ARTS
Music
Learning more from the notes
Alexander Waugh explains the cultural insecurities which stop people enjoying classical music There is no such thing as an unmusical person — lots of people think that, but somehow society is still peppered with intelligent, educated and cultured people who think they do not understand classical music but rather wish they did. People who can easily appreciate that Beethoven or Mozart were composers who made nice noises, people who might even quite enjoy going to concerts, but in their heart of hearts they cannot make the connection between music, as a decorative and attrac- tive type of sound and music as an emo- tional even ecstatic aesthetic experience.
Part of the problem lies with our typical fear of appearing stupid or intellectually deficient. People find it easier to claim that they are unmusical than that they are musi- cally ignorant. Cultural insecurity, which is one of the greatest barriers to people enjoying classical music, is a product of the cultural snobbery which dates back to the time of Confucius and probably before. Even Plato was a musical snob. 'The excel- lence of music,' he claimed, 'is to be mea- sured by pleasure, but the pleasure must not be that of chance persons; the fairest music is that which delights the best and best educated, and especially that which delights the one man who is pre-eminent in virtue and education.'
But we needn't pay any heed to Plato or any others of his kind. Stravinsky angered the music world when he pronounced, in 1936, that music was fundamentally power- less to express anything at all. 'If music appears to express something,' he said, 'this is only an illusion and not a reality.' He was absolutely right. How can anyone pretend that an abstract sequence of sounds, howev- er well organised, is, by itself, capable of expressing any form of emotion? It is not possible. We know that people do feel emo- tional when they listen to music, but only a fantasist could believe that the emotion was somehow embedded in the music itself and released on the unsuspecting listener. The 18th-century theologian, Thomas Bisse, believed that it was God's meddling that transformed music from something which is emotionally sterile into something emotion- ally potent. This is what he had to say to his congregation one Sunday in 1726:
Musick is not in the instrument, nor in the ear. The instruments and their furniture, we see, are mere matter, wood, metal or string, the work of the craftsman; which neither feel nor hear, nor of themselves move nor send forth any sound. And the ear, though it seems to hear and is the work of the Divine artificer, is still not an instrument and is in itself altogether insensible. But by the co- operation of both these instruments, natural and artificial, God works in us to twal all ,ve hear and enjoy as musick.
If Bisse had only managed to keep God out of his equation then he would, no doubt, have agreed whole-heartedly with Stravinsky. The art of listening to music relies, not on searching for emotion among the notes where it cannot be found, but creating external emotions or meanings to which the music can then be applied. This may sound confusing, but nothing could be simpler. Music is entirely adjectival, in other words, it has no meaning except when it is used to describe something else.
The simplest analogy can be drawn with numbers. Numbers like music have no sub- stantive meaning either. We can only understand the concept of the number seven, for instance, by imagining seven objects (seven dots or seven sheep etc.), without them the number seven (not the symbol or the word but the number itself) is an impossible concept to grasp. Music is just the same. If we want to get beyond the stage of finding it simply beautiful and into a deeper realm where we believe it can influence our feelings, then we need to set up our own meanings which it can then colour and influence.
Why is slow, low music considered to be calm and reflective, while fast, high music gives an impression of panic or excitement? If we believe, and I think we should, that the music itself is not expressing anything, then the question that should more proper- ly be asked is 'Why do we feel calm and reflective when we hear slow, low music and excited and panicky when we listen to music which is high and fast?' The obvious answer lies, not in the music, but in our- selves. When we feel excited or tense, our heartbeat and our breathing speed up, adrenaline causes us to move or to walk faster, our throats are constrained and we talk at a higher pitch than normal. When we are feeling calm and reflective the opposite is true; our heartbeat is slower, our voices lower and our movements alto- gether more restrained. We assume there- fore that music works in exactly the same way as we do and already, by this uncon- scious analogy we find ourselves putting emotional meaning into music where it really didn't exist in the first place.
There are hundreds of other ways in which we can introduce into music ele- ments common to our own experience, some are just as subliminal, others are more obviously conscious. Opera, for instance, is easy because the words and the drama tell us what the music is supposed to mean at any given moment. With a symphony or a string quartet though, where the composer has left no obvious programme, the chal- lenge to the listener is naturally intensified.
In writing Classical Music, A New Way of Listening, I needed to find elements which are common to all music. No listening tech- nique is of much use if it only applies to the music of one or two composers. There had to be a system for listening to all classical music from the earliest masses and lays of Guillaume de Machaut to the latest offer- ing from Peter Maxwell Davies or the dreaded Harrison Birtwistle; and the only way to find the key to that system would be by identifying first what it was that all clas- sical music, of whatever age or type, shared.
The answer is, quite simply, mood. All music gives the illusion of an expression of mood but classical music is particular in that the mood is liable to change in the middle of a piece. There are only three basic moods in music. 'Past' which is reflec- tive, nostalgic, usually slow and lyrical, `Present', which is a straight musical state- ment, a dance or a march, for instance, the recitative of an opera or the bold opening argument of a symphony and 'Future' which can be broadly described as music with forward momentum, music that seems to be questing or moving in anticipation of some future goal, leaving the listener to wonder where it is leading and how it will be resolved. I don't think that there is a sin- gle bar of any piece of classical music which cannot be posited within the parameters of one or a combination of these three moods. If ever you are wondering what a certain piece of music is supposed to be about or what emotional messages it is supposed to be conveying, just stop and ask yourself, 'Is it Past, Present or Future?' What a surpris- ing difference that can make.
Alexander Waugh is opera critic of the Evening Standard. His book Classical music, A New Way of Listening, is pub- lished this month by de Agostini Editions, price £14.99.
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