The 'Vanishing Music' thread and my interchange with Richard and time got me thinking in all sorts of ways.  This thread is not asking for a definitive answer about a grey area (there's no right or wrong) - just what your personal views are.

Imagine a composer who is synaesthetic (tones are associated with colours).  To compose a piece he walks down a road, and makes as faithful a representation of his visual experience as he can in sound (as dictated by his synaesthesia)

Is that music, or a sound-representation of a walk down a road?

In one sense the composer has had some input - it is his version of synaesthesia, his interpretation of how to represent the sounds he hears with sights, and his choice of walk.

In another sense , he has just set up a system for composing, but has not acually made decisions during that composition.

What do members think, and more importantly (forgetting this silly thought experiment), what is you view of what distinguishes music from "sound representations" (of, say, a walk, or a formula, or a set of numbers, or an algorithm)?

Tommo

Consider the listener.

The synaesthetic music gives a difficulty to the listener, does he learn the colour language first and then listen to the sound?

If the composer walks past a vibrant red ferrari does he put a rhythm into his composition? Then if he looks over a fence and sees just the vast expanse of a golfcourse fairway does the music stop or cue a high flute solo?

I prefer music that uses sound, i.e. onomatopoeia, to make the music  A vast silent green fairway could still have a high note on the flute 

John W

Blimey, that strikes to the heart of what I do.  In staging operas we're involved in "deconstruction" of exactly these ideas... trying to extrapolate the real actions and pictures which inspired a particular musical response from a specific composer.  It's a completely tendentious business in which one is walking the highwire with no safety-net...  it's purely the Director's own belief that he "hears" an action, or movement, or a change of lighting or mood, in a particular moment in the music.  If challenged, the only defence is "well, surely you can hear it, can't you?" - because there's nothing else.  But it's all there is to go on.

I'll give a particular example which might hopefully be well-known to most.  In WALKURE Act III, everything that happens once Brunnhilde has confessed to assisting Sieglinde's escape is a colossal musical and emotional crescendo, leading to a particular moment. Wotan is clearly aware that he's letting Brunnhilde take the rap for his own transgressions, catching her on a technicality... and there is also an unspoken agreement that "she knows that he knows", and she's ready to take the fall for him.  When he's already put her on the rock (pace the stage-directions) we finally reach the culmination of this near-unbearable crescendo in a massive chord of emotional release... but there is no stage-direction to indicate what it means.  Personally I think it's obvious what it means - having already turned-away from her and beginning to climb off the rock, either she, or he, rushes forwards for a last embrace, in a moment which says everything that may not be said in words.  However...  I have seen three different productions of the opera in which nothing... absolutely nothing... happens at this moment?   It's as though the stage-director was deaf to what was happening in the music,  and was just mechanically fulfilling what the stage-directions say, and that alone?  (I think it's significant that two of the directors involved in my list of three had no musical background.  The third, I'm afraid, was Gergiev, who mistakenly believed he could stage operas as well as conduct them).

It is, of course, an act of the most colossal arrogance to take upon onesself responsibility for telling the audience what - in your opinion - each passage of music is supposed to represent, and it's a responsibility I have a lot of trouble with.  (One thing is for sure - whatever you do won't be right.  I bet even Wagner was told he'd misinterpreted the composer's intentions).


I'd contend that although we can use period instruments, what we can never do is fit ourselves with "period ears".  Many references in works like the Pastoral are lost to us.   To give a different example,  look at the music which opens the second section of Bach's Christmas Oratorio - a "pastorale" for a six-part ensemble of 2 x oboes, 2 x tenor oboes, and 2 x bassoons, alternating with the string section on the repeats.  Why?   Because it's a musical impersonation of the Italian zampogna and bombarde bands.  The zampogna is a huge baritone-pitched bagpipe with two chanters, one played with each hand,  and it bumbles along rather pleasantly in parallel sixths (which is all it can really do, considering each hand can only play a max of four notes, there's no thumbhole or you'd drop the thing) while the bombarde (a kind of shawm that's a bit softer than its catalan cousin) plays the melody, or maybe a melody in parallel thirds if there are two players.  So the bassoons mimic the bagpipe open-fifith drones, the tenor oboes do the zampogna stuff, and the oboes play the melody.  What we DON'T hear is that to the C18th ear, this was the iconic sound of Christmas in the same way that Frank Sinatra or Noddy Holder are now...  because these zampogna bands were made up of shepherds, who were laid-off by the farmers once the sheep were penned-up for the winter,  so they went off busking... all around Europe, in fact.  (There were reports of them being seen as far north as Edinburgh).   The connection with "shepherds" and the sound of the Christmas Nativity was too good to miss.   Handel couldn't resist including this sound in The Messiah at the point of the Nativity either,  although he didn't attempt to mimic the bagpipe sounds with wind instruments, and stuck to the string group alone.

Which is all by way of saying that what WE hear as "abstract" music,  might not have sounded that way to audiences of other cultures or generations

This view is probably moronically oversimplified but I would say that unless we all have some degree of synaesthetic sensibility, any hope of the hypothetical composer conveying a specific idea musically is doomed to fail.
My belief is that we respond to sounds which evoke a memory from previous experience, or to identifiable abstract patterns.

I suppose it could be that the directors in those cases took the view that 'what was happening' was happening in one or other of the protagonist's minds as they parted and that this is one of the things that opera can do that straight drama can't: internal thoughts and emotions (even subconscious ones if you happen to be dealing with a startlingly good composer) can be expressed from the pit without anyone having to act it all out with gestures or 'business'? 



That has to be analytically true, almost by definition, but I do think we now tend to overdo the point. I reckon we seriously underestimate just how good the human brain can be at 'getting inside' other people's (and other peoples') world views and perspectives. In fact what you go on to describe about that passage in the Christmas Oratorio is an excellent example of how we can begin to understand the original 'meaning' to it's contemporary audience.

We can't, of course, ultimately ever escape the metaphysical loneliness of the 'other minds' problem (even in personal  relationships with our contemporaries) but, for good practical evolutionary reasons, our brains are pretty good at representing these things - which is as good as we are ever going to get. My own view is that we can, if we work on it, 'put on baroque ears' far better than received wisdom says we can. And the music itself, plus the sort of extra-musical information you provided in the case of that Bach passage, gives us the clues about how to do it.

(Ditto, and vastly more importantly of course, I believe we can, and urgently should, make an effort to understand other peoples' world views 'from the inside' far better than we have talked ourselves into thinking we can.)