# Visual images/poetry in music?



## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

If music is inherently abstract and not tied to language (unless it's a song or has a text), how does one proceed to tie in a music passage with a concrete image?

For example, what makes Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 particularly rustic or pastoral if the subtitle wasn't there to inform the listener there already?

In other words, what makes music tied to the concrete?


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## MoonlightSonata (Mar 29, 2014)

I think it's largely the fact that some parts of the symphony have a rustic character (like the opening). 
In other works, the sound can suggest the nature of the item, like the water in 'Aquarium' from Saint-Saens' "Carnival of the Animals".


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

This makes Debussy's music of particular interest to me. Somehow he is able to capture the essence of image within an abstracted form.

For me, an image of nature can be tied into a certain chord structure but this is arbitrarily determined by the composer?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

When we get our collective cerebral cortices buzzing and go all theoretical and talk about what music can and can't express or evoke or whatever, we easily underestimate or understate the evocative power which, purely as listeners, we know music can have. Beethoven's _Pastoral Symphony_ is a wonderful illustration. Although the composer stated that the work was "more an expression of feeling than painting," he didn't mind giving us clues as to his meaning by giving each movement a descriptive title, and in each he uses a variety of musical devices to convey to us the intended feeling and imagery. Let's just have a look at a few of these devices.

First Movement:_ "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country."_ Beethoven begins by striking an open fifth in the bass, over which sounds a sprightly tune that suggests someone setting out on a vigorous walk in the open air. That deep open fifth will occur again and again throughout the movement (as well as later in the symphony), often continued for many measures, creating a sort of static drone beneath whatever other activity is going on. It serves to create a sense of stability and calm, a feeling of peacefulness and well-being, undisturbed by any emotional turmoil. But this sound has a more literal referent as well: it's a sound characteristic of folk musics of various lands, which utilize such a drone to accompany their melodies. Think of bagpipes! That sound would have been immediately recognizable to Beethoven's contemporaries, and would have said, unambiguously, "countryside." In accord with the image thus evoked, the movement's melodic material often has a simple, folklike quality, with many repeated figures and phrases. The music moves with a steady vigor, yet its barely changing harmonies seem bound for nowhere in particular - just like a proper walk in the country.

Second Movement:_ "Scene by the brook." _It's hard to miss the nature imagery here, with the quiet, continuous rhythmic movement, the rustling figuration in the strings, the gentle, steady oscillation of the simple harmonies, and the fragments of melody that flit above the texture, somehow both happy and poignant, as the violins trill softly like swallows dipping and turning over the murmuring stream. This is musical onomatopoeia as exquisitely apposite as any ever conceived. Of course there are those literal imitations of bird song at the end - so much for feeling versus painting!

Third Movement:_ "Merry gathering of country folk."_ A carefree bustle, a succession of country dances, with folklike tunes again based on the simplest harmonies, those evocative bass drones again underpinning the vigorous activity, while the village bassoonist who's drunk too much lager misses his cue repeatedly! The transition to the next movement, which depicts a violent thunderstorm, is amusing in its depiction of the festivities abruptly breaking up and people scampering for cover.

Fourth Movement: _"Thunderstorm."_ Terrifically paced and orchestrated, Beethoven's storm hurls lightning bolts through howling winds and wastes not a note or a minute. It's the first substantial passage in a minor key we've heard, and as it abates it hovers in ambiguous diminished sevenths while a last flash of distant lightning marks the clearing of the sky. A peaceful phrase of a hymnlike melody steals in, a flute evokes a bird singing, and a soft horn call sounds in open fifths as if from a distance - another unmistakeable sound of the countryside of Beethoven's time.

Fifth Movement: _"Shepherd's song; cheerful and thankful feelings after the storm."_ The quiet transition that ushers in the song of thanksgiving is as terse as it is magical; I can't help thinking how no later composer would ever achieve such a pictorially complete and deeply moving transformation in so few measures! The expansive lyrical melody here is not typical of Beethoven's finales, but then this symphony is unique in many ways. The lyricism in no way holds up the music's forward motion, and the harmonies carry forward the effect of innocent, idyllic simplicity, as in the earlier movements often merely oscillating between tonic and dominant. At the end, having sung its hymn of praise to nature and life, the symphony ends with a series of pensive pauses, a final call on the _Waldhorn_, and a simple stroke of affirmation.

These are just some things I note while listening to this work, actually for the first time in probably a couple of years. Nothing like absence to make the heart grow fonder! I confess I had to stop occasionally to wipe away some of those "feelings" that Beethoven hoped to conjure, and surely does conjure for a lot of us. Much, much more could be said about the magic by which he does it. But what I once again take away from the "Pastoral" is amazement at how much of deep human significance can be evoked by such apparently simple means - but, needless to say, only by a composer of the calibre of Beethoven.


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2014)

What is meant by 'an open fifth'?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> What is meant by 'an open fifth'?


Usually, a triad has three notes in it, which are named by where they occur in relation to the main note of the chord (no matter how the notes are laid out, the notes are named the same way).










From bottom to top, they are the root, the third, and the fifth. The third is the third note of the diatonic scale in relation to the root, and the fifth likewise is the fifth note.

A bare fifth is the root and the fifth minus the third, which produces a more "hollow" sound which you would associate with early music (when the third was considered a dissonance in need of resolution), folk music (where you'll find fifth doublings of drones to thicken the sound of the drone), and rock music, where so-called "power chords" are actually distorted bare fifths with the root doubled.

For a bare fifth used for its folk music implications as in the Beethoven, refer to the trio of this movement (at 1:59):





For bare fifths used as a semi-resolution that doesn't feel like a full resolution (as a full chord would), listen to the endings of the first movement of Bruckner's Ninth and the ending of Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony.


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> When we get our collective cerebral cortices buzzing and go all theoretical and talk about what music can and can't express or evoke or whatever, we easily underestimate or understate the evocative power which, purely as listeners, we know music can have. Beethoven's _Pastoral Symphony_ is a wonderful illustration. Although the composer stated that the work was "more an expression of feeling than painting," he didn't mind giving us clues as to his meaning by giving each movement a descriptive title, and in each he uses a variety of musical devices to convey to us the intended feeling and imagery. Let's just have a look at a few of these devices.
> 
> First Movement:_ "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country."_ Beethoven begins by striking an open fifth in the bass, over which sounds a sprightly tune that suggests someone setting out on a vigorous walk in the open air. That deep open fifth will occur again and again throughout the movement (as well as later in the symphony), often continued for many measures, creating a sort of static drone beneath whatever other activity is going on. It serves to create a sense of stability and calm, a feeling of peacefulness and well-being, undisturbed by any emotional turmoil. But this sound has a more literal referent as well: it's a sound characteristic of folk musics of various lands, which utilize such a drone to accompany their melodies. Think of bagpipes! That sound would have been immediately recognizable to Beethoven's contemporaries, and would have said, unambiguously, "countryside." In accord with the image thus evoked, the movement's melodic material often has a simple, folklike quality, with many repeated figues and phrases. The music moves with a steady vigor, yet its barely changing harmonies seem bound for nowhere in particular - just like a proper walk in the country.
> 
> ...


What a beautiful exegesis of such beautiful music-- thank you.

Simple, precise, unpretentious, and searching-- I can't (re)read this without succumbing to it.


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## Guest (Dec 17, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> First Movement:_ "Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country."_ Beethoven begins by striking an open fifth in the bass, [etc]


On the whole, I am happy to accept your analysis. However, there are some points where I would suggest you overinterpret, or set aside the possibility that another listener may be immune to your 'suggestions' (such as "_a sprightly tune that suggests someone setting out on a vigorous walk in the open air")_



Mahlerian said:


> A bare fifth is the root and the fifth minus the third, which produces a more "hollow" sound which you would associate with early music (when the third was considered a dissonance in need of resolution), folk music (where you'll find fifth doublings of drones to thicken the sound of the drone), and rock music, where so-called "power chords" are actually distorted bare fifths with the root doubled.


Many thanks. I notice you don't use the word 'open'. Is that simply because you prefer the word 'bare'?


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

MacLeod said:


> Many thanks. I notice you don't use the word 'open'. Is that simply because you prefer the word 'bare'?


Both terms are equal. I just used the one that came to mind first, forgetting that it had not been the one used by others. That's all.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

albertfallickwang said:


> If music is inherently abstract and not tied to language (unless it's a song or has a text), how does one proceed to tie in a music passage with a concrete image?
> 
> For example, what makes Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 particularly rustic or pastoral if the subtitle wasn't there to inform the listener there already?
> 
> In other words, what makes music tied to the concrete?


Music is tied to thought. Thought is also abstract, until written or spoken.

Big things sound big (bass drums=elephants approaching); little things sound small (birds=flutes)

Windy things are turbulent, pizz strings sound like sneaking footprints. Most of this has already been established and imprinted on our minds by the rubbery cartoons of our youth.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

albertfallickwang said:


> This makes Debussy's music of particular interest to me. Somehow he is able to capture the essence of image within an abstracted form.
> 
> For me, an image of nature can be tied into a certain chord structure but this is arbitrarily determined by the composer?


Musical "gestures" are what does it. These gestures can represent all kinds of movement.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

albertfallickwang said:


> If music is inherently abstract and not tied to language (unless it's a song or has a text), how does one proceed to tie in a music passage with a concrete image?
> 
> In other words, what makes music tied to the concrete?


Of course the irony is that in order to express our reactions to a piece of music, we must use words. We don't hum our reaction. We could dance it, I suppose. Or build it into an architectural structure. But then, in order to "explain" the dance or the architecture, we would have to turn to words again. In a real sense we as human consciousnesses are inherently tied to language for expression in ways that leap beyond music or structure or movement for expression.

A deaf person cannot understand the "communication" of a piece of music; a blind person cannot perceive the "communication" of dance. But even Helen Keller utilized masterful language to communicate.

Much of the point behind music is that it_ does_ express the inexpressible (in terms of language), but we can only seek to understand what that means by utilizing language, whether vocally, written, or mentally. Has anyone ever _composed _the explanation or interpretation of a piece of music?

Folks _have composed_ the explanation/interpretation of a poem (_L'après-midi d'un faune_ by Debussy) or a painting (_Pictures as an Exhibition_ by Mussorgsky) or a work of architecture (_Rothko Chapel _by Morton Feldman). But even then we still tend to rely upon our language in order to comprehend these works, each of which has been written about, discussed, and thought about in millions of words.

Too, I suspect a composer could put music to a dance (which is originally choreographed without music), just as a film composer can put sound to images.

The ability of music to evoke is powerful, but we always tend to translate that evocation into something we can quantify by language. Even our feelings, even when largely "beyond words", tend to translate into words in our minds or our journals or our poetry or our discussions. We must not dismiss the power of language when coupled with any art form.

But this does not mean the art itself is secondary to language. It is another irony, perhaps, that art such as music depends upon its very nature to be understood as music. You may not be able to think about Beethoven's Sixth without resorting to language, but no number of words will ever serve to disseminate that work to a person who has never heard it. In other words, you cannot _tell_ someone what the Sixth is; one must hear it to know it.

The same goes for painting. No number of words will depict the _Mona Lisa_ the way a single view of the painting will do. "A picture paints a thousand words." Maybe even several million words. Still, even as we gaze upon the DaVinci painting, our language kicks in. We note the "enigmatic smile", the "mysterious landscape in the background", the "color scheme". We depend upon language to understand to ourselves what we are seeing. Or, in the case of music, what we are hearing.

Which is probably why song (words and music) has been such a crucial part of humanness in every culture, present or past.

Ironies abound. But such is the nature of the human experience.

-----

By the way, as I have long heard the Beethoven Fifth as the composer's psychological struggle (fate knocks at the door, first you fret and cry, next you go into denial, then you confront and struggle, and finally you accept and adjust, and triumph over the initial emotions of anger and frustration), I have listened to the Sixth as the composer's remembrances of the physical sounds of his universe. It always seemed right that the _Pastoral _Sixth follows the Fifth. They seem linked to "the living world of sounds" in a way no other Beethoven works are, as both are about sound and the loss of sound and the glory of sound.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> On the whole, I am happy to accept your analysis. However,* there are some points where I would suggest you overinterpret, or set aside the possibility that another listener may be immune to your 'suggestions' (such as "a sprightly tune that suggests someone setting out on a vigorous walk in the open air")*


May I call that an "anticipatory association"? Once you've got farther into the movement the "walking" sensation and the fresh, open atmosphere are more fully established. But even at the beginning, the open fifth - the folk-music drone - has been struck and sounds through the tune until the first cadence, the tempo is a vigorous walking pace, and the melody springs upward without hesitation, with a hint of excitement but without drama or ceremony. And its very intervals - skipping the tonic (the drone takes care of that), glancing right off the third as if our walk is already in progress, bounding right up to the fifth by way of the sixth note of the scale - suggest a feeling of uninhibited freedom (think of Julie Andrews singing "The hills are alive" to these same intervals!).

Some of this is conventional association, some of it intrinsic to the "shapes" of emotion and bodily movement, but the details add up. Someone with the time and inclination could pick his way through this whole symphony uncovering one masterful touch after another by which Beethoven transports us to his idyllic countryside. What fascinates me about this work is the apparent simplicity of its elements - the harmonic scheme which spends a great deal of time oscillating back and forth between tonic and dominant, the easy tunefulness, the calculated monotony of rhythm and repetition of melodic figures - and the richness of imagination and precision of form and feeling that this simplicity simultaneously conveys and belies. It's also the work of a master orchestrator - something we don't often note about Beethoven, probably because he's such a master of everything else that his orchestral imagination takes a back seat. In any case the orchestration plays as great a part as any other element in evoking the world of the _Pastoral_.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A very strong association, for me -- Beethoven's Andante con Moto (3rd movement) from his B-flat quartet Op. 130. Travelling around Vienna in a horse-drawn carriage, in a leisurely fashion. All kinds of interesting things happen.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

For me, opera tends to be a lot easier to tie in the visual imagery I suppose because you have the action on stage to "match up" with the melody at hand. A vivid example of this would be the use of the glissandi of the trombones in the opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District to represent the sexual tryst of Katerina with her lover.

However, if you were to play just the instrument part of the opera section without its plot context then how would be the listener know that it is specifically tied into something sexual with those trombones?


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

The whole Romantic era is based on poetics, poetic imagery, and visual, pictoral evocations. That's why everybody likes it.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

albertfallickwang said:


> For me, opera tends to be a lot easier to tie in the visual imagery I suppose because you have the action on stage to "match up" with the melody at hand. A vivid example of this would be the use of the glissandi of the trombones in the opera Lady MacBeth of the Mtsensk District to represent the sexual tryst of Katerina with her lover.
> 
> However, if you were to play just the instrument part of the opera section without its plot context then how would be the listener know that it is specifically tied into something sexual with those trombones?


The listener would have no idea what the trombones were supposed to convey. Music can't depict concrete things, except for things it can actually mimic the sounds of. But I don't think I want to hear music that actually sounds like sexual intercourse.


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## Figleaf (Jun 10, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> The whole Romantic era is based on poetics, poetic imagery, and visual, pictoral evocations. That's why everybody likes it.


I don't like it. I find it unsettling when music is supposed to depict something and I can't hear anything meaningful in it, just noise. I feel like I've failed as a listener because I can't visualise a country scene or whatever, and I don't even want to. The whole romantic thing of pretending to have paroxysms of joy over the sight (or aural representation) of a muddy field is absurd to me, and while I'm not knocking anyone who likes this stuff, it's not something all of us are temperamentally suited to. While I'm probably never going to have a great ear for non vocal music, I think I would feel less intimidated (if that's not too strong a word) by music that didn't claim to represent anything outside itself and which didn't come with some huge amount of cultural baggage that says 'anyone who admits to being bored by this is officially a philistine'. (The latter point is not the composer's fault, obviously.)

Sorry for the rather negative tone of this post. I'm just trying to explain why 'everybody' doesn't in fact like this music, yet feels embarrassed to admit it. Or maybe it's just me.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Mahlerian said:


> and rock music, where so-called "power chords" are actually distorted bare fifths with the root doubled.


Good explanation Mahlerian. Just a couple small points to add - firstly on stringed instruments the term "open" generally refers to open strings (as opposed to fretted strings) so to a guitarist an "open fifth" would suggest a fifth played in an open tuning such as dropped D. Lastly a power chord (ie- on guitar) as a term is generally used to indicate _any_ kind of fifth - not necessarily with the root doubled. In fact in a very large percentage of rock songs that rely heavily on power chords - the root is not doubled.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

millionrainbows said:


> The whole Romantic era is based on poetics, poetic imagery, and visual, pictoral evocations. That's why everybody likes it.


Interestingly enough Glenn Gould avoided much of the music of the Romantic era. I think that he preferred more "abstract" types of music.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

albertfallickwang said:


> This makes Debussy's music of particular interest to me. Somehow he is able to capture the essence of image within an abstracted form.
> 
> For me, an image of nature can be tied into a certain chord structure but this is arbitrarily determined by the composer?


I seriously doubt if you could tie a particular harmonic chord progression to a visual image and have it 'stand' as a sort of icon for the object.

_Once titled, or named, or given a program,_ however, THEN the listener will seek those images / narratives out, and _voila,_ then 'find' the piece -- if successful -- does "what is on the tin."

Mahler, in a note to a critic on his 'program' notes of one of his symphonies, says he first put them there (for the premiere) _*as a directional aid to the non-musician listeners.*_ Right after the premiere, he found them beyond 'wrong,' and of no real use, and those descriptive sub-titles for the movements were not presented in the printed program for subsequent performances.

Sure, a _pastorale_ is a traditional form, in 6/8, with a lilting feel, and often will have a melody in a harmony of pairs, all to evoke shepherd's flutes / pipes -- the shepherds making a little music to entertain themselves while watching the flocks, and this has become a _genre / character piece_ the sort which most anyone will recognize as "pastorale."

Beethoven said of the Pastorale, "more the expression of feeling than (a) painting",

Liszt's _Les Preludes_ is _supposedly_ a narrative tone-poem based upon a poem by Lamartine, yet it seems that well after the piece was finished and the ink was dry, it was a friend who pointed out the piece did seem to 'fit' the particular poem, and it is pretty certain that the title, and the programmatic association, were tacked on to the music_ after the fact of Liszt conceiving of and realizing the score_ 

Debussy, it is fairly certain, arrived at a title for any number of his pieces after the fact of their being started or completed, while it is also certain that some were conceived from some narrative idea or image. _Nuages_ from the Trois Nocturnes (for orchestra) is music which moves about like slowly shifting / drifting clouds -- yet I wonder if the title was prior his imagining the piece, or when he was working on it, or when done!

But as to musical specifics? A few configurations, like the gently-rolling under accompaniment in the opening of Smetena's _Ma Vlast,_ as "river music," does give a feeling of flowing water -- _but,_ if we did not have the title, the listener would hear it as just music with a 'flowing' quality.

The Harvard Dictionary of Music has a _very_ long entry under "program music," which amounts to a rant, i.e. the stance is that much program music is completely dreadful, and the _only_ successful program music is music which does not at all rely upon the listener knowing anything about the program


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Figleaf said:


> I don't like it. I find it unsettling when music is supposed to depict something and I can't hear anything meaningful in it....
> 
> The whole romantic thing of pretending to have paroxysms of joy over the sight (or aural representation) of a muddy field is absurd to me...it's not something all of us are temperamentally suited to.
> 
> ...maybe it's just me.


Since I'm already on record enough times as looking none to kindly upon a good deal of the music of the mid to later romantic era, I won't hammer that one in further. But to your point, the more programmatically determined the composer or piece, usually the less interested I am (exceptions being for opera, sung texts, and ballet scores tied to the libretto / action.) Other than that, I do feel many of those pieces actually intended to carry a program, narrative (or worse, a poem or a philosophy) usually so fail to do so that those pieces just might be better off if no one had ever heard the least suggestion as to their extra-musical "content."

I think many a listener is quite mistaken about the pictorial or literal aspects they seem to find in Debussy's music. Sure, he wrote a handful of pieces quite on the direct image / narrative side, but so much of it is such highly abstract music, titled in a manner as to be more a suggestion than a directive:__in both the manuscripts and the original published edition, his _Preludes_ are listed by number alone, and the titles only appear at the end of each piece, on the score after the double bar, i.e. as an afterthought, or a mere suggestion to the performer _if it was needed and they had not already 'gotten' the interpretation of these abstract pieces from the score alone._ His symphony, _La Mer,_ was composed primarily in a summer retreat high in the inland mountains of France, finished that same summer while visiting England, near the coast of the English Channel. (Other than the English Channel, and one childhood vacation where he saw the Mediterranean, Debussy never clapped eyes upon an ocean  Too, it seems to me more music modeled upon how water behaves, the middle movement ditto, including the play of light on the water -- but these seem like mere premises for a type of musical motion more than any thought to create, in music, either a postcard / painterly image of the sea, or evoke any sentimentality about "The Sea." Whatever the titles, Debussy was a classicist at heart.

_I think it most unfortunate a composer should choose to, in a way, tell the audience either 'what the piece is about,' and at its worst, it is telling the audience both what to think and how to feel!_

So... no, it is not 'just you.'


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

tdc said:


> Good explanation Mahlerian. Just a couple small points to add - firstly on stringed instruments the term "open" generally refers to open strings (as opposed to fretted strings) so to a guitarist an "open fifth" would suggest a fifth played in an open tuning such as dropped D. Lastly a power chord (ie- on guitar) as a term is generally used to indicate _any_ kind of fifth - not necessarily with the root doubled. In fact in a very large percentage of rock songs that rely heavily on power chords - the root is not doubled.


Two things:
1.) even without the root doubled, that open fifth on the (bass) guitar is going to produce a very strong octave overtone which lets us hear 'the root doubled.'
2.) picayune yet a fact: in classical theory, common practice and / or contemporary, a chord has to have, minimum, _three discrete pitches_ -- which any sole interval, with or without either of its members doubled, does not. Ergo, 'power _chord'_ is a misnomer: it is not a chord, it is an interval, or a duad


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

PetrB said:


> Two things:
> 1.) even without the root doubled, that open fifth on the (bass) guitar is going to produce a very strong octave overtone which lets us hear 'the root doubled.'
> 2.) picayune yet a fact: in classical theory, common practice and / or contemporary, a chord has to have, minimum, _three discrete pitches_ -- which any sole interval, with or without either of its members doubled, does not. Ergo, 'power _chord'_ is a misnomer: it is not a chord, it is an interval, or a duad


Yep, correct on both counts. The thing is I suspect by actually doubling the root it creates even more overtones and an even muddier sound, and/or depending on what octave the root is doubled in a case where the sound of the octave interval is a lot more prominent than the fifth, ie - a player going for a "heavy" sound by moving around fast changing power "chords" ends up coming across somewhat like he is trying to sound like Wes Montgomery. That is why I find power "chords" in many cases are so much more effective without the doubled root.

I do realize a power "chord" is not an actual chord, however that misnomer/term has become quite common among guitar players. I prefer just calling them 5ths.


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## Guest (Dec 18, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> (think of Julie Andrews singing "The hills are alive" to these same intervals!).


No, please...must I??


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

The discussion of what is and/or isn't a chord in which musical context is one of the oldest and most ridiculous, especially in late Romanticism when the theorists no longer could cope with the ever increasing harmonic oddities and already didn't know how to 'interpret' all those 'nonexistent/forbidden/improperly resolved' inverted (non contrapuntal) 9ths.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

SONNET CLV said:


> Of course the irony is that in order to express our reactions to a piece of music, we must use words. We don't hum our reaction. We could dance it, I suppose. Or build it into an architectural structure. But then, in order to "explain" the dance or the architecture, we would have to turn to words again. In a real sense we as human consciousnesses are inherently tied to language for expression in ways that leap beyond music or structure or movement for expression.
> 
> A deaf person cannot understand the "communication" of a piece of music; a blind person cannot perceive the "communication" of dance. But even Helen Keller utilized masterful language to communicate.
> 
> ...


I love this essay, and I can't help taking it as an invitation to meditate on the nature of art, expression, and meaning.

We all recognize that whatever meaning music seems to convey to us is something different from a verbal description of the world, and anyone who has tried to translate the former into the latter has encountered the difficulty, more or less insurmountable, of conveying that meaning in words. We variously refer to the meaning conveyed by music as "feeling" or "emotion," yet this often seems an imprecise, or even irrelevant, way to describe what we derive from the experience of hearing it.

The question of what music is "about" may cause us to throw up our hands, or to say things like "music is about itself" or "music communicates nothing." But such statements clearly fail to do justice to the way music strikes most of us. Obviously, music has the power to arouse an enormous range of responses, ranging from detached pleasure to emotion of great intensity. But what's interesting to me in relation to the subject of this thread is not that we react to music, but rather that we perceive it as _expressing_ things - as containing within it, even beyond or apart from our individual feelings about it, meaning and content. Music which tries to depict objects in a literal, superficial way is really rather peripheral, even in avowedly programmatic works (the bird calls in Beethoven's _Pastoral Symphony_ are a delightful touch but not fundamental to the nature of the work), and even in such works the burden of communicating meaning falls mainly upon abstract musical structures which have no explicit reference to anything concrete. Entertaining as outright imitation through musical sounds may be, it doesn't tell us much about the nature of musical expression.

Does music actually have content beyond the sounds of which it consists? Is there something in the way sounds are arranged by a composer which enables music to embody and communicate elements of experience which transcend its mere physical structure? Can music be "about" something?

Whole books have been written on this question. I've read some over the years. But what I've noticed in my personal experience as both a musician and a visual artist is that the apprehension of "meaning" is an absolutely unquestionable and inescapable part of what I do when I create or perform a work of art - and, therefore, when I experience one. I am always aware that the choices I make as a creator of a painting or an interpreter of a song are meaningful choices, that the goal of those choices is not merely to make an effect pleasing to the mind and senses but to make a specific kind of effect in a specific kind of work with a specific kind of meaning, often completely nonverbal, in mind. I've also noticed - and here's the most interesting part - that the elements and effects in music that seem to embody and convey meaning have striking parallels in visual art.

What sort of parallels? Formal parallels.

Neurological studies have shown that the functions of the brain - the senses and the cognitive faculties - are not isolated and independent but communicate with each other, sometimes even compensating for each other's incapacities. But, brain science (about which I'm mostly ignorant) aside, what I've noticed in my artistic practice is that the perceptions that come to me through the different sensory modes are not just vaguely related, but are to a startling degree _analogous_, with each sensory-perceptual channel imaging in its own medium - aural or visual - _significant forms_, abstract forms independent of any particular sense mode, but carrying meanings, consisting of feelings and associations, which are remarkably similar in whatever sense modes they are expressed. These forms are not pictures of objects as we perceive them; they are _qualities_ common to objects of sense perception and to ideas derived from sense perception; they are forms abstracted from both external realities and inward experiences of the body and mind. They belong to physical objects and their motions, to our sensations of these, to the realms of feeling and emotion, to the movements and gestures and sensations of our bodies. And as they are perceived through the senses, they are abstracted by the mind, mostly at levels below conscious awareness, and reside there as a repository and resource upon which an artist in any medium may draw to create - and a viewer or listener may draw to respond.

I believe that it is through significant form, form representing not things but the _qualities_ of things, however abstract or concrete, that a work of art can be a meaningful image of the world and of life, evoking through forms as varied as their sources in reality some aspect of what life feels like, what it _means_ to us. To the extent that music can express and communicate anything, I believe it does so by presenting to us audible analogues to the mental forms which we have abstracted from our experience of the world and which we recognize and respond to. I don't think this accounts entirely for the sheer _intensity_ of our emotional response to certain kinds or works of music; that may be less a cognitive than a physiological phenomenon. But we don't know enough to separate these things out in the immediate experience of listening. The peculiar power of music to affect us, its power to bypass our conceptual networks and strike at our subconscious recognition of the manifold "forms of life" with such instantaneous directness and, if the music's particular forms are sympathetic with our own constitution and life experience, such emotional precision, is what makes music seem so miraculous to humankind, and so personally meaningful and important to us as individuals.

With regard to that "emotional precision," I recall reading that Mendelssohn said that the feelings expressed by music are not too vague to be expressed in words, but too specific. I've puzzled over that for many years. It seems contrary to our common perception, as we rightly observe that music cannot convey specific concepts, and that any given work will be heard, felt, and understood differently by different listeners. But from a fellow artist's standpoint, I think Mendelssohn was on to something. As a composer, he was always consciously in pursuit of just the right notes, the ones that had to follow each other inevitably to embody a certain "feeling" which was beyond any verbal explanation but which was immediately recognizable to him as "right" when he hit upon it. And similarly, as a pianist, he was always seeking that precise shaping of the music that would exactly express his felt understanding of the work he was performing. In either case any attempt to explain the desired musical effect using the verbal language of emotions would only reveal the poverty and imprecision of such language. A piece of music may convey different things to different people, but this is because its forms are analogous to abstractions which may be drawn from a wide range of perceptions and experiences, not all of which are common to all listeners. What this may tell us is that the expressive abstractions of music should properly be described not as _"vague,"_ a concept applicable to language attempting and failing to describe specific realities, but rather - exactly like the realities from which those abstractions are drawn - as _multiple._ The difference is not merely semantic: if the meaning of something is vague, we can't know if we're correct - but if it is multiple, we may all disagree about it, even at times seem to contradict each other, and yet _all_ be correct.

I find that this way of looking at musical meaning - not as a pseudo-language which fails utterly to attain verbal articulateness, but as a fundamentally different, abstract "language" of formal analogues to a limitless range of physical and psychological phenomena, open-ended yet not arbitrary in significance - helps, at the very least, to strike a plausible balance between "subjective" and "objective" views of whether and how music "means." It certainly describes my perception of where meaning resides for me as a creative and performing artist. And it may also go some way toward vindicating the conviction, so widely shared among listeners, that what they feel when they hear music is not a mere personal affliction of the nervous system determined by their genes, culture and upbringing.

There really is "joy," "poetry" and "grandeur" in that symphony - and much, much else besides, which it only requires another listener to discover.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> No, please...must I??


Now, now! Julie is an archetype and is not to be tossed over an Alpine precipice lightly.

But if it makes you happier (and with my luck it won't), think of the first notes sung by the Rhinemaidens after the prelude to _Das Rheingold_: "Weia Waga..." Another representation of innocent nature, and those same notes of the scale - the sixth, the fifth, and the third. The same notes also begin the song of the forest bird in _Siegfried_, to much the same effect. The sixth note as an addition to the tonic triad figures prominently in Strauss waltzes and polkas, and in popular music from the late 19th century on, even at final cadences, imparting a feeling of carefree lightness and freedom. I don't know why that sixth has that effect, but it seems to.

Have you seen Victor/Victoria? Julie's quite charming and sings beautifully.


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## SONNET CLV (May 31, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> Music can't depict concrete things, except for things it can actually mimic the sounds of. *But I don't think I want to hear music that actually sounds like sexual intercourse*.


Not a fan of Ravel's _Bolero_ then, I take it?


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Figleaf said:


> I don't like it. I find it unsettling when music is supposed to depict something and I can't hear anything meaningful in it, just noise. I feel like I've failed as a listener because I can't visualise a country scene or whatever, and I don't even want to. The whole romantic thing of pretending to have paroxysms of joy over the sight (or aural representation) of a muddy field is absurd to me, and while I'm not knocking anyone who likes this stuff, it's not something all of us are temperamentally suited to. While I'm probably never going to have a great ear for non vocal music, I think I would feel less intimidated (if that's not too strong a word) by music that didn't claim to represent anything outside itself and which didn't come with some huge amount of cultural baggage that says 'anyone who admits to being bored by this is officially a philistine'. (The latter point is not the composer's fault, obviously.)
> 
> *Sorry for the rather negative tone of this post.* I'm just trying to explain why 'everybody' doesn't in fact like this music, yet feels embarrassed to admit it. Or maybe it's just me.


Oh, that's quite alright. Now close your eyes, and imagine that you are crawling, in ecstasy, through a muddy field.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Woodduck said:


> ...We all recognize that whatever meaning music seems to convey to us is something different from a verbal description of the world, and anyone who has tried to translate the former into the latter has encountered the difficulty, more or less insurmountable, of conveying that meaning in words. We variously refer to the meaning conveyed by music as "feeling" or "emotion," yet this often seems an imprecise, or even irrelevant, way to describe what we derive from the experience of hearing it.
> 
> Obviously, music has the power to arouse an enormous range of responses, ranging from detached pleasure to emotion of great intensity...we perceive it as _expressing_ things - as containing within it, even beyond or apart from our individual feelings about it, meaning and content. Music which tries to depict objects in a literal, superficial way is really rather peripheral, even in avowedly programmatic works (the bird calls in Beethoven's _Pastoral Symphony_ are a delightful touch but not fundamental to the nature of the work), and *even in such works the burden of communicating meaning falls mainly upon abstract musical structures which have no explicit reference to anything concrete...*_significant forms_, abstract forms independent of any particular sense mode, but carrying meanings, consisting of feelings and associations, which are remarkably similar in whatever sense modes they are expressed. These forms are not pictures of objects as we perceive them; they are *qualities* common to objects of sense perception and to ideas derived from sense perception; they are forms *abstracted* from both external realities and inward experiences of the body and mind. _They belong to physical objects and their motions, to our sensations of these, to the realms of feeling and emotion, to the movements and gestures and sensations of our bodies. And as they are perceived through the senses, they are abstracted by the mind, mostly at levels below conscious awareness, and reside there as a repository and resource upon which an artist in any medium may draw to create - and a viewer or listener may draw to respond._...I believe that it is through significant form, of t* form representing not things but the qualities of things, *however abstract or concrete, that a work of art can be a meaningful image of the world and of life, evoking through forms as varied as their sources in reality some aspect of what life feels like, what it _means_ to us. To the extent that music can express and communicate anything, *I believe it does so by presenting to us audible analogues to the mental forms which we have abstracted from our experience of the world and which we recognize and respond to.*
> 
> ...


Excellent post, I couldn't agree more. This is art, yet people still seem to be stuck in a literal mindset, devoid of imagination, especially when they question it, demand am explanation, or try to explain it. Regardless of this, I think these people still listen to music for reasons beyond their ability to explain it


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Richannes Wrahms said:


> The discussion of what is and/or isn't a chord in which musical context is one of the oldest and most ridiculous, especially in late Romanticism when the theorists no longer could cope with the ever increasing harmonic oddities and already didn't know how to 'interpret' all those 'nonexistent/forbidden/improperly resolved' inverted (non contrapuntal) 9ths.


This is pretty simple really: two period definitions, the earlier common practice is three pitches which are a traid, i.e. two pair of stacked thirds, major, minor, augmented or diminished.

I think it was Hindemith who coined the modern / contemporary definition -- _any_ three _discrete_ pitches, while he was strongly traditionalist enough to think that kind of chord was a 'chord' only if it had 'function.'

With Debussy, the monkey-wrench was thrown into the harmonic analysis machine, 'chords' as sheer color, without function 

To the classically trained, common practice or modern contemporary, it goes as far as "B diminished 7, flatted 9, 11" (for example) _also means nothing..._ i.e. there is no real meaning to 'just a named group of pitches' without some context of key or chord function.


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

millionrainbows said:


> Excellent post, I couldn't agree more. This is art, yet people still seem to be stuck in a literal mindset, devoid of imagination, especially when they question it, demand am explanation, or try to explain it. Regardless of this, I think these people still listen to music for reasons beyond their ability to explain it


The current wave of literal thinking in general has more than music being wildly misdirected and / or misunderstood. Personally, I find that trend more than a little tragedy


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

PetrB said:


> This is pretty simple really: two period definitions, the earlier common practice is three pitches which are a traid, i.e. two pair of stacked thirds, major, minor, augmented or diminished.
> 
> I think it was Hindemith who coined the modern / contemporary definition -- _any_ three _discrete_ pitches, while he was strongly traditionalist enough to think that kind of chord was a 'chord' only if it had 'function.'
> 
> ...


I just wanted to point out that there is literature on the topic as the thoughts around it changed. In the same way a melody can be said to imply a given harmony, for a Classical composer an interval could represent a triad with one of its tones elided and thus be called a chord. This would depend on the context but of course one can argue that _Ceci n'est pas une pipe_. Otherwise, I don't care what you call what as long as everyone understands the construction and how it sounds.


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## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> What is meant by 'an open fifth'?


tdc and Mahlerian have addressed this pretty well, but more specifically: The term open fifth usually means bowing or plucking two open strings on an instrument tuned in fifths (Cello: C-G-D-A, violin G-D-A-E). If one is going for a rustic sound, one does not want the players to use vibrato, since fiddles and other rustic string instruments are generally played without vibrato, or at least without the singing style vibrato of classical strings. One way to be sure to get a rustic sounding fifth is to make it impossible for the players to use vibrato. If one requires the cellos to play their lowest C and G together, for example, the only way a cellist can do this is by using the open C and G strings. Voila: no vibrato possible, rusticity assured. Haydn does this in a rustic movement of one of the Op. 76 quartets, but I am too lazy to go find which one.

In the specific case of the opening of the Pastoral Symphony, the violas are called upon to play their lowest available note, the open C string, (The cellos play the F below that.) which means it must be played without vibrato. Ergo, Beethoven was specifically going for a rustic sound. This supports Woodduck's fine interpretation. It is also worth noting that Beethoven loved walking in the woods and fields and often composed while doing so, which makes it easy for me to accept the vigorous walking bit too.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Interestingly enough, Vivaldi's Four Seasons doesn't evoke nature to me but more of a lighthearted pastoral experience. I can't claim how profound that experience is however.


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## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Here is something from the more popular Debussian side of Delius's style.








wikipedia said:


> A Song of Summer derived from an unpublished 1918 symphonic work, originally called "Poem of Life and Love". In 1921, Delius told Peter Warlock that he had misplaced most of that score. Delius resumed work on this composition after becoming blind, dictating the notes to his amanuensis, Eric Fenby, to whom the score was dedicated.
> 
> *Delius explained the context of the tone poem to Fenby by saying: "I want you to imagine we are sitting on the cliffs of heather and looking out over the sea. The sustained chords in the high strings suggest the clear sky and stillness and calm of the scene...You must remember that figure that comes in the violins when the music becomes more animated. I'm introducing it there to suggest the gentle rise and fall of the waves. The flutes suggest a seagull gliding by."*


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## Guest (Dec 20, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> But if it makes you happier (and with my luck it won't), think of the first notes sung by the Rhinemaidens after the prelude to _Das Rheingold_: "Weia Waga..." Another representation of innocent nature, and those same notes of the scale - the sixth, the fifth, and the third.


Yes, I get it - though not familiar with it, I get the openness and airy feel - even though the production on Youtube I could find had three bints struggling to dive about in a fishtank!



SONNET CLV said:


> Not a fan of Ravel's _Bolero_ then, I take it?


About sexual intercourse? I should say not! Well, not kneeling up on ice at any rate...

View attachment 59069




PetrB said:


> I think many a listener is quite mistaken about the pictorial or literal aspects they seem to find in Debussy's music.


I don't see how the listener can be 'mistaken' about what they find in anyone's music, unless in a technical sense. The listener will 'hear' whatever he will, whether intended by the composer or not. It might seem wilful, should someone suggest that on hearing _Sunken Cathedral_, it prompts images of milk going sour in a fridge, but as you say, if Debussy wasn't really too worried about what his music was 'about', and added many titles as an afterthought, who cares whether what we picture corresponds to his afterthought.

However, I note that whenever a thread about imagery in music appears, you seem keen to focus on the literal and the programmatic, and are critical of listeners whose responses are more sophisticated than your reduction implies.

IMO, you could assemble a continuum of 'music with imagery' to 'music without' from the mere onomatopoeic to the absolute. It's not an on/off, program/absolute, thing.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Wow, reading through all of these wonderful responses have helped me to understand this issue a lot better. I appreciate all of this discussion.

No doubt that music is a complex phenom indeed. It straddles the abstract and concrete so well.


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## Dasein (Dec 14, 2014)

I think this small essay might interest you.

http://www.msu.edu/~sullivan/AdornoMusLangFrag.html

Strangely enough, whenever I hear a minuet the exact mental image I had while reading the party scene from James Joyce's '_The Dead_' appears in my mind.


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## Albert7 (Nov 16, 2014)

Four Last Songs I am listening to and it evokes so much to me. I think of spirituality and nature a lot.


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## MoonlightSonata (Mar 29, 2014)

albertfallickwang said:


> Interestingly enough, Vivaldi's Four Seasons doesn't evoke nature to me but more of a lighthearted pastoral experience. I can't claim how profound that experience is however.


I listened to the omnipresent "Spring" concerto last night, and parts of it did evoke birdsong for me. Maybe I am in the minority, but the two violins did remind me of birds.


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