On 18 Jun 2003 at 6:56, Rodney Waterman wrote:
> I get a little uneasy when scholars strip music to the bone and claim to
> have pigeon-holed it. . . .
I don't know of any scholars who do that kind of thing.
Scholars look at the way music is put together for the same reason we
look at the way anything is put together, to try to understand how it
works, why it has the effect it has.
> . . . For me, its the same with all music. I used to get
> furious back in the old days at the music faculty (Melbourne) when my
> professor stripped Mozart down bar by bar, note by note, chord by chord and
> smugly told us what it all meant - it was control freak stuff. . . .
No, your teacher was giving you training in the most basic musical
analysis tools. He wasn't telling you what it ultimately meant,
anymore than a doctor who looks at an X-Ray is telling you what a
person means. But the doctor does find the X-Ray a handy analytical
tool to find out certain things about the patient.
You were being taught to read musical X-Rays, that was all.
> . . . I have never
> been excited by Expositions, Developments and Recapitulations - but its
> nice know they are there!
If that's all you think about them, then you never really had any
understanding of what they were.
> Intuition, bold risk taking and inexplicable bursts of inspiration barely
> rated a mention.
That's because you were taking a class in music theory or musica
analysis, not a class in musical intuition and inspiration.
> At the same time I enjoy as much as anyone having a critical technical and
> social understanding of a piece of music. For instance, I love to show
> people the wonderful passage early in the Beatles' (Lennon's) Strawberry
> Fields Forever (I play it in G) where the melody goes F-G-Ab ("Noth-ing is
> real") over an E major chord - it's wonderfully deadpan and obtuse, and
> yes, it is definable as a harmonic and melodic sequence. . . .
Stop! Stop! You're killing the music for me!
Or, do you want to have it both ways? That the analysis that *you*
like is good and the anlaysis you don't like is bad? If that's the
case, you're just spouting off about your personal taste.
> . . . But it is also
> just 'right' and needs no justification. . . .
The analysis your teacher was doing was not being done to justify
anything -- it was being done to understand how the music works.
--
David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
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