# Music expresses nothing / Writing music is 75% an intellectual activity.



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

"The *G-major Concerto took two years of work*, you know. The opening theme came to me on a train. But the initial idea is nothing. The work of chiseling then began. *We've gone past the days when the composer was thought of as being struck by inspiration, feverishly scribbling down his thoughts on a scrap of paper. Writing music is seventy-five percent an intellectual activity."* ~ Ravel

"...*music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all....
Expression has never been an inherent property of music*.... this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being." ~ Stravinsky

Years later, he clarified what was said...

"The over-publicized bit about expression (or non-expression) was simply a way of saying that *music is supra-personal and super-real and as such beyond verbal meanings and verbal descriptions. It was aimed against the notion that a piece of music is in reality a transcendental idea "expressed in terms of" music, with the reductio ad absurdum implication that exact sets of correlatives must exist between a composer's feelings and his notation.* It was offhand and annoyingly incomplete, but even the stupider critics could have seen that *it did not deny musical expressivity*, but only the validity of a type of verbal statement about musical expressivity. I stand by the remark, incidentally, though today I would put it the other way around: *music expresses itself.*" ~ Stravinsky

(any bold or italics are my emphases)

The statements of the two composers above seem to be at near polar opposites of how most listeners think of music, or what people think composers intend or are feeling while they compose.

What they ^^^ said, and its implications, seems to rock the world of how many a classical music consumer thinks of the music they love, or what many seem to think is the emotional state of a composers when they write what they write.

What do you think of the two composer's statements above?


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I'm not sure that most people think that composers work "possessed, like some wild poet." Even LvB, who spoke more often of his muse and inspiration than of "the work of chiseling" or of his formidable technical skills, once said "A composer must be able to assume many humors."

That said, the only thing controversial here is Stravinsky's evident implication that music cannot express non-musical ideas, something that seems quite mistaken on the face of it. Music can and probably always has been able to do this, within broad limits, because of common understandings of conventions used in music.


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## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

I sometimes get an ASMR when listening to something that "moves" me, but other than that I'd say listening to music is a perceptual, non-emotional activity for me. Maybe I sometimes anticipate a cadence or certain note in a slightly emotional fashion but the pleasure I derive from listening to music is nearly 100% aesthetic-perceptual I'd say, so I'm not bothered by Ravel's comment at all.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

I think even if we take Ravel's statement as true - it is still a fascinating point to ponder as it suggests a rather large 25% of the composition process is _not_ intellectual. If that part of composing is not an intellectual activity than what kind of activity is it? Where is _it_ coming from? What is _it_?


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## MoonlightSonata (Mar 29, 2014)

Music, basically, is sound.
It is how we interpret this sound that makes it music.
If you think it is powerless to express emotions - fine, that's how it is for you.
It you think it is powerfully emotional - that's fine too.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

tdc said:


> I think even if we take Ravel's statement as true - it is still a fascinating point to ponder as it suggests a rather large 25% of the composition process is _not_ intellectual. If that part of composing is not an intellectual activity than what kind of activity is it? Where is _it_ coming from? What is _it_?


Um, the intuitive / unconscious / non-intellectual quarter, methinks. -- my intent was, to a good degree, to get people to think about the 'other 75%,' since at least on TC, it appears some think that 25% is about 100% of what music is and how it gets written and performed


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

"Music expresses itself" - Stravinsky

I don't fully agree with Stravinsky's statement/s (of course music expresses itself, that seems self-evident, but I think it can also express other things). What those two composers said does nothing to rock my musical world or my perception of music.

To say that certain sounds are incapable of expressing certain emotions is false in my opinion. From practical evolutionary/adaptive purposes, pre-civilization humans in the plains feared certain sounds (a hissing of a snake, growl of a large predator, etc.). This subject is being studied right now.

I can't fathom that Ligeti was unaware that some of his music would express and evoke fear, tension, dread, suspense, and other such primal emotions (like the Requiem or other music that was used in _2001_). I stated on another thread that music is not a language and I completely stand by it, but it can communicate certain base and primal emotions that we happen to be able to translate into words (with great difficulty, of course). It cannot clearly state something precise like "I have a knife and I'm going to hurt you, so be afraid". Only a language can do that.

From Firenze Universita' Website - http://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13769/12801



> ... Eye spots and curved versus zigzag lines have some research to back up the notion that they are releasers of specific emotions and of their rather obvious use in art, but this is not the case for alarm calls and predator howls used in music to evoke fear. However, research has demonstrated that a threat in alarm calls is recognized across species (Seyfarth & Cheney [1990]). These calls are known to cause gooseflesh or a tingle down the spine which is a pilomotor reflex associated with fear. One study found that music caused gooseflesh (Gray [1955])...





> Dissanayake suggests that the synchronized rhythms, vocalizations, and movements of baby talk became chanting, singing, and dancing - or the temporal arts (Dissanayake [2000]: 9-10, 160). The temporal arts can provide the emotional bonding that promotes social unity and the willingness to work together because the brain chemicals released by the rhythmic activity makes us feel really good and what we are doing feels right (see www.nancyeaiken. net, Chapter 2 for a more thorough discussion). A recent fMRI study of 17 people listening to a piece of classical music, which none of them had heard before, identified brain activity from the midbrain to cortex. The study found that all participants' brains tracked the musical stimulus in similar ways. The authors note that the brain areas stimulated foreshadow those movements that typically accompany listening to music such as clapping, dancing, marching, singing, and head bobbing thus facilitating social coordination (Abrams, et.al. [2013]: 11). Thus, moving together in time to the music is more or less pre-programmed by our brains and activating the mammalian bonding mechanism which makes us trusting and caring for each other.


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## Musicforawhile (Oct 10, 2014)

I don't think it's just about our interpretations or that a work is created simply intellectually. Art isn't created like some complicated painting-by-numbers, it is to do with the subconscious, emotional intuition and spontaneity. A work of art is created out of the artists's subconscious and although it may be fiddled with and added to by the conscious part of the mind there will generally be a spurting of spontaneous ideas from the subconscious. The artist himself/herself is not privy to this, as we cannot consciously delve into the subconscious except maybe in lucid dreaming and so the artist is not to be a trusted analyser of their own work. To note down your own spontaneous flow of creativity is to channel something and put it into the physical world, you may not be feeling the particular emotions bound up in what is being channelled. It's all just passing through you and you might not be able to make sense of it, so you might wrongly say that those feelings aren't part of the art that was created...does this make sense to anyone?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

PetrB said:


> Um, the intuitive / unconscious / non-intellectual quarter, methinks.


Right, so there is a lot to the process then which remains quite mysterious, and not really measurable or observable. There seems to be a certain element in composition that is very difficult if not impossible to practice or exercise or increase in some way - it is either there or it is not. So for Ravel the composition process was mostly intellectual after 25% seemed to materialize in other ways - for other composers perhaps these percentages are very different. I remember reading Stravinsky believed he was simply the vessel through which the Rite of Spring passed through - this suggests at least in that instance perhaps a smaller percentage of the intellect was used.


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## Musicforawhile (Oct 10, 2014)

The poets Keats and Milton talked about their poetry basically flowing out of them. Keats said something about don't bother being a poet unless poetry comes to you like leaves to a tree, and Milton said that his 'Paradise Lost' was channelled from God. Although they both did things to contradict these statements, like rewriting and editing their work, I definitely do think they both were creating poetry from the spontaneous creative flow that came from the subconscious. I think this goes for visual artists, composers, etc. All good artists work in this way I would say

I think you can relax yourself so that you can allow the flow to come forward, whether it will or not. Procrastination for an artist is necessary I think to a point, like taking walks, and just not trying to think. But then also it's neccessary to study and learn about other great artists and be inspired by them and to feed your subconscious as it were.So you can help yourself along a bit like that if you're an artist. Also lucid dreaming...scientific theories and all sorts have been hit upon by lucid dreaming.


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## Musicforawhile (Oct 10, 2014)

I agree that for the most part it is either there or not.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Music expresses music and the writing of music is the work of the mind, all good, nothing to add.

Add.: So there _is_ something to add, or rather change. I think it is better to say that music *communicates* music, that is to say it communicates purely musical ideas in purely musical terms.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

"...by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being." ~ Stravinsky

Stravinsky was brilliant, but I think this is just some artsy *B*affle *S*peak that people expect enigmatic creative types to utter, and so during an off moment they may.

The same statement could be said of words. Words are approximations. shortcuts at best, labels we have merely agreed upon as shorthand symbols representing the real deal. Yet words express quite a bit. The word "love" expresses more to me than the closer approximation, "the physiological effect of various hormones, brain endorphins, dopamine and oxytocin generated naturally by the endocrine and central nervous systems when in the presence or contemplation of the object of one's affection."

Or in other words, if we have come to _believe_ by convention that the minor key in general can express melancholy more so than the major key, then that is what it _expresses_ at this point in time to most listeners. To deny this obvious fact is intellectual posturing.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I find Stravinsky's "clarification" of his earlier statement to be a backpedaling rationalization, and his famous dictum "music expresses itself" to be utter nonsense. _Nothing_ can express itself; the very concept of expression implies that two things exist, one of which tells us something about the other. Really, this sort of too-clever aphorizing is typical of the man who, after making the true observation that an artist must accept limits in order to create, made the absurd one that (and I paraphrase but slightly) "when you accept no limits you get _Parsifal_, but _Parsifal_ is already there, so who wants to write it again?"

Besides being literally meaningless, the idea that music expresses only itself, and cannot express states of feeling, evades the difficulty of explaining why most people have believed the contrary since some impulse from within first moved a human being to sing or dance.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Musicforawhile said:


> ...and Milton said that his 'Paradise Lost' was channelled from God.


I believe Stravinsky said similarly, "I am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed." Hope that didn't cause too much discomfort.


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## Esterhazy (Oct 4, 2014)

It depends on the composer, doesn't it? Johann Sebastian Bach wrote a lot of intellectual music, right? I'm sure I don't need to comment anymore about his musical expression.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

I guess it depends on how consciously in control one thinks they are. I mean, lets take it all the way down... Are you consciously working all of your organs to keep yourself alive... are you ordering your thoughts before they come.... have you predicted your initial inspirations and ambitions... did you consciously choose to be born with certain inclinations? I would assume the answer to all of this is no. So, it narrows down to - what really is the artist, a person, in control of? Are they just modes of the connective tissue of life? Being moved like puppetry...

I don't know if you wanted to take the topic this far down the line of causality, but it's an interesting look.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> I guess it depends on how consciously in control one thinks they are. I mean, lets take it all the way down... Are you consciously working all of your organs to keep yourself alive... are you ordering your thoughts before they come.... have you predicted your initial inspirations and ambitions... did you consciously choose to be born with certain inclinations? I would assume the answer to all of this is no. So, it narrows down to - what really is the artist, a person, in control of? Are they just modes of the connective tissue of life? Being moved like puppetry...
> 
> I don't know if you wanted to take the topic this far down the line of causality, but it's an interesting look.


It could go also down the line of the concept of Free Will, which I happen to not believe in. Dr. Sam Harris (among many others, like Stephen Hawking), is a good start with that subject. He also brings up what you wrote, about us not controlling our organs to keep us alive, not controlling our thoughts, etc. etc. He's got a few videos on YouTube about it and an interesting book titled _Free Will_.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> It could go also down the line of the concept of Free Will, which I happen to not believe in.


Well, of course you're free to believe that or not, as you wish. But to be certain, maybe you should throw dice?


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Well, of course you're free to believe that or not, as you wish. But to be certain, maybe you should throw dice?


Or am I?! _That_ is the question. 

On a serious note, people resist and fight and fear the very possibility that we might not have Free Will. Some people are genuinely offended at the very thought. They usually bring up some sort of "Slippery Slope" type of response, "Well, if I don't have free will, then I don't even have to wake up in the morning. Criminals shouldn't be punished. My talent isn't really my talent. Yada yada yada". Dr. Harris addresses those nuances such as guilt, responsibility, punishment, talent, etc.

At first, the thought is sort of scary/depressing on some level, but it ain't so bad. The subject actually isn't as black-and-white as some people would think.


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## brotagonist (Jul 11, 2013)

I think Ravel was being honest. This is how I would expect the process of composing to go... and that is good. I would hope there is some grey matter behind it. After all, I'm investing my time and some of my money into it.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> It could go also down the line of the concept of Free Will, which I happen to not believe in. Dr. Sam Harris (among many others), is a good start with that subject. He also brings up what you wrote, about us not controlling our organs to keep us alive, not controlling our thoughts, etc. etc. He's got a few videos on YouTube about it and an interesting book titled _Free Will_.


Awesome, yes. I'm glad it wasn't an off-the-wall post, and other people around here are actually questioning this. It's really a simple thing. Just watch yourself... inside and out. And see how much happens without your "will."

I think Lawrence Krauss had also commented on this notion of "free will."


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> Awesome, yes. I'm glad it wasn't an off-the-wall post, and other people around here are actually questioning this. It's really a simple thing. Just watch yourself... inside and out. And see how much happens without your "will."
> 
> I think Lawrence Krauss had also commenting on this notion of "free will."


Yes, I believe Lawrence Krauss has discussed it as well. You should also check out Dr. Harris and Daniel Dennett discuss Free Will, it's great to watch. They both deny free will but they differ on the details, some of its implications, _why _we don't have free will, etc. It's very interesting.

I'm paraphrasing Stephen Hawking, we humans are part of the universe that observes physical laws, for us to have free will would be to act _outside _ or _independent _of the very universe we are undoubtedly a part of.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Yes, I believe Lawrence Krauss has discussed it as well. You should also check out Dr. Harris and Dr. Daniel Dennett discuss Free Will, it's great to watch. They both deny free will but they differ on the details, some of its implications, _why _we don't have free will, etc. It's very interesting.
> 
> I'm paraphrasing Dr. Stephen Hawking, we humans are part of the universe that observes physical laws, for us to have free will would be to act _outside _ or _independent _of the very universe we are undoubtedly a part of.


For sure. I've got a pretty straight-forward test for most. Try to sit in complete silence for a minute without allowing a single thought or sensation in you... then tell me how in control of everything you are.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Or am I?! _That_ is the question.


Well, we may not have free will, but we can rationalize like crazy. And that's almost as good.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Well, we may not have free will, but we can rationalize like crazy. And that's almost as good.


Hehe, it seems like the only thing we have control of is attention. What movement do we feed? I've had many o' very uncomfortable thoughts and sensations, but I removed attention. I'd like to have a precursor check-book to say - allow these, and don't allow these. But we don't get that choice. We do seem to have a choice of feeding them energy... And even that I'm not quite sure of.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Well, we may not have free will, but we can rationalize like crazy. And that's almost as good.


We sure can. Just like coping with pain (through various methods, like humor) and a desire to express ourselves/others/nature through art, rationalization is a distinctly human trait. Whether we have free will or not has no effect on my actual life (for the most part), it's kinda just there in the background for me. It's the things that make us human that I like to concentrate on.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> We sure can. Just like coping with pain (through various methods, like humor) and a desire to express ourselves/others/nature through art, rationalization is a distinctly human trait. Whether we have free will or not has no effect on my actual life (for the most part), it's kinda just there in the background for me. It's the things that make us human that I like to concentrate on.


But, you see... most of what we pride ourselves on being human is the fact that we willingly do things. And if in fact there is no free will, even in the subtlest level, then this is just a show. And who are we to watch it?


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

There's the good old "Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind." Brahms. 

Personally, to judge music and musicians I only care about the fact, the finished composition. I do have a considerable interest in the compositional methods and techniques nurtured by the composer to reach that end but I do not judge those by themselves. 

The question here is if we consider intuition a kind of inspiration or we reserve the latter only to refer to pure spontaneity and to origin of the material. "It happened by inspiration, inspired by the folk music of X" I think intuition is crucial in composition as one of the main sources of 'vitality' and 'logic'. 

Some composers seem to (also) rely heavily in 'intellectual' analysis. Bruckner, even more evidently in his revisions of his symphonies, cared very much from the interplay of the harmonies in relation to the key to the length of the phrases themselves. Schubert and Beethoven's Symphonies being his most obvious referential models. 

Ravel highly regarded Poe's analysis of his own poems, going as far as suggesting that he learned 'how to compose' from Poe. Ravel, Schoenberg and many others across the eras have heavily borrowed forms and models form other composers. All the pre-copyright dudes, Stravisnky and many others across the eras have heavily borrowed material form other composers.

Most composers at some point in their careers have claimed to have their pieces already composed and finished in their heads, but craft and intuition is still very necessary in the transduction.

Schoenberg wrote a little essay/article called 'Heart and Brain in Music' on which he point out that these work together and often in seemingly cerebral endeavours (which take more time) inspiration intervenes spontaneously.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

I don't get that people are so defensive of image of the "naturally" gifted artist who makes art out of sheer "divine"(not in a religious sense in this context) inspiration. Almost all art is for a very large part dependent on craftsmanship. You don't create perfect paintings, poetry, literature or music without constant revising and tinkering. A great artist is someone who can take a bit of inspiration and craft it into a masterpiece.

It is very easy to find example of pieces of music which had great initial ideas but ended up being simply uninteresting because the composer wasn't able to put it in a context. There are also great examples of dull or uninspiring ideas being crafted into great pieces because the composer was able to bring out the best of it.



Vesuvius said:


> I guess it depends on how consciously in control one thinks they are. I mean, lets take it all the way down... Are you consciously working all of your organs to keep yourself alive... are you ordering your thoughts before they come.... have you predicted your initial inspirations and ambitions... did you consciously choose to be born with certain inclinations? I would assume the answer to all of this is no. So, it narrows down to - what really is the artist, a person, in control of? Are they just modes of the connective tissue of life? Being moved like puppetry...
> 
> I don't know if you wanted to take the topic this far down the line of causality, but it's an interesting look.


But my subconsciousness is a part of my person. I am not just my consciousness; it is not like the consciousness is some puppeteer that tries to control a puppet with a will of it's own. It is a system that works together and influences each other. My subconsciousness is just as influenced by my conscious decisions as visa versa.


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## GioCar (Oct 30, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> "Music expresses itself" - Stravinsky
> ....
> From Firenze Universita' Website - http://www.fupress.net/index.php/aisthesis/article/view/13769/12801....


Good article. Thanks!


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## Guest (Oct 11, 2014)

I hestitate to take us all the way back to page one after all that kerfluffle about free will, but there were a couple of things on page one that I was compelled to address. As it were.



Weston said:


> "...by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being." ~ Stravinsky
> 
> Stravinsky was brilliant, but I think this is just some artsy *B*affle *S*peak that people expect enigmatic creative types to utter, and so during an off moment they may.


Um, no. A pretty plain statement of a pretty plain idea. Something has been added to music which is not part of music but which now seems to be an essential characteristic.

And so we find people who perceive this thing as essential rushing to outmanuever Stravinsky's plain statement, which is plain enough to have alarmed almost everyone who has read it. That doesn't sound to me like there's been any bafflement at all.



Weston said:


> The same statement could be said of words. Words are approximations. shortcuts at best, labels we have merely agreed upon as shorthand symbols representing the real deal.


Mr. Jonathan Swift has already satirized this idea, in a book called _Gulliver's Travels._ Skewers the idea, I could say.



Weston said:


> Or in other words, if we have come to _believe_ by convention that the minor key in general can express melancholy more so than the major key, then that is what it _expresses_ at this point in time to most listeners. To deny this obvious fact is intellectual posturing.


Allow me to posture then. When I was a little kid, swept off my feet by classical music, I noticed that some pieces affected me more strongly than others, and certain parts more than other parts. Later, I found that the things I found more interesting were things in what is called "minor." I liked not just the minor, of course, but the back and forth between major and minor. That is, the movement from major to minor. Movement from minor to major always seemed a bit disappointing, only palatable by virtue of its opening up the possibility of going back to minor again some time. So for me, listening, "minor" meant interesting and "major" meant vaguely disappointing.

Later, in school, I learned the cliche that major "means" happy and minor "means" sad, but it was too late for me. I had already listened to too much music to be impressed by that idea. Irritated, sure, especially at first. But impressed? No.



Woodduck said:


> I find Stravinsky's "clarification" of his earlier statement to be a backpedaling rationalization, and his famous dictum "music expresses itself" to be utter nonsense.


OK. Any reason for this conclusion? I mean, other than another assertion.



Woodduck said:


> _Nothing_ can express itself; the very concept of expression implies that two things exist, one of which tells us something about the other.


And there it is. A little more developed, this assertion. And it's true that expression implies at least two things, an expressor and an auditor. Which we have already. So what's the problem? I express myself (one thing) to you (the other thing). There you go. Two things.

But of course, that's not what you were looking at. You were looking at what the expressor was expressing not at the to whom. So there has to be an expressor and the thing being expressed. Two different things. But do they really have to be different? Think about how you experience yourself. There's your self, and there's your awareness of your self. Almost as if there were two selfs, one looking at, one being looked at. We do that all the time. It's no thing.



Woodduck said:


> ...the idea that music expresses only itself, and cannot express states of feeling, evades the difficulty of explaining why most people have believed the contrary since some impulse from within first moved a human being to sing or dance.


Um, for one, you weren't there when the first human was first moved to sing or dance, so that part is just idle speculation. For two, Stravinsky does precisely what you say he has evaded, which is explain why most people believe the contrary. It's right there, in the earlier statement and in the "backpedaling rationalization" (which is fine mouthfilling expression, but does it mean anything?).


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## shangoyal (Sep 22, 2013)

I think what composers say is merely their state of mind when they are saying that. Of course, music is expression and cannot be devoid of expression - but of course the composing itself can be a purely technical activity. But it takes years to gauge what works and what doesn't - to become the person who composes music this way and not that way... it's like an engineer doesn't work on a lathe until he starts studying engineering but he obviously was learning how to use his hands... so I think such statements are a little one dimensional.

Off late, I have learnt to not trust the "quotes" of these famous people all that much - or at least read them with caution because they are just things they said. Do you really think if somebody quoted everything you ever said (even things that were said seriously, I am not talking about goofing around) and told you things about you gleaned from those quotes, you wouldn't be quite surprised and disagree?


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## Couac Addict (Oct 16, 2013)

Well, I've seen movies/documentaries and the inspiration always hits the composer like a lightning bolt. They scramble for a quill and paper and during a 30 second montage, they furiously churn out 1200 bars. I've never seen a film where the composers spends two years trying to resolve to a stable consonance through trial and error.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

some guy said:


> I hestitate to take us all the way back to page one after all that kerfluffle about free will, but there were a couple of things on page one that I was compelled to address. As it were.
> 
> Um, no. A pretty plain statement of a pretty plain idea. *Something has been added to music which is not part of music* but which now seems to be an essential characteristic.
> 
> ...


"Plain statements" about the ends and means of art are always open to question.

To say that, because an overwhelming number of people feel that music is an expressive art, something has been "added to music" by all these people, is a "plain statement" so peculiar that it cries out for questioning. I'm not the first to question it, and it's been questioned by people from standpoints of both aesthetics and science. I imagine that people are questioning, and studying, and writing about it this very moment, and are doing so because there is something uniquely compelling there to question, study, and write about.

"Self-expression" is the prerogative of a living being. This meaning of "expression" is different from the meaning implicit in Stravinsky's statement, and you are fudging the difference. In the sense of "self-expression," music, like all other inanimate, unconscious things, cannot express. It merely exists. If we say that music "expresses", this must imply the expression of some meaning which the music, as a vehicle of expression, conveys. It's the difference between "I (a living being)express myself by laughing" and "my laughter (a non-living thing I make) expresses amusement." I can express _myself_; laughter - a _product_ of my self-expression, like music - cannot express _itself,_ but must express my amusement (or something else). The word "expression" thus has two distinct meanings, and you and Stravinsky are obscuring the distinction.

Stravinsky has not even begun to explain why people think music is an expressive art, and neither have you. As for my not "being there" for the dawning of humanity's musical awareness, my statement that singing and dancing are prompted by an internal impulse, a feeling of some kind, and in that sense are expressive of that feeling, hardly requires time travel - unless it be travel back into the origins of my own musical impulses. For that, watch children singing and dancing, and then tell me that "music expresses only itself."


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

The word "feeling" might be hanging up the discussion a little bit. There's some range of meaning there between "impulse" or "curiosity" or whatever and something like "passion." 

Anyway, I figure as usual there's no need to be prescriptive. If someone wants to compose the überpäßioñàté divine whatever that roars inside their tortured souls, fine with me. If someone else wants to see what they can do manipulating a particular motif, fine with me. If someone else sees it as something like following the instructions that came in in the box, fine with me. 

In any case, I might want to hear some of it. Particularly if someone I trust and respect says, "Hey, this is pretty good. Try this."


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Couac Addict said:


> Well, I've seen movies/documentaries and the inspiration always hits the composer like a lightning bolt. They scramble for a quill and paper and during a 30 second montage, they furiously churn out 1200 bars. I've never seen a film where the composers spends two years trying to resolve to a stable consonance through trial and error.










Talk about comic, lol... _and the basis of all comedy is misunderstanding_


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

_PetrB_, you - and _some guy_ - are shooting at a target that is well armored _and_ dodges 'logic bullets' with ease if not with grace.

You are going to need artful circumlocution to succeed. Artful being necessary because the 'circum' element must constitute an apparent _encirclement_, lest the target escape.

Good luck with that.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

Tell Mahler that the final movement of his third symphony, adagio from his sixth symphony, adagio from his tenth symphony and the first movement of his ninth symphony were 75% intellectual exercises.

Hell if classical music was that much intellectual, I would have been bored to death years ago.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

hpowders said:


> Tell Mahler that the final movement of his third symphony, adagio from his sixth symphony, adagio from his tenth symphony and the first movement of his ninth symphony were 75% intellectual exercises.
> 
> Hell if classical music was that much intellectual, I would have been bored to death years ago.


Ravel was referring to _his_ intellectual exercise, not yours. There was no intent to _shake_ anyone awake. Much of Ravel's piano music is as compatible with 'drifting along' as with paying close attention. Or in the Gaspard case, drifting followed by alarm. The suggested 'drift channels' work quite well, if the listener will just let them go out to the periphery - to percolate rather than ratiocinate.


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## senza sordino (Oct 20, 2013)

I tell my students that when they understand the topic at hand, I mean really understand it, it become common sense, and less of an intellectual process. It become a part of who you are. Stravinsky and Ravel were so musical, that's how they communicated, it was the very fabric of their being. Scientists can't help but look at the universe through the eyes of a scientist, a musician looks at the world through music, it determines how they exist.


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## tgtr0660 (Jan 29, 2010)

I'm not sure both statements are impossible to reconcile with each other. Whatever percentage of music composition is not an intellectual process in the end it becomes one. And emotion and feeling is put on by the listener and by years and decades and centuries of a process of adaptation and assimilation of our brains to certain patterns and sounds that make it fire as an emotion when heard. But music doesn't express anything by itself. 
I don't believe in "inspiration". I believe in a process where it so happens that at one moment the brain has the right idea and is willing to work on it.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Piwikiwi said:


> But my subconsciousness is a part of my person. I am not just my consciousness; it is not like the consciousness is some puppeteer that tries to control a puppet with a will of it's own. It is a system that works together and influences each other. My subconsciousness is just as influenced by my conscious decisions as visa versa.


I just don't find that the person is in control of any part of it. Even the sense of making a decision is just a thought that arises in consciousness. You're going to choose whatever your inclinations and conditionings are geared for. Life moves the person, not the other way around. The human is just a temporary mode of life evolving.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> I just don't find that the person is in control of any part of it. Even the sense of making a decision is just a thought that arises in consciousness. You're going to choose whatever your inclinations and conditionings are geared for. Life moves the person, not the other way around. The human is just a temporary mode of life evolving.


My subconsciousness is (a large) part of my person.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Sounds have a _tangible testable physiological effect on humans_, this isn't an opinion. To say that music can't express anything by "itself" would be to say that music isn't made up of _sounds_. I mean, does music exist outside of the laws of the universe? lol. Why would composers who are experts in constructing sounds into music be "powerless/incapable" to "express anything at all except the music itself" (Stravinsky). Is the controversial statement by Stravinsky the "logical" and "normal" statement now?


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Piwikiwi said:


> My subconsciousness is (a large) part of my person.


What you call a person are the bundle of movements you're conscious of. Your mind and body are simply machines of life, doing what they've evolved to do... and many of it is outside of a person's control. Life will continue to evolve or be destroyed... either way this current phase of humanity will be obsolete at some point; just like all the other forms of existence.

Not even galaxies last forever... how much less this tiny speck of our species?


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> What you call a person are the bundle of movements you're conscious of. Your mind and body are simply machines of life, doing what they've evolved to do... and many of it is outside of a person's control. Life will continue to evolve or be destroyed... either way this current phase of humanity will be obsolete at some point; just like all the other forms of existence.
> 
> Not even galaxies last forever... how much less this tiny speck of our species?


But perhaps "time" itself is an illusion, and everything is in fact one simultaneous present moment. Then I'm not so sure about things ever being obsolete - and how can we ever know what happens to all other forms of existence? Especially those outside the context of our little illusion?


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

tdc said:


> But perhaps "time" itself is an illusion, and everything is in fact one simultaneous present moment. Then I'm not so sure about things ever being obsolete - and how can we ever know what happens to all other forms of existence? Especially those outside the context of our little illusion?


Every beginning has an end. It's almost absurdly irrational to think that something can begin and run on forever. It goes against all practical reasoning.

But that's a good point about time and the moment. I don't have much to add on that.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> Every beginning has an end. It's almost absurdly irrational to think that something can begin and run on forever. It goes against all practical reasoning.


I think you may need to listen to some Bruckner.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> Every beginning has an end. It's almost absurdly irrational to think that something can begin and run on forever. It goes against all practical reasoning.
> 
> But that's a good point about time and the moment. I don't have much to add on that.


Yes, but "end" in what sense? Many physicists seem to think the universe is infinite (others hypothesize an infinite multiverse, even Krauss himself who was one of the multiverse skeptics at first). Lawrence Krauss postulates that the universe will stretch and stretch until everything is so far from each other that life is impossible, the universe will be a barren wasteland, no longer of "use". Our galaxies and life and nebulae and so forth may have ended in the simplest sense that they are no longer in that form anymore but their energy is still there, so they would still be "there". Energy cannot be "deleted" or "erased". It will still be there, somehow.

"_Observations suggest that the expansion of the universe will continue forever. If so, the universe will cool as it expands, eventually becoming too cold to sustain life. For this reason, this future scenario is popularly called the Big Freeze_"


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

KenOC said:


> I think you may need to listen to some Bruckner.


:lol:

In the End, it was decided that all shall be washed away, but Bruckner's 8th will still be in the middle of the 3rd Movement.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Yes, but "end" in what sense? Many physicists seem to think the universe is infinite (others hypothesize an infinite multiverse, even Krauss himself who was one of the multiverse skeptics at first). Lawrence Krauss postulates that the universe will stretch and stretch until everything is so far from each other that life is impossible, the universe will be a barren wasteland, no longer of "use". Our galaxies and life and nebulae and so forth may have ended in the simplest sense that they are no longer in that form anymore but their energy is still there, so they would still be "there". Energy cannot be "deleted" or "erased". It will still be there, somehow.
> 
> "_Observations suggest that the expansion of the universe will continue forever. If so, the universe will cool as it expands, eventually becoming too cold to sustain life. For this reason, this future scenario is popularly called the Big Freeze_"


Who's going to be there to verify any of this? Haha, it's a comical paradox. Even the information we are gathering is a form that will also break down to nothing with the rest of the cosmos.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> Who's going to be there to verify any of this? Haha, it's a comical paradox. Even the information we are gathering is a form that will also break down to nothing with the rest of the cosmos.


Yeah, we won't be there, but we also aren't near the planets that we detect going around distant stars. There are other ways of detection. We measure the light from the star that it is revolving around. We are able to make inferences from the information and knowledge we have, there's a reason why the Big Bang is a scientific theory even though we weren't there when it happened.

Actual _Information_ can't break down, though. Check out the famous argument (and wager that went along with it) between Stephen Hawking and other physicists over this very subject.

Ultimately, I think this is merely a miscommunication of semantics. The end of things as we humans know it will definitely "end". Galaxies will dissolve into formlessness, our species will end, etc., I'm only saying that the actual energy/information will still be there, albeit unrecognizable. Try to look at the vantage point without humans there to make observations. Yes, what we know and love will not be in those forms anymore. A galaxy won't be a galaxy anymore, a nebula won't be a nebula anymore, but the information that made up that galaxy and nebula will still be in the universe. They will be in different forms, what we humans would call formlessness if we were there to observe it.


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## Badinerie (May 3, 2008)

tdc said:


> I think even if we take Ravel's statement as true - it is still a fascinating point to ponder as it suggests a rather large 25% of the composition process is _not_ intellectual. If that part of composing is not an intellectual activity than what kind of activity is it? Where is _it_ coming from? What is _it_?


Plagiarism............


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Yeah, we won't be there, but we also aren't near the planets that we detect going around distant stars. There are other ways of detection. We measure the light from the star that it is revolving around. We are able to make inferences from the information and knowledge we have, there's a reason why the Big Bang is a scientific theory even though we weren't there when it happened.
> 
> Actual _Information_ can't break down, though. Check out the famous argument (and wager that went along with it) between Stephen Hawking and other physicists over this very subject.
> 
> Ultimately, I think this is merely a miscommunication of semantics. The end of things as we humans know it will definitely "end". Galaxies will dissolve into formlessness, our species will end, etc., I'm only saying that the actual energy/information will still be there, albeit unrecognizable. Try to look at the vantage point without humans there to make observations. Yes, what we know and love will not be in those forms anymore. A galaxy won't be a galaxy anymore, but the information that made up that galaxy will still be in the universe. They will be in different forms, what we humans would call formlessness if we were there to observe it.


Yea, it's a pretty intense subject. Ultimately all actions are unavailing. There is no eternal fortress to build. Of course I'm going to enjoy this beautiful existence, but even the memory of this life won't be there. Who will be there to remember? It's quite bizarre.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> Yea, it's a pretty intense subject. Ultimately all actions are unavailing. There is no eternal fortress to build. Of course I'm going to enjoy this beautiful existence, but even the memory of this life won't be there. Who will be there to remember? It's quite bizarre.


I share your bewilderment at the very existence of existence. It can definitely be bizarre, but in the meantime I'll soak in the beauty and strangeness of it all, with extra doses of classical music.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

I guess intellectual activity is sometimes thought of differently than inspiration or maybe subconscious activity. To me they are really all the same and originate in a similar manner. So I would say composition is 100% an intellectual activity.

I think music can express a general emotional feeling in most people. Some may not respond the same way as others. Some works may cause some people to be sad or think of sadness, some others to be despondent or think of despair, some others to feel fear, helplessness, anxiety, or annoyance. Of course others may just think it's beautiful. The point is that a composer can try to create a work that expresses a particular emotion, but music is too blunt for that expression. Maybe most will view certain works (or parts of works) as expressing something negative, but they will not all agree on exactly what negative emotion is expressed. 

So while I wouldn't say music cannot express anything, I think it does a very poor job of expressing specific thoughts, feelings, or emotions.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

mmsbls, I agree with you. The very fact that it does get across something, no matter how broad or difficult to grasp that emotion may be, it is still getting across something. I find this to be the definition of expression, "_the process of making known one's thoughts or feelings_", just because the end-product may be extremely vague doesn't mean the expression isn't there. I brought up the example of Ligeti earlier, I can't fathom that he wasn't aware that some of his music would be thought to evoke dread, tension, and fear.

*Pithily put: I don't think abstraction negates expression.*

It's why are we able to comment on such thread topics like this, "Dark, Ominous, and Foreboding Music"

PS. Specific thoughts, feelings, and emotions can only be articulated with language, which I do not think music is. Music cannot get across specific thoughts, to paraphrase what some guy said, get 100 people into a room and let them listen to a musical piece with a program, let's see how many people can figure out what it's "about" without the program. I doubt a single person would.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Actual _Information_ can't break down, though. Check out the famous argument (and wager that went along with it) between Stephen Hawking and other physicists over this very subject.


But is it information if there's nobody to be informed?


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

KenOC said:


> But is it information if there's nobody to be informed?


I was only referring to the connotation of information in physics.


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## trazom (Apr 13, 2009)

Vesuvius said:


> Every beginning has an end.


I have this friend in the Italian mafia who always said this exact same thing. In fact, he'd also say things like "some people don't deserve to live" and for my own safety, I would NEVER question him.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

> "...music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all....
> Expression has never been an inherent property of music.... this is only an illusion and not a reality. It is simply an additional attribute which, *by tacit and inveterate agreement*, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being." ~ Stravinsky


That "tacit and inveterate agreement" is the culture within which the music is written, though, which is not a trivial thing.
Sure, _in theory_ music can't express anything, but in practice it does. 
Let's say you've never heard "The Soldier's Tale" before, and somebody plays a recording for you without telling you what it's called... now think of all the "tacit and inveterate agreement" you have to abandon in order to think that the narrator's opening words are wholly inappropriate for the music.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> What you call a person are the bundle of movements you're conscious of. Your mind and body are simply machines of life, doing what they've evolved to do... and many of it is outside of a person's control. Life will continue to evolve or be destroyed... either way this current phase of humanity will be obsolete at some point; just like all the other forms of existence.
> 
> Not even galaxies last forever... how much less this tiny speck of our species?


I'm sorry but I fail to see how this is relevant to the current discussion?



Vesuvius said:


> Every beginning has an end. It's almost absurdly irrational to think that something can begin and run on forever. It goes against all practical reasoning.
> 
> But that's a good point about time and the moment. I don't have much to add on that.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe


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## Guest (Oct 12, 2014)

Nereffid said:


> Sure, _in theory_ music can't express anything, but in practice it does.


I'd like to finesse this if I may. In order to present what I think is really going on. (And more in line with what Stravinsky plainly said.)

In practice, music cannot express anything. In practice, listeners are more than able to react to music *as if it were communicating something.*

Humans generally are capable of this kind of activity. They are also able, for one example, of seeing faces in almost everything, in clouds, in rocks, in the moon, in flaking paint on the side of a building. The clouds and the rocks and the moon and the paint are none of them expressing faces. We're doing all of that.

It is the same with music, with one exception, that music is a thing made consciously by, you guessed it, humans. The same people who are capable of seeing faces in anything. So it's no surprise that a human making a musical composition can be able to feel as if the notes and the rhythms are expressing grief over the loss of a child or anger over the execution of innocent people or happiness at being in the country on a beautiful day or joy at the idea of everyone becoming able to just get along.

Many of the arts are imitative, that is, are capable of imitating--theater, sculpture, painting, literature. They don't have to imitate, but historically they mostly have done so. Architecture, um, not so much.

Music, however (which is unfrozen architecture), can imitate some things as well. Anything that sounds, anything with rhythm, can be imitated. Some pieces of music even imitate other pieces (or styles) of music. Since crying, for instance, has sound and rhythm, it can be imitated musically. And that makes it easy to conclude that music can express grief. Well, music can imitate the sound of crying. In this instance, however (which is why I chose it, of course), we have a thing that is very similar, sonically and rhythmically, to laughing, which is otherwise the opposite of crying. Two things which are opposites sharing some of the same sounds and rhythms, which are the things that music can imitate. And without a context, which has of necessity to be provided by words, it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to tell which it is that any particular piece is presenting, laughter or crying.

And that's only on the fairly superficial level of imitation.

Music is incapable of expressing anything but itself. Humans are capable of feeling that they are receiving messages from just about anything, music included.


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Besides sounds like laughter, a baby crying, a scream of fear, the wail of mourning, and so on, including some non-human sounds such as the roar of a predatory cat, the rumble of thunder, or a lark's singing - besides such sounds, most sounds don't have any inherent human meanings, but yet we attach them to arbitrary (or nearly arbitrary, as in onomatopoeia and almost everyone association of a baby's first "ammammammammammamma" and her mother) meanings and manage to communicate - not only in words, but with various sirens, beeps, rings, alarms, Morse code.... 

I think it's obvious that music makes some use of these things. Some of it is arbitrary cultural stuff like the grammar and vocabulary of a language ("resolution"), while some of it is deeper, probably inherent, such as the experience of octaves as "the same note." 

Let's take the opening of Brahms' first symphony. I can't imagine anyone anywhere saying that it represents tenderness, nostalgia, sleepiness, effervescent delight, sinister sneakiness.... Pretty much everyone is going to hear something like someone stomping, whether it's a hunter or a conqueror or a terrifying giant, a proud groom on his way to the bridal chamber, a god announcing the creation and destruction of universes, a father coming to punish his disobedient children, a summons of the guilty to the judgment.... 

It's fair to say that the music expresses that. But, since we can't tell whether the music represents Beethoven's thundering legacy, or Christ's harrowing of hell, or Hulagu entering Baghdad (or any other man preparing to rape and plunder), or an Aztec priest ascending the pyramid for the sacrifice, or a scholar reading the first lines of an ancient text long thought lost that he's just found in some old monastery - or any number of things, including nothing but someone pounding on a timpani while other musicians make other noises - it's also fair to say the music doesn't express anything. 

I can't see that there's more than semantics here. 

One interesting example of all this is "crime jazz." I once read an argument that when white musicians played "crime jazz" (or "noir jazz" or whatever) they made it loud and brazen, reflecting their impression of a threatening black man, while black musicians making "crime jazz" would play it quiet and subtle, reflecting their impression of a threat that cannot be openly expressed. Of course we could play some "crime jazz" and get all kinds of interpretations of the music....


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

science said:


> Besides sounds like laughter, a baby crying, a scream of fear, the wail of mourning, and so on, including some non-human sounds such as the roar of a predatory cat, the rumble of thunder, or a lark's singing - besides such sounds, most sounds don't have any inherent human meanings, but yet we attach them to arbitrary (or nearly arbitrary, as in onomatopoeia and almost everyone association of a baby's first "ammammammammammamma" and her mother) meanings and manage to communicate - not only in words, but with various sirens, beeps, rings, alarms, Morse code....
> 
> I think it's obvious that music makes some use of these things. Some of it is arbitrary cultural stuff like the grammar and vocabulary of a language ("resolution"), while some of it is deeper, probably inherent, such as the experience of octaves as "the same note."
> 
> ...


I was obsessed with jazz for 6 years and I have never heqrd of crime jazz or noir jazz, could you give some examples to clarify what you mean? (The terms make some sense but just to avoid confusion)

It highly depends what kind of period you are talking abouy because in the 50' s-60's it was the opposite of what you are describing. Relaxed west-coast jazz wqs mostly played by white people and more bluesy and raw hard bop was mostly played by black people.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Nereffid said:


> [...]
> Let's say you've never heard "The Soldier's Tale" before, and somebody plays a recording for you without telling you what it's called... now think of all the "tacit and inveterate agreement" you have to abandon in order to think that the narrator's opening words are wholly inappropriate for the music.


_*"...the narrator's opening words"*_ lead you down the primrose path, to embellish the music with the 'expression' the narrator (and Stravinsky) have suckered you into. Yes, Stravinsky avoided composing music 'wholly inappropriate' to the subject. He wasn't a dunce.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Ukko said:


> _*"...the narrator's opening words"*_ lead you down the primrose path, to embellish the music with the 'expression' the narrator (and Stravinsky) have suckered you into. Yes, Stravinsky avoided composing music 'wholly inappropriate' to the subject. He wasn't a dunce.


My point being that if music doesn't express anything, or isn't supposed to express anything, then with that opening music, a narration that began with a hushed "All was quiet in the monastery..." wouldn't seem in any way odd.
If music doesn't express anything, or isn't supposed to express anything, then it's, I don't know, a _weird coincidence_ that a piece of music written to accompany a darkly humorous narration about a soldier should sound like a lively military march.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Piwikiwi said:


> I'm sorry but I fail to see how this is relevant to the current discussion?
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe


I have a sneaking suspicion that you're using that statement because you're running out of valuable contributions. It was on topic to what you'd said. No hard feelings.

As for the heat death theory... it's interesting, sure. But who will be able to verify this? It implies the destruction of our very species, among the rest, long before this can happen. We can have 99% of the equation figured out, but that 1% can send the ship down... change the whole world. Unless it's 100%, I can't reasonably accept it. It's just a highly intellectual fairy-tale.


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## Ukko (Jun 4, 2010)

Nereffid said:


> My point being that if music doesn't express anything, or isn't supposed to express anything, then with that opening music, a narration that began with a hushed "All was quiet in the monastery..." wouldn't seem in any way odd.
> If music doesn't express anything, or isn't supposed to express anything, then it's, I don't know, a _weird coincidence_ that a piece of music written to accompany a darkly humorous narration about a soldier should sound like a lively military march.


Your point (of view) is from a different hill than mine. We are seeing different 'scapes. That's what makes life interesting; and the world woefully short on peace too, of course.


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

Vesuvius said:


> I have a sneaking suspicion that you're using that statement because you're running out of valuable contributions. It was on topic to what you'd said. No hard feelings.


Well you are right. I felt like I couldn't contribute anything to the topic because I am not a philosophy student, and I felt like my layman speculation wouldn't be very useful.


> As for the heat death theory... it's interesting, sure. But who will be able to verify this? It implies the destruction of our very species, among the rest, long before this can happen. We can have 99% of the equation figured out, but that 1% can send the ship down... change the whole world. Unless it's 100%, I can't reasonably accept it. It's just a highly intellectual fairy-tale.


You are absolutely right about but there are certain signs that it seems a likely outcome, but is all speculation of course.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Piwikiwi said:


> Well you are right. I felt like I couldn't contribute anything to the topic because I am not a philosophy student, and I felt like my layman speculation wouldn't be very useful.
> 
> You are absolutely right about but there are certain signs that it seems a likely outcome, but is all speculation of course.


I hear ya'. I think many of us are layman on the majority of topics. Philosophy, in particular, doesn't really require a degree. It's more of a mental disposition. I've known several people who were much more philosophical than my comrades in the philosophy classes I've taken.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

"...music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all...."

I wonder if fellow Russian Shostakovich would accept this statement by Stravinsky as a truism.

In the meantime, I'm struck by how so many of us in this human race react with such similar responses to certain pieces of music. If music expresses nothing, why do we feel the opening of Beethoven's _Moonlight Sonata _is serene, that Stravinsky's _Le Sacre _is powerful and savage, that the end of the Beethoven Fifth is uplifting, that the "Eternal Memory" of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony is heart-rending...?

Music does seem to express things. I know that if I ran a funeral home, there are pieces I would not play over the sound system while a viewing was in progress.


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

Should we make a distinction between "to express" and "to evoke?" Where the former usually implies something transmitted by the subject, the latter usually implies something received by the object regardless of prior volitional transmission by the subject. Might be an interesting distinction in this discussion.


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## Stavrogin (Apr 20, 2014)

some guy said:


> I'd like to finesse this if I may. In order to present what I think is really going on. (And more in line with what Stravinsky plainly said.)
> 
> In practice, music cannot express anything. In practice, listeners are more than able to react to music *as if it were communicating something.*
> 
> ...


I have always had the doubt that I can only imitate myself being happy and people will feel that I am happy.
Doh.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

science said:


> Besides sounds like laughter, a baby crying, a scream of fear, the wail of mourning, and so on, including some non-human sounds such as the roar of a predatory cat, the rumble of thunder, or a lark's singing - besides such sounds, *most sounds don't have any inherent human meanings, but yet we attach them to arbitrary (or nearly arbitrary*, as in onomatopoeia and almost everyone association of a baby's first "ammammammammammamma" and her mother)* meanings* and manage to communicate - not only in words, but with various sirens, beeps, rings, alarms, Morse code....
> 
> I think it's obvious that *music makes some use of these things.* *Some of it is arbitrary cultural stuff* like the grammar and vocabulary of a language ("resolution"), *while some of it is deeper, probably inherent*, such as the experience of octaves as "the same note."
> 
> ...


This, I think, begins to get us somewhere.

Aphoristic dictums such as "Music expresses nothing" or "music expresses only itself" are fine as springboards for discussion, but that's all they can be. I believe we must start by giving credence to the common experience of mankind, which those pronouncements, taken literally, simply deny. Clearly, music can inspire powerful emotional reactions in people, along with perceptions that it's "about," or "expresses," something - two things which are importantly different but which occur, in varying proportions, as aspects of a single subjective experience. That "something" may be vague or specific, it may be nameable in words or completely outside of any conceivable category: at one extreme we sense, in some music, very strong evocations of, or parallels to, aspects of reality external to music as such; at the other extreme we have music which affects us mainly by the abstract play of sound and induces feelings which seem unrelateable, at least in explicit terms, to anything beyond it. Between these extremes is the whole immense and complex range of musical content and our subjective responses to it.

I don't think we can progress much in discussing music's expressive reality without making the distinction between "feelings" as the reaction of the listener and "feelings" as something embodied in the music itself. I say "feelings," rather than "emotion," because emotions are generally understood as specific complexes involving both physical sensations and ideational implications; they are feelings plus (implicit or explicit) thoughts. And although music may sometimes seem to come very close to communicating definite ideas, it really cannot, short of actually imitating natural sounds, do so. Some members have pointed out (I think I'm recalling Mahlerian under another thread) that by the late 19th century the tendency to regard music as explicitly descriptive of specific emotions and ideas had reached an extreme. This is understandable, given the extraordinary expansion of music's sound world and descriptive potential by Romantic composers; Richard Strauss, for example, said admiringly that in Wagner music had reached its highest capacity for expression, and boasted that he himself could (see his _Symphonia Domestica_) set eating utensils to music! I doubt that Strauss himself felt that pictorial description was music's ultimate function, but he can still be considered representative of the late Romantic aesthetic which Stravinsky and his "neoclassicism" rejected. I think we need to recognize that the latter's statements about music expressing "nothing" were outlandish, but also need to understand where he was coming from.

The confusion between the feelings we have when we listen to music and the feelings music expresses or embodies has, I think, caused some people to throw out the baby of the latter with the bathwater of the former. In other words, the fact that an individual's feeling response to a given musical work will be personal, unique, and variable has sometimes led to the assumption that expressive content in music is a mere subjective attribution, entirely arbitrary and unrelated to anything actually in the music. This belief, of course, discredits far more than the aesthetics of Romanticism mentioned above (and makes the musical achievements of the era virtually incomprehensible: what in the world do we think Wagner was up to with all that harmonic and orchestral complexity?). It actually ignores the way people have responded to music at least since Plato made such an issue of its effect on society and morality. True, our reactions to music are individual. So are our reactions to other people. But we do not conclude that another person's character can be understood as a mere projection of our personal reaction to him, or doesn't really exist except in that projection.

So if music really does have expressive capacities, if it really does somehow embody or represent feelings in ways that can induce feelings in us, it seems to me that the basic questions to be asked are two: 1.) What, in the constituent elements of music, enables it to arouse feelings? What attributes or elements of sound and of musical gestures, structures, and their development in time, do we perceive as images of subjective feeling states which we somehow recognize and respond to? And 2.) What are the neurological bases for the perception of these images and of our subjective responses to them? How, physiologically, is music perceived, what parts of the brain and nervous system are affected by it, and why do we process the incoming data in the aural perception of music the way we do? These questions can - must, really - be regarded as two tributaries to the same stream of inquiry in seeking to understand what music is and how it does what it does, and I know that work has been and is being done and that written material is available. I haven't read anything since Leonard B. Meyer's _Emotion and Meaning in Music_ many years ago, but I have to say that these discussions on TC have inspired me to read it again. I also recall some interesting remarks relating to the expressiveness of musical gestures by member EdwardBast, and would like to hear more from him if he's inclined to chime in.

I would add only that the remarks of science above seem to me to be on point, but also to underestimate the subtle ways in which the sounds of music really do present our brains with images which have not merely emotional associations but actual structural parallels with feeling states themselves. I am a musician myself, having been both a performer and to a minor extent a composer, as well as a visual artist; and I have always known without a shred of doubt that, alongside the 75% (or whatever percent) intellectual activity required to produce a meaningful work of art, my hand, ear and eye have been moved and guided, in the quest for formal relationships that not only cohere but _say something worth listening to or looking at,_ by the whole subjective, and largely unconscious, reality of who I am as a person. There does not have to be - and in many ways it's better if there is not - a conscious intent to express a specific meaning in a work of art, and likewise does not have to be a specific message received by a listener or viewer, to affirm the fundamental expressivity of art as a human activity, passion, and discipline.


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

> Woodduck: Aphoristic dictums such as "Music expresses nothing" or "music expresses only itself" are fine as springboards for discussion, but that's all they can be. I believe we must start by giving credence to the common experience of mankind, which those pronouncements, taken literally, simply deny. Clearly, music can inspire powerful emotional reactions in people, along with perceptions that it's "about," or "expresses," something - two things which are importantly different but which occur, in varying proportions, as aspects of a single subjective experience. That "something" may be vague or specific, it may be nameable in words or completely outside of any conceivable category: at one extreme we sense, in some music, very strong evocations of, or parallels to, aspects of reality external to music as such; at the other extreme we have music which affects us mainly by the abstract play of sound and induces feelings which seem unrelateable, at least in explicit terms, to anything beyond it.


That's how I see the aesthetic matter in its entirety.

I'm a phenomenalist and a representationalist to the tips of my epistemic fingers when it comes to how music affects me. Music has a mood, a feeling, an 'intuition,' if you will-- which is tacitly understood but at the same time very hard to articulate and to put into words.

For instance, I could never respond to something like the _Liebestod _ in a 'postitivistic' way-- that is to say, to only see that the music has a certain key, form, and harmonic structure; that the music is 'just about' measurement, technique, and form.

In an analogous way, this view is very akin to the mistaken view of a lot of econometricians in economics (both leftwing Keynesians and rightwing Friedmanites), who think that economics is 'measurement.'

-- As if one could go to Grand Central Station and only 'see' and 'measure' the time of day people were walking around and where they were going to. . . aside from and independent of the act of human choice, motivation, and mind-set that drove them to make the choice to travel to begin with.

Art and humanistic sciences like economics and clinical psychology aren't about 'measurement,'-- they're about people's actions, attitudes, beliefs, evaluations, and choices-- things that can't be quantified or reduced into a single musical formula or econometric algorithm. . .

Superb post.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Nereffid said:


> That "tacit and inveterate agreement" is the culture within which the music is written, though, which is not a trivial thing.
> Sure, _in theory_ music can't express anything, but in practice it does.
> Let's say you've never heard "The Soldier's Tale" before, and somebody plays a recording for you without telling you what it's called... now think of all the "tacit and inveterate agreement" you have to abandon in order to think that the narrator's opening words are wholly inappropriate for the music.


Bah, music with words is no longer 'just music,' those words sung, spoken, or the title or an appended 'program,' to an otherwise absolute /abstract piece... i.e. once involved, you no longer have a completely 'abstract' piece of music. I will say about any time something like what you have presented comes up, it includes some text as an ancillary element. If the suite from Stravinsky's piece were presented, and without its title, it would then be just music and nothing but music, and a wide-open aural Rorschach Blot to any listener (though that satiric quote of "God Save the monarch" would be puzzling, lol.) Without text as ancillary to the music, what you've posited dissolves to nothing.

Do you have any idea of just how many other texts, attached to the same music, would have you saying "it would be near impossible to think of this piece as not being associated with, and expressive of any one of those other texts than the one with which the piece is associated?

The same could be said of any piece of music either with a narrated / sung text; titled so as to color the listeners' perception or as given a 'program' which the music is supposed to express or narrate. Change the 'program,' present it to someone who knows nothing of the original program associated with the piece, and see what kind of listener reaction / perception you get... many would strongly line up with whatever textual context had been provided!

It is pretty certain that Liszt's _Les Preludes_ was completed, the ink dry, when a friend suggested to Liszt that the piece 'seemed' to have a content very suggestive of the Lamartine poem which is now associated with it, i.e. it was suggested to Liszt, who _after the fact of having conceived of and completed the piece,_ attached the program of the poem to that symphonic work.

Beethoven brought to his publisher the completed _Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13_, which the publisher looked at, and suggested to Beethoven that they print the work with the added subtitle _Sonata Pathétique._ Beethoven said, "sure," and there is that 'composer non-specific expression,' and audience perception, tacked on to that. The _Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57,_ and the earlier _Sonata Op. 27, no. 2 (quasi una fantasia) -- the second of a pair bearing Beethoven's given quasi una fantasia, referring only to their form --_ bore only those names in Beethoven's lifetime, only being named, well after the fact of being written, "Appasionata," and "Moonlight."

Other accounts abound of a composer starting and finishing a work, only thinking of a title given to that work after the fact of its completion.

None of Chopin's Études or Preludes were given any name by the composer other than Etude or Prelude, with Op. and number in the series under that opus number. Whatever titles they now have were also given by others, and after the fact of those pieces being written. I imagine some can not imagine the Étude Op. 25, No. 12 as anything but evocative of "Ocean Waves," but it is Étude Op. 25, No. 12, while "all it is" is a virtuosic study in parallel arpeggios.

So much of what the listener takes as a given title meant to color listener perception is, from the composer, or some later person, is a title given through the tangential association made by another than the composer, then.

For those who have only first heard a piece with one of those later-assigned titles, knowing those titles are not given by the author, you could as reasonably say then that the listener _must abandon_ that "tacit and inveterate agreement" which was 'made' with those pieces so associated _because they are wholly inappropriate for the music_.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I hear lots of expression in Bach's WTC on the harpsichord. The harpsichord has no real dynamics, and the timbre is essentially stable and unchanging, the rhythm in many of the preludes and fugues is uniform and repetitive, leaving us with only* pitch *and melodic contour, and *harmony *as the congruence of these lines, as an expressive aspect. Yet, Bach does this, and does it well. How?

He does it by the way that _music emulates and models the thought process._ There is logic, and harmony creates "color" in the strict pitch sense. Music is "gesture" of thought.

Music is "non-representational" in that it does not convey literal meanings; but come on, we ALL can think, feel, and experience. This is how music gets to us, in bypassing the literal channels (subject to literal meaning, language) and hitting us in our infrastructure of thought, feeling, and being. That's all we need to know; the rest is unnecessary intellectualizing.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Music is originally colorless, yet it lights up according to the listener's disposition. That's the amazement.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> Clearly, music can inspire powerful emotional reactions in people, along with perceptions that it's "about," or "expresses," something....


That is all that needs saying to corroborate Stravinsky's intent in saying what he did. Music (on its own) expresses nothing, or, it expresses itself. _But,_ and a very big "but" that is, _music has great power to evoke emotional responses within the listener._

Ergo, emotion not at all denied, and that along with I would hope a little question raised as to the source of that emotion, either within the composers or the listeners.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

PetrB said:


> That is all that needs saying to corroborate Stravinsky's intent in saying what he did. Music (on its own) expresses nothing, or, it expresses itself. _But,_ and a very big "but" that is, _music has great power to evoke emotional responses within the listener._
> 
> Ergo, emotion not at all denied, with I would hope a little question raised as to the source of that emotion, either within the composers or the listeners.


That's why I feel Stravinsky was right on. If music expressed specifics, then everyone would get the same affect. That's obviously no the case. But to get to this point... a broadening of view beyond one's personal emotions has to take place. If someone is so focused on their personal reactions, they'll always project their own imprint on things where it doesn't naturally occur.


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## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

millionrainbows said:


> I hear lots of expression in Bach's WTC on the harpsichord. The harpsichord has no real dynamics, and the timbre is essentially stable and unchanging, the rhythm in many of the preludes and fugues is uniform and repetitive, leaving us with only* pitch *and melodic contour, and *harmony *as the congruence of these lines, as an expressive aspect. Yet, Bach does this, and does it well. How?
> 
> He does it by the way that _music emulates and models the thought process._ There is logic, and harmony creates "color" in the strict pitch sense. Music is "gesture" of thought.
> 
> Music is "non-representational" in that it does not convey literal meanings; but come on, we ALL can think, feel, and experience. This is how music gets to us, in bypassing the literal channels (subject to literal meaning, language) and hitting us in our infrastructure of thought, feeling, and being. That's all we need to know; the rest is unnecessary intellectualizing.


The harpsichord gives an edginess to Bach and Scarlatti that the modern piano simply cannot match.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Originally Posted by Woodduck: 
"Clearly, music can inspire powerful emotional reactions in people, along with perceptions that it's "about," or "expresses," something...."



PetrB said:


> That is all that needs saying to corroborate Stravinsky's intent in saying what he did. *Music (on its own) expresses nothing, or, it expresses itself.* _But,_ and a very big "but" that is, _music has great power to evoke emotional responses within the listener._
> 
> Ergo, emotion not at all denied, and that along with I would hope a little question raised as to the source of that emotion, either within the composers or the listeners.


You realize that you are excising a phrase from a sentence from a paragraph from an essay in which I dealt at some length with the question of whether and how music might indeed, on its own, express something other than "itself" (an incoherent concept). It feels odd to be quoted in support of an idea with which I disagree, particularly as the quoted phrase, taken out of context, does not actually support that idea!

Perhaps you would like to look at the full context and discuss what I actually said? I really don't mind challenges by smart people like you, PetrB! I get so few such. Sometimes I feel lonely.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Kopachris said:


> Should we make a distinction between "to express" and "to evoke?" Where the former usually implies something transmitted by the subject, the latter usually implies something received by the object regardless of prior volitional transmission by the subject. Might be an interesting distinction in this discussion.


Yes we should make this distinction. Baroque composers never thought they were expressing affect. The role of the composer was thought to be akin to that of an orator, and the job of the composer was to learn all of the best tricks for evoking or inducing a particular affect. No one ever would think that the composer must have been feeling the emotion the music evokes. Understand, however, that I am talking about vocal music here, and that the proper affect to evoke would be determined by the text.

Consider "Dido's Lament" from Purcell's _Dido and Aeneas_. Every element of the music is a conventional gesture for evoking disconsolation: Minor mode, ground bass in a slow tempo, beginning with the traditional tetrachordal descent (chromatically filled), incessant sighing figures from the strings. No words are even necessary. It is perfectly obvious what the music is supposed to evoke. Purcell merely uses the whole conventional bag of tricks - tricks everyone knew, both creators, and listeners - for moving an audience in a very particular way. Here is the whole scene:


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## science (Oct 14, 2010)

Piwikiwi said:


> I was obsessed with jazz for 6 years and I have never heqrd of crime jazz or noir jazz, could you give some examples to clarify what you mean? (The terms make some sense but just to avoid confusion)
> 
> It highly depends what kind of period you are talking abouy because in the 50' s-60's it was the opposite of what you are describing. Relaxed west-coast jazz wqs mostly played by white people and more bluesy and raw hard bop was mostly played by black people.


A good start is this list.

If you google it you'll find more information, and there's even a whole book on the topic available on amazon.


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## Stavrogin (Apr 20, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> That's why I feel Stravinsky was right on. If music expressed specifics, then everyone would get the same affect. That's obviously no the case. But to get to this point... a broadening of view beyond one's personal emotions has to take place. If someone is so focused on their personal reactions, they'll always project their own imprint on things where it doesn't naturally occur.


One thing I don't like about this position is the personification of music. Music is just a medium. "Music expresses something / doesn't express anything" are non sense statements per se. The correct question is: can a composer express something with music?, and my answer would be Yes, even thought not with the same effects as other media of course.

The composer can try to express "something" (I am not saying they always do, but they can). Will he manage to communicate the same things (or anything at all) to all the listeners? That's another story.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Stavrogin said:


> One thing I don't like about this position is the personification of music. Music is just a medium. "Music expresses something / doesn't express anything" are non sense statements per se. The correct question is: can a composer express something with music?, and my answer would be Yes, even thought not with the same effects as other media of course.
> 
> The composer can try to express "something" (I am not saying they always do, but they can). Will he manage to communicate the same things (or anything at all) to all the listeners? That's another story.


The other side has responded already with, "OK, but the music *itself *is incapable of communicating. You're projecting what the composer and audience thinks."

My response is _music is NOT created on its own in a vacuum_. There is no music without the human composer/artist. To say music itself is absurd to me, it's like saying "Yeah, the painter can hope to express something with this abstract painting but it can only express the oil paints of which it is made of". Well, duh! But paint, just like pitches and notes have to be molded by the human artist/composer. It's a non-starter to say music itself can't express anything. Where can I find this "music itself", this music that is a standalone entity w/out a human creator and human listeners?

Perhaps there is an issue with semantics here. Music can't express concepts/things/actions/ like a language because it isn't a language. If you think expression only means precise articulation (i.e., a language), then yes, it's merely a problem of semantics. I'm arguing that if one person hears despair in one piece of music and another person hears dread in the same music, then the music is still expressing something. Why are we forgetting that there is no music without a human creator and then that music would have to fall upon human ears. There is not one without the other.

On second thought, this _must_ be a problem with semantics, Stravinsky states that "music expresses itself", yes, that's fine and dandy. But that only goes so far, as I've said, there are humans involved. We all hear something in music, we hear the "music itself", so to speak, but that music itself means something. *I just cannot divorce the human listener and composer from the "music itself". Logically, it makes no sense to do that*. Therefore, seeing music merely expressing itself doesn't make any sense. It's a non-starter, self-evident but meaningless.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

EdwardBast said:


> Yes we should make this distinction. Baroque composers never thought they were expressing affect. The role of the composer was thought to be akin to that of an orator, and the job of the composer was to learn all of the best tricks for evoking or inducing a particular affect.


I think that's quite true. The idea that a composer's own emotions, states of mind, etc., had any importance at all lie well in the future. The 19th century in fact. CPE Bach paved the way so maybe it wasn't quite that sudden, but...


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## Piwikiwi (Apr 1, 2011)

science said:


> A good start is this list.
> 
> If you google it you'll find more information, and there's even a whole book on the topic available on amazon.


Ah I completely get what you mean but I can't comment on it since I don't know enough about it


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

Woodduck said:


> I haven't read anything since Leonard B. Meyer's _Emotion and Meaning in Music_ many years ago, but I have to say that these discussions on TC have inspired me to read it again.


Funny you should mention that book, as it's part of what prompted me to start the thread asking for music which expresses hatred in the first place.


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## Guest (Oct 13, 2014)

And round and round and round we go.

Though it's also true that after the last flurry of posts, it seems like it would be easy for just about anyone to reject the "music expresses something" idea. It is so obviously wrong.

And while I want so to come storming into the discussion with my heavy boots and my loud voice (but NOT accompanied by Brahms' 1st*), I will try to confine myself to an attempt to recast the discussion. Who knows. It might help.

It seems that underneath everything that's been said so far are two ideas, one is that music is a servant; it has purposes and it exists primarily to accomplish those purposes. Anyone who denies those purposes is diminishing music to mere technique: keys, modulation, sonata-allegro form. The purposes are good and noble and important, and music's importance is directly related to how well it serves those purposes.

The other idea is that music is full. It is good all on its own. It doesn't need any purposes except its own purposes. That it can be perceived as fulfilling other purposes is neither here nor there. Clouds don't intend to make forms recognizable to humans as faces or sheep or the last supper, but humans are capable of seeing those things, and many more, all the time. And that's just clouds. *To someone who adheres to the second idea, a statement like this about Brahms' 1st is going to seem literally obscene: "Pretty much everyone is going to hear something like someone stomping, whether it's a hunter or a conqueror or a terrifying giant, a proud groom on his way to the bridal chamber, a god announcing the creation and destruction of universes, a father coming to punish his disobedient children, a summons of the guilty to the judgment...."

To someone who adheres to the second idea, statements like this quite clearly diminish music.

So we have two camps, surprise surprise. But in this instance, both camps are arguing the same thing, that what the other camp is doing is diminishing music.

Both camps, therefore, agree that music is important and should not be diminished. Neither camp wants music to be diminished.

We agree about so much. Which makes the disagreement pretty fundamental, I fear. That is, in spite of our agreement, I really don't see us resolving our fundamental disagreement, which is that the side we're not on is the one that's diminishing music.


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## Kopachris (May 31, 2010)

How does one _diminish_ music? (Aside from the meanings of "diminish" as related to musical dynamics, harmony, and motivic development, of course.)


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## Musicforawhile (Oct 10, 2014)

Can I just add my thoughts on the Strauss quote. If you're too bored of this thread now, I wont be offended if you don't read it. 

I think it is quite obvious what Strauss was saying unless I'm missing something. Music is sound consciously arranged in a certain way by the composer. Sound, whether or not it has been put together consciously i.e. to create a piece of music or is just the noise we hear of traffic or leaves rustling, is energy moving through a medium e.g. air. This energy disturbs the medium (air) particles with a pattern correlative of its frequency, and then this wave pattern hits our eardrum and our brains are wired to perceive this as the phenomenon we call sound. Sorry if that felt like a physics lesson, and I am not good at physics, so please tell me if I got something wrong. So anyway, if that is what sound is then how in god's name can sound express anything in itself?? It isn't a sentient being with memories, desires, feelings etc. so it can't be the thing expressing anything. We as humans do the expressing of our feelings and thoughts and can use various stimuli like different sound pitches or different colour paints, in the visual arts, to express ourselves. The music created is the result of our expression. Music cannot feel; it is not alive so therefore in itself it expresses nothing. It is only what it is or as Strauss put it jokingly 'it only expresses itself.' But of course, it doesn't even express itself, it has no powers of expression it is a wave of energy that's all. It is just a form of energy like heat. 

So Strauss seems to be stating the obvious, that's the only bit I don't get. Why state something so obvious? I suppose if he didn't say it we wouldn't be having this discussion though. Maybe he just wanted to say something opposite to what we would expect a composer to say, just to wilfully confuse us and to make himself sound appear artistically elusive and enigmatic.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

some guy said:


> Though it's also true that after the last flurry of posts, it seems like it would be easy for just about anyone to reject the "music expresses something" idea. It is so obviously wrong.


From the OP of this very thread:



> The statements of the two composers above seem to be at near polar opposites of how most listeners think of music, or what people think composers intend or are feeling while they compose.
> 
> What they ^^^ said, and its implications, seems to rock the world of how many a classical music consumer thinks of the music they love, or what many seem to think is the emotional state of a composers when they write what they write.


Does this suggest that the Stravinsky statement that music expresses something is so "obviously wrong" or does it suggest the Stravinsky statement is controversial and not holy scripture accepted as truth? Do the math. It's funny how you start your post claiming that your opinion is so "obviously right". Furthermore, do you think what Stravinsky stated is the widely-held view of composers "in the know" while we listeners ("uneducated masses") have just been flat-out wrong all along? Why is this controversial statement so "obviously right"?



some guy said:


> It seems that underneath everything that's been said so far are two ideas, one is that music is a servant; it has purposes and it exists primarily to accomplish those purposes. Anyone who denies those purposes is diminishing music to mere technique: keys, modulation, sonata-allegro form. The purposes are good and noble and important, and music's importance is directly related to how well it serves those purposes.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...


Please don't assume what we mean or what we think this topic entails, putting thoughts into our heads, and words into our mouths. I, nor anyone else, has said that we fear it has diminished music or even said what we think the purpose of music to be. Those thoughts are on another thread. We are addressing expression on this thread. It seems that you started your post on this thread topic and finished your post addressing a separate thread topic.

I didn't even think about music being diminished and certainly didn't form my thoughts with that in mind. You've only muddied the already muddy issue by assuming something and then arguing against the issue with the flawed assumption as your base. There's a logical fallacy for that.



some guy said:


> The other idea is that music is full. It is good all on its own. It doesn't need any purposes except its own purposes. That it can be perceived as fulfilling other purposes is neither here nor there. *Clouds don't intend to make forms recognizable to humans as faces or sheep or the last supper, but humans are capable of seeing those things, and many more, all the time. And that's just clouds*. *To someone who adheres to the second idea, a statement like this about Brahms' 1st is going to seem literally obscene: "Pretty much everyone is going to hear something like someone stomping, whether it's a hunter or a conqueror or a terrifying giant, a proud groom on his way to the bridal chamber, a god announcing the creation and destruction of universes, a father coming to punish his disobedient children, a summons of the guilty to the judgment...."


This analogy of the "clouds making shapes and faces" is *extremely misleading*. CLOUDS DO NOT HAVE A HUMAN CREATOR. *If they did, we could assume that the artist who created those clouds had some say in what the finished product would look like or resemble!* You've created this flawed analogy as your base and then went on to form your argument around it.

The very fact that many people will hear a similar general, let's say "mood", from the music is enough to show you the intentions and expression of its creator, the composer. I've already admitted, on this thread and on another, that music isn't a language, so of course it won't get across specifics and articulate statements. The examples you give for the Brahms music isn't addressing the issue at hand, we're _not_ discussing whether music can express specific and articulate concepts, like a language can. We're discussing expression which isn't synonymous with language.

We cannot divorce the listener and composer from the music, you're boiling this down to "Sounds cannot express anything, only itself". If you wanna say that sounds are sounds and can't express something other than itself, then that would be better served as your statement. In fact, it would even match up perfectly with the clouds analogy! Sounds don't have a human creator. They are just there. Just like clouds are.

This whole idea of "itself" merely boils music down to "*it* being *it*" and we humans can extract what we'd like from *it*. That can be said about a tree, the clouds in the sky, a natural river, or a mountain range. Those are there without a human creator, we can make all the interpretation we'd like about those. Yet they are only capable of expressing themselves. The very concept of "only expressing itself" only makes sense when talking about natural physical things that humans have not made. Like nature.

*You're stripping music down to its material nature. But why? As if the music is analogous to the sounds of which it is made of. It isn't. This notion of divorcing the music from the human creator is bizarre.*


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## Guest (Oct 13, 2014)

Like I said....


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Kopachris said:


> Should we make a distinction between "to express" and "to evoke?" Where the former usually implies something transmitted by the subject, the latter usually implies something received by the object regardless of prior volitional transmission by the subject. Might be an interesting distinction in this discussion.


*Yeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssssssss!*


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> This analogy of the "clouds making shapes and faces" is *extremely misleading*. CLOUDS DO NOT HAVE A HUMAN CREATOR. *If they did, we could assume that the artist who created those clouds had some say in what the finished product would look like or resemble!*....
> 
> We cannot divorce the listener and composer from the music
> 
> ...


And here you have written out what I think is the general outrage, literally, in the premise that music written by human creators is nonetheless no more than an aural Rorschach blot for the listener.

Especially when composers have an idea for a symphony, based on a musical idea alone; idea without a name, influential title or narrative or other representative intent, it is frequent enough that the composers themselves could not begin to honestly say what the basic idea -- or the whole piece -- expressed or what was intended to be communicated. It is in just such a circumstance where a composer can be readily likened as analogous to the meteorological circumstances that form clouds, i.e trained and practiced as the composer is, the unconscious at work within that similar set of circumstances allows for the formation of clouds which the composer is able to produce, without any further conscious thought as to what those clouds represent or how they might be 'interpreted.'

The western outlook on individualism and 'creating' (and most of all "self-expression") nearly goes out the window in circumstances like the above, to a measure where one could say the composer is divorced from the music they composed (and, lol, was the composer ever married to music in the first place?)

All this points to what is called a state where ego has pretty much dissolved. Some consider that state a high meditative / religious one, and 'lofty.' That matters not as much as I think that many people are simply appalled at anything which hints at a state of little or no ego, lack of personal control, willfulness, what you may... the notion of 'loss of conscious self,' terrifies, or offends, or appalls many, especially those in western cultures. Yet many an artist has said and believes that something they have made 'comes from that place.'

I would prefer to believe them, and that such works are commonplace, and that there is pretty much nothing specific to say about their intent -- all that can be honestly said about those works is what listeners think of them / think they mean -- the composer if not fully divorced, at a very remove in the picture while writing such works.

A craftsman selects two sheets of veneer to face a pair of cabinet doors, the obvious choice being to match those up to be near perfectly symmetrical, and people 'see faces,' or figures, etc. in that pattern. Is it such a far stretch to think that a composer has _no concrete idea that could be expressed in words,_ writes the piece, and is like to having put the veneer on those doors, or as analogy, created clouds, and that little or any of the artist's ego was at work there?

If so, beyond the wild speculations of what the composer intended, what is there, no matter the backup of examples of musical intervals, harmony or forms as tied to linguistics, philosophy, etc. that can be 'concretely said' about the meaning of the work and what it expresses other than what the individual listener perceives?

*"As if the music is analogous to the sounds of which it is made of. It isn't."*
I agree. That is not an analogy; music _*is*_ the sounds of which it is made of.

*"This notion of divorcing the music from the human creator is bizarre."* -- only to those who are highly affronted / frightened by the notion that loss of ego = loss of self... a very literal and western minded perspective / mistake. It is more truly absence of ego with the self that much more very present.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> My response is _music is NOT created on its own in a vacuum_. There is no music without the human composer/artist. To say music itself is absurd to me, it's like saying "Yeah, the painter can hope to express something with this abstract painting but it can only express the oil paints of which it is made of". Well, duh! But paint, just like pitches and notes have to be molded by the human artist/composer. It's a non-starter to say music itself can't express anything. Where can I find this "music itself", this music that is a standalone entity w/out a human creator and human listeners?....Why are we forgetting that there is no music without a human creator and then that music would have to fall upon human ears. There is not one without the other....We all hear something in music, we hear the "music itself", so to speak, but that music itself means something. *I just cannot divorce the human listener and composer from the "music itself". Logically, it makes no sense to do that*. Therefore, seeing music merely expressing itself doesn't make any sense. It's a non-starter, self-evident but meaningless.


But what about the attempts to divorce the composer's intent or "ego" from the music, as in the case of John Cage and even Pierre Boulez (in _Structures,_ where he attempted to create a self-generating system? Is this effective music? I say yes.

To elaborate on your statements, yes, I agree that music is a two-way street. In most cases, the composer creates a work which, if effective, communicates with the listener on "agreed-upon" meanings and experiences. Music is then a human-to-human experience, a "mapping of experience" from composer to listener.

To separate the "art itself" from its creator is rather disingenuous, because in this sense, all art is a shared experience, created by humans, for humans. Agreed.

But what about the human being's innate tendency to find meaning in unintended ways? I remember a fad in which Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon was listened to while viewing The Wizard of Oz, and many people swore that there were connections which were too congruous and meaningful to be simply coincidental.

This is the "unconscious" at work, and what the Surrealists exploited. WE will see meaning where we will. This is the way all "oracles" work as well: Tarot cards, the I-Ching, Ouija boards, etc. Taoism saw "the way" in whirlpools, grain patterns of wood, and other natural phenomena. The orientals are much more aware of this aspect of the mind than Westerners seem to be. Boulez was aware of the French surrealists and Mallarme, so we must take this into consideration.

Abstract Expressionism was also influenced by surrealism and "archetypes" of the unconscious mind. Morton Feldman was friend with many of these painters, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko, John Cage, and others.

So, really we need to consider that _any symbol_, or experience, whether art, intended or not, can gain "meaning" if we put it there.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

some guy said:


> ...The other (second) idea is that music is full. It is good all on its own. It doesn't need any purposes except its own purposes...To someone who adheres to the second idea, a statement like this about Brahms' 1st is going to seem literally obscene: _*"Pretty much everyone is going to hear something like someone stomping, whether it's a hunter or a conqueror or a terrifying giant, a proud groom on his way to the bridal chamber, a god announcing the creation and destruction of universes, a father coming to punish his disobedient children, a summons of the guilty to the judgment...."*_...To someone who adheres to the second idea, statements like this quite clearly diminish music.


Much music is based on shared human experience: we all have two legs, and can walk. We all are capable of fearing larger, more powerful beings. Big things make big sounds, little things make little sounds.

*I don't think the generalization about Brahms diminishes the music at all. *

Someguy is so horrified by the notion that he might share a _universal reaction_ to music, that he has closed-off the possibility of "shared" meaning. After all, the Brahms statement was just a* generalization.* Nobody is trying to make Someguy think a _specific_ _thing,_ in a specific way, or control his thoughts.

All the statement is saying is that _art evokes meaning in humans based on our shared, universal characteristics as human beings, _that's all. If you take it literally, as if "literal" meanings were being conveyed, then this is rather condescending, and over-estimates the stupidity of listeners in general.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

PetrB said:


> And here you have written out what I think is the general outrage, literally, in the premise that music written by human creators is nonetheless no more than an aural Rorschach blot for the listener.
> 
> Especially when composers have an idea for a symphony, based on a musical idea alone; idea without a name, influential title or narrative or other representative intent, it is frequent enough that the composers themselves could not begin to honestly say what the basic idea -- or the whole piece -- expressed or what was intended to be communicated. It is in just such a circumstance where a composer can be readily likened as analogous to the meteorological circumstances that form clouds, i.e trained and practiced as the composer is, the unconscious at work within that similar set of circumstances allows for the formation of clouds which the composer is able to produce, without any further conscious thought as to what those clouds represent or how they might be 'interpreted.'


PetrB, I appreciate your thoughtful response. I am convinced we are at odds over what we mean by expression, and mere semantics. In addition to that, I think a main roadblock in our communication is varying levels of abstraction. I agree with what you say about music being an aural Rorschach blot for the listener, we differ on what is the next step after that acknowledgement. I would bring back in the human element, I think the composer _does_ indeed have a decent idea of a general mood or sentiment that is to be conveyed in the aural Rorschach blot. Whether 65% of the people see a butterfly in an actual Rorschach blot or whether 65% hear despair in a piece of music is irrelevant to me. The expression is still there. "_Art evokes meaning in humans based on our shared, universal characteristics as human beings_" (millionrainbows' quote). You agreed with kopachris' statement that a distinction should be made between _express _and _evoke_, and perhaps that is right, but I think expression _must_ evoke something or else it wouldn't be expression.

One other issue I have with this statement, "_It is in just such a circumstance where a composer can be readily likened as analogous to the meteorological circumstances that form clouds, i.e trained and practiced as the composer is..._"

This doesn't add up. The meteorological circumstances have no choice but to form those clouds. It's abiding by the laws of the universe. A composer can decide to write music expressing grief or he can choose to write music expressing joy (as best as that composer can to his human ablities, something that can't be said about the meteorological circumstances that create clouds). Bring water to 212 F and it WILL boil. 100% of the time. The physical laws of this world do not compromise. For this reason, they are scientific laws. Mix two incompatible elements together and there WILL be a volatile consequence 100% of the time. Composers who are "trained and practiced" do not have this level of absolute. The trained and practiced human composer pours his artistic human element into the music, I find that nearly a literal definition of a "composer composing/creating music". The music is an end-product of his creativity and thus has no choice but to express and evoke. I stated earlier that "expression must evoke", there doesn't need to be a 100% consensus on what it evokes or expresses. Expression doesn't necessitate articulation, it isn't a language. That's the difference between the meteorological circumstances and the man-made music.

I understand that we humans create music and music is actually a physical thing just like everything else in the universe, soundwaves, chords, pitches, notes on paper, etc. but I think we have to call a spade a spade. There's a reason why we as a society don't call clouds art, but we do call music art.

Respectfully and pithily,


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> I hear lots of expression in Bach's WTC on the harpsichord. The harpsichord has no real dynamics, and the timbre is essentially stable and unchanging, the rhythm in many of the preludes and fugues is uniform and repetitive, leaving us with only* pitch *and melodic contour, and *harmony *as the congruence of these lines, as an expressive aspect. Yet, Bach does this, and does it well. How?
> 
> He does it by the way that _*music emulates and models the thought process.*_ There is logic, and harmony creates "color" in the strict pitch sense. Music is "gesture" of thought.
> 
> *Music is "non-representational" in that it does not convey literal meanings; but come on, we ALL can think, feel, and experience. This is how music gets to us, in bypassing the literal channels (subject to literal meaning, language) and hitting us in our [/I]infrastructure of thought, feeling, and being. That's all we need to know; the rest is unnecessary intellectualizing.*


_

Thank you, millionrainbows. If I have any disagreement with you, it's with your last sentence; I don't think it's useless to analyze the subject of musical expressiveness further. In fact, I think continued scientific research into the brain and nervous system will yield information that helps us see in more detail how music "works." I also think it's useful to look at the other arts to see in what ways their expressive devices, or "languages," are similar in form and function to those of music.

I would say that music emulates and models not only the thought process but the dynamic "shapes" of feeling. Visual art does this as well; the expressive qualities of forms, colors, and visual rhythms are perhaps more easily grasped than the forms of music because they are not transitory and can be seen. But in visual art these forms have the obvious, and often dominant, function of depicting objects; visual art which eliminates depiction of subject matter attempts, in a sense, to be "musical," but abstracted visual stimuli don't have the degree of expressive power that musical stimuli do. We may never really "understand" why musical sounds and their organization uniquely arouse such strong feelings in us, but there is no denying that they do - and it is absolutely germane to this discussion to attempt to understand how they do, and what are the specific features of music and of our psycho/physical beings between which communication takes place.

That music "models and emulates" the processes of thought and feeling, and hits us "in our infrastructure of thought, feeling, and being," has long struck me as the philosophical and scientific entryway to whatever understanding of music's powers we can attain. I'm really surprised, as I move about in this and other threads, that this conception and its implications seem to mean nothing to some people. The idea that there may be some actual correspondences between what music is doing and what we are doing when we exercise our faculties of awareness - when we think and feel - and that these correspondences might imply that our emotional responses to, and interpretation of, music are not entirely arbitrary - is anathema to some who repeat over and over the mantra that "music means (only) itself." We can all understand that music does not, as you say, convey literal meanings - does not make "statements" the way words do. I have yet to see anyone contending that it does. And yet we still have people conflating this with the idea that music cannot convey or communicate anything at all, and arguing that anything we may feel while listening to music is entirely our own imaginative projection and has no objective basis in the sound and structure of the music itself. It's a blatant case of throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I have shocking news for the "music expresses only what you read into it" contingent:

*Beethoven's Ninth and Tiptoe Through the Tulips actually express different things.*

We do not have to be able to name those things, or agree on what they are, or experience them identically to the way others experience them, to know that the psychic energies, emotional and intellectual both, that guided Beethoven's creative choices in composing the former work could not have resulted in the latter. And it is therefore no mystery that no one will ever confuse the expressive meaning of the latter with that of the former._


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Well said, Woodduck. I think I discovered this as I fell asleep listening to headphones, and my unconscious mind kicked in. You know how, as you are falling asleep, and things have different meanings, sometimes totally irrational.


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

> Woodduck: *Beethoven's Ninth and Tiptoe Through the Tulips actually express different things.*
> 
> We do not have to be able to name those things, or agree on what they are, or experience them identically to the way others experience them, to know that the psychic energies, emotional and intellectual both, that guided Beethoven's creative choices in composing the former work could not have resulted in the latter. And it is therefore no mystery that no one will ever confuse the expressive meaning of the latter with that of the former.


I don't know _why_ some music makes me (and scores of other people besides) feel unmistakeably one way and some music makes me distinctly feel another-- but I gather its something in the physiology of the human ear and in the deep syntax of the human mind-- and how we, as humans qua humans, _relate_ to certain combinations of sounds.

Even if I heard something like the _Adagio_ of Mahler's _Sixth Symphony _or the _Scherzo_ of Shostakovich's T_enth Symphony_ as a_ kid_-- I would inevitably hear the former as 'sad' and the latter as 'angry' or 'exciting.'

Why do I hear it that way?

I have no idea.

But its clearly coming from the structure of the sounds.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> PetrB, I appreciate your thoughtful response. I am convinced we are at odds over what we mean by expression, and mere semantics. In addition to that, I think a main roadblock in our communication is varying levels of abstraction. I agree with what you say about music being an aural Rorschach blot for the listener, we differ on what is the next step after that acknowledgement. I would bring back in the human element...


Communicate is used most often in the context of something quite specific which is also specifically conveyed, and with all the screaming hunger for literalism when it comes to 'what abstract music is about' (N.B. all the grabbing at the straw citations of music which involves an influential title or text) I much prefer the dynamic associated with the word "Evoke." (I sincerely think and feel that is more specifically what music does, and about all that can really be said about it -- the rest, pretty much barking up the completely wrong tree.)

The irony to me is that Stravinsky's quote, or that particular angle on 'inspiration,' what music is or means, does not at all 'remove the human element,' while it does very much reduce the role of ego on the part of the creator, at least (Stravinsky honestly said, and thought, that he was the vessel through which _Le Sacre du Printemps_ passed.) People get highly angry, maybe even frightened, when confronted with a statement which _implies_ a lesser emphasis, ergo maybe 'value' on individual ego....



DiesIraeVIX said:


> One other issue I have with this statement, "_It is in just such a circumstance where a composer can be readily likened as analogous to the meteorological circumstances that form clouds, i.e trained and practiced as the composer is..._"
> This doesn't add up.


Maybe I am mistaken that analogies do not have to be exact and literal parallels? I meant the trained and ready composer can be likened to that set of meteorological circumstances, that without much thought (at least conscious thought) 'clouds form.' That of course is because of the composer's chosen path of study, learning, and practice in acquiring master-level skills; at the end of that road, a composer with the tools of the craft can and does sometimes make pieces for which they have no explanation nor any idea where the idea came from, what their 'inspiration' came from, etc. -- and further, quite used to plumbing their well of intuition, many of them do not bother to question, analyze or define 'what that is, where it came from, what it means' and simply sit down to write the piece and keep it as much on track as they can.

Therein is I think a wild and huge difference between many an artist and their audience members. Of those consumers who are more than strongly attracted to music as an abstract art, and attracted to that music we call 'absolute' music, a number seem to, in a nano-second after their attraction and felt reaction, feel compelled to "take it apart and break it down to pieces and do a rational analysis of why it makes me feel the way it makes me feel." This is like finding yourself completely drawn to a wholly abstract painting, being moved by it, and then immediately jumping to "wondering what the painter was thinking / had in mind when they painted it." So much of that sort of dynamic seems to me one of, first a great attraction, being deeply moved, and thereafter -- maybe out of fear or bewilderment that something so non-specific could have such a profound effect upon them -- follows almost immediately a need to virtually kill the thing and dissect it, to see how it works, _and to gain back their upper hand of power and control over it_. "You had such power over me I have to cut you down to size to protect myself while I did love it when you had that power over me."










DiesIraeVIX said:


> I understand that we humans create music and music is actually a physical thing just like everything else in the universe, soundwaves, chords, pitches, notes on paper, etc. but I think we have to call a spade a spade. There's a reason why we as a society don't call clouds art, but we do call music art.


I know, 'the music of nature' is not 'organized by man' so we call it _musical_ but do not call it _music._ Paint those same clouds, exactly as seen, and they become art.

All of what we call art is filtered through the human sensibility and man-made vs. 'as found _in situ_ in nature.' That also goes nicely with the fact that no matter 'how natural sounding' it may be to us, all art _is_ a product of artifice, is artifice. It is both a bit shocking, admired, and 'awesome' that people can create things which a great many other people perceive as 'natural' or 'right' in the overall order of things. _To boomerang that, Stravinsky said nothing in the way at all negating the creator of an artwork, or the audience. What he said took some relatively recent and very late-romantic affectations on how artists, and art, were thought of and stripped those affectations away; in the doing, he actually left more of the mystery and wonder of it all than those romanticized notions would have it._

Respectfully and pithily back atcha, sir


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## Guest (Oct 13, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> Someguy is so horrified by the notion that he might share a _universal reaction_ to music, that he has closed-off the possibility of "shared" meaning.


Bill, believe me, you really have no idea what does or does not horrify me. And even if you did, it's only courtesy to let _me_ say it.

Otherwise, I'm just puzzled by the other remarks. Why should I care if a share a reaction to music? I do it all the time. I don't think it says anything about the music, though. And that's easy enough to explain, because other people, listening to the same piece, will not share that reaction. We see this all the time. You've been a member of several online boards for many years. When in all that time--or in any of the time before the interwebs, in the long, long ago (in the before time)--have you ever seen anything even remotely close to a "universal" reaction?

And how, if there is no such thing, can it possibly horrify me?

Anyway, to reiterate, you have no idea what I've closed off and what not, unless I tell you. And I'm telling you now, that I have not done any such thing about shared meaning. Indeed, if you look over my posts (instead of making stuff up about my inner reality, which you fortunately do not have access to), you will read about shared meaning alla time. In fact, one of my points was that Stravinsky, too, said that there was shared meaning. Where he and I differ from some of the esteemed members is simply where that meaning comes from.



millionrainbows said:


> After all, the Brahms statement was just a* generalization.*


*Seemed pretty specific to me. A lot of hedging, sure, but hedging with specifics, while it causes a certain amount of blurring, is not at all the same thing as generalizing (which, if it's done right, doesn't cause any blurring at all).

Otherotherwise, I'll point to the gauntlet I threw down several posts ago and only say that leaving it lying on the ground really hurts my feelings. Music is fine all on its own. It doesn't need to serve any non-musical purposes in order to be valuable and even essential.

I'll throw out another idea, not so gauntlety as the other, but still maybe worth a gentle punch or two. All this talk about communication completely ignores the point of writing new music. New means, among other things, that whatever else may happen, communication won't be one of them, not at first. That's what "new" means when it's not being used simply as a synonym for "recent." If something is truly new, then it won't be understood. Think of all the whinging from this or that person now and again about composers not thinking about them, about their needs. That's a thing. It comes up all the time. I find it fascinating that it hasn't come up in this context at all. Or maybe it came up in a post that I skimmed. I've done that before, especially with posts that are as long as, well, this one.

But there it is. And if you are one who truly believes that music expresses this or that, then you must also think that pushing the bounds of expression (into what at first will seem incomprehensible) is a good thing. (Either that or that saying the same thing over and over again is a good thing. One or the other will seem good. They cannot both be, however.) So if you think communication is a good thing and a thing that music can do, then it seems that you would also value the incomprehensible as well, as that is what will eventually become a thing communicated that was not possible to communicate before.*


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

PetrB said:


> And here you have written out what I think is the general outrage, literally, in the premise that music written by human creators is nonetheless no more than an aural Rorschach blot for the listener.
> 
> Especially when composers have an idea for a symphony, based on a musical idea alone; idea without a name, influential title or narrative or other representative intent, it is frequent enough that the composers themselves could not begin to honestly say what the basic idea -- or the whole piece -- expressed or what was intended to be communicated. It is in just such a circumstance where a composer can be readily likened as analogous to the meteorological circumstances that form clouds, i.e trained and practiced as the composer is, the unconscious at work within that similar set of circumstances allows for the formation of clouds which the composer is able to produce, without any further conscious thought as to what those clouds represent or how they might be 'interpreted.'
> 
> ...


The depths you've probed are impressive. It seems the need for individual control is at the root of this debate. Life can't simply work on it's on, and be what it is... we have to push it around!

At the core, I don't think the artist ever really chooses what they want to convey. Inspiration comes out of nowhere to compose a certain way, and after comes the intellect to dissect it for reasons why. It's a hard pill to swallow for most.


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## hreichgott (Dec 31, 2012)

To me it seems obvious that music has emotional content.

But here's what I get from that Ravel quote in the OP -- Making music takes a whole lot of hard work, and work on many different levels. I know that when I study a piece I am always thinking of the experience I want listeners to have, but I spend lots of time working out mechanical issues, analyzing different parts of the piece, drawing connections from one section to another, figuring out what in the heck is going on with my thumb... all of this is geared toward presenting the musical content (emotional and otherwise) as effectively as possible. We don't prepare music by just sitting down, being overcome by emotion and producing musical magic. 

I notice that many people, particularly musical dabblers, seem to think hard work and intellectual work are somehow opposed to expressive music-making. This might be the sort of romantic notion that PetrB wrote the original post about. The reality is that all the hard work and careful thought help us understand the expressive possibilities of the music and communicate them to their fullest. (And if we want to be emotionally spontaneous in performance without train-wrecking, we need to be that much more prepared both technically and in our understanding of the music.)


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

hreichgott said:


> But here's what I get from that Ravel quote in the OP -- Making music takes a whole lot of hard work, and work on many different levels.


Yes...indeed. If I take Ravel's quote to mean his music is 25% inspiration and 75% perspiration, then he must have been one of the most inspired composers in history! I suspect it's usually more like 5%/95%, and that's on a good day.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

some guy said:


> And round and round and round we go.


There is another way off the carousel. Those in this thread who have been arguing that _music's formal properties express emotion_ might have it backwards. I believe that the inverse is true: that, in fact, _music's expressive properties organize its form_. Or to use your words: "[Expression] is a servant, it has [structural] purposes and it exists primarily to accomplish those purposes." What purposes? From Beethoven on: imposing comprehensive formal and dramatic unity on ever larger musical structures. As one would expect, composers of this era exploited every resource available to them in accomplishing this goal. Arranging their thematic material in ways suggesting (or simulating?) coherent sequences of human emotion was one particularly potent means to this end. This is one explanation for why more than half of their sonatas and symphonies beginning in the minor mode end in the major; It lends a sense of direction to the overall progression that any reasonably sensitive listener will understand. This might also be why the standard model of sonata form in the nineteenth century specified two contrasting themes; Strong binary oppositions, including modal contrast, create expressive tension that augments the purely formal tensions of harmonic and tonal progressions. For tensions based on a simulated contrast of human expressive states have an advantage over such purely formal tensions; They are associated with specific themes and motives and so can be reactivated later in the work by quoting or transforming these themes.

Is the expression described above the expression of specific human emotions? No. The expressive qualities are musical ones, existing only in relation to the musical materials at hand and having only a general sort of extramusical significance. Such expressive qualities are specified only enough to accomplish their structural function and no farther. Does a tense theme opening a symphony represent Fate, anger, terror or despair? It doesn't matter. It only matters that it is somewhere on the darker end of the human expressive continuum so that when it is transformed in the major mode in the finale (for example), the overall progression seems purposeful. This is one of many ways composers of the last two centuries learned to keep listeners on the edge of their seats.

Obviously this is a rough sketch of a complicated idea. I just want to suggest that perhaps the expression of affective states isn't the purpose of music, but rather a servant of musical structure, a potent means to a musical end.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

EdwardBast said:


> There is another way off the carousel. *Those in this thread who have been arguing that music's formal properties express emotion might have it backwards. I believe that the inverse is true: that, in fact, music's expressive properties organize its form. Or to use your words: "[Expression] is a servant, it has [structural] purposes and it exists primarily to accomplish those purposes." *What purposes? From Beethoven on: imposing comprehensive formal and dramatic unity on ever larger musical structures. As one would expect, composers of this era exploited every resource available to them in accomplishing this goal. Arranging their thematic material in ways suggesting (or simulating?) coherent sequences of human emotion was one particularly potent means to this end. This is one explanation for why more than half of their sonatas and symphonies beginning in the minor mode end in the major; It lends a sense of direction to the overall progression that any reasonably sensitive listener will understand. This might also be why the standard model of sonata form in the nineteenth century specified two contrasting themes; Strong binary oppositions, including modal contrast, create expressive tension that augments the purely formal tensions of harmonic and tonal progressions. For tensions based on a simulated contrast of human expressive states have an advantage over such purely formal tensions; They are associated with specific themes and motives and so can be reactivated later in the work by quoting or transforming these themes.
> 
> Is the expression described above the expression of specific human emotions? No. The expressive qualities are musical ones, existing only in relation to the musical materials at hand and having only a general sort of extramusical significance. Such expressive qualities are specified only enough to accomplish their structural function and no farther. Does a tense theme opening a symphony represent Fate, anger, terror or despair? It doesn't matter. It only matters that it is somewhere on the darker end of the human expressive continuum so that when it is transformed in the major mode in the finale (for example), the overall progression seems purposeful. This is one of many ways composers of the last two centuries learned to keep listeners on the edge of their seats.
> 
> Obviously this is a rough sketch of a complicated idea. I just want to suggest that perhaps the expression of affective states isn't the purpose of music, but rather a servant of musical structure, a potent means to a musical end.


Thesis - Anti-thesis... Synthesis?

A composer may, at times, consciously look for forms to represent a feeling or emotional concept. He may, at other times, use an expressive idea (consciously or not) to make his forms more complex, interesting, and effective. Music itself varies in how much of its interest for the listener lies in formal versus expressive qualities (just compare the movements within many a symphony), but in creating music the two considerations work together so intimately that the composer rarely thinks about them as such, much less their proportionate influence on his choice of notes. I would differ with the premise of this post only to say that, as a general principle, neither form nor expression exists primarily for the sake of the other, but either may in any given act of artistic creation, and any given moment of it, determine the other.

Speaking from my own experience as both painter and (occasionally) composer, I'd like to speak for artists in general and aver that a composer, when he's in the thick of writing, is focusing consciously and primarily on sound and structure. Unless he's writing a piece that's explicitly programmatic, or a song or opera in which he's trying to express the meaning of a text or dramatic scenario, the expressive element of the work operates upon his choices mostly below the level of conscious awareness. He is not typically in some state of emotional transport; that, in fact, precisely a state he cannot be in if he wants to get any work done. The act of artistic creation is far more cold-blooded and calculating than non-artists tend to imagine, and at the end of a session of writing, painting, or composing an artist is far more likely to be deeply tired than deeply moved (though hopefully more satisfied than frustrated!). All of which is simply to say that whether the role of emotional expression in putting together a musical composition (or painting or novel) is more that of an end or a means, it is for the artist just part of a day's work.


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## Guest (Oct 14, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> I'd like to speak for artists in general....


With all due respect, there's been way too much of this on this thread.

Why, I've probably done it myself.

Be interesting to see if we could talk about this topic without pretending to be able to go inside other people's heads, many of them people we don't even know, many of them dead already.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

some guy said:


> Be interesting to see if we could talk about this topic without pretending to be able to go inside other people's heads, many of them people we don't even know, many of them dead already.


What goes on in people's heads really isn't THAT interesting. But we all spring from the same life, so if one can understand the core of himself - beyond their 'personality' - you can bet it's the same for everyone else. No individual created this cosmos, and our world of thoughts, perceptions, and sensations... but we're all subject to it.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Consider, for a moment, *Orpheus, whose playing and singing...
"could charm the birds, fish and wild beasts, coax the trees and rocks into dance, and divert the course of rivers.* He was one of the handful of Greek heroes to visit the Underworld and return; *his music and song even had power over Hades.*" *








Ponder then, _what human emotions and sentiments, what music, what texts, could be of any interest to or have such power over "birds, fish and wild beasts, coax the trees and rocks into dance, and divert the course of rivers," and have power over Hades as well?_

While pondering, best to remember that _the Orphic ideal_ when it comes to music / classical music, is still very much the ideal by which those criteria of "what is good music" are set, and by which music is generally still evaluated.

------------(Hmmmm. Back to the drafting board for many an argument in this thread.)

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orpheus


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## mtmailey (Oct 21, 2011)

TO BE HONEST I REALLY DO NOT CARE WHAT HE THINKS also his music is not that great anyway.To me if the music does not sound great i do not want to hear it.Also how the music sounds is the most important thing if it sound lame it do not well.If it sounds great it do well .


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

*What's in a word? A lot.*



Vesuvius said:


> What goes on in people's heads really isn't THAT interesting. *But we all spring from the same life*, so if one can understand the core of himself - beyond their 'personality' - you can bet it's the same for everyone else. No individual created this cosmos, and our world of thoughts, perceptions, and sensations... but we're all subject to it.


That thought in bold is something doesn't seem to matter with many on this thread. I find it to be of utmost importance in this subject. We are all human beings, to say that music expresses itself is one of the most meaningless things I've ever heard from an absolute genius before. To say something expresses itself is self-evident. Everything _is_ itself, is it not? Itself (whatever thing or being may be) has no choice but to express itself. It just so happens that music and the sounds of which music is comprised of _does _have an emotional and tangible effect on HUMAN BEINGS (something actually scientifically tested). We are all of the same species, we sprang from the same life and as a species we _do_ react to music. So, *when others say music only expresses itself, we only differ on what the "itself" truly consists of and means.*

Why is it so terrifying to admit that we as humans do react to music? The very ITSELF that Stravinsky is referring to, music itself, has an actual (physical/emotional) effect on humans. How is that not expression! Whether we all agree on what emotions it evokes is of no importance and isn't the topic at hand.

As millionrainbows stated a few posts back, there's nothing wrong if we as a species share a reaction to something. "Art evokes meaning in humans based on our shared, universal characteristics as human beings"

In the meantime I'll be attempting to figure out what the Orpheus MYTH has to do with this thread concerning nonfiction.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Vesuvius said:


> What goes on in people's heads really isn't THAT interesting.


LOL. That is so generally insulting and yet too true... but just try and get that through to the young composer who wants the audience to know, often in paragraphs long notes attached to a simple piano piece, etc. just what they were thinking and feeling when they wrote the piece, _because they think that it is not only really interesting but that 'all of that' is somehow actually embedded in the music -- and will be communicated via the notes alone._

Well, if you believe that and want to test it out, let the audience hear the piece without providing them with all or any of that ancillary 'personal information.'


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Nobody here is stating that music does that. We aren't dealing with precise articulate ideas or actions. That's a separate topic concerning whether music is a language.

General emotions like melancholy, fear and joy can be conveyed in music. Quite effectively. That's enough for expression. Even if sounds only evoked the most primal emotions in humans, that'd be enough to justify its expression.

EDITED: Edited after mmsbls's response.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> PetrB, nobody here is stating that music does that. We aren't dealing with precise articulate emotions. That's a separate topic concerning whether music is a language.
> 
> general emotions like melancholy, fear and joy can be conveyed in music. Quite effectively. That's enough for expression. Even if sounds only evoked the most primal emotions in humans, that'd be enough to justify its expression.


I'm not sure exactly how you are differentiating precise articulate emotions from general emotions. Isn't fear a precise emotion? Do you believe that a talented composer can write a work that would convey the feeling or idea of fear to the vast majority of listeners (or just majority of listeners)? I'm not sure that's true. And remember the work would have to be new, without preconceived ideas of what it was about.

Do you have an example of a work (or part of a work) that conveys fear and not a different but perhaps related emotion?


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> That thought in bold is something doesn't seem to matter with many on this thread. I find it to be of utmost importance in this subject. We are all human beings, to say that music expresses itself is one of the most meaningless things I've ever heard from an absolute genius before. To say something expresses itself is self-evident. Everything _is_ itself, is it not? Itself (whatever thing or being may be) has no choice but to express itself. It just so happens that music and the sounds of which music is comprised of _does _have an emotional and tangible effect on HUMAN BEINGS (something actually scientifically tested). We are all of the same species, we sprang from the same life and as a species we _do_ react to music. So, *when others say music only expresses itself, we only differ on what the "itself" truly consists of and means.*
> 
> Why is it so terrifying to admit that we as humans do react to music? The very ITSELF that Stravinsky is referring to, music itself, has an actual (physical/emotional) effect on humans. How is that not expression! Whether we all agree on what emotions it evokes is of no importance and isn't the topic at hand.
> 
> ...


For sure. You've had a solid argument throughout. Almost convinced me a couple of times... But I still think that your stance is delegated to an individualistic perspective - it's not universal. As I've said, we have all sprang from the same life, but the countless manifestations themselves are not the same. You're looking at the transient forms of existence and trying to find objectivity. Some people feel absolutely nothing when listening to music. The objects are simply objects, the individual imparts meaning on them.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

mmsbls said:


> I'm not sure exactly how you are differentiating precise articulate emotions from general emotions. Isn't fear a precise emotion? Do you believe that a talented composer can write a work that would convey the feeling or idea of fear to the vast majority of listeners (or just majority of listeners)? I'm not sure that's true. And remember the work would have to be new, without preconceived ideas of what it was about.
> 
> Do you have an example of a work (or part of a work) that conveys fear and not a different but perhaps related emotion?


I wrote incorrectly, I meant music can't express specific articulate ideas or actions.

Music can express fear, but it can't express *why* you're afraid, the specific articulation I spoke of.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> For sure. You've had a solid argument throughout. Almost convinced me a couple of times... But I still think that your stance is delegated to an individualistic perspective - it's not universal. As I've said, we have all sprang from the same life, but the countless manifestations themselves are not the same. You're looking at the transient forms of existence and trying to find objectivity. Some people feel absolutely nothing when listening to music. The objects are simply objects, the individual imparts meaning on them.


Those few who feel nothing when listening to music don't negate the fact that sounds do have a tangible effect on humans. Exceptions don't negate the rule. I'm trying to see this from the opposite of an individual viewpoint, I'm interested in humanity as a whole and whether or not music affects us. It does. I'm glad I almost had you convinced, though! So close. Lol


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Those few who feel nothing when listening to music don't negate the fact that sounds do have a tangible effect on humans. Exceptions don't negate the rule. I'm trying to see this from the opposite of an individual viewpoint, I'm interested in humanity as a whole and whether or not music affects us. It does. I'm glad I almost had you convinced, though! So close. Lol


Of course there are going to be points of coherence since we are all human beings experiencing clusters of thoughts and emotions. However, the counterbalance to your argument is as simple as someone telling me an artists is trying to express fear, and I feel joy... or nothing at all. It's completely relative. Music is just what it is. It's not directly expressing anything. It's really beyond the artist's control.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

There is no one-size-fits-all. To get closer to the non-answer, we would need a sampling of one thousand or more. Huh?


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

..................................


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Unless it fits all, you can't logically say that music is inherently expressive. It just means that many people's imaginations are on similar wavelengths.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> Unless it fits all, you can't logically say that music is inherently expressive. It just means that many people's imaginations are on similar wavelengths.


We disagree on a fundamental level, then.

When is there ever a fit-all? Not even in language is there a fit-all, even words can be considered approximations. Something as simple as pain, not everyone feels pain the same, some like it!

Nobody debates whether poetry is expressive, yet I can guarantee you that a poem by Dickinson will mean something different to different people. I'm struggling to see how that since that poem isn't a fit-all, it isn't expressive.

There will never anything we as a human species will ever agree on 100%, that shouldn't negate the expressiveness of everything that we consider expressive. I must ask, what do you consider expressive?


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

From a study done at Carleton U. on this very subject. It's an interesting read, for both sides of this argument.

http://www.people.carleton.edu/~jlondon/musical_expression_and_mus.htm

The Conclusion and Implications of the Research



> - Musical expression always involves sonic properties, and to things like loudness and roughness I would add the rhythmic properties of sounds (as indicative of coordinate movement, spatial location, and so forth). Moreover, alterations to the "sonic" properties of a musical passage may be made without changing its basic melodic or harmonic structure--the same melody and accompaniment played high, fast, and loud may convey a vastly different expressive character from its low, slow, soft version (the locus classicus of such variations is the various presentations of the idée fixe in Berlioz's Symhonie Fantastique).
> - If one uses "real world" musical stimuli, especially well-known repertoire, one will often be faced with "associative interference," as one cannot control the contexts in which subjects have first heard and come to know such repertoire. Therefore in many cases newly composed or otherwise unfamiliar musical stimuli may be preferable, as they circumvent such interference.
> - Context will often individuate emotional expression, transforming a simple emotion to a higher emotion by providing an intensional object. Different visual and/or linguistic cues (including prompts that are part of an experimental design!) will give different expressive results. Moreover, a level of musical activity that is most apt for one particular emotion may be inapt for another. For example, a passage that expresses "anxious anticipation" very well will not be made more expressive by making it louder, faster, and so forth. There isn't a simple linear relationship between musical parameters and the robustness of an emotional expression.
> - Some perfectly good musical expressions of emotion may not arouse those emotions (or much of anything, for that matter) in the listener. Yet it would be incorrect to call such passages "inexpressive."
> - Any emotions that are aroused by listening to music, while perhaps similar to "real" emotions that occur in non-musical contexts, nonetheless have important differences. Even if context provides an intentional object for an emotion, transforming a yearning, longing passage into an expression of hope (to take an example from Levinson), it is not at all clear that the listener should feel hopeful, what she should be hopeful about, and so forth. Moreover, such hope (and its emotional stimulation) is commingled with other aesthetic properties--balance, beauty, intensity, coherence--and those properties may (and most certainly will) also stimulate affective responses of their own.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Another interesting article on this topic from Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-does-music-make-us-fe/

It's worth a read, as is the Study posted above.



> ... Regardless of whether music is emotional intonation from speech or a summary of expressive movements - or something else altogether - the new research by Logeswaran and Bhattacharya adds yet more fuel to the expectation that music has been culturally selected to sound like an emotionally expressive human. While it is not easy for us to see the human ingredients in the modulations of pitch, intensity, tempo and rhythm that make music, perhaps it is obvious to our auditory homunculus.


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## Guest (Oct 14, 2014)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> music and the sounds of which music is comprised of _does _have an emotional and tangible effect on HUMAN BEINGS


But no one on this thread has ever argued the contrary.

We don't have to agree, but we should at least keep up with what's actually been asserted so that we're arguing with each other and not with chimera, nice though the mythical beings are.



DiesIraeVIX said:


> [G]eneral emotions like melancholy, fear and joy can be conveyed in music. Quite effectively. That's enough for expression. Even if sounds only evoked the most primal emotions in humans, that'd be enough to justify its expression.


Wow. It was suggested awhile back that we might be able to communicate more effectively if we substituted evoke for express. But here, we've got the two terms conflated again, with a vengeance. Or with solder.

In any case, time for a personal anecdote:

In Prokofiev's _Eugene Onegin,_ there's a tune that seems utterly melancholy to me. I can almost cry just thinking about it.

That's the tune itself, not the words. The words do not support my very strong and consistent reaction to those notes in that order. The words are about how bored the singer is with women. How little effect they have on him.

So not melancholic at all.

Prokofiev used the same tune in _Betrothal in a Monastery._ It seems still utterly melancholic to me, not surprisingly, it's the same notes in the same order. Here, however, the words are about what an honor it is for the singer to serve a beautiful woman.

The opposite meaning to the song in _Eugene Onegin._ And neither of them melancholic.

So I cheated there a little. That is, I made two points, only one of them anecdotic. The other one is just simple observation: the meaning expressed in the words to the tune in one piece are the opposite to the meaning expressed in the words in the other piece.

And this happens a lot. Composers write some music for one context and then, for whatever reason, they use the same music in entirely different contexts. So the notes that go with the words "I'm bored," and are supposedly appropriate for expressing ennui, get put to the words "I'm honored," and are supposedly appropriate for expressing delight. Or the notes that go with words about the resurrection (in Berlioz' _Messe Solennelle_), and are supposedly appropriate for that event, are the same notes that go with the carnival (Mardi Gras) scene in Berlioz' _Benvenuto Cellini._

So there's two things to chew on, one from an earlier post, that new music (which, being new, doesn't communicate very well, yet) and the phenomenon of self-borrowing, from this post )), in which composers use identical or at least very similar music in very different contexts, sometimes so different as to be contradictory.

What is it that music is expressing? According to many composers, _in their practice_ (not necessarily in their words), just about any combination of notes can be used in just about any context.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> We disagree on a fundamental level, then.
> 
> When is there ever a fit-all? Not even in language is there a fit-all, even words can be considered approximations. Something as simple as pain, not everyone feels pain the same, some like it!
> 
> ...


I think life itself is the expression. But to narrow things down to "this piece expresses this emotion, and that piece another" is a vast limitation on what music actually is. I'm comfortable saying that music is an expression of humans, but to narrow it down to specifics is divisive and limiting. Why can't life just sing? "Meaning" is a human fabrication.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

some guy said:


> But no one on this thread has ever argued the contrary.


The crux of my argument is that since music has a tangible effect on humans that that means expression. Please do read those articles I posted, you may not want to since your side is so "obviously right", though. I've also stated multiple times that I think we are disagreeing over meanings of words, mere semantics. And what the word "itself" entails in Stravinsky's statement and what the word expression means with regards to art (music).

An extract from the Scientific American article, "if music sounds like human expressive movements, then it sounds like something that, all by itself, is rich in emotional expressiveness, and can be easily interpreted by the auditory system.". As I've said, both articles and plenty of others on the subject are worth reading if you're interested. Though, you may be just fine thinking that you're "obviously right" and leaving it at that. (surely, someone who dishes out the sarcasm in seemingly every post, must be able to take some attitude directed at them. )



some guy said:


> Wow. It was suggested awhile back that we might be able to communicate more effectively if we substituted evoke for express. But here, we've got the two terms conflated again, with a vengeance. Or with solder.


Please tell me something that is expressive yet does not evoke anything. I've never substituted express for evoke, I've recognized that one deals with the other and to shelf the word "evoke" while discussing expression isn't possible.


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## DiesIraeCX (Jul 21, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> I think life itself is the expression. But to narrow things down to "this piece expresses this emotion, and that piece another" is a vast limitation on what music actually is. *I'm comfortable saying that music is an expression of humans*, but to narrow it down to specifics is divisive and limiting. Why can't life just sing? "Meaning" is a human fabrication.


Perfect, that's partly what I'm trying to get at! That's why I found Stravinsky's statement so meaningless. To me, it says that *nothing *is expressive except of itself, that's true on the most literal level, but so what? Yes, music is a physical thing just like everything else in this very universe, everything expresses itself. I also agree that meaning is a human fabrication, but these are the rules by which we as a species play. Humans are indeed involved, that's the *only* way we can even have this discussion is to discuss music, sounds, and expression in relation to humans.

Furthermore, I'm arguing against specifics and division. As I've stated, even words themselves are approximations but their expression is not in question. Well, go further down the slope of approximation and you have music, a much greater sense of abstraction is at play with music, I'm just saying that that abstraction has nothing to say against its expression.

Nothing can be expressive of anything more than itself, humans are expressive of themselves, when they gather new ideas and thoughts, they become part of that person and becomes part of that person's expression. A plant takes in sunlight and that sunlight becomes part of that plant's "self", the list goes on. Name one thing that is expressive of something other than itself, that's why I found Stravinsky's statement so baffling. It's what comes after acknowledging that fact, what do we make of that? What does the "itself" in "music itself" mean, what does it entail?

I still want a single answer to what expresses something other than itself. (I'm not addressing you, Vesuvius, just in general.) If you can't find an answer, can you tell me just what is expressive?

The implications of saying since music only expresses itself and isn't expressive are wide-reaching since everything expresses itself! Then nothing can be allowed to be expressive. It's absurd.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> Perfect, that's what I'm trying to get at! That's why I found Stravinsky's statement so meaningless. To me, it says that *nothing *is expressive except of itself, that's true on the most literal level, but so what? Yes, music is a physical thing just like everything else in this very universe, everything expresses itself. I also agree that meaning is a human fabrication, but these are the rules by which we as a species play. Humans are indeed involved, that's the *only* way we can even have this discussion is to discuss music and sounds in relation to humans.
> 
> Furthermore, I'm arguing against specifics and division. As I've stated, even words themselves are approximations but their expression is not in question. Well, go further down the slope of approximation and you have music, a much greater sense of abstraction is at play with music, I'm just saying that that abstraction has nothing to say against its expression.
> 
> ...


I kind of look at it how a rose is an expression of the bush. What is it expressing? Nothing in particular. But our minds say it's beauty, or it's a sweet fragrance, etc. I feel a similar way in the intake of art. I know it came out of a human... but what is it expressing? Nothing in particular. I still say it's lovely.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I really don't get what the discussion is about. It seems apparent to me that:

- You do some things with the music and suddenly you're in the countryside, gamboling with wood nymphs, all that stuff.

- You do some other things and wham! you're marching off to war.

- Some other things and you're in some kind of struggle.

- Some other things and the problems are resolved.

All this is from a common understanding of the conventions that have been developed over centuries in Western music -- and are apparent to Western or other accustomed ears. C'mon, is anybody going to say that Barber's Adagio doesn't ooze sadness? That the first movement of the Eroica doesn't suggest, in fact more than suggest, nobility and heroism? Or that nobody would hear any of this stuff unless they read it somewhere in program notes? Ridiculous. IMOH of course! :lol:


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

DiesIraeVIX said:


> From a study done at Carleton U. on this very subject. It's an interesting read, for both sides of this argument.
> 
> http://www.people.carleton.edu/~jlondon/musical_expression_and_mus.htm
> 
> The Conclusion and Implications of the Research


Looks like even if gone at hammer and tongs, the 'conclusive results' will *yield but a tiny handful of already widely known and recognized generalities.*

What a lot of effort for very little, like the U.S government paying tens of thousands to 'find out how to cook soy beans so they were edible.' -- when made public, the results of the study got thousands of responses -- letters to the editors of many a newspaper -- from housewives throughout the nation saying, "They could have just asked me or looked in any number of cookbooks!"


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

KenOC said:


> I really don't get what the discussion is about. It seems apparent to me that:
> 
> - You do some things with the music and suddenly you're in the countryside, gamboling with wood nymphs, all that stuff.
> 
> ...


--Right on, brother!


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Originally posted by Woodduck:

"Speaking from my own experience as both painter and (occasionally) composer, I'd like to speak for artists in general and aver that a composer, when he's in the thick of writing, is focusing consciously and primarily on sound and structure. Unless he's writing a piece that's explicitly programmatic, or a song or opera in which he's trying to express the meaning of a text or dramatic scenario, the expressive element of the work operates upon his choices mostly below the level of conscious awareness. He is not typically in some state of emotional transport; that, in fact, is precisely a state he cannot be in if he wants to get any work done. The act of artistic creation is far more cold-blooded and calculating than non-artists tend to imagine, and at the end of a session of writing, painting, or composing an artist is far more likely to be deeply tired than deeply moved (though hopefully more satisfied than frustrated!). All of which is simply to say that whether the role of emotional expression in putting together a musical composition (or painting or novel) is more that of an end or a means, it is for the artist just part of a day's work."



some guy said:


> *With all due respect, there's been way too much of this on this thread. *
> 
> Why, I've probably done it myself.
> 
> Be interesting to see if we could talk about this topic without pretending to be able to go inside other people's heads, many of them people we don't even know, many of them dead already.


Having been a practitioner of several arts all my life - aural, visual, and verbal - I know something about the creative process, both mine and that of other people. I might have thought that if you took the trouble to read and respond to my post you might express an opinion about the ideas I presented, including my remarks on the creative process, rather than about my right to present them.

That would be the way to exhibit due respect.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> Unless it fits all, you can't logically say that music is inherently expressive. It just means that many people's imaginations are on similar wavelengths.


Why can't a thing be inherently expressive despite the fact that different people experience it differently? Different people experience everything in the universe differently. That doesn't mean there is no expression in the universe.

Any thought I express in words, any emotion I express by laughing or crying, any simple sensation or complex of concepts and feelings embodied in a cymbal crash or a sonata-allegro movement, will be experienced differently by different people according to their individual nature, life experience, and intellectual judgment. All this means is that meaning is complex and interactive. But that does not imply that it's completely arbitrary or nonexistent.


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## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Why can't a thing be inherently expressive despite the fact that different people experience it differently? Different people experience everything in the universe differently. That doesn't mean there is no expression in the universe.
> 
> Any thought I express in words, any emotion I express by laughing or crying, any simple sensation or complex of concepts and feelings embodied in a cymbal crash or a sonata-allegro movement, will be experienced differently by different people according to their individual nature, life experience, and intellectual judgment. All this means is that meaning is complex and interactive. But that does not imply that it's completely arbitrary or nonexistent.


I wasn't quite clear in that post. What I was thinking is that music doesn't inherently express any particulars... regardless of what the artist might say his intent was. And if it appears so, it just means the respective imaginations are on similar wavelengths. Everything in life is an expression, but it's our minds that put all these unnecessary meanings on things.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

some guy said:


> But no one on this thread has ever argued the contrary.
> 
> We don't have to agree, but we should at least keep up with what's actually been asserted so that we're arguing with each other and not with chimera, nice though the mythical beings are.
> 
> ...




I agree that there are many examples of the same music being used in different contexts and having much different, and equally suitable, expressive effects. Almost any strophic song by Schubert demonstrates this remarkably, often amazingly, well. This shows how unspecific musical expression _can_ be. But it doesn't support your final statement (in bold, above). Music can vary widely in its expressive specificity.

No one will ever have the text of _I Love You Truly,_ set to the music of Alberich's curse on the ring, sung at their wedding, suitable as it might be for a large percentage of marriages.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Vesuvius said:


> I wasn't quite clear in that post. What I was thinking is that *music doesn't inherently express any particulars... regardless of what the artist might say his intent was.* And if it appears so, it just means the respective imaginations are on similar wavelengths. Everything in life is an expression, but it's our minds that put all these unnecessary meanings on things.


Thanks for that qualification. I'll agree with you almost completely about "particulars," and fully about the relationship between an artist's intentions and what his art actually is in itself. When people used to ask me what my paintings "meant," I always told them that it was too complex to describe, that there might be more (or less) to a work of art than the artist himself is even aware of, and that whatever they got out of them was just fine with me. I didn't mean by that, however, that I actually meant nothing by my paintings, that they were inherently meaningless, or that any meaning any insane person attributed to them was congruent with their content. As I've said, everyone reacts to expressive gestures or objects differently, but that doesn't indicate an absence of expressive intent, expressive parameters, or expressive power. There are, in general, things a given work of art can signify to a (not insane) human being, and things it cannot.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> I'll agree with you almost completely about "particulars," and fully about the relationship between an artist's intentions and what his art actually is in itself. When people ask me what my paintings "meant," I always told them that it was too complex to describe, that there might be more (or less) to a work of art than the artist himself is even aware of, and that whatever they got out of them was just fine with me.


The sculptor Rodin had a well-practiced and oiled set schtick whenever he was asked what one of his pieces meant / what he intended it to mean. Whenever asked, he would counter with the question, "What do you think it means?" and then make himself look attentive while listening to that viewer. When the viewer was done speaking, Rodin would remain silent in a well timed pause during which he pensively stroked his long beard, and then he would say, "You know, I think you may be right."

I have no idea -- whatsoever -- of 'what I intend to convey' when I get an initial idea, or for the most part while I work further on it to make it a piece. I might after some time working on it better grasp its essential character -- which I _suppose_ is also partially its 'emotive import' -- but the thing I track most attentively is just trying to keep the piece and its innate inner dialogue on track so it at least seems cohesive _to me_... because that is the only aspect I've ever been able to 'define' or track. Done, and done deal.

For any of those other 'issues,' just as Rodin wisely (or shrewdly) let it be, that is in an arena far outside of my self or what I may think of a finished work, and that external arena is where sits what others may think and how they react to that work; the only nameable connection or commonality is that we are of the same species. That still leaves me _and the listener_ without any concrete lead as to what it is about or is meant to convey. The next new idea and piece finds me at least just as much in the dark. Other composers and visual artists I know / have known, have very similar stories as to what comes up, how they work it, and what they may or may not know of "what it all means."


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## Guest (Oct 15, 2014)

PetrB said:


> What do you think of the two composer's statements above?


Not a lot really. Just the opinions of two composers who bring their own experience and understanding of their 'art' to their interpretation of what 'music' is.

Perhaps the most significant piece is where IS refers to "tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention - in short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being."

I'm not going to assert that my opinions about music are objectively more valid than anyone else's, but I am just as entitled to a view about music as any other listener and any other composer. So is everyone here. As Stravinsky seems to concede, whatever he might think about music's expressivity, it is something that a large number of people seem to believe in. It may be an illusion, but it's effect is the same.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Vesuvius said:


> I wasn't quite clear in that post. What I was thinking is that music doesn't inherently express any particulars... regardless of what the artist might say his intent was. And if it appears so, it just means the respective imaginations are on similar wavelengths. Everything in life is an expression, but it's our minds that put all these unnecessary meanings on things.


Speaking of wavelengths, I had been thinking of an analogy: 
Light with a wavelength of about 650 nm doesn't express anything. We give it the name "red", though, and it expresses different things in different context.
I wear a red shirt and you say "what a nice shirt!" or "what a dreadful shirt!" regardless of what my intent was.
But red on a traffic light at a junction pretty much has one agreed-upon meaning, and it matches the intent of its creator.

Thus with music: there are so many shared conventions that, OK, in theory music doesn't express anything, but in practice there's varying degrees of expression to be found, depending on the music. Composer's intent does have some bearing but that depends on the music too. I just think that ignoring both intent and listeners' assumptions implies that the culture surrounding the music is irrelevant. Music in a vacuum expresses nothing, but it's not heard in a vacuum.


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## Guest (Oct 15, 2014)

Nereffid said:


> in practice there's varying degrees of expression to be found,


I agree with your post, though to be pedantic, I might quibble over the use of the term 'found'. That is to say, many people may agree that they 'find' particular piece of music expressive to a certain degree, by which they mean that their response to it can be described using certain emotional terms, but not not that such expression can be 'found' in the music.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> I agree with your post, though *to be pedantic*, I might quibble over the use of the term 'found'. That is to say, many people may agree that they 'find' particular piece of music expressive to a certain degree, by which they mean that their response to it can be described using certain emotional terms, but not not that such expression can be 'found' in the music.


That's OK, this entire thread is based on pedantry! :lol:


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## Guest (Oct 15, 2014)

Shared conventions, eh?

And what is the commonest criticism of new music--at least since the early nineteenth century this has been so--that it's incomprehensible.

Underneath all the snark and all the name-calling and all the colorful insults that those criticisms have displayed over the centuries, is the simple statement: "I don't understand."

So what's being expressed in new piece? If you don't understand it, then nothing is being expressed. Or, to play devil's advocate, whatever is being expressed is inaccessible to you. Only later, when the idiom of the piece is no longer incomprehensible, can we even talk about "expression." (We can still talk about evocation, however, as all sorts of things can be evoked (negative things only) from a piece you don't understand.) There's a nice mystery for ya, how does the incomprehensible become comprehensible? Just as a general thing.

And how is it possible (nice evasion there by Woodduck) for a sequence of notes to mean boredom one day and delight the next? How is it possible for the same sequence of notes to be appropriate for opposites? 

You know what I think the answer is.

Here's what I'm really have trouble accepting--that a simple shift from "meaning is coming from the notes, put there by a composer" to "meaning is coming from the listener, reacting as humans react to everything, by making it meaningful" should be seen as so freakin' threatening.

(I actually think that "meaning" is what happens when a subject and an object get together. That it's neither a function of the object or the subject, either one, but a consequence of the two getting together. But that's been such a hard sell in the past that I don't have any hopes for its success in the current thread. People really seem to need "meaning" to be located in either the subject or the object. And hardly anyone really believes that meaning resides anywhere else but in the object, lip service to cliches like "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" notwithstanding. Indeed, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is the moral equivalent of "you're entitled to your opinion," which, translated, means "you're wrong.":lol


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## Stavrogin (Apr 20, 2014)

some guy said:


> ...
> 
> the idiom of the piece
> 
> ...


wh-wh-what?


I have no problem with that shift, by the way.
The problem I have is equating music (a product of a composer) with totally random "things" such as clouds or paint on the wall.

I have asked you a few times.
Do you explicitly exclude that ANY composer at ANY time wrote a piece of music with the intention to express "something" and actually succeeding at that with ANY listener?


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## Guest (Oct 15, 2014)

You really want me to answer something that you already know the answer to?

That seems, um, a rather pointless exercise, no?


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> Thesis - Anti-thesis... Synthesis?
> 
> A composer may, at times, consciously look for forms to represent a feeling or emotional concept. He may, at other times, use an expressive idea (consciously or not) to make his forms more complex, interesting, and effective. Music itself varies in how much of its interest for the listener lies in formal versus expressive qualities (just compare the movements within many a symphony), but in creating music the two considerations work together so intimately that the composer rarely thinks about them as such, much less their proportionate influence on his choice of notes. I would differ with the premise of this post only to say that, as a general principle, neither form nor expression exists primarily for the sake of the other, but either may in any given act of artistic creation, and any given moment of it, determine the other.


Yes, I thoroughly agree that "neither form nor expression exists primarily for the sake of the other, but either may in any given act of artistic creation, and any given moment of it, determine the other," which is the ultimate synthesis. I argued the case I did because it is the side of equation no one seems to get; You can't have a synthesis if no one understands the antithesis! The other reason I made the argument is because it suggests a practical limit for the specificity of music's expressive qualities, that is, enough to accomplish the structural function and (except for some special cases) no more.


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## Stavrogin (Apr 20, 2014)

some guy said:


> You really want me to answer something that you already know the answer to?
> 
> That seems, um, a rather pointless exercise, no?


I honestly have no idea as to what your answer would be.
So please, go ahead.
Otherwise, one will have to "guess" what you think, a thing that you explicitly condemned


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

some guy said:


> Shared conventions, eh?
> 
> And what is the commonest criticism of new music--at least since the early nineteenth century this has been so--that it's incomprehensible.
> 
> ...


I think it is incorrect to say that meaning _exists_ only when "subject and object get together." Meaning is _communicated_ only under that circumstance. But I _mean_ something quite specific by this sentence whether that meaning gets through to you or not. You may grasp the meaning I intend, or assume a meaning I do not intend, or discover a meaning present in my words which I was unaware of. My sentence may even have a personal meaning for you which has nothing to do with any meaning its words contain or anything I intended by them. But that would not negate either its intended or its implicit meaning. The same principle would pertain if I were to perform some action other than writing - say, frowning, laughing, vomiting, breaking into song, or inventing a new solar-powered car. My actions would all be meaningful, maybe even laden with complex and very powerful meanings, whether or not those meanings were received or understood by anyone, possibly including myself. That an action or product has a certain meaning for one person and a different meaning for another does not imply that its meaning is completely arbitrary - that it has no attributes which direct or limit the range of meanings which can be sanely attributed to it - much less that its meaning(s) is(are) nonexistent until "created" by the observer. "Meaning" as intended, "meaning" as embodied, "meaning" as received, and "meaning" as attributed, are not all the same thing. Recognizing these different meanings of "meaning" dissolves the dichotomy you set up between "meaning coming from the notes" and "meaning coming from the listener."

The question remains: can a piece of music possess properties which embody meanings and, given a receptive listener (always assumed in any meaningful transaction), communicate them? The fact that the same music can "mean" something different to different people, or to the same person at different times, does not eliminate that possibility.


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## Guest (Oct 16, 2014)

some guy said:


> Shared conventions, eh?


Yes, though I doubt anyone would claim universally so.



Woodduck said:


> The question remains: can a piece of music possess properties which embody meanings and, given a receptive listener (always assumed in any meaningful transaction), communicate them? The fact that the same music can "mean" something different to different people, or to the same person at different times, does not eliminate that possibility.


Are there two questions here? Yours, and the slightly different one which is: have composers ever used specific forms of music to convey agreed meaning between composer and listener? Obviously they have. Consequently, while 'the question remains' about whether music can embody meanings in an absolute sense (I don't think it can) it seems pretty clear to me that it is when a composer wishes to break out of the agreed or shared conventions that he will write music that can seem to fail to carry meaning for some listeners.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> Yes, though I doubt anyone would claim universally so.
> 
> Are there *two questions* here? Yours, and the slightly different one which is: *have composers ever used specific forms of music to convey agreed meaning between those composer and listener? Obviously they have.* Consequently, while *'the question remains' about whether music can embody meanings in an absolute sense *(I don't think it can) it seems pretty clear to me that *it is when a composer wishes to break out of the agreed or shared conventions that he will write music that can seem to fail to carry meaning for some listeners.*


Well-stated distinction.

"The question" does remain. It's absurd to claim, as some seem to, that music has to be universally meaningful - has to mean something, or the very same thing, to everyone who hears it - to have expressive significance and carry meaning. But the even more radical question is: to what extent _are_ human responses to music, and sound in general, "universal" - to what extent do they not depend on cultural conditioning and learned conventions? I think we shouldn't be so reactive to the erroneous conception of (our) music as a "universal language" that we hastily presume that "it's all relative" and that there are no biological and cognitive bases for certain physical, emotional, and intellectual reactions to sounds and their organization. It appears that, at least on a rudimentary level, there are; and there's every reason to expect that we'll learn more about this in time. Cognition and emotion are immeasurably complex and subtle, and my intuition is that much of this discussion has assumed overly simple views of both the substance of music and our apprehension of it.

Just to be finicky: on your last point, I don't think listeners to music in unfamiliar idioms necessarily find it meaning_less_. It may affect them strongly and suggest meanings which their cognitive judgment finds strange or dislikable. Our emotional reactions to things usually involve evaluation, consciously or unconsciously, which might lead either to future avoidance of the stimulus (not listening to the music again) or a decision to try to set judgment aside and repeat the stimulus in an effort to apprehend it differently and understand or modify our responses to it.


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## Guest (Oct 16, 2014)

It seems odd somehow to define meaning in the absence of a receptor.

But I guess it's no odder than defining (the) sound (of a tree falling in the forest) in the absence of an auditor.

Meaning is all there in the object. No need for any subjects. The object is self-sufficient.

That and a metro ticket will get you down to the beach. Hey. Great idea!!

See ya!!


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## Guest (Oct 16, 2014)

some guy said:


> It seems odd somehow to define meaning in the absence of a receptor


It does, doesn't it?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

some guy said:


> It seems odd somehow to define meaning in the absence of a receptor.
> 
> But I guess it's no odder than defining (the) sound (of a tree falling in the forest) in the absence of an auditor.
> 
> ...


All? Who's making that claim? 

About that tree: there are measurable sound waves whether or not an ear is present.

Which metro line goes to the beach? All this sitting in front of a computer is making me pasty.


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## Guest (Oct 16, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Well-stated distinction.
> 
> "The question" does remain. It's absurd to claim, as some seem to, that music has to be universally meaningful - has to mean something, or the very same thing, to everyone who hears it - to have expressive significance and convey meaning. But the even more radical question is: to what extent _are_ human responses to music, and sound in general, "universal" - to what extent do they not depend on cultural conditioning and learned conventions? I think we shouldn't be so reactive to the erroneous conception of (our) music as a "universal language" that we hastily presume that "it's all relative" and that there are no biological and cognitive bases for certain physical, emotional, and intellectual reactions to sounds and their organization. It appears that, at least on a rudimentary level, there are; and there's every reason to expect that we'll learn more about this in time. Cognition and emotion are immeasurably complex and subtle, and my intuition is that much of this discussion has assumed overly simple views of both the substance of music and our apprehension of it.


Quite. Trying to separate physiological response from conditioned response is, I would suggest, almost impossible.



Woodduck said:


> Just to be finicky: on your last point, I don't think listeners to music in unfamiliar idioms necessarily find it meaning_less_.


Nor do I, but what I presume is that for some listeners, the departure from shared conventions on which they have come to depend causes a hiatus in their reception, assimilation and synthesis of any meaning that they _think _might be being 'transmitted' - which is, I think, what you said?


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