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How do people listen to music, how do
audiences hear it?
Apparently, they need to hold on to certain
images, to 'states of mind';
They'll feel at a loss if they can't
see a garden that is green,
a sky that is blue or something like
that.
(Anton Webern, 1883-1945)
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| It is undeniable that today's erudite music
is difficult to perceive and understand, accounting for the wide demand
for classical music, not to mention that of the more rock- or pop-like
genres, and the comparatively meagre interest even in the most popular
of 20th century pieces. Moreover, it is usually termed as overly complex
and impenetrable without justification. Is this a sign of our times? Indeed,
our times are those of a hurried life, overflowing with daily preoccupations,
that does not care for anything that adds more trouble to its bewildering
pace.
It so seems that something is wrong with this state of affairs: either erudite music is out of phase with, and completely deaf to, audience expectations, or the audience has fallen into a kind of easy listening addiction. Exceptions allowed on both of these alternatives, I think erudite music is generally accessible to the general public, given this public is able to sustain an eventual initial shock, since there certainly exists a lag between the overall styles, techniques and aesthetic grounds of the music we are exposed to in our daily life and those of this century's. |
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Music is not a language. Every piece
is like a rugged rock,
with countless grooves and carved with
drawings on the surface
and beneath, which people decipher and
interpret in a thousand
different ways, none of them being the
best nor the truest.
(Iannis Xenakis, 1922- )
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| This quote made me definitely give up on
that generally accepted idea that music is a universal language, immediately
understood and perceivable by everyone. Moreover, I'd say that it is erroneous
to think that music is for everyone or, in other words, that a piece of
music is always composed with consensus in mind, everyone gathering a similar
understanding from hearing it.
I take from this that the appreciation of a piece of art is a very personal affair, and despite the evidence that some art appears to be universal, it always rests upon our own brains to perform the task of assimilating it. Since we cannot extrapolate a general law simply from common phenomena, the only way to prove the universality of a certain kind of art or any of its specific renditions would be by taking the intersection of all appreciated art forms and creations and obtaining it in the resulting set. It is clear that most likely the resulting set is empty, i.e. there is no single art form or work universally appreciated. As a composer, this all brings an interesting concept: A work of art, in this case, a music piece, ceases to be the expression of a very definite idea--an idea that was to be desirably consensual between audience and composer--to be like that piece of rock, infinitely reinterpreted and thus with different facets for each member of the audience. In a sense, Music is universal since it has the means to reach everyone, albeit with a different aspect from one person to the next. On another sense, it is not, since it is an altogether different thing for different people. Either way, the idea of an "universal truth" seems cast aside. |
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Art is not born out of reason. It is
the fleeting treasure
of our unconscious, this unconscious
that has more understanding
than our lucidity. In art, an excess
of reason is fatal. Beauty does
not come out of a formula... Imagination
shapes our dreams.
(Edgar Varèse, 1883-1965) |
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| As human beings, we feel an overpowering
need of determinism, expressed in music by the countless systems devised
along the times that supposedly rule the ways of making music, thus establishing
methods that produce good music. It is as if we don't trust our
ability to organize musical events based solely on our ears and uneducated
knowledge. Or perhaps it is a guiding ray that directs us to the right
path among the chaos of noise, giving us a sense of safety.
Such systems were always bent by composers of all times when expressive needs pressed on. But nevertheless there was always a system that was quickly resumed and followed again. In a way, the very act of bending the rules--in a perfectly attentive and conscious effort, it might be added--proves that there is no perfect system that expresses with absolute exactitude the ideas the composer wishes to convey. Yet we remain desperate to find a concise reasoning process that exhibits the behaviour we wish to capture--and preferably one such process that applies to a wide range of problems. But is this really a way to seek more understanding and broaden our horizons? Does it not constrain our inventiveness, if not the ability that allows us to create something even in a medium with poor diversity, then that unconscious creative strength that allows us to dream? The system should be our own imagination, always paired by its corresponding anti-system, in such a way that our expressive vein is completely free. The true artist creates the rules by which he creates his work. |
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| ...how time passes...
(Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928- ) |
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