I'm not trying to master Bach's E Minor sonata for flute and continuo, since I know I'll never master it. But I've been working on it for a few weeks and gradually coming to feel that I understand what's going on in the piece. Ra'anan Eylon, my first flute teacher, used to say, when he didn't think I was playing something right, that he didn't understand the music.
My son-in-law, who took a BA in linguistics, rejected the idea of music as a language, since it doesn't denote anything. But a listener can tell whether a performer understands what he or she is playing, whether the phrasing and dynamics, the tempo, the general feel, testify to a grasp of the music. And a sophisticated listener, who is familiar with the music, might either confirm that the performer's understanding was convincing, or object to it, or disagree but concede that it added to his or her own understanding of the music. If music isn't, at least metaphorically, a language, how can it be understood or misunderstood?
Learning to play the Bach sonata, or any other demanding piece, is like learning to recite a great poem or examining a great painting square centimeter by square centimeter, though a painting doesn't direct your experience as a viewer as powerfully as art that unfolds in time.
Written music is a bit like a computer program that makes the performer move and breathe the way it wants him or her to do. But people aren't sound cards. The performer responds to the instructions sent by the score, both before and after playing the notes. A comical way of looking at the performance of a string quartet, the musicians' movements, is to think of them as automatons whose behavior is controlled by the score on the music stands in front of them. But that's an unacceptable take on what's happening.
But reading music, especially when you are playing with other people, is participation in a scripted conversation, like the written dialogue in a play or film. You respond to many stimuli: to your own playing, to the playing of the others, and to the audience. Your performance is also a kind of dialogue with the composer, and with all the other musicians who have played the piece in question, even if you haven't heard them.
I have often been in groups of musicians playing a piece for the first time, a piece no one in the group has heard before, and I've often been astonished by how quickly the music takes shape. Together, the players understand it.
My son-in-law, who took a BA in linguistics, rejected the idea of music as a language, since it doesn't denote anything. But a listener can tell whether a performer understands what he or she is playing, whether the phrasing and dynamics, the tempo, the general feel, testify to a grasp of the music. And a sophisticated listener, who is familiar with the music, might either confirm that the performer's understanding was convincing, or object to it, or disagree but concede that it added to his or her own understanding of the music. If music isn't, at least metaphorically, a language, how can it be understood or misunderstood?
Learning to play the Bach sonata, or any other demanding piece, is like learning to recite a great poem or examining a great painting square centimeter by square centimeter, though a painting doesn't direct your experience as a viewer as powerfully as art that unfolds in time.
Written music is a bit like a computer program that makes the performer move and breathe the way it wants him or her to do. But people aren't sound cards. The performer responds to the instructions sent by the score, both before and after playing the notes. A comical way of looking at the performance of a string quartet, the musicians' movements, is to think of them as automatons whose behavior is controlled by the score on the music stands in front of them. But that's an unacceptable take on what's happening.
But reading music, especially when you are playing with other people, is participation in a scripted conversation, like the written dialogue in a play or film. You respond to many stimuli: to your own playing, to the playing of the others, and to the audience. Your performance is also a kind of dialogue with the composer, and with all the other musicians who have played the piece in question, even if you haven't heard them.
I have often been in groups of musicians playing a piece for the first time, a piece no one in the group has heard before, and I've often been astonished by how quickly the music takes shape. Together, the players understand it.
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