# Stravinsky: Music w/o "expression"



## Avey (Mar 5, 2013)

From Igor Stravinsky's _An Autobiography_:

_"..music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc. Expression has never been an inherent property of music. That is by no means the purpose of its existence. . . . It is simply an additional attribute which, by tacit and inveterate agreement, we have lent it, thrust upon it, as a label, a convention -- short, an aspect which, unconsciously or by force of habit, we have come to confuse with its essential being."_

Re the Stravinsky violin concerto, the composer (allegedly) said that the concerto was an attempt to write "in an objective fashion, a music that would have no emotional resonance." [http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivec...-when-the-world-got-much-smaller-much-faster]

So is Igor full of it? Is this his mocking critics? Or do you believe he was sincere? Is _expression_ something we, the listener, give to each note or chord or melody, etc.? Is _expression_ different than _emotion_? When you think of music that lacks "emotional resonance," do you think of the Violin Concerto in D?


----------



## Guest (Oct 2, 2014)

He's absolutely right that a type of combination of various frequencies with various amplitudes and intensities and whatnot...are not expression. Now, if this is not your definition of music, so be it. But let's not get into one of _those_ discussions.


----------



## MoonlightSonata (Mar 29, 2014)

It's interesting to see Stravinsky, of all people, asking this. Perhaps he has not heard some of his own music?
I think _expression_ and _emotion_ are very closely linked, though not interchangeable. One could, for example, write music that could be thought of as _sad_ using only minor scales and arpeggios.
Maybe what Stravinsky was saying is that music in itself is powerless to express, but when we listen to it, we read the emotions into it. Music can be written specially to be interpreted as an emotion (e.g. Ode To Joy) but as not everyone experiences emotion the same way, people will each see a piece in a different way.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

What Stravinsky probably meant (he wasn't a very good writer of anything except music) is that he did not believe that music was representative of specific emotions or extra-musical stuff (like tone painting). He would of course acknowledge that music can evoke emotion, simply by its musical nature, or become associated with an extra-musical idea, but that there is no obvious correspondence between the two. He was also reacting against the Romantic aesthetic.

...Of course, this is coming from a man who wrote some of the best and most colorful ballets of the 20th century, and a good deal of extremely expressive music, so it should probably be taken with a grain or two of salt. I think the Violin Concerto is a very expressive piece indeed.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

It is obvious that music can evoke emotions. Even more, the composer can express himself and imprint particular emotions in his music, that's part of his craft, to deliberately set up a particular mood. I don't see anything 'sacrilegious' in this notion.

On the other hand, it is also obvious that these emotions are experienced viscerally and that a literal reading of things is not often the most adequate mode. It's far more vague and abstract by the very abstract nature of the medium (even when there's a program), but its richness lies precisely in the combination of this vagueness, but at the same time can be very intense.

Also, it is obvious that music has many other aspects as well, that have nothing to do with this 'emotional' part, but to me are equally important for a piece. The (in)famous 'intellectual' aspects (emotion is, of course, also 'intellectual', so the distinction is not something I care very much...; so, yes, I think 'emotions' are just another brain construction, and this makes any music just a brain candy, i.e., an artificial device designed for the entertainment and stimulation of this restless thing we have in our heads, called brain)

For me, music is about all these things and I experience all of them simultaneously. Also, I think good composers think about all these aspects and they are always there, in their minds, when they compose.

Also, my personal take: at the very moment in which _you_ are composing a piece, _you are expressing yourself_, i.e., I think the process is automatic and there's no need of extreme self awareness (mainly because this extreme self awareness often is implemented at the detriment of other musical aspects, and this diminishes the overall musical quality of the piece as a whole). Of course, this is a modernist view. Modernists were reacting to the emotional self awareness of romantic composers and Stravinsky's comments should be read in that context.


----------



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> ...Of course


Indeed. It's always hard to tell where the irony starts and stops with Stravinsky.

*p.s.* For those interested, the Autobiography is in the public domain.

https://archive.org/details/igorstravinskyan011583mbp


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Stravinsky later appended that, after realizing what a reaction it had gotten, _and more to the point -- that people were getting what he thought he meant to say all wrong._ Later, he said music was incapable of expressing anything, but it did have a great power to evoke emotions in the listener.

He did not think that in composing a particular sort of music a composer could immediately inflect, and get as reaction, one precise emotion or emotional response, for example. That was more a later romantic _notion_ than a reality. [In more current time, just 'music and emotion by numbers' has become a partial reality, where more and more has been codified via musical theater and more commercially driven music, that 'catalogue' of qualities of music X evoking this emotion, Y another, used as reference in order to specifically steer / manipulate the listener. this is most often and most successfully executed by film composers and some professional pop song-writing teams for singers with a 'tween fan base.]

In the very later 1800's and through much of the early 1900's, an excess of romantic and hyper exaggerated romantic affectations in music performance were still very much present, and those affectations were the habit and near universal norm for orchestras, conductors, and what the audiences expected -- all accompanied by an equal inflation in literary / verbal associations of attributes and emotive adjectives assumed to inexorably be a part of music and any and all scores -- _this was not just a little further exaggeration of earlier stylistic traits, but something really extreme, so much so that I think it might have more than a little upset Chopin's stomach to hear later renditions of his work with those later period affectations applied._

This was the concert practice of the late 19th, early 20th century, *regardless what period the work was / is from*, and that additional literal mentality about all of music had become as universally pervasive, too.

This is what Stravinsky, and many another early 20th century composer ran across nearly whenever and wherever their works were performed. To be even wildly over-reactive to all that at the time then becomes readily understandable.

Remember about that context which Stravinsky lived through, and much of what he said then becomes readily and plainly understood, and well within proportion: the composer battled, for near to fifty years, to get orchestras to perform his works _without their being inflected with all the late romantic vibrato and other exaggerated to a point of distortion mannered late romantic stylistic trimmings._

Getting all that out of the way and just listening, it is more likely the listener will then be able to discern two things *about much of Stravinsky's work. He was one of the most consistently and genuinely deeply spiritual composers since Bach, and one of the most deeply expressive of composers as well.*


----------



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

PetrB said:


> He was one of the most consistently and genuinely deeply spiritual composers since Bach, and one of the most expressive of composers as well.


I agree. WRT his famous remark, I think it's easy enough to understand what he meant, and hard to argue with. Unless you're an inveterate author of program notes, of course!


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Stravinsky quote take two:

The Violin Concerto is two outside movements of irrepressible ebullience and two inner movements (Aria I, Aria II) of eloquent and deeply moving neoclassical pathos. If 'no emotion' was what the composer was aiming for, the piece is a spectacularly successful failure. 

What he wanted to avoid, distance himself from, was that late romantic cheaply sentimental kind of emotion which had ultimately, at the end of the romantic era, become not only creepily decadent, but so indulged in that it could be considered a patent and downright gutter-level mundane blockhead stupid misunderstanding of the earlier romantic era's ethos. 

Then again, I'm for anything which counters and halts calling, say, one Chopin Prelude 'the raindrop' and another 'suffocation,' (i.e. the sort of thing Chopin was well known to have no truck with whatsoever) to a point where if I think about it enough, even beheading as a means to stop that spate might be something I might advocate if I'd had a very stressy day

By that measure, I think Stravinsky was very calmly measured in saying "Music has no expression."

At any rate, he's right --A bunch of notes on paper are nothing expressive


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

PetrB said:


> Stravinsky quote take two:
> 
> The Violin Concerto is two outside movements of irrepressible ebullience and two inner movements (Aria I, Aria II) of eloquent and deeply moving neoclassical pathos. If 'no emotion' was what the composer was aiming for, the piece is a spectacularly successful failure.
> 
> ...


You are, of course, right. And I think we all here more or less get what he was saying, since we know the historical context, etc.

But, when seen in the distant future, i.e., now, I find his (Stravinsky's) exaggeration a little unfortunate. Of course, it was in response to an exaggeration from the 'other side'! and, as I have heard, when somebody pulls the rope to one side, you pull to the other in order to make the equilibrium! But I say unfortunate since to the modern 'newbie' listener, it only adds confusion about modern music, and only serves to reinforce certain cliché we all know...

But, of course, it is easy to judge history from the commodity of our modern life, so I certainly don't blame Igor, in the same sense I can't blame Boulez for what 'he did' in the 50s.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Stravinsky's Violin Concerto is one of his most emotional works, and it was directly influenced by his study of Bach's concertos for the instrument. He wasn't that confident in composing for the violin, and he and the soloist Samuel Dushkin spent some time going over Bach's scores. It is an emotional work, perhaps giving out a sort of otherwordly or timeless emotion, but emotion is there. So too a sense of the Russian dance, the two bubbly outer movements.

I think that we have covered the debates over Romantic aesthetic on this forum, witness this thread on John Cage parroting Igor and downgrading his former teacher Schoenberg:

http://www.talkclassical.com/33479-cage-stravinsky-schoenberg-schoenberg.html

Schoenberg, along with Sibelius and Rachmaninov where easily amongst the most dissed composers of the 20th century. But this sort of ultra-orthodox, almost fanatical, kind of Modernist ideology isn't voiced by many composers today. A good deal of them have returned to expressing emotion directly, and it is no longer a no-no to do that or tell stories with music, or convey a sense of imagery or landscape.

In any case, you have Stravinsky being quite emotionally direct in a couple of other works I know - Symphony in Three Movements and Elegy for solo viola (or violin). The former was finished in the closing months of the war, and Stravinsky traced the advance of armies in Europe on a map as he composed the work. It opens with a mock fascist fanfare and has these rhythms reminiscent of newsreels, which is how he saw the war play out from America. He even considered calling it Victory Symphony, but didn't due to his objective stance. The latter was composed in memory of a friend, a violinist in a string quartet which played his works.

Getting back to Bach, scholarship has changed with regards to him as well. In the mid 20th century, his music was boiled down (like Webern's) to technique, a matter of what was on the page. It was in recent decades that Bach's context was taken into account, his interests in theology, philosophy and influences from composers of his time and before. I see Stravinsky in some respects similar in that he is no longer seen as this oracle sprouting the truth but as a composer whose music has links to its history and context, however hard he tried to distance himself from it.

He is definitely a composer with a different aesthetic to Rachmaninov or Schoenberg - who would agree on more things with eachother than they would with Stravinsky (who would probably agree most with, ironically, Richard Strauss). However, to say he is totally a detached composer is to go to an extreme, its just as extreme as saying that Rachmaninov's or Schoenberg's music can only be understood with reference to their context or biography.

Over 40 years have elapsed since Stravinsky's death. I would bet that composers today would be very reluctant to make a similar statement to Stravinsky, that tries to apply their own aesthetic values to everything, to all composers, to all music. It just indicates an agenda, which is basically to invalidate composers with other values and ways of doing things.

Like Boulez and Cage, Stravinsky went too far in trying to apply a set of blanket rules to music, in terms of what composers do and how it is perceived by listeners.


----------



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Unless you're an inveterate author of program notes, of course!


In fairness, Stravinsky was usually paid quite well for these.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Blancrocher said:


> In fairness, Stravinsky was usually paid quite well for these.


Vladimir Nabakov (a friend of Stravinsky's, each a mutual admirer of the other) pointed out that Stravinsky had, in his first three ballets, written what amounted to three international best-sellers, and due to the Russian Revolution and the Soviet state not allowing for or honoring copyright, Stravinsky had missed out on the income he deserved. This left the composer in a position where for a good deal of his life, to support himself, his wife and four children, he had to take all those jobs of conducting his own popular works -- for which he got no royalty -- to keep it all afloat.

Imagine being conned out of the residual income from your first three and most popular mega-hits, having been paid only a relative pittance for the commissions themselves. (Stravinsky commented that Rubinstein paid him more for the arrangement of _Three pieces from Petrushka_ than Diaghilev had paid Stravinsky for the original ballet.) You'd do whatever you could, and had to do, to supplement that loss.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

aleazk said:


> You are, of course, right. And I think we all here more or less get what he was saying, since we know the historical context, etc.
> 
> But, when seen in the distant future, i.e., now, I find his (Stravinsky's) exaggeration a little unfortunate. Of course, it was in response to an exaggeration from the 'other side'! and, as I have heard, when somebody pulls the rope to one side, you pull to the other in order to make the equilibrium! But I say unfortunate since to the modern 'newbie' listener, it only adds confusion about modern music, and only serves to reinforce certain cliché we all know...
> 
> But, of course, it is easy to judge history from the commodity of our modern life, so I certainly don't blame Igor, in the same sense I can't blame Boulez for what 'he did' in the 50s.


Stravinsky had 'the misfortune' of being one of the more celebrated composers when alive, that is what you get! Debussy, in one of his many essays on music, after reading through / hearing Ravel's _Oiseaux Tristes,_ "proclaimed" that "All music should take this form!" and then went about writing however he wrote. No one is harping on that artist's declaration!

To say it for the umpteenth time: Many an artist, if interviewed, will say something they firmly believe in the moment, and often it is in reaction to a general sentiment of their time. No one should pay much attention to what any artist says as much as simply look to their works 'to see what they said.'


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

PetrB said:


> To say it for the umpteenth time: Many an artist, if interviewed, will say something they firmly believe in the moment, and often it is in reaction to a general sentiment of their time. No one should pay much attention to what any artist says as much as simply look to their works 'to see what they said.'


After seeing certain responses here, I think we will have to repeat it many more times I think!


----------



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

*Intricate interpretations of a passage from Stravinsky's Autobiography deleted, since I see in hindsight they are irrelevant to the discussion.*


----------



## Guest (Oct 2, 2014)

I think Stravinsky was a perfectly fine writer, and I think he said pretty well what he thought.

Readers, on the other hand, when they come up against ideas that go counter to their most deeply held beliefs, will very naturally react. Not to validate those reactions or anything, but I acknowledge that they're natural. And when the ideas are expressed by someone they otherwise admire, well, just as naturally the special pleading and the interpretations and the second-guessings will commence. Just as natural. Just as invalid.

Stravinsky, characteristically precise, said exactly what he meant. His subsequent restating is not an attempt to soften the first or to take anything back but to clarify the idea for readers who were struggling with it.

Humans, and man am I ever tired of reiterating this bit of obviousness, are emotional creatures who react emotionally to just about everything, clouds, kittens, movies, Bach's b minor mass. Everything. And humans are equally adept at transferring their responses to the things they're responding to, turning their responses into characteristics of the things. Stravinsky would never say that humans aren't emotional or that they don't respond to things emotionally. And as far as I know, he never did. But as a composer, he was interested in rectifying that transference. In articulating what a work was and in clearly and cleanly differentiating that from how a work could be responded to.

I don't see that that takes any apologetics or intricate interpretations or historical contextualizing (though I'm usually a big fan of the latter).


----------



## hpowders (Dec 23, 2013)

It's also not a crime to change one's mind. Moments change.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

What Stravinsky was up against making that statement is still what later artists find themselves up against: a very decadent late romantic notion egregiously aggrandized by Hollywood film representations of artists, and bad writing in cheap novels where artists are a character.

"Using a medium of _expression_ to _express themselves._" is a seriously simplified and tremendously warped way of thinking of both artists or the art they make. It far too easily makes people think the artist is some monumentally self-centered egomaniac who is replete in their own massive self-indulgence.

We then get that 'picture' of the composer sitting down to drip his expressed emotion onto the manuscript paper via the pen, and think the end product is also a direct personal expression, all of that patently absurd... but it is almost impossible to disinfect the general populace of that particular notion.


----------



## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

some guy said:


> I think Stravinsky was a perfectly fine writer, and I think he said pretty well what he thought.


When I wrote that statement, I had in mind the extremely verbose and circuitous essay on his Octet, which, unlike the Autobiography or the conversation books with Craft, did not have the involvement of a ghostwriter.


----------



## Blancrocher (Jul 6, 2013)

Mahlerian said:


> When I wrote that statement, I had in mind the extremely verbose and circuitous essay on his Octet, which, unlike the Autobiography or the conversation books with Craft, did not have the involvement of a ghostwriter.


In fairness, I think he was alluding to a comment I made about how good the Autobiography is in a post I deleted.


----------



## Blake (Nov 6, 2013)

I think he was just tired of people slapping weak, objective labels on music. Shoving it in little boxes because many can't handle allowing things to simply be without categorizing. We have to control everything, ya' know? And in this extreme need for control we molest life's natural beauty.

It's like I hear a lovely piece without putting any reservations on it, but someone comes along and says something like - "this piece is a direct representation of the the artist's tormented childhood." Oh god, enough.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

PetrB said:


> In the very later 1800's and through much of the early 1900's, an excess of romantic and hyper exaggerated romantic affectations in music performance were still very much present, and those affectations were the habit and near universal norm for orchestras, conductors, and what the audiences expected -- all accompanied by an equal inflation in literary / verbal associations of attributes and emotive adjectives assumed to inexorably be a part of music and any and all scores -- *this was not just a little further exaggeration of earlier stylistic traits, but something really extreme, so much so that I think it might have more than a little upset Chopin's stomach to hear later renditions of his work with those later period affectations applied. *


I'd like to know more about this idea. Is there any reading you can put me on to about it? Are you thinking of Mengelberg, Furtwangler, Bruno Walter, Pfitzner, Friedman, Backhaus, Rachmaninov, Rubinstein,Schnabel in the early 20th century? Who are you thinking of for the late 19th century?


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

See my blog, Instrumental Music ans Dramatic Gesture for my complete thoughts on this:http://www.talkclassical.com/blogs/millionrainbows/1069-instrumental-music-dramatic-gesture.html

Stravinsky is correct up to a point; music started out as an adjunct to dancing or dramatic action. The "residue" of dramatic gesture still remains.

Then again, you can't un-ring a bell.

I think Stravinsky was either out-of-touch with his feelings, or did not like the Tchaikovsky brand of over-emoting. He was trying to be a classicist. But this seems too extreme. Even abstract visual art evokes feelings of some sort. Music is essentially non-representational medium, but it evokes abstract "inner" states of being. This is exactly what all "abstract art" does. To say "non-representational" abstract art does not have emotional or dramatic experiential associations is disingenuous.

Besides all that history and civilization, I think there are some universal associations we, as humans, make with music.

We know music is made by people (except the kind of music John Cage wants us to also recognize); so music is a social medium (Cage may be right anyway; we tend to hear meaning in all sounds, just about).

Big sounds are produced by big things (elephants, tigers, the thunder, volcanoes, the ocean), so we associate low, big sounds with big things, perhaps scaring us, making us uneasy, or at least getting our full attention...

High sounds are made by small things (unless it's an elephant wheezing); flutes are birds, etc...

All sorts of musical sounds emulate "real" sounds: pizzicato violins are rabbits sneaking by, a plucked string is Moe pulling out a nose hair from Larry, a timpani boom is Moe hitting Curly in the stomach, etc.


----------



## bigshot (Nov 22, 2011)

I think Stravinsky just liked to say things he really didn't mean to get a rise out of people.


----------



## millionrainbows (Jun 23, 2012)

bigshot said:


> I think Stravinsky just liked to say things he really didn't mean to get a rise out of people.


...And to perhaps get them to make some sort of substantial comment. But you're not gonna fall for that old trick, are you?:lol:


----------



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

In my view music expresses musical ideas, that's all it can do, the rest is experiential.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Crudblud said:


> In my view music expresses musical ideas, that's all it can do, the rest is experiential.


OK. Do you think that music in performance expresses emotions?


----------



## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> OK. Do you think that music in performance expresses emotions?


No. The performers might express emotions, but the music itself is incapable.


----------



## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

My take on this is the following: music cannot express anything to an objective, inhuman observer; the Universe, God, a measuring machine. Words still mean things without a human being hearing them; the colour green is still green, things have measurable traits like weight and height...

...but music has no meaning, save the conventional names of the tones, scales, intervals...

Now, when you change the setting so that a _human being_ is hearing the music, then everything changes. Suddenly, there's meaning, expression, associations, a world of non-musical ideas.

Music has no meaning _as music_. As an _experience_, it is full of meaning. And as human beings, we can never, nor should we attempt to, hear music _as music._ It is impossible and futile.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Crudblud said:


> No. The performers might express emotions, but the music itself is incapable.


Performance = Music + Expression. Is that it?


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Mandryka said:


> Performance = Music + Expression. Is that it?


I'm going to qualify the performance -- expression formula. _Technique *is* expression._

That said, of course the more a performer is completely in command of technique, then any and all inflections, from the broadest to the minute, are possible in performance. If you've played, well and from memory, enough to know how relatively 'free' that is so one can only pay attention to the shape and sound of what you are making, you would also first-hand know there is still so much to think about, shape and control that is _so much business_ that the ill-conceived notion of the player freely expressing themselves, pouring their guts out via the music, becomes rather silly.

Take this as you will, but performers are servants of the composers' scores, and composers are servants of the Muse(s). None of them, imo, are 'free to express themselves.'

While, yes, the performer is very much a part of the 'emotion' or expression you hear. Most of them are so busy performing, no matter how free, no matter how deeply they are in to it, that to assume they are directly putting out emotion is also rather false.

What both composer and performer have done is to have delivered something with an inherent quality where there is the possibility of its sounding expressive, i.e. gives the greatest opportunity _for the audience to hear it as expressive_.

Of all my little compositional scribblings, I've never had one iota of a notion of 'what I was expressing,' but instead have always first landed upon some musical idea (not chords, not melody) which seized my imagination, and in pursuing that, trying to keep it integral to itself, mid way or later can think "this sounds emotional adjective here" Sometimes that can help me as I continue and finish the piece to eliminate material which 'does not belong,' or to think of a contrasting idea which is a good foil to further enhance the main idea. Having spoken with many others who compose, including professionals, I find what they say of their process often accords with my personal experience.

Others may say they know exactly what emotion they want the work to convey, what their emotion is when they sit down to write, and that emotion their intent for the piece, but if you have read enough from composers themselves, there is very little of that going around, it seems, their more often saying they 'realized' what they had only at some point while working on it, not before 

Aleazk put it well, that if you have the musical idea, work on the piece with your only concern being the integrity of the piece, there is plenty of the author 'in it,' emotion, abstract thoughts and all. Thinking of making the piece 'expressive,' or what that expression is, often does nothing, or nothing more, the attention to 'just writing the piece and making it work,' often takes care of expression all by itself.


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Vesuvius said:


> I think he was just tired of people slapping weak, objective labels on music. Shoving it in little boxes because many can't handle allowing things to simply be without categorizing. We have to control everything, ya' know? And in this extreme need for control we molest life's natural beauty.
> 
> It's like I hear a lovely piece without putting any reservations on it, but someone comes along and says something like - "this piece is a direct representation of the the artist's tormented childhood." Oh god, enough.


Oooh, this prompts me to where I want to tell it:

Living abroad, I had just finished practicing (Chopin, an Etude, maybe a Nocturne) and walked out the door of my long-term rental atop a family run _pensione_. A guest was just coming up the stairs as a closed my door, and asked 
*G: "Was that you playing the piano." 
Pb: "Yes"
G: "That was Fabulous! Have you played for a long time?"
Pb: "Since the age of six."
G: "Oh, I see, you were horribly unhappy in childhood, and that drove you into the world of music and the piano where you could escape the pain."*
(I'm sure while hearing that my head had already gone into that curved neck tilt thing of "Hunh?' when you're not really sure you're hearing right, or think what you're hearing is semi-crazy. But I responded when he finished, not hesitating one beat, with,)
*Pb: "Wow, you are a real romantic."*


----------



## Guest (Oct 2, 2014)

PetrB said:


> often takes care of expression all by itself.


Sweet mother of God! (That would be Mary for those of you who are atheists.)

And also Bingo! (That would be a game of filling in rows of items for those of you who are chess players.)

Anyway, yes. This is exactly and precisely and perfectly _it._ Expression is an inevitable and necessary side-effect of any artistic activity. When it becomes the goal, everything (and everyone) suffers. When it is allowed to just happen, then all is well.

It's gonna happen anyway, so why fash about whether or not one is or is not expressing something? Fash about what is under your direct control, what you can actually change and manipulate. And that would be 'just writing the piece and making it work.'


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I'm adding to what I said in my earlier post that Stravinsky had a conversation with Busoni about how musicians interpret music. This also sheds light on differing ways of seeing music, its similar to the famous conversation Mahler and Sibelius had about the symphony. I did a thread on that conversation here:

http://www.talkclassical.com/18674-performance-interpretation.html

I also recently read, in a generalist book on classical music, a quote by Stravinsky to the effect that he'd like to have been a composer like Bach was in the past, in the service of God. It reflects the way Bach was seen by Neo-Classicists like Stravinsky, as kind of detached. Scholarship reflected this until around the 1960's, when we see the beginnings of the period instruments/historically informed performance movement.

Bach's achievements where taken into account in terms of how his music was more than just something detached and in the service of God or the church. In fact, he had many disagreements with the church authorities in Liepzig. He also was constantly after the money, applying to court positions while there (unsuccessfully). He also set up the Collegium Musicum in Liepzig which was for music performance outside the auspices of the church. It was there that more earthy works like the Coffee Cantata where first performed, appropriately enough the building he used was a coffee house. This is seen as a forerunner of the Gewandhaus in the 19th century, when music would be fully opened up to the bourgeoise (and none of other than Mendelssohn organised those, another composer whose importance the Modernists downplayed for various ideological reasons). There's also Bach who was in the service of more absolute music, as a pedagogue, composing works for instruction and study.

Its the same with any other composer. Another irony is the quote attributed to Stravinsky, a joke about Vivaldi composing the same concerto hundreds of times. As I said before, Stravinsky was influenced by Bach's violin concertos when composing his own. Now guess which Italian 'Red Priest' Bach was influenced by? No prizes for guessing, or for realising there's a lineage of sorts here!


----------



## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

Any performer who has so subsumed their self to a point where there is "no one actually there" is useless to composers and music in general.

Any performer who has done anything but subsume their self and instead sees a score as a vehicle for their personal expression is also useless to composers and music in general.

I think it near impossible for a non-performer to appreciate that while subsuming the self to be in full service of a score and the composer's intent, that performer does anything _but_ yield their mind and heart to a degree where they are no longer there. There is oceans of space for the individual who is the performer even while they knuckle down to serve the score as directly as possible. They are, after all, a human rendering the work of another human.

Composers depend upon an aggressive presence and delivery from performers, and too, rely upon the performers musicianship, trained as well as innate. There is no true 'loss of self' if a performer has dedicated themselves to a piece: what there is is a full presence of self, devoid of personal ego, i.e. "Pay attention _To This,_ not to me."

This is why, well beyond the physical, so many performers are personally pretty well depleted after performing. They are deeply invested while not thinking of their self at all. For that same reason, that is why the audience will feel they too, have been really taken for a turn.


----------



## MoonlightSonata (Mar 29, 2014)

There's a reason string quartets aren't known as _Quartets for Two Violinists, Violist and Cellist_.


----------



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

To boil my earlier posts down, Bach was 'objective' well before Stravinsky, so he's just as 'modern' as Stravinsky. The book I read recently on Bach argued that he was the first composer that can be labelled as such. 

However, the whole objective/subjective divide (or emotional/detached, or Romantic/Classicist) is a concept that I often find okay to generalize about a composer, but it has limitations when one gets more specific about his works. 

The argument for music being about nothing but itself (and therefore, Bach's 'objectivity') is of course based on an ideological position. It isn't neutral or objective, and neither is any other position (eg. Romantic). 

Composers can have whatever aesthetic or other values they wish. Their aims will differ, and I would hate if all their aims would be the same as one composer, be it Stravinsky or whoever else. I could just as easily put a statement by another composer with contrasting values and views, it wouldn't necessarily mean it is right or wrong in every case. It may be applicable to some but not others. I don't see this issue in a dogmatic way.


----------

