Years ago I attended a concert in a small auditorium at which the works of ten contemporary composers were performed. I must have enjoyed it and found it interesting, because I stayed to the end, though the music made no concessions either to the listeners or to the performers. I came away with the feeling that each composer was writing in a musical language of his or her own, a language that the composer invented along with the piece that was played. I didn't feel that the works were in conversation with one another, which is not the case when a program contains works from the standard Western classical repertoire.
Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart built on and rebelled against the baroque composers who preceded them. Beethoven and Schubert looked back at their classical predecessors and opened new possibilities for the romantic composers who followed them - and so on. These composers didn't try to invent a new musical language. They were writing in idioms shared by their contemporaries. True, their compositions stretched the conventions of the norms they inherited, but by and large they remained within them.
I'm tempted to say that using an existing musical language made it easier for them to compose, but obviously it isn't easy to compose like any of these great composers. We all speak a language, but not everything we write in it is immortal poetry.
On my only trip to Japan (so far, one can always hope) my wife and I went to one act of a kabuki performance. The music and chanting sounded entirely random to me, interesting, not exactly pleasant, but full of energy and surprises. I couldn't understand it any more than I can understand the Japanese language when I hear it spoken. Other non-Western music, such as classical Indian music, is far less off-putting, and I can listen to it with enjoyment, if not real understanding.
So what do I mean by understanding music?
To be continued.
Classical composers like Haydn and Mozart built on and rebelled against the baroque composers who preceded them. Beethoven and Schubert looked back at their classical predecessors and opened new possibilities for the romantic composers who followed them - and so on. These composers didn't try to invent a new musical language. They were writing in idioms shared by their contemporaries. True, their compositions stretched the conventions of the norms they inherited, but by and large they remained within them.
I'm tempted to say that using an existing musical language made it easier for them to compose, but obviously it isn't easy to compose like any of these great composers. We all speak a language, but not everything we write in it is immortal poetry.
On my only trip to Japan (so far, one can always hope) my wife and I went to one act of a kabuki performance. The music and chanting sounded entirely random to me, interesting, not exactly pleasant, but full of energy and surprises. I couldn't understand it any more than I can understand the Japanese language when I hear it spoken. Other non-Western music, such as classical Indian music, is far less off-putting, and I can listen to it with enjoyment, if not real understanding.
So what do I mean by understanding music?
To be continued.
No comments:
Post a Comment