Music evokes thought process in me. This can be gestural, related to movement, or gestural speech, or some action, like walking. It's part of being human, in this physical body.

It can be emotional, or evoke states of being. It can mimic thought patterns. It can be sensual. It can be visual and spatial.


----------



## Adam Weber (Apr 9, 2015)

In most cases, no. Often it brings out emotions in me, wells of feeling. I respond best to music that deepens my current moods or indulges certain shifting peculiarities of thought. However, some music does for me evoke images, especially when the composer lays it out before hand, such as in a tone-poem: I can't help but see mountains when listening to Strauss or recall passages in Nietzsche. Likewise, Mahler, though mostly absolute in my mind, does not fail on numerous occasions to bring out something colorful and pictorial into my head, like a meadow, or a lake, or a summer storm; these images are sparsely flashing, however, and I know that to reduce a symphony to cows in a meadow is a reductive and not conducive to a fuller appreciation of the work. Seeing as I lack any concrete musical knowledge, this deeper understanding is for me emotive in nature, a seeking to find and bind the strands of my life that a piece brings out, and a tying them together into a unified sort of experience. On Strauss, again, if I listen to the Four Last Songs, I reflect on death and transcendence, preferably in a Jungian or Nietzschean way, as might be appropriate to the texts. It's very fun, though I've probably succeeded in doing nothing but bungling my expression of what is really an ineffable inner sensation. I'm likely verging close to incoherence. 

Dang it... 

How about this: 

I relate the music to emotions which I then relate to philosophical concepts. 

That's what I mean.


----------



## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

As I wrote on another thread, music generally does evoke a vague sense of color, shape and space for me, but rarely mental images in the sense of the OP here.

There are exceptions, however, if a particular piece has a strong association with a particular time in my life - it may then call up images from that time.


----------



## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

No images, not ever. decades back, some music would instigate a vague storyline, but now not so much.


----------



## GreenMamba (Oct 14, 2012)

Any sense of color or imagery I sense inevitably matches the CD cover artwork.


----------



## Creatio (Jul 2, 2015)

I have some images or sceneries in my mind sometimes. But they correspond with emotions that the music evokes in me. Classicaly.


----------



## papsrus (Oct 7, 2014)

brotagonist said:


> If there is an obvious program, then it does; mostly it doesn't seem to.


I'm kind of in this camp.

I tend to _try_ to approach a piece of music on the artist's terms, as much as possible. If the composer meant for the music to evoke certain images, then I will open myself to those images as a way of trying to immerse myself in the composer's vision (no pun intended) for the piece.

Opera is another instance where certain visuals are intended to accompany the music, obviously. Particularly if you've attended a performance and seen the visuals, it's easy to conjure those images up while listening to a recording of the same opera later.

This does not mean that one can't listen to program music or opera in purely musical terms. But it does raise the question of whether doing so somehow diminishes the artist's intent.

I tend to think not. A piece of music should/will go wherever it takes the listener, I suppose, regardless of artistic intent.


----------



## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

Not so much with classical music, but I do get "images" a bit from ambient and electronic music. Not static images, more like vague flashes. If there is imagery at all, it's only a small part of a much bigger feeling of being someplace undefinable and intangible. So, nothing really specific.


----------

