# Do you need to "understand" a piece in order to enjoy it?



## Lucifer Saudade (May 19, 2015)

Reading through Mahlerian's recent thread regarding educating audience... I began to wonder what this will include and whether it will help me "understand" certain pieces more.

Lets look at this piece by Elgar for instance:






At no point do I really ask myself "what's going on in this piece?" - while I don't understand music theory, I still don't have any trouble "following" it or interpreting the harmony/ rhythm/ melody etc. Other times, I find myself asking the question "What's going in the composer's mind, theoretically/ emotionally/ intellectually? What is he hoping to achieve?"

In Mahlerian's thread, someone mentioned a couple of composers that caught my ear. One of them was Michael Pisaro:






Now, I find myself enjoying this piece but I had a hard time "figuring it out" so to speak. I kept wondering "what is he trying to do here? What am I supposed to be paying attention to/ how am I supposed to interpret it?"

Here's what the composer had to say about it for those interested:



> I find the implication that there are "ears" everywhere, at every point in a world, a fascinating concept, even if it is rather hard to imagine. It implies that position might be more important than time in hearing; and that the sounding configuration of a world can be understood (differently) from an infinite number of points. It says that what is audible to any one person is unique, but at the same time contiguous (and therefore directly related) to what is audible to others. So the series is about creating (or rather, imagining) configurations of sounds in a "field."


Then again, other pieces I don't seem to care too much about the intent behind and just enjoy the music. Another composer I was introduced to - Iancu Dumitrescu:










This mostly surfaces up with Modern music for me. Musically speaking, I often feel like I don't "follow" or "get it" the same way I do common practice/ popular music where all the musical devices seem to make sense.

Anyway, to my question: Do you ever feel like you need to "understand a piece"? Does education about background, composer intention etc help you get the piece or does it detract from personal interpretation?


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I don't see how knowledge and understanding could detract from anything except religion. With Dumitrescu, I think you need to know that he is a Spectralist, at least.
With the Elgar, I probably ask different questions than you do. I ask, "Why should this music be relevant to me now, and in what way? Why might it have been relevant in its time? What was he trying to accomplish aesthetically? Why is this battle scene depicted? What is the "triumph"?


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

Lucifer Saudade said:


> Anyway, to my question: Do you ever feel like you need to "understand a piece"? Does education about background, composer intention etc help you get the piece or does it detract from personal interpretation?


I never feel as though I _need_ to understand a piece to enjoy it. I know relatively little about music theory, but I enjoy a very high percentage of works from the Renaissance through Romantic eras and am continuing to enjoy more and more modern music. I have no doubt that understanding music at a high level would allow me more enjoyment since that seems to be the case in many fields. My daughter is a grad student in music and clearly gets an _additional_ amount of enjoyment from following the theory of the music she hears, but I'm not sure she enjoys the works _more_ on a purely aesthetic sense.

It's possible that understanding something about the work allows one to pay closer attention or to pay attention to aspects one would otherwise miss, and perhaps that might allow one to more quickly become familiar with the music. Familiarity with unusual (to the listener) aspects can be key to enabling enjoyment.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Certainly knowing more about a piece might marginally increase the amount of enjoyment I can get from it, but I don't know of a single instance where greater knowledge has prompted me to change from not liking a piece to liking it. Whenever such a change occurs, it's a result simply of greater familiarity. 
Once upon a time I didn't like, say, Berg's violin concerto, but now I do. My understanding of the notes, the structure, anything musiclogical about it, hasn't increased an iota.

Actually the Pisaro example above is interesting. I listened to it without reading the quote from the composer, and for fun decided to construct an "explanation" for the piece. When I came to read Pisaro's own rationale I was rather unimpressed, to be honest, and liked my idea better, by which I mean _I liked the piece more under my own false interpretation_. Which raises the amusing possibility that there's a whole bunch of music out there that I like for the wrong reasons!


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

...and let's clarify that 'understanding' music does not just mean music theory, but as in any art, the historic context and all that goes with it. I'd say that some of the self-proclaimed 'theoretical know-nothings' could do a little research in this regard. Like my daddy used to say, "nothing is worth much unless you work for it."

And while Nereffid's observation that "more knowledge does not convert dislike to like," more knowledge can certainly increase one's liking, as my own experience has shown me. 

I do not subscribe to the "ignorance is bliss" approach. I feel a responsibility to gather all I can when it comes to classical music, or any music for that matter.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I think that where a work really gets its meaning from referring to other works, you're pleasure's going to be highly limited unless you follow the references. An example is History of Photography in Sound, a sort of Finnegans Wake in music.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Lucifer Saudade said:


> Reading through Mahlerian's recent thread regarding educating audience... I began to wonder what this will include and whether it will help me "understand" certain pieces more.
> 
> Lets look at this piece by Elgar for instance:
> 
> At no point do I really ask myself "what's going on in this piece?" - while I don't understand music theory, I still don't have any trouble "following" it or interpreting the harmony/ rhythm/ melody etc. Other times, I find myself asking the question "What's going in the composer's mind, theoretically/ emotionally/ intellectually? What is he hoping to achieve?"


Well, in the sense that I would mean "understand," it's clear that you do understand the Elgar piece just fine. I am of the opinion that great art is accessible to any listener who is able to approach it on its own terms. Education and knowledge of theory are not necessary. This of course applies to contemporary classical music as well.

We don't realize how much implicit information we bring with us when we listen to and interpret even a relatively simple piece of music. Our brains develop listening strategies for grasping as much of that signal as is necessary for enjoyment or as much as it is possible for us, given our background, to experience.



Lucifer Saudade said:


> In Mahlerian's thread, someone mentioned a couple of composers that caught my ear. One of them was Michael Pisaro:
> 
> Now, I find myself enjoying this piece but I had a hard time "figuring it out" so to speak. I kept wondering "what is he trying to do here? What am I supposed to be paying attention to/ how am I supposed to interpret it?"
> 
> ...


Where is the line for you personally? I ask because it actually is different for everyone. Some can't make heads or tails out of Wagner, though they love Beethoven, Verdi, and Mozart. Some tend to lose interest after the Classical era, and some after the Baroque. Some people's interest only extends as far back as the beginnings of true common practice tonality in the late 1600s and find the modally inflected tonality and the pretonal music difficult to grasp.

It is true that there are many who believe that what they're bothered by is something called atonality, and that this is the dividing line between music they can understand and music they can't, but all of them seem to disagree as to which pieces are atonal. Is Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony atonal? The Fourth, then? What about Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony or Friede auf Erden? Benjamin Britten's War Requiem? You may laugh and say that all of these things use key signatures (actually, one of them doesn't, mostly, but I won't say which) and therefore can't be atonal, but I've seen all of them referred to as such by others. In actuality, there is no strict definition of atonal at all. Attempts to try to make "atonal" a technical description rather than a fuzzy categorization with vague boundaries always fail by including too much or including too little.

If I may guess, I would think that a good part of what seems strange about the Dumitrescu pieces you posted is the focus on unusual timbres which you don't associate with music as you know it.

The truth is that I can't tell where the line is for you or anyone else where a musical device begins to make sense. I've certainly experienced, and believe that it is common for others to experience, a kind of gradual or sudden unveiling where a piece or composer who had been impenetrable becomes comprehensible and music that had sounded like noise reveals itself as music.



Lucifer Saudade said:


> Anyway, to my question: Do you ever feel like you need to "understand a piece"? Does education about background, composer intention etc help you get the piece or does it detract from personal interpretation?


I don't think any of these things are necessary. They may be helpful for some people in some cases, but I don't think that we need to know that Boulez sought a freer way of writing serial music in Le marteau sans Maitre in order to follow the piece and enjoy its sonorous textures combined with a laser-sharp focus and intensity any more than we need to know that Beethoven had written the Third Symphony with Napoleon in mind before retracting his dedication in order to follow it and enjoy its expansion of the possibilities of symphonic form.


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

A few months back I visited one of Violadude's You Tube videos wherein he spends a good 20 minutes or a half hour explaining in detail what is going on in a very short Brahms piano prelude (or Ballade, or other short work). It turns out there enough going on it really takes that long! It's a highly dense work, and I suspect that's typical of most classical composers. 

Did I need all that info to enjoy the work? No, but it greatly enhanced my experience of it. In the end we must each decide how deeply we want to fall down the rabbit hole. In general for me it's wonderful enough to get the surface things that are happening. I may notice deeper relationships within the music subconsciously, meaning I like a work without really knowing why, but I like the deeper analyses too. It's all good.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

If I needed to understand something to enjoy it, I probably wouldn't enjoy many things, certainly nowhere near as many as I do.


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## D Smith (Sep 13, 2014)

A composition needs to make musical sense to me in order to enjoy it. I have to feel the composer had a 'game plan'. However, it's not necessary for me to understand the musical theory behind it (which would most likely be beyond me anyway). I can listen to Schoenberg and usually sense that there was a reason for what he was doing and so enjoy it on some level, even though '12-tone music' is not my thing. I have some discs by Webern however that I have listened to multiple times and still don't get what the composer could possibly have had in mind. I suppose I could study up and try and find out but I'm not that motivated.


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## Vaneyes (May 11, 2010)

Understanding is optional. The listener may proceed at their own pace, unless of course there's a quiz, test, exam lurking.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

I don't need no professor to tell me about my music. I just wanna lay back and groove out to Mozart. Here, take a hit off this. W-w-w-w-f-f-f....ahh, that's some good music. Is that frozen pizza ready yet?


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## Lucifer Saudade (May 19, 2015)

> If I may guess, I would think that a good part of what seems strange about the Dumitrescu pieces you posted is the focus on unusual timbres which you don't associate with music as you know it.


Well, as I said, I like the way the piece _sounds _ and the timber is part of what makes it interesting. What I have trouble with is the compositional process behind the piece/ what it's supposed to communicate. The composer obviously follows some sort of process/ wants to achieve something musical but I have no idea what am I supposed to listen to or how _he_, the composer listens to the piece.

When I listen to the Elgar piece (a triumphant match - simple enough) - I don't have any trouble following along (emotionally, musically - I'm on the same wavelength with the piece). It's not even about liking it - I just understand what Elgar is doing and why, without getting into the technicalities. I'm fairly sure most people will "get" this piece which is akin to film music better then the latter ones.

Let's put it like this - upon hearing Beethoven's symphony number 5 - I wouldn't feel the need to go ask him "what was that about?" after, regardless if I liked it or not. Of course I don't understand every nook and cranny the way someone who studied it, just as a casual listener. I get what he's trying to say, and how he achieves the desired affect.

With Dumitrescu's piece, I'd go up to him and say something like this: "hey man, I like the way this piece sounds - but I have no idea what the hell are you doing. What are you trying to say/ build musically speaking? What can I read to understand this better?"

Now, I don't always feel the need to "understand" a piece.... but I feel kind of lost musically with avant garde pieces.... so I was wondering if anyone else felt like he needs to understand the process behind the music, regardless of if he liked it or not.



> I have some discs by Webern however that I have listened to multiple times and still don't get what the composer could possibly have had in mind.


This is what I'm talking about. Of course I don't know much about spectral music, so maybe it's a matter of exposure and learning the basics so to speak. I'm getting the feeling I just haven't put in enough listening time for me to "get" avant garde better.


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## GhenghisKhan (Dec 25, 2014)

I don't really know a lot of music theory, tbh. If that's what it means, I don't think it's necessary for enjoyment of music. I will admit it's interesting, and if I had more time, I would sink my teeth into it.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Regarding my earlier posts: I got hypnotized by the OP's premise! I forgot that I already know how to "get" modern music. This involves a different way of thinking.

Re:Lucifer's post, I notice terms like "follow" and "what this is about," terms we would normally use when describing a narrative, such as a story, stageplay, book, or literature. The narrative idea is a literary idea, and this seems to be a problem for many in approaching modern music which has no narrative.


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## Guest (Sep 14, 2015)

Lucifer Saudade said:


> Reading through Mahlerian's recent thread regarding educating audience... I began to wonder what this will include and whether it will help me "understand" certain pieces more.
> 
> ...
> 
> Now, I find myself enjoying [a] piece [by Michael Pisaro] but I had a hard time "figuring it out" so to speak. I kept wondering "what is he trying to do here? What am I supposed to be paying attention to/ how am I supposed to interpret it?"


I have been enjoying music for most of my life. So sixty some odd years, some of them very odd indeed. And I can say that I have never ever asked myself these questions.

Contrary to what some people have said so far, I do think you have to understand, but I think, one, that understanding and enjoying are to all intents and purposes the same thing, and two, that a lot of things that have been said have nothing to do with understanding the music at all. Side issues like composers' intentions (which are always guesses, even if the composer explicitly says what was intended--epistemology, kiddos) and knowledge of current events might affect how one listens, but none of these kinds of things has any effect on the actual sounds that you hear. Hold on to that; it's the only firm anchor: the music is the actual sounds that you hear. That's what you have to deal with, and there's not a single word in any language that will get you any closer to enjoying the sounds than listening carefully and intelligently.

Yeah, I know. What is "carefully and intelligently"? Well, ask yourself how it is that you don't ask yourself these questions about the Elgar but you do about the Pisaro or the Dumitrescu? It's because you already understand the Elgar. You may know nothing about the history of the piece or of the story it supposedly conveys in sound, but you understand this kind of music. How did you come to understand it? Answer that, and you've got the answer to everything this thread has brought up.



millionrainbows said:


> ...and let's clarify that 'understanding' music does not just mean music theory, but as in any art, the historic context and all that goes with it. I'd say that some of the self-proclaimed 'theoretical know-nothings' could do a little research in this regard.


 Now there's risible. Someone who would proclaim themself to be a theoretical know-nothing. I can imagine someone else proclaiming that, but one's own self? Nah. Not likely.

I had been listening to music, and understanding it quite well--by which I mean being able to follow the twists and turns of melodies and of shifting harmonies, and being able to recognize characteristic stylistic features of individuals and of eras so that I could easily identify the composer of a piece and date it within five years--long before I ever took a theory class. And my listening changed not one whit for having taken that class. It was a fun class, but it didn't help me "understand" music any better. Current events and biography the same. Those are interesting things, but they don't help me enjoy music any more than before I knew them.

Maybe I'm just talking about myself and not about music, but for me, music is overwhelming. It is important all on its own, needing nothing else for it to be powerful and engaging, needing no other purpose to justify its existence aside from its existence. Perfectly self-sufficient. Apparently that's not a popular view. Most people seem to take music as a support for something else, as secondary to other, more important things, like autobiography, psychology, sociology, politics, and religion. Apparently, it's quite good--so other people have assured me--at doing those things. I don't see it. Music is good for being itself and nothing else. It is good because it is itself and nothing else. It needs nothing else to be important.

That's how I see it, anyway.


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

You don't need to know or understand anything about the composer, the composer's intention or underlying theory, unless it's the composers intention that you understand those things (and that's when I start to get uncomfortable, suspicious and skeptical). Music that has to be explained is the kind of music I personally like to stay away from.
It's about you, the music and forming a connection with it over time, helped by 1. memory and 2. previous experience with (similar) music. If it starts to make sense and becomes enjoyable in any kind of way, it has succeeded. Everything else is bonus but nonessential.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

The problem seems to be one of a narrative frame of reference, vs. "just listening." In this sense, the "ignorance" professed is really an inability to "not think, and just be here now, and listen."

To "know nothing" in many cases means to "unlearn," which is not possible for many people. They need help with this.

From a 20th century textbook:
New Conceptions of Musical Time*Linear time:* Music that imparts a sense of linear time seems to move towards goals. This quality permeates virtually all of Western music from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras. This is accomplished by processes which occur within tonal and metrical frameworks.
*Nonlinear time:* Music that evokes a sense of nonlinear time seems to stand still or evolve very slowly.

Western musicians first became aware of nonlinear time during the late 19th century. Debussy's encounter with Javanese gamelan music at the 1889 Paris Exhibition was a seminal event.

*Moment Form:* broken down connections between musical events in order to create a series of more or less discrete moments. Certain works of Stravinsky, Webern, Messiaen, and Stockhausen exemplify this approach.

*Vertical Time: *At the other extreme of the nonlinear continuum is music that maximizes consistency and minimizes articulation. Vertical time means that whatever structure that is in the music exists between simultaneous layers of sound, not between successive gestures. A virtually static moment is expanded to encompass an entire piece. A vertical piece does not exhibit large-scale closure. It does not begin, but merely starts. It does not build to a climax, does not set up internal expectations, does not seek to fulfill any expectations that might arise accidentally, does not build or release tension, and does not end, but simply ceases.
*Minimalism* exemplifies vertical time, but instead of absolute stasis, it generates constant motion. The sense of movement is so evenly paced, and the goals are so vague, that we usually lose our sense of perspective.​


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

some guy said:


> I have been enjoying music for most of my life. So sixty some odd years, some of them very odd indeed. And I can say that I have never ever asked myself these questions.


That's because you listen "in the moment."



some guy said:


> Contrary to what some people have said so far, I do think you have to understand, but I think, one, that understanding and enjoying are to all intents and purposes the same thing, and two, that a lot of things that have been said have nothing to do with understanding the music at all. Side issues like composers' intentions (which are always guesses, even if the composer explicitly says what was intended--epistemology, kiddos) and knowledge of current events might affect how one listens, but none of these kinds of things has any effect on the actual sounds that you hear. Hold on to that; it's the only firm anchor: the music is the actual sounds that you hear. That's what you have to deal with, and there's not a single word in any language that will get you any closer to enjoying the sounds than listening carefully and intelligently.


Agreed; if somebody is stuck in that narrative thought style, they need to stop thinking.



some guy said:


> Yeah, I know. What is "carefully and intelligently"? Well, ask yourself how it is that you don't ask yourself these questions about the Elgar but you do about the Pisaro or the Dumitrescu? It's because you already understand the Elgar. You may know nothing about the history of the piece or of the story it supposedly conveys in sound, but you understand this kind of music. How did you come to understand it? Answer that, and you've got the answer to everything this thread has brought up.


It's like I said; the Elgar is narrative, and literary; you "follow" it like a story, until you "get it," and the musical syntax is geared to this kind of thinking: i.e. 19th century literature.



some guy said:


> Now there's risible. Someone who would proclaim themself to be a theoretical know-nothing. I can imagine someone else proclaiming that, but one's own self? Nah. Not likely.


They are just saying that they are stuck in a narrative frame, that's all.



some guy said:


> I had been listening to music, and understanding it quite well--by which I mean being able to follow the twists and turns of melodies and of shifting harmonies, and being able to recognize characteristic stylistic features of individuals and of eras so that I could easily identify the composer of a piece and date it within five years--long before I ever took a theory class. And my listening changed not one whit for having taken that class. It was a fun class, but it didn't help me "understand" music any better. Current events and biography the same. Those are interesting things, but they don't help me enjoy music any more than before I knew them.
> 
> Maybe I'm just talking about myself and not about music, but for me, music is overwhelming. It is important all on its own, needing nothing else for it to be powerful and engaging, needing no other purpose to justify its existence aside from its existence. Perfectly self-sufficient. Apparently that's not a popular view. Most people seem to take music as a support for something else, as secondary to other, more important things, like autobiography, psychology, sociology, politics, and religion. Apparently, it's quite good--so other people have assured me--at doing those things. I don't see it. Music is good for being itself and nothing else. It is good because it is itself and nothing else. It needs nothing else to be important.
> 
> That's how I see it, anyway.


Yeah, but you are 'here now.' You can't expect everybody to make the train.

Some guy, you need to realize that people out there have different brains than you & I. They have been conditioned to be and think a certain way, and art is art, and is many times at odds with "utilitarian functioning in this real world." This is art!

Give them a break. Help them to 'unlearn.' Help them to 'get dumb' and simply listen. They think differently than we do.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Lucifer Saudade said:


> With Dumitrescu's piece, I'd go up to him and say something like this: "hey man, I like the way this piece sounds - but I have no idea what the hell are you doing. What are you trying to say/ build musically speaking? What can I read to understand this better?"


Dumitrescu would probably reply, "What are you talking about? What do you mean, 'what I am trying to say'? It's just sound! The piece is "about" the sounds! Now go sit down, shut up, and listen!"



Lucifer Saudade said:


> Now, I don't always feel the need to "understand" a piece.... but I feel kind of lost musically with avant garde pieces.... so I was wondering if anyone else felt like he needs to understand the process behind the music, regardless of if he liked it or not...This is what I'm talking about. Of course I don't know much about spectral music, so maybe it's a matter of exposure and learning the basics so to speak. I'm getting the feeling I just haven't put in enough listening time for me to "get" avant garde better.


Stop worrying and fretting! Just listen. There's nothing to "get" except that this is not narrative art, like Elgar or Wagner. Enjoy being lost! Enjoy the mystery. Enjoy the sound...or not.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

some guy said:


> Maybe I'm just talking about myself and not about music, but for me, music is overwhelming. It is important all on its own, needing nothing else for it to be powerful and engaging, needing no other purpose to justify its existence aside from its existence. Perfectly self-sufficient. Apparently that's not a popular view. Most people seem to take music as a support for something else, as secondary to other, more important things, like autobiography, psychology, sociology, politics, and religion. Apparently, it's quite good--so other people have assured me--at doing those things. I don't see it. Music is good for being itself and nothing else. It is good because it is itself and nothing else. It needs nothing else to be important.
> 
> That's how I see it, anyway.


Yes, but don't you realize that these other people have no capacity to do that? They are wound-up so tight that they might not ever be able to let go of all that conditioned response. They're robots, seeking to live. It's like the Matrix; they don't even realize how to "be."


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## Le Peel (May 15, 2015)

Charles Rosen once said "If it brings you pleasure, then you understand it."


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## DeepR (Apr 13, 2012)

some guy said:


> Maybe I'm just talking about myself and not about music, but for me, music is overwhelming. It is important all on its own, needing nothing else for it to be powerful and engaging, needing no other purpose to justify its existence aside from its existence. Perfectly self-sufficient. Apparently that's not a popular view. Most people seem to take music as a support for something else, as secondary to other, more important things, like autobiography, psychology, sociology, politics, and religion. Apparently, it's quite good--so other people have assured me--at doing those things. I don't see it. Music is good for being itself and nothing else. It is good because it is itself and nothing else. It needs nothing else to be important.
> 
> That's how I see it, anyway.


Actually that's pretty much how I see the universe as well (except that I don't believe in a composer ).


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Do I need to know the recipe of my favourite food to find it delicious?


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

^No, but you might ask what's in it out of curiosity.


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## helenora (Sep 13, 2015)

> Contrary to what some people have said so far, I do think you have to understand, but I think, one, that understanding and enjoying are to all intents and purposes the same thing, and two, that a lot of things that have been said have nothing to do with understanding the music at all. Side issues like composers' intentions (which are always guesses, even if the composer explicitly says what was intended--epistemology, kiddos) and knowledge of current events might affect how one listens, but none of these kinds of things has any effect on the actual sounds that you hear. Hold on to that; it's the only firm anchor: the music is the actual sounds that you hear. That's what you have to deal with, and there's not a single word in any language that will get you any closer to enjoying the sounds than listening carefully and intelligently.


quite agree with some guy. Music and any art, any true is self-sufficient. 
But the more you understand it, composition, modulations, polyphony,etc, etc the more enjoyable it becomes. But yet, it all depends on a personality. Let's say for my mind it's part of enjoyment, all that understanding, for someone else it's not. But one thing is for sure is that the more complicated the music the more it is to understand. Let's say Wagner, it's better to know his "leitmotiv" system and one can enjoy more his works than a person who listens to it without prior knowledge. For some composers it's more or less a must to figure out a form of a composition, difference of voices if it's polyphony. Otherwise some works are left misunderstood or underrated due to a lack of so called "basic" knowledge of a composition ( well, sometimes it requires not just a basic knowledge lol) and it prevents people from liking such composers whose style was less dependent on melody. Let's say for the majority of people it's much easier to get a piece with clear melody, here I mean a melody which is quite easy to remember, often in homophony texture with clear "beginning" and "end "points like ones of Mozart, Verdi, etc , but when it expands, become rich in modulations or the entire composer's style is not really "melodic" here comes Beethoven then it requires some preparation from the part of a listener to understand it better. Well, well, I anticipate people's voices saying that Beethoven is still quite easy to get, not complicated and in short one those composers enjoyable by the majority of people. Ok, I understand it. But still it was an example of a composer whose style can't be defined as melody-dominant as even his melodies are a "product" of a harmonic structure and even by those who enjoy his most famous works his last works of chamber music are left unappreciated . and often a lot of misunderstanding ( what we call we can't enjoy) happens with works that require some more knowledge than just pure "follow" the music. Yes, music it's a flow , but not to get lost in its overwhelming flow sometimes and for some works in particular some understanding, preparation from a part of a listener is to be expected. I'm not talking about people on this forum, here people are quite prepared, but about people I've met throughout my life , some of them professional musicians and they couldn't understand quite well, profoundly Richard Strauss, Mahler, Wagner or early music just because of a simple fact they were not prepared for that. They kinda "didn't like it very much". They explained their unliking of them by simply saying it was not enjoyable for them, not their style.....hm......but in fact it wasn't the music which was unpleasant but their lack of ability to grasp it. well, it's a still a lot to be said about it, topic is very wide, things depends on prior experience , on expectations of a person, and even it's about an opinion of a person who writes all that ( it is only my opinion) but in short it's about understanding in order to enjoy more


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## breakup (Jul 8, 2015)

NO, sometimes understanding gets in the way of enjoyment.


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## breakup (Jul 8, 2015)

millionrainbows said:


> Like my daddy used to say, "*nothing* is worth much unless you work for it."


"Nothing" is worth what you pay for it.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

If a piece of music doesn't make sense to you, don't assume automatically that it's because you don't "understand" it. It's possible that the piece really doesn't make "sense," or that the "sense" it makes is right on the surface, and that you "understand" that perfectly well already.


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## Marschallin Blair (Jan 23, 2014)

Woodduck said:


> If a piece of music doesn't make sense to you, don't assume automatically that it's because you don't "understand" it.* It's possible that the piece really doesn't make "sense," or that the "sense" it makes is right on the surface, and that you "understand" that perfectly well already.*


Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.


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## Pugg (Aug 8, 2014)

Le Peel said:


> Charles Rosen once said "If it brings you pleasure, then you understand it."


Very wise words :tiphat:


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## haydnfan (Apr 13, 2011)

To me "understand" does not mean what it does to other posters. Well from what I read, some of you are writing gigantic treatises on the subject as usual.

Challenging pieces on the first listen can sound like a formless mass of notes, and I get little out of it. I repeatedly listen paying attention to Copland's four: melody, harmony, rhythm and color. The narrative of the piece starts to reveal itself to me, and I develop a fondness for the music.

That to me is understanding and it is important. I will never study music or perform it. But attentive listening is key.


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## helenora (Sep 13, 2015)

haydnfan said:


> But attentive listening is key.


that's true. But sometimes it doesn't work for some people, regardless how many times they will attentively listen to a piece of music. if they don't really understand harmony or melody or whatever nothing will help them in their "understanding" and attentive listening. It's like for a child (here we don't speak about prodigies, ok?) if you give a very small kid a piece of Wagner or Mahler this kid would hardly ever appreciate it because some music requires experience, experience in listening to music. And with adults is the same, if they are quite new to classical music , the same applies for them... no fondness will be developed even if they listen to very attentively


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## Guest (Sep 15, 2015)

Discussions of this sort always send me back to when I first started listening to classical music, in 1961. Of course, in 1961, anyone who had watched a movie or a tv show, especially if it were an animated show from Warner Brothers, had heard some classical music. Quite a lot, actually. But it's not labeled as such, and it's part of a mix of all sorts of different things, each of which is competing for your attention. But in 1961, I received a big box of 78s from a relative, including a lot of classical music. For me, it was a revelation. "This is what music was supposed to sound like" is how I described it, years later, from the lofty eminence of high school seniority. At the time, I had no such thoughts. I just responded to how this music sounded. And my favorite thing was modulation. I didn't know that's what it was called, not at the time, but that's what I responded to. Other types of music don't have so much of that thing, so other types weren't as engaging for me.

At the time, I didn't know anything. I learned composer's names from the discs themselves (or from the narratives of _Rusty in Orchestraville_ and of _Sparky's Magic Piano_). Nothing ever sounded to me like a formless mass of notes, not until 1972 with Carter's _Double Concerto._* And while I had read voraciously when I first started out, having had been a dedicated reader since I was two or three, I soon gave it up. Why? Because the things people were saying about the music did not match what I was hearing, what I was familiar with and already enjoying. I tried to make things line up, but eventually just stopped reading about music almost entirely. One can't help picking up a word or two here and there, but I didn't know until I got into theory class as a college freshman what "major" and "minor" meant, though I had been responding to them all along. And since my sense of things was that minor meant "interesting" and "major" meant "predictable," I didn't get much out of the standard idea that "major" means "happy" and "minor" means "sad." So I struggled even through music theory with disconnects between what was being taught and what I already knew as a dedicated, passionate, voracious listener.

Long story short, I learned everything I knew about music by listening to it. It rarely ever presented itself as work to me, but as a great pleasure. It was not a difficult thing to be understood, but a delightful thing to be enjoyed. I found out long after I had become familiar with it that it was considered difficult, that it required attentive listening, that reading about theory and about composers' lives would help on overcome the difficulties, but that it would always be challenging.

As a kind of postscript, I want to mention that two things happened to me when I first started listening to classical music, labeled as such--I loved it, instantly, and I was constantly being surprised by how much of it I had already heard without realizing it.

Two things happened to me when I first started listening to twentieth century music, which was as revelatory and as enchanting an experience as first hearing classical music--I loved it, instantly, and I was constantly being surprised by how much of it I had already heard without realizing it.

*I've mentioned this before, but I would dearly love to be able to hear the _Double Concerto_ that I first heard back in October of 1972. Much as I love the lucid and various piece I now know, I would love to hear that incomprehensible and chaotic mass of undifferentiated noise that I first heard. That would be fun, having acquired a taste for incomprehensible and chaotic masses of undifferentiated noise, and being situated, musically, where almost nothing nowadays sounds incomprehensible or chaotic or undifferentiated. Oh well. I have my memories.


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## haydnfan (Apr 13, 2011)

helenora said:


> that's true. But sometimes it doesn't work for some people, regardless how many times they will attentively listen to a piece of music. if they don't really understand harmony or melody or whatever nothing will help them in their "understanding" and attentive listening. It's like for a child (here we don't speak about prodigies, ok?) if you give a very small kid a piece of Wagner or Mahler this kid would hardly ever appreciate it because some music requires experience, experience in listening to music. And with adults is the same, if they are quite new to classical music , the same applies for them... no fondness will be developed even if they listen to very attentively


I disagree. When I was a teenager I got into classical music by buying two tapes-- Beethoven's Symphonies 1 and 2 and the Best of Bach. I got into classical music by simply listening to them over and over. I didn't take a music appreciation course until later, and knew almost nothing about music.

You don't have to know what the term harmony means to appreciate good counterpoint. You know a good melody when you hear it, when you hum it even if you call it a tune. You appreciate the rich sound of an orchestra even if you can't name all of the instruments that you're hearing.


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## helenora (Sep 13, 2015)

haydnfan said:


> I disagree. When I was a teenager I got into classical music by buying two tapes-- Beethoven's Symphonies 1 and 2 and the Best of Bach. I got into classical music by simply listening to them over and over. I didn't take a music appreciation course until later, and knew almost nothing about music.
> 
> You don't have to know what the term harmony means to appreciate good counterpoint. You know a good melody when you hear it, when you hum it even if you call it a tune. You appreciate the rich sound of an orchestra even if you can't name all of the instruments that you're hearing.


well, yes, it is like that. But let's say if one is conditioned by culture, different culture, not western, then it's quite a different story, they can't just get used to it by relistening piece of music which is completely "strange" to them. it simply doesn't work for them.... and for sure my opinions are conditioned and based on my experience , that's for sure. it's good to broaden one's horizons knowing other people's views and experiences.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

helenora said:


> if you give a very small kid a piece of Wagner or Mahler this kid would hardly ever appreciate it because some music requires experience, experience in listening to music. And with adults is the same, if they are quite new to classical music , the same applies for them... no fondness will be developed even if they listen to very attentively


What you say here may be true but I'm not sure, why do you think it's true? And is there some music which can be appreciated with no previous listening experience?

I'm actually inclined to agree with what Haydnfan wrote, but I'm not sure.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

I usually need to misunderstand a TC post to enjoy it.


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## Guest (Sep 15, 2015)

Dim7 said:


> I usually need to misunderstand a TC post to enjoy it.


I always enjoy yours.


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## Dim7 (Apr 24, 2009)

dogen said:


> I always enjoy yours.


It's because you don't really understand them. They are actually not written in English, but in a language where all the sentences (though entirerly different in meaning) happen to be homographic with an English sentence..


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## Guest (Sep 15, 2015)

You're homographic? Or am I not understanding? Fur coat?


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## The Member Who Forgot (Sep 2, 2015)

To answer the original question:- No.


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## Sonata (Aug 7, 2010)

No, but my enjoyment is a little different. I don't particularly understand Shostakovich's music. With a few exceptions (his piano preludes and fugues, Lady Macbeth, chamber music with piano) I don't find aesthetic enjoyment from listening to his music. However I find it intellectually stimulating.

There was discussion about enjoying an opera vs understanding one in the opera forum recently and I think this fits here too. There is plenty of opera I can listen to for the sheer beauty of the music. With several operas, I'm not even inclined to read the libretto. That's enjoyment of it as pure music. But when I do go more in depth with the actual story of the operas (in particular Verdi), there is definitely more appreciation for other elements. Understanding the opera as a whole of an artistic work, learning the history of the story and events going on during the composers time. That extra knowledge helps the piece hit on more cylinders so to speak


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## Guest (Sep 15, 2015)

Yeah, music. Weak, feeble music. Needs to be propped up at all points with strong, sturdy bio and politics and history, not to mention. Hardly worth the effort, really. Might as well just read a theoretical treatise or two and get on with your lives.

I can't imagine why anyone would waste their time listening to it.


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## calvinpv (Apr 20, 2015)

The problem with questions like "Do you need to understand X to enjoy Y?" is that it focuses the debate around the term "understanding." Unless I missed a post, it seems like everyone is trying to pinpoint an acceptable threshold of "understanding" for music appreciation. But this begs the question: what do we mean when we "enjoy" a piece of music? A lot of responses here seem to assume that "enjoyment" is enjoyment of the entirety of a work: that is, these responses are essentially saying "sure, understanding can give me an in depth look of this or that technicality, but it can't aid me in the raw emotions I get from the unifying narrative of the work."

But is this really the case? In my experience, at least, when I say "I enjoy such and such music," I'm clearly not referring to the entire work; in fact, with maybe 2-3 exceptions, I can't even recall an entire work in my head. What I do recall are isolated fragments of a couple seconds each that "turn me on," so to speak. Of course, I don't mean to use this expression in the vulgar sense, but at the same time, maybe I am. Those enjoyable fragments of a work are those that, for some reason or another, allow me to construct an entire fantasy in my head. If, say, you hear a really exotic set of harmonies from a chord progression, it may trigger in your mind various positive memories that you may now want to supplement with these said harmonies. I really think we overstate our ability to "enjoy" a piece of music: there is no purified music waiting on a silver platter for our absorption; if anything, we cut up and splice the music in our head while contaminating it with our wild imaginations. 

Long story short, I think the question "Do you need to understand a piece in order to enjoy it?" is framed in such a way that "understanding" will inevitably be cast in a negative light. Framed in this way, of course understanding will never fulfill the expectations of enjoyment, because we're silently defining enjoyment as a recognition of music as greater than the sum of its parts. But if we instead give "enjoyment" a more modest definition, then we open up the possibility of technical knowledge actually enhancing the works we enjoy.


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## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

Some guy (I can't recall exactly who) said that "music is just sound." That's pretty Zen! It's also true...in a way, and to a point, and in certain cases...

Remember that music is a language of sound.

It would be somewhat disingenuous to say that "The English language is just sounds."

"But," you retort, "the English language is more specific in meaning than music; music is vague, more abstract, etc."

That's true, but _music,_ tonal music specifically, is a_ certain kind _of sound. We understand music, generally, and as distiguished from noise, as being sustained pitch. This is what distiguishes talking from singing.

Singing, and music, are sustained pitches.

Talking is sibilance, noises, short bursts of vocalizations; not music, in other words.

So, music is a sound language of sustained pitches of certain frequencies, which sustain, and are recognized as notes, or musical pitches.

This 'sound language' is based on the way our ears hear. In almost all music, this is tonality, where our ears hear tone centers, because of the way we perceive pitch; based on a harmonic model, where we hear a fundamental note with higher partials, and the partials are all related to that one fundamental pitch: this is the tonality of music, in hearing tonal centers.

So, if it is "music," it is a_ certain kind _of sound; and almost all music is based on hearing natural tone centers, which is a manifestation of what our ears tend to hear. In tone-centered music, which almost all music is, even folk and ethnic musics, the 'structure' of the sound is audible, and makes sense to our ear/brain, because that's the way our ears hear things: with a bass note on bottom, and higher notes above it. We tend to hear the higher notes in relation to the bass note; the bass note becomes a 'fundamental pitch' or tone-center, to which the higher notes refer to in a less dominating way. This is the 'usual' way music is made and perceived. It seem to come naturally to people the world over.

Ok, now that we've defined the norm, here are the exceptions. We have expanded the notion of what music is, from the 'natural' paradigm described above. Electronic music is 'just sound' in many cases, Wendy Carlos and Tomita being notable exceptions. John Cage wants his music to be 'just sound,' so he has devised all sorts of ways of structuring it. Lots of percussion, which is not sustained pitch, but can be done very musically. This brings us to the point that music is not "all pitch." It can be dominated by the other elements: rhythm, and timbre, if we wish.

Serialism is not 'just sound,' because the organization of the pitches is arrived at using a hidden process, not audible 'as a process' of structure. True, it ends up being, ultimately, 'just sound,' but unlike the 'natural' paradigm of music explained above, the structural elements are determined by a mathematical process which is in its essence not related to the ear or the way it hears. The ear will ultimately determine its 'sound meaning' when it is ultimately heard as 'just sound,' but that is a secondary effect; the true structural essence of the music is abstract, and separate from the sound aggregate it ultimately produces.

So, sometimes "music is a certain kind of sound in which the generating principles are based on natural principles of pitch perception;"

...sometimes "music is just sound in which the sounds are unrelated to the natural music paradigm and are just sounds;"

...and sometimes "music is based on mathematical or geometric structuring principles which are not as directly related to the natural principles of pitch perception as the original music paradigm."

This leads to the conclusions that:

Tone-centered music based on natural principles of pitch perception is "understandable" in a universal and self-evident way; because of our ears;

Music based on "sound being just sound," even if unpitched or exclusively rhythmic or based on noise, is understandable in a universal and self-evident way if it is conceived of and perceived as music;

But music in which pitch material is generated using geometric/mathematical procedures, and is not based primarily on natural pitch perception, and in which the resulting pitch structures, as sound, are separated from their generating principles and are not direct manifestations "in sound only" of these generating principles (i.e., a 'hidden' process), is not music that is universally "understandable' in a self-evident way.

Note that these conclusions do not contradict the fact that "sound is just sound" or "music is just sound;" nor do these conclusions contradict that music can be liked, regardless of whether we understand it.

The conclusion is that "understanding" music is not necessarily conveyed by the sounds themselves, but is sometimes a 'hidden' process.


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## OperaChic (Aug 26, 2015)

To me, understanding means aesthetic appreciation. If you have that, you get it.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

OperaChic said:


> To me, understanding means aesthetic appreciation. If you have that, you get it.


Right. The fundamental "understanding" of music is not the conceptual process we generally call "understanding." It is subconceptual, or perceptual: we perceive patterns in sound, and they evoke feelings in us, and when the patterns "make sense" or seem "right" to our faculties of perception we "understand" the music precisely as it is intended to be "understood." When the patterns don't make sense, we fail to "understand" it: we feel confused and frustrated. In some cases we may suspect that there's a sense, an order to the music that repeated exposure might clarify; in other cases we suspect, or even know right away, that the music is simply not well-composed, that it never will seem "right" and satisfy us no matter how often we hear it.

People differ in their ability to hear and grasp the aesthetic "logic" of music, which varies in complexity and presents variable challenges to perception. But aesthetic perception is fundamental to musical enjoyment, and the greater our aesthetic perception the richer our enjoyment may be, whether or not we go on to be able to think and talk about what we hear and feel. The conceptual mind normally requires decades to mature, but musical appreciation as a perceptual process seems to mature earlier, in many people quite early. I'm sure many others share my experience of having grasped intuitively the structure of music at quite an early age, earlier than any awareness of its techniques. "Understanding," later on, was largely a matter of learning what to call the things I already knew - which is not to say that naming things doesn't, at times, help us to focus on them more clearly and notice things we might otherwise miss.


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