# How do you follow a "musical argument"?



## Boychev (Jul 21, 2014)

As per Wiki:



> A musical argument is a means of creating tension through the relation of expressive content and musical form
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This leads me to believe that:
1. you could understand pre-Second-Viennese-School music by thinking of it as the development of an argument (verbal argument?);
2. this way of thinking may not apply to dodecaphonic, serialist, (those two are included under "process music", right?) minimalist, and aleatoric music.

I'm having a hard time imagining music that way though. Oftentimes when listening to a concerto, I imagine the whole thing as a sort of "dialogue" between the soloist and the orchestra - is that what this refers to? Or is something along the lines of, say, stating the "premises" of the piece in the beginning, and then over the course of the piece's development examining how they lead to a certain conclusion? Or does it merely refer to counterpoint and how the different voices in a piece relate to each other, in a sort of "dialectic" (i. e. the musical flow is internally contradictory, made up of voices which go in different directions)?

Also why wouldn't this apply to all music? Is it because with, say, indeterminacy, the point is more to explore the possibilities of sound rather than present an idea?

I also recall Stravinsky stating explicitly something along the lines somewhere that many listen to his music but few can follow the musical arguments.


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

There are plenty of musical arguments on this forum. :lol:

But. more seriously, I am not sure the term means anything more than "the development of the piece" that you refer to. So the argument referred to is akin to the argument of an essay or academic paper rather than a dialogue. There are plenty of members here who can address the various ways that musical development can be tackled.


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## Eva Yojimbo (Jan 30, 2016)

Enthusiast is essentially correct. Just as an argument is developed logically, so are most pieces of music. Following the argument means following how themes lead to other themes, are transformed in development, how they go through certain keys or whatever the case may be.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

If the music uses speech-like phrasing, we can detect "gestures" in the music. Then we can start waving our hands in the air, and conducting.


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## MarkW (Feb 16, 2015)

Again, an example of trying to use words to convey something of what music does or tries to do I would agree agree with Enthusiast, and say that the musical "argument" of a piece is merely how the parts fit into a coherent whole that has a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion that stems from them, somehow.


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## Boychev (Jul 21, 2014)

I see, thanks for the clarification!


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

MarkW said:


> Again, an example of trying to use words to convey something of what music does or tries to do I would agree agree with Enthusiast, and say that the musical "argument" of a piece is merely how the parts fit into a coherent whole that has a beginning, a middle, and a conclusion that stems from them, somehow.


I would say that a musical argument is how effective and persuasive the coherency of everything is, just like somebody having a verbal conversation about a particular subject that's trying to be effective and convincing to somebody else. That's what a musical argument is: how convincing it is, and some musical arguments are more convincing than others.


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## DBLee (Jan 8, 2018)

This little video clip deals with some of this in a very simple manner:






The above is actually the third in the series, so if you want more basics behind it, here is the first:


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## Boychev (Jul 21, 2014)

DBLee said:


> This little video clip deals with some of this in a very simple manner:
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This is... kind of frustrating, actually, haha. Must I be able to identify the harmonic movements and modulations and basically have a perfectly trained ear along with theoretical understanding in order to grasp the musical argument then? Thinking of this by analogy with language, the structure of someone's speech or writing is always apparent to me, that is, I could instantly identify the subject and the object and the predicate of a sentence, without even having to think about them - that's what understanding consists of, after all. Not only that, but it's impossible for me to understand the language without understanding of those concepts, and on the other hand if someone misuses them the language becomes unintelligible (e. g. "I throw the ball" vs "Balling me the throws").

But... there's no such thing as music with a "wrong" structure, and the structure the way it was originally conceived is not always readily available to me and from what I can gather musicians with a sophisticated ear training and theoretical understanding make up a very insignificant precentage of all listeners so... surely there must be something simpler going on? I don't believe that intuition by itself can allow us to get any kind of knowledge, but then what are the concepts we use that make musical understanding possible? In Western music I can identify the movement between the dominant and the tonic, the major / minor / augmented / diminished characters of chords, some general characteristics of rhythm, differentiate the voices and timbres and the ways they move in relation to each other, so those seem like a good start. How do those add up to convey an emotion and express something (and in relation to that - how can you be sure that you have the correct interpretation of what's going on)? The way I've tried to think about it in the past is by relating the movement of music to different trajectories of movement and different shapes the music makes, by trying to imagine it as an abstract painting and from then on trying to relate those shapes to meaningful things I could understand. That seems like an awful stretch given that... well, if Bach had wanted to paint he would've been a painter, not a composer, haha (not to mention that that way of thinking implies that music is merely inept storytelling or inept painting which is a stupid notion).


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## Enthusiast (Mar 5, 2016)

In my opinion it is what that argument does for you that matters. You will experience the argument as it is meant to be experienced. Music is written for non-musicians to enjoy.


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## hammeredklavier (Feb 18, 2018)

_"The connection to painting as reason and science is the same as the composition of music as Delacroix learned when he asked his friend Chopin a question "what gives music the impression of logic?" This entry in Delacroix's 'Journal' reveals his understandings that the scientific methods used to compose music are the same methods used in painting. "The Journal of Eugene Delacroix" reads, "Saturday, 7 April, Went with Chopin for his drive at about half-past three. I was glad to be of service to him although I was feeling tired. The Champs-Elysees, L'Arc de L'Etoile, the bottle of quinquina wine, being stopped at the city gate, etc. We talked of music and it seemed to cheer him. I asked him to explain what it is that gives the impression of logic in music. He made me understand the meaning of harmony and counterpoint; how in music the fugue corresponds to pure logic, and that to be well versed in the fugue is to understand the elements of all reason and development in music. I thought how happy I should have been to study these things, the despair of commonplace musicians. It gave me some idea of the pleasure which true philosophers find in science. The fact of the matter is, that true science as regarded and demonstrated by a man like Chopin, is art itself, but on the other hand, art is not what the vulgar believe it to be, a vague inspiration coming from nowhere, moving at random, and portraying merely the picturesque, external side of things. It is pure reason, embellished by genius, but following a set course and bound by higher laws."_
https://books.google.ca/books?id=2M4xDwAAQBAJ&pg=PA35


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

This musical argument trope might have its roots in Baroque music theory, where theorists like Johann David Heinichen and Johann Mattheson analyzed musical structure by analogy to the parts of an oration as formulated by classical rhetoricians like Cicero and Aristides Quintillianus. These included the _exordium, narratio, confirmatio, confutatio_ and _peroratio_. _Narratio_ is the section where the orator presents the facts of the case, the _confirmatio_ is where the evidence in favor of the argument is made, the _confutatio_ contains the evidence against. Heinichen suggested that the structure of a concerto movement consisted of analogous parts. In music, the _narratio_ is compared to the statement of the principal idea, the _confirmatio_ to the episodic elaborations that follow, the _confutatio_ to statements in another key or the opposite mode, and so on.

So, theorists were talking about musical structure by analogy to the structure of an argument. This way of talking seems to have persisted into the Classical Era and beyond.


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