Music can be a bit like storytelling; first there is one sound, then another and we wonder what is going to happen next, and so on until a sound tells us the adventure has ended. Just as obviously, all this, like storytelling, depends on overlearned traditions about how sounds are put together, how sequences start and end. Performers can then delight or confuse us by playing with our expectations, confirming or subverting the conventions, extending them to new sounds or subtly undermining them. Moreover, we can easily imagine music originally accompanied real stories, as in song or ritual. Even today a lot of music, perhaps most, plays this role, especially in popular music and film.
Nevertheless, music has always had an obviously independent character. It is still mysterious how certain sequences of sound can be heard once and never be forgotten. For individual sequences, this might be culturally dependent, but the strangeness of the phenomenon is universal. It happens when you hear the melody of “The Long and Winding Road” once, and it stays in your brain for life. In traditional folk music, a tune can have so much of this power that new words and new uses are produced for it - indicating the independence of the music.
Another obvious feature of music is it’s ability to stir (and manipulate) our emotions and thought, often independently of any song or narrative or drama. In these circumstances we might invent our own narratives to explain our emotions to ourselves, but this not necessary and usually not adequate. The music seems to be saying so much more.
And of course, music isn’t really the sound of anything; we hear it directly. It is a particular arrangement of heard tones, organised around principles that have now been well mapped out, but are still mysterious. These include tone, pitch, timbre, rhythm, dynamics, harmony. The “science” of musical theory can rival physics in its complexity, but it is dealing with the heard (and felt) sounds of the musical world. Of course, these are all produced by processes studied by physics and musical technology (and heard by processes studied by physiological science, in contexts studied by the social sciences) but they are not about these processes, they are about the world of music, a world which powerfully acts on us, but which is entirely autonomous in its logic.
This world has been investigated by performers since the beginning of time, and over the last few centuries by composers, but still seems inexhaustible and wondrous, with no end in sight to the discoveries yet to be made. It is hard to say what this world is they are exploring, other than “music”, and hard to say how they go about discovering anything in this world other than to say “they create” new music. After listening to the Jupiter Symphony, you’d be tempted to call it a revelation.
By now there are worldwide communities and networks dedicated to investigating, performing, listening to, studying and commenting upon the phenomenon of music in buildings ranging from the magnificent to the insignificant. It has millions of followers ranging from the lukewarm to the fanatic. It could almost be a religion.
The same is true of all other artistic activities of human societies, such as dancing, drama, painting, pottery, sculpture, jewellery, and many others. All depend upon rich traditions of production and participation, coupled with innovation and invention. All involve grappling with issues of feeling, expression, fittingness, appropriateness and other values related to a general concept of beauty. Most artists feel there is logic and structure to their art, though in none has the abstract structure and logic been so well worked out as in music. Even here it is clearly not fully understood, and is only the precondition of the art. Least of all understood are the mysterious processes of the imagination in creation and invention, or the perception f the work as saying something not sayable in other ways.
No comments:
Post a Comment