Re: Does music express things?

Date: Thu, 17 Jul 2003 17:47:55 +0100
Newsgroups: rec.music.compose
Size: 3,768 bytes

"Michael Mossey" <email-address-deleted> wrote
> A common debate question is: "Can music express things beside
> itself?"
Music cannot express or represent specific things. What it can do is evoke
emotional reactions within the listener, which in turn the listener may
associate with certain specific things they've experienced in their lives.
That doesn't mean that those things are present in the music, or even that
the emotions are, merely that the music evokes those emotions.
Whether or not music evokes the same emotions in different people is an
interesting question, and one which I'm not so inclined to assume to be the
case after what's already been written about cultural conditioning.
Take Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony as an example, one which I can
particularly relate to. Not only does the title indicate what the music is
about, but each section is specifically broken down with titles indicating
what each section means. It begins with sunrise, then takes you on a
journey through woods and meadows, past a waterfall and eventually to the
summit. On the way down a storm is experienced and the piece ends with
sunset.
None of those specifics are actually present in the music, but the music
evokes the same emotions that might be experienced in those actual
situations. Having experienced such situations myself, I can really relate
to this, I can almost feel the warmth of the musical sun's rays as it rises
above the horizon.
But how would a listener respond to this piece if he or she had no idea what
it was meant to represent? The same emotions *may* be evoked by the music,
but the listener might attach those emotions to something else entirely, or
to nothing at all, simply hearing it as a piece of music that represented
nothing specific. It would be interesting to test this on someone
unfamiliar with the piece.
For most music though, I never feel that it represents anything specific in
the real world, I hear it simply as music, a journey though sound which
evokes emotions which I attach to nothing other than the music itself. I
don't feel a need to associate music with anything tangible, and I perhaps
enjoy it even more because of that, as an abstract emotional escape from the
real world.
Perhaps for this reason, as well as others, I much prefer instrumental music
to anything tainted with lyrics, although the human voice can be an
interesting instrument when used purely as such. Karl Jenkins' Adiemus is a
good example of using the human voice with no specific meaning attached to
it.
Coming back to the subject of mountains, and the outdoors in general, it
always annoys me that TV programmes about local landscapes (Wales in my
case) invariably tend to be accompanied by traditional Celtic folk music, as
though that's representative of the landscape, whereas in fact it's only
representative of the culture that evolved here.
I hear a lot of music in my head as I wander alone over the hill tops, but
none of it is ever remotely similar to Celtic folk music. The landscape
inspires much deeper musical emotions in me, totally unlike traditional
local music.
By the same token I get equally irritated by the commonly used technique in
film and TV music, where local traditional music is regularly used to
indicate which part of the world you are currently looking at. For example,
how many times have you seen a programme on the Andes that doesn't have a
pan flute accompanying it? This may be a useful geographical identification
technique, but it never evokes the *true* emotions present in the landscape
itself (or rather evoked in the human mind), only of the culture that
happens to live there.
Paul
--
http://www.wilderness-wales.co.uk
http://www.photosig.com/go/users/userphotos?id=118749