A Word please. ANY word.
Classical music is no laughing matter. We treat it, in print as in performance, with respect. Program books offer information and aspire to list the sections of the pieces, the movements, correctly.
But how are we to do that in print, in language?
Well, in essence, annotators, critics, and commentators go to the scores and look for words. Any words. Damn the notes, give me words! What else can you quote in essays? So any words that can be found are elevated to the status of titles, declarations, pronouncements, the revered names of the components. Unfortunately this is not why words get into scores. Those you find in the business section of the music are just words that got into the score because they were handy.
Look at an orchestral score. There are really very few words to be found. It isn’t about words, it isn’t about language. For the most part, there are a few words scattered around that say things like ‘slow down’, ‘speed up’, ‘get quieter gradually,’ – that sort of thing. Little administrative details of purely professional concern, not for the audience, that happen to be more easily notated by words than by musical symbols. That’s all. They occupy no privileged position in the unfolding of the work. None.
But: - danger lurks, - they are usually in a foreign language. Mainly Italian, for reasons of historical convenience, much as medieval writings were in Latin, air traffic control is done in English, and we still learn the silly QWERTY keyboard. It makes life simpler if people all over the world all learn the same jargon. There is some German, the French put rather a lot of French in, English speakers tend to avoid putting English words in – doesn’t seem properly “artistic”, perhaps. (There is even an odd fashion for English-speaking composers to give their compositions titles in foreign languages for no apparent reason that I can see, except a little high-brow snobbery. Maybe it gives the illusion of gravitas, but I think it is pandering to set a bunch of poems, some of them in English, and then give the whole set a German name. If it’s going to be played in New York, why?)
Not a great crime, but it is part and parcel of the reification of things that seem to have exotic names. This is what I mean by that. When the music says ‘slow down’, that is just an instruction about how to play a certain bit. But when it says in Italian, ‘ritardando’, it sounds more exotic and like a thing, a name, and pretty soon people are actually talking about “the ritardando” as if it were an independent thing. “I don’t think he achieved the ritandando very well.” How silly that would sound if someone said “I don’t think he achieved the slow down a bit very well.”
The most obvious place where this happens, leading to endless nonsense, is in the search for the titles, the names, of individual movements in a work, so that the tracks of a CD, and the listing in the program book, can offer up the names we crave. What is the name of this first chunk? Look in the score. Aha! Right at the beginning it says “Allegro vivace, ma non troppo.”
Wonderful! What a great title. And so that goes into the program book as the title of the first movement. All it means is ‘Quick and lively, but not too much so.” This isn’t a name, it is an instruction. Using this as a name is like giving someone driving directions like this: “Start out at “stop”, then drive to “sharp left turn”, enjoy the view at “yield to incoming traffic” and look for “wrong way,” we live at “No outlet.” These are not the names of places. Yet words of that type are the ones we jump at to talk about music. And pretty soon you have learned discussions about Beethoven’s Allegros, and the Romantic Adagio.
My friends, there are no such things. There are real things that can be talked about and compared in music, but they are not found by just looking at a score and picking out things that happen to be words.
As a child, before I knew any German, I was deeply impressed by the first movement of Schumann’s cello concerto. It seemed to me so bittersweet; tender, not melancholy yet not quite aspiring; aware of the cello’s weakness as well as the intense sincerity of it’s introspective feeling. And the piece, fortunately, had a wonderful title that, intoned in an impeccable German accent, seemed to capture all that complex and contradictory feeling. It was called: “Nicht zu schnell.” Ah! Such poetry.
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But how are we to do that in print, in language?
Well, in essence, annotators, critics, and commentators go to the scores and look for words. Any words. Damn the notes, give me words! What else can you quote in essays? So any words that can be found are elevated to the status of titles, declarations, pronouncements, the revered names of the components. Unfortunately this is not why words get into scores. Those you find in the business section of the music are just words that got into the score because they were handy.
Look at an orchestral score. There are really very few words to be found. It isn’t about words, it isn’t about language. For the most part, there are a few words scattered around that say things like ‘slow down’, ‘speed up’, ‘get quieter gradually,’ – that sort of thing. Little administrative details of purely professional concern, not for the audience, that happen to be more easily notated by words than by musical symbols. That’s all. They occupy no privileged position in the unfolding of the work. None.
But: - danger lurks, - they are usually in a foreign language. Mainly Italian, for reasons of historical convenience, much as medieval writings were in Latin, air traffic control is done in English, and we still learn the silly QWERTY keyboard. It makes life simpler if people all over the world all learn the same jargon. There is some German, the French put rather a lot of French in, English speakers tend to avoid putting English words in – doesn’t seem properly “artistic”, perhaps. (There is even an odd fashion for English-speaking composers to give their compositions titles in foreign languages for no apparent reason that I can see, except a little high-brow snobbery. Maybe it gives the illusion of gravitas, but I think it is pandering to set a bunch of poems, some of them in English, and then give the whole set a German name. If it’s going to be played in New York, why?)
Not a great crime, but it is part and parcel of the reification of things that seem to have exotic names. This is what I mean by that. When the music says ‘slow down’, that is just an instruction about how to play a certain bit. But when it says in Italian, ‘ritardando’, it sounds more exotic and like a thing, a name, and pretty soon people are actually talking about “the ritardando” as if it were an independent thing. “I don’t think he achieved the ritandando very well.” How silly that would sound if someone said “I don’t think he achieved the slow down a bit very well.”
The most obvious place where this happens, leading to endless nonsense, is in the search for the titles, the names, of individual movements in a work, so that the tracks of a CD, and the listing in the program book, can offer up the names we crave. What is the name of this first chunk? Look in the score. Aha! Right at the beginning it says “Allegro vivace, ma non troppo.”
Wonderful! What a great title. And so that goes into the program book as the title of the first movement. All it means is ‘Quick and lively, but not too much so.” This isn’t a name, it is an instruction. Using this as a name is like giving someone driving directions like this: “Start out at “stop”, then drive to “sharp left turn”, enjoy the view at “yield to incoming traffic” and look for “wrong way,” we live at “No outlet.” These are not the names of places. Yet words of that type are the ones we jump at to talk about music. And pretty soon you have learned discussions about Beethoven’s Allegros, and the Romantic Adagio.
My friends, there are no such things. There are real things that can be talked about and compared in music, but they are not found by just looking at a score and picking out things that happen to be words.
As a child, before I knew any German, I was deeply impressed by the first movement of Schumann’s cello concerto. It seemed to me so bittersweet; tender, not melancholy yet not quite aspiring; aware of the cello’s weakness as well as the intense sincerity of it’s introspective feeling. And the piece, fortunately, had a wonderful title that, intoned in an impeccable German accent, seemed to capture all that complex and contradictory feeling. It was called: “Nicht zu schnell.” Ah! Such poetry.
posted by Andrew Massey | Monday, January 10, 2005
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