# Music for musicians?.



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

I have heard this expression several times. It is often applied to music which is considered 'good music', but *only* musicians can understand it properly. Do you think it's a valid observation?.
Personally, I think that there are certain aspects of some musical ideas that a musician will 'capture' more quickly. Maybe those aspects related with technical things. I'm thinking if this has something to do with the apparent dislike towards modern music, for example. In any case, I think the phrase has some content.


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## Frasier (Mar 10, 2007)

aleazk said:


> I have heard this expression several times. It is often applied to music which is considered 'good music', but *only* musicians can understand it properly. Do you think it's a valid observation?.
> Personally, I think that there are certain aspects of some musical ideas that a musician will 'capture' more quickly. Maybe those aspects related with technical things. I'm thinking if this has something to do with the apparent dislike towards modern music, for example. In any case, I think the phrase has some content.


I'm never sure what's meant by understanding music except (possibly) technically. I mean you don't understand a piece of cake, you enjoy it or otherwise. Also not sure what is actually meant by "_the composer's composer_" and _"music for musicians_" - I've heard the phrase(s) and they sometimes seem to refer to introspective music like later Tippett or music good in one sense or another, say, technically, like the Rawsthorne Symphonies but with little interest to the listening public at large. I've heard him referred to as the composer's composer and kind of see what is meant but without knowing why this is applied to him rather than Rubbra or Humphrey Searle. See if anyone else can shed light.


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## jani (Jun 15, 2012)

Well as a guitar player i regularly visit guitar forums and watch videos about virtuoso guitarists like Joe sartriani,Steve Vai, Yngwie Malmsteen etc...
I have noticed that term is used almost always with technically skilled guitarists and with instrumental music etc...

So i guess that they mean that the music is harder to play, harder to understand and harder to listen.


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## MaestroViolinist (May 22, 2012)

I've never heard of this and I don't agree. Anyone can understand music as long as they give a go (most people don't bother). 

Different musicians interpret music differently, but it doesn't mean their way is wrong. Though there is one instance where I was listening to Bruch's Kol Nidrei and I think Jacqueline du Pre interprets it the best.


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## sah (Feb 28, 2012)

Ortega y Gasset said the contemporary art is an art for artists (_La deshumanización del arte_, 1925). I don't know if he was the first person saying that. This phrase has some content:
http://arthistoriaart.blogspot.com.es/2011/11/sobre-el-arte-contemporaneo.html

I enjoyed reading the book.


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

> I've never heard of this and I don't agree. Anyone can understand music as long as they give a go (most people don't bother).


Hmmm...let me test this out. Why do so many people tell me no matter how many goes they give listening to my unfathomable string quartet collection, it never gets any better for them? 

In contrast...take for example, Haydn's classical string quartets. I've listened to them for over 2 decades, with numerous recordings, trawled through the LPs and seen several chamber concerts.

I still don't appreciate them. They might even irritate me at the slightest whiff of hearing them now. I've probably spent more on amassing a collection by the Amadeus Quartet and trying to listen to them to convince myself it was worth it. Does that mean I should try harder? 

I understand some of the technical aspects; however the music itself does nothing for me. That's just an example, to suggest, that a motivational theory of 'getting music', does not work. At least, it doesn't work for me. There is music out there, no matter how hard I try, it just doesn't twig with me.

On the other hand ... 'difficult music' - like listening to contemporary post 1970's string quartet music: I love the sonorism and the surconventionalism of the Stalowa Wola school, before I even knew what these were. When I first heard the music, I was electrified and spurred into discovering more of this music. I still don't understand the full technical concepts behind it, but I do really love this kind of music.

Equally, I am a musician (well, do bad ones count? ) But I wasn't. For example, I played the concert flute in concerts in college and in choir. Do musicians who stop playing instruments, count under 'musicians' musicians', or does that exclude the retired and pensioned 

Just jesting lol. It's a nebulous concept - 'the musician's musician', or the artists' artist, to refer to the tastes of the elite.

To me, it seems that this idea of music for musicians, is a marketing concept which is created in journalism and by critics or industry insiders, to try to conceptualise (or make into an elite), the tastes and preferences of artists or musicians who are on pedestals to be emulated.

We all know composers and musicians alike, listen to Sesame Street and James Bond theme tunes. They don't take themselves so seriously. Maybe we do lol.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

_As a musician_, I completely understand this term.

:tiphat: had to say that. 

No seriously, it's something musicians experience when they delve into the music of their particular instrument. There is music that focuses on the music, and there is music that focuses on the musician. Chamber music especially focuses on the musicians, but also avant-garde music focuses on the_ technical brilliance of the player_ as opposed to the musical quality. This movement also occurred in Visual Art in the Modern era, where focus was put on the _action _of painting and the easel/tools/paints themselves instead of the image it made. Ever heard of the term "showpiece"? That's music for musicians. And we all know showpieces tend to be thrown aside as stuff with little to no musical merit, but they can be _loved _by the musicians who play them to show their skills and compete with each other.

Then there may be another aspect. As a musician, one looks at music in a completely different way than the listener. They see things that the listener won't understand unless they come and look over the shoulder of the musician. Suspensions, progressions, dissonances, those are heard, but they are also seen. There is _theory _involved, why and how things work. There is some music out there that sort of engrosses itself in the idea of theory, form, etc. and for "unlearned" folks seems _esoteric_. And they are right in sensing that. Composition is an _extremely _complex art, the highest of the Musical Arts as I like to say. So much goes into a piece of music that only like 10% of its listeners understand, and 2% that truly fathom (namely other composers).


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## MaestroViolinist (May 22, 2012)

@ Headcase ^A very good post. :tiphat:


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

That is Eliot Carter's self-proclaimed intention, that his music is composed for the edification of the musicians who perform it. The audience is on their own.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Hilltroll72 said:


> That is Eliot Carter's self-proclaimed intention, that his music is composed for the edification of the musicians who perform it. The audience is on their own.


In that case, his music _should _be only performed for other musicians. They would be the only ones to get something out of it.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

LOL. Other than to mention almost all of Bach, much of Mozart and Beethoven is 'musicians music' and leaving those so inclined to work that one out, I'm not touching this evidently hair-trigger volatile question with a ten-foot pole. The term has probably been around since at least the thirteen hundreds, but I think 'music for the Cognoscenti' or some such was the phraseology of prior eras - I'll leave that for a resident musicologist to research.

"Jazz and Chamber Music are not for everybody."

Have fun everyone.


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## Jaws (Jun 4, 2011)

I have no idea what they mean by musicians? To qualify as a musician do you have to have been playing for 6 months, 20 years but only once a week or what?


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> In that case, his music _should _be only performed for other musicians. They would be the only ones to get something out of it.


That isn't quite the case (it's _by_ not _for_). However, when I listen to his chamber music for winds, I seem to detect secondhand the pleasure felt by the participants. Could well be my imagination, but hey... .


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

My desire to play a piece on the piano always comes from listening to it first and falling in love with it so to speak. IMO music should be able to speak for itself without requiring a manual. I don't like the idea of music that can't be really appreciated and enjoyed unless it's played and/or studied. 
Of course, playing and/or studying music does enhance the experience. When I practice a piano piece, I discover and hear many things that I didn't notice (or couldn't have noticed) when just listening to the music. And my knowledge of theory is limited, so if I had better understanding of music theory and composing, I'm sure I would discover even more when practicing a piece.


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## rrudolph (Sep 15, 2011)

For insight into at least one major composer's thoughts about the issue, see Milton Babbit's infamous (and unfortunately mis-titled by someone else) 1958 essay "Who Cares if You Listen":

http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Jaws said:


> I have no idea what they mean by musicians? To qualify as a musician do you have to have been playing for 6 months, 20 years but only once a week or what?


Pros, and in the old sense, 'amateurs' - i.e. those who played as well as professionals but who did not do it for a living.


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## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

rrudolph said:


> For insight into at least one major composer's thoughts about the issue, see Milton Babbit's infamous (and unfortunately mis-titled by someone else) 1958 essay "Who Cares if You Listen":
> 
> http://www.palestrant.com/babbitt.html


Yes, an interesting article (here's a pdf version, without the blue background  http://mypage.iu.edu/~tcbest/babbitt article.pdf).
Basically, Babbitt says that he considers unfair the criticism towards modern music, particularly that which says it is 'too technical'. He argues that in the field of mathematics, the extreme technification is seen as something 'admirable' by the great public, but in music as something 'decadent'. He's clearly interested in mathematics, he cites a lot of concepts from physics and mathematics (for example, he talks about 'musical events' which form a 'five dimensional space' because each event can be represented or parametrized by five parameters, pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration and timbre; this is a clear paralelism with general relativity, in which events, which are points in space at an instant of time, form a four-dimensional space, spacetime, because each event can be locally parametrized by four real numbers, this is the basic idea of spacetime as a differentiable manifold, defined as a set locally homeomorphic to R^n and 'smooth'). He thinks that music is no different from mathematics and that a 'layman' should not say 'I don't like that music' in the same way as he can't say 'I don't like that mathematical theorem', i.e., the value of the theorem does not depend on taste.
It's a view that I don't share at all. First, those paralelisms with mathematics are of a very superficial nature. 'musical events' form a 'five dimensional space' because each event can be represented or parametrized by five parameters, pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration and timbre, that's only a very loose similitude with the definition of a differentiable manifold, that's not mathematics. On the other hand, I think that the whole idea of music as a 'science' is ridiculous. _Music is an art_. As Aldous Huxley said, the difference between art and science is that science deals with those similar sensations that everybody feels toward the same thing (for example, everybody feels the heat of fire), while art deals with much more complex sensations, where the subjectivity has a great role. Sure, you can do whatever you want, but do not claim that composing music is like demonstrating a theorem. I mean, if music has this capability for exploring the deep subjectivity of a person, why deny it in the wake of the value of the method of composition. I think that's one of the huge differences between Ligeti and his serialist friends like Boulez, for example. While the serialists were talking about mathematics and the action of a homeomorphism in the five dimensional musical space, Ligeti was composing awesome music like his Requiem or Atmospheres, inspired, as Ligeti said, in the fear of death, the human being confronted with the eternity, etc. Ligeti also used mathematics, but only as an inspiration, never as a goal, as he said (see the interview that I have posted in the composers forum). If you are interested in homeomorphisms, go and study mathematics then. But, please, do not come here to try to sell us some *pseudoscience* that you have invented. Music _can_ be intellectual, but by its own nature as an art, this intellectuality is of a very different nature than that of mathematics.


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## Philip (Mar 22, 2011)

One type of music that i would call "music for musicians", is geometrical music (there is probably a better term for it...), ie. music exploiting the geometry and symmetry of the instrument. The sheet music may seem unreadable at first glance, but once patterns emerge on the instrument, it suddenly becomes more easily playable and memorizable. The musician can learn to appreciate the piece, while a listener may not fully understand its purpose.

This is mostly applicable to modern and contemporary music, particularly for keyboard and fretted instruments. A couple Villa-Lobos études for guitar come to mind:

Jose Antonio Escobar Plays Etude N. 12 by Heitor Villa-Lobos


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## rrudolph (Sep 15, 2011)

aleazk said:


> Yes, an interesting article (here's a pdf version, without the blue background  http://mypage.iu.edu/~tcbest/babbitt article.pdf).
> Basically, Babbitt says that he considers unfair the criticism towards modern music, particularly that which says it is 'too technical'. He argues that in the field of mathematics, the extreme technification is seen as something 'admirable' by the great public, but in music as something 'decadent'. He's clearly interested in mathematics, he cites a lot of concepts from physics and mathematics (for example, he talks about 'musical events' which form a 'five dimensional space' because each event can be represented or parametrized by five parameters, pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration and timbre; this is a clear paralelism with general relativity, in which events, which are points in space at an instant of time, form a four-dimensional space, spacetime, because each event can be locally parametrized by four real numbers, this is the basic idea of spacetime as a differentiable manifold, defined as a set locally homeomorphic to R^n and 'smooth'). He thinks that music is no different from mathematics and that a 'layman' should not say 'I don't like that music' in the same way as he can't say 'I don't like that mathematical theorem', i.e., the value of the theorem does not depend on taste.
> It's a view that I don't share at all. First, those paralelisms with mathematics are of a very superficial nature. 'musical events' form a 'five dimensional space' because each event can be represented or parametrized by five parameters, pitch-class, register, dynamic, duration and timbre, that's only a very loose similitude with the definition of a differentiable manifold, that's not mathematics. On the other hand, I think that the whole idea of music as a 'science' is ridiculous. _Music is an art_. As Aldous Huxley said, the difference between art and science is that science deals with those similar sensations that everybody feels toward the same thing (for example, everybody feels the heat of fire), while art deals with much more complex sensations, where the subjectivity has a great role. Sure, you can do whatever you want, but do not claim that composing music is like demonstrating a theorem. I mean, if music has this capability for exploring the deep subjectivity of a person, why deny it in the wake of the value of the method of composition. I think that's one of the huge differences between Ligeti and his serialist friends like Boulez, for example. While the serialists were talking about mathematics and the action of a homeomorphism in the five dimensional musical space, Ligeti was composing awesome music like his Requiem or Atmospheres, inspired, as Ligeti said, in the fear of death, the human being confronted with the eternity, etc. Ligeti also used mathematics, but only as an inspiration, never as a goal, as he said (see the interview that I have posted in the composers forum). If you are interested in homeomorphisms, go and study mathematics then. But, please, do not come here to try to sell us some *pseudoscience* that you have invented. Music _can_ be intellectual, but by its own nature as an art, this intellectuality is of a very different nature than that of mathematics.


A very cogent refutation of Babbitt. Probably a lot of what you say ilustrates why his music has never particularly moved me (as I mention in the "bad music" thread under Orchestral Music). However, my own personal belief is that it is legitimate to have many different kinds of music with many different purposes. Music is not a zero-sum game; if some people like music realized through extra-musical principles being applied to musical materials, it does not mean that music based in expression of emotion (for example) is invalidated (and vice-versa). The musical world is large enough (infinte?) to accomodate all sorts of aesthetic approaches. I think that when we look for some airtight philosophical view we risk "throwing out the baby with the bathwater"-this is why I often go out of my way to listen to music I might not care for. Sometimes I do find something of value to me where I least expect it. This is why I still give Babbitt a chance, although so far I have nothing to show for it except respect for his technical abilities.


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