I'm interested in defining what people know about music who listen with pleasure, hence understanding, but have no knowledge in the technical sense. They can't read music, say, or give definitions of technical terms.
I think people can feel a chord change in a popular song. The more or less know that the chord changes and can identity where it happens. They can feel a beat if that is relevant to the style, or some kind of pulse if it is evident.
People can feel the length of a musical phrase as being natural, if it is 4 or 8 bars, say. They can tell when something is repeated, or when one musical phrase answers another (question and answer). They can recognize a cadence: when at the end of a phrase or section or piece the music resolves and ends. They could recognize a theme and variations form. They can be responsive to timbres and textures; attribute emotions to music (nervous sounding music at the point of the film score to make you nervous). They can use words like "pretty" or "muddy" or "weird."
It's obvious that people can do this, because if you couldn't, then only musicians would listen to music. Also, it's obvious that people who do not understand certain music, music that requires more than his kind of capability, say is: "I don't understand it." When I don't understand something in music, I cannot follow it, I cannot understand what is happening or why something is happening--say with Indian classical traditions that I just don't "get." Or someone who doesn't like jazz because it just sounds like random scales improvised pointlessly over a nervous sounding rhythm.
When I listen to Mozart, I am just following along a theme, then I say to myself, now he is doing something different for a while, and then oh, back to that but slightly different, and now the end is coming. I'm not thinking about technicalities at all. It is enjoyable because the themes are enjoyable, and the structures are well-formed on an intuitive level, and the contrasts are interesting, and the tensions are resolved the way you want them to be. I recognize some forms of musical wit, and respond to emotional cues, etc...
The reason I am posing this is a question is that I don't know what people know, hence I don't know how to write about music for an audience I am imagining in my head: someone with near zero knowledge in the technical sense but significant ability to respond to music as a listener.
4 comments:
I think you're downplaying rhythm, which is primal. I wonder if one of the (many) reasons more people respond to "popular" music more easily than to classical is because it has that pronounced, accentuated, regular, syncopated beat. People also respond to lyrics, even if they can't make all of them out. How many people would listen to pop music if it were all instrumental?
I'm your audience because I respond but have no terminology at my disposal to explain what I'm responding to. I just listened to a short concert of organ music and I can say that it was life-affirming, sunny, springtime music. It was happy and cheerful. There was a clear theme with an obvious resolution at the end. How any of it was achieved, however, I can't say.
Yes, I believe people can follow easy rhythms easily. You have to know the rhythm and be able to follow it, but even "Take Five" can be popular. People who only listen to music with a drum set think of some classical music as not having a beat. It does, but not one marked out by a drum beat.
You glanced a little while back at the traditional quip that "talking about music is like dancing about architecture". (Last I heard, this was fairly securely attributed to Martin Mull, but perhaps the scholarship has advanced.) It occurred to me that one way to look at this bit of rhetoric is as a structuralist pun, maybe even a clever one.
First, I take it that the real and valid analogy is between "talking about X" and "talking about Y" for any expressive activities other than "talking". That is, talking about music, talking about dance, talking about architecture, are all analogous (and in each domain, the talking has its successes and failures).
There's a special case in talking about talking, e.g. literary criticism. Here the subject matter is present within the talking in quite a different way -- the talking can quote, allude, parallel, rival the text. There are successes and difficulties here too, but I feel on a securer footing talking about Heine than about Schumann's setting.
Finally, the other expressive activities are more tenuously related to one another. The role of reference, I think, is sufficient to explain this, though there's surely more going on. But words refer in a well-known way (not to say well-understood); music, dance, architecture all refer, but I think it's uncontroversial to say they do so more weakly and inconsistently.
We could diagram this as a star-shaped graph, with talking at the center, and solid arrows going out from talking to the other arts. I'd add a thicker arrow from talking back to itself, and lighter, maybe dotted arrows between the other arts (painting about cooking and vice versa).
So the quip pretends to find an analogy between "X about Y" and "talking about Z" -- we know from our diagram that this isn't fair, but it's effective hyperbole to underscore what's risky in talking about anything.
Post a Comment