by Greg D'Alessio
Music has a notoriously uneasy relationship with language. Words always seem inadequate to the experience we have of listening to music especially any sort of explanatory or theoretical discussion. In large part when we come across these sorts of things- in a concert program, liner note article or classroom most of us have one or both of two responses:
1. “Yuck, I hate thinking about music like this, -why can’t I just listen to it?”
I think it’s worth standing this one on its head because even the most hardened academic has had, I suspect, to deal with such feelings. The question is can we “just” listen to music without thinking about it. Well, that depends on exactly what we mean by thinking, and how we describe that thinking in words after we have both listened and thought. This is traditionally the province of music theory, a discipline occupying a place in the heart’s of most people somewhere between algebra and accounting.
The problem with music theory, as opposed to literary or art theory, is that we really have to take it on faith that the things we are talking about have even the remotest relationship to actual music. Whereas, if someone talks about the figure in foreground in a painting, or the difficulties the main character goes through in a novel everybody can immediately see the relevance. By which I mean that you can’t read a book and have no idea that there is a main character, nor can you look at a painting and be unaware that there is a figure in it, but you can listen to a piece of music quite happily and be totally unaware of the technical aspects of it. In fact, except for formal classes in harmony, the overwhelming majority of people listen to the overwhelming majority of pieces without really pausing to think about, well, anything at all except “here comes that one bit I like”. And I’m talking about musicians too – myself included. So, to suit up in the music theory armor and start paying attention to all those chords and intervals and themes seems not only like hard work, but hard work that is actually taking us away from what we like about music not towards it.
The problem seems to revolve around this thing “theory”. We tend to associate it with the scientific method, “Einstein’s theory of relativity” –that sort of thing. Basically we take theory to be factual postulates, or at least fact-based guesswork, that explains some sort of complex phenomenon. Music theory therefore is usually portrayed as explanations of what is “really” going on in a piece of music. On the other hand most music theory is exceptionally dull and music, at least music we like we find the opposite of dull, so our minds, not unfairly, rebel. The problem again is that the things that theory seems to be concerned with don’t seem to be the things that we love about music.
But there is an interesting thing about this word theory, Originally the word “theory” comes from an old Greek word “theor”. A theor was someone you who send to visit an oracle or to witness a divination, or ritual, or some other dwelling on a mystery or existential paradox. The original meaning of theory then was some sort of intense concentration on a mystery the goal of which was not to explain that mystery but rather to deepen or intensify it. I think we could do worse than to try and incorporate this sense of theory into our approach to music.
What I mean is we shouldn’t think of discussing music as a weird kind of algebra for sounds, or crossword puzzles for notes, but rather an intensification of whatever it is we are doing when we are really listening to a piece and totally following it. I try and think of theory as a very slow and intense kind of listening that you then try and talk about, rather than any sort of proving out of a conceptual or structural scheme. The best writing on music makes us more interested in a piece rather than less interested. It is, unfortunately, rare.
The other very common response we all have to discussions of pieces of music is:
1. “Yes but, was Beethoven (or the composer in question) really thinking X when he wrote this? (X = any given analytic observation being made about a piece)”
This is a killer because it seems as though what we are doing when we analyze a piece of music is trying to uncover the secret plan of the composer thereby understanding what the piece is all about right? So if the composer was not thinking of something, but we seem to hear it in the music, who’s right? It must be the composer surely; after all we aren’t trying to tell Beethoven what his music was all about …are we? Well, as it turns out, that is exactly what we are trying to do.
There is actually a name for this problem, its called the “intentional fallacy”, meaning the fallacy of assuming that a person’s intent in saying (or writing) something is the sole determinant in what it can mean. We see this in everyday life all the time. Someone may say something, and even entirely mean it, but we are free to interpret the meaning of what they say on the basis of their body language, the situation at the time, our own prior experience, even our own internal emotional state, and so forth. We are not obliged to simply and only “take people at their word” about everything. Indeed, to do so would give us a false and potentially dangerous view of the world.
This basic situation is made much more acute, and also harder to recognize, when it comes to music. Firstly, it is in general very hard to say concrete things about music of any kind, even though there certainly seems to be a lot going on, and composers are not necessarily very good at it – if they were they would be writers or theorists and not composers. Secondly, in most instances composers have not said what they think their music is all about at all, or when they did they focused on issues which seem trivial to us, either because they were so close to their own work that they could not get perspective on it, or because over the intervening years concepts about music has changed. Lastly, just because someone can write music well doesn’t mean that they are particularly self-aware. It’s always quite possible that they have literally no earthly idea what their music is “about” but just “how it goes”.
In any case, even if a composer had written an exhaustive essay saying” I Ludwig Van Beethoven do set forth herein the entire musical meaning of my Piano Sonata Opus XYZ” we are not obliged to take him at his word any more than we are when our friend “explains” why they have had a string of bad relationships. Think of analysis not as archeological work to uncover the fixed objective meaning of the work of a composer, but more as a collaboration between you, the composer, maybe even a particular performer, and then all the various other people who have thought about the piece since it was written, (plus you have to factor in all the music that you know that the composer didn’t), all aiming at a new interpretation of what the piece might mean. Pieces are moving objects.
Or think of it this way: The composer just starts the process: he throws a ball over a high fence, he has maybe an idea of where he would like it to go but once he throws it, its literally out of his hands, we are on the other side of the fence and how or whether we catch it, what it means to us when we do, is all determined not only by how he threw it but by circumstances after it left his hand, and by our own abilities and internal conditions. All this is a long way of saying “It doesn’t matter what Beethoven, or any other composer thought, or didn’t think about their music (especially since for the most part we have no idea what that was), what we are interested in is what we think about their music”.
So, whatever our resistance to talking or reading about music I think that it is ultimately an essential act and however we might like to shut down the speech centers in our brain and just let music happen to us I think that we are language making creatures to the core and some attempt to mediate the musical experience is ultimately crucial for our understanding of it.
