What we listen for

Has anyone else thought about investigating what people listen for in
music.. or asking a composer what his "purpose" is.. and then maybe
classifying things a bit?

For example, Matt Fields has described his purposes, distilled down to
three words, as "Splendor in Sound." (Correct me if I'm wrong, Matt.)

Matt has also classified one of his works as impressionistic (Mount
Washington Memories) and another as expressionistic (Kabala). This
always made sense to me if you think of human experience as falling
into a few categories:

- Humans can experience themselves expressing an emotion. Music can
evoke such experiences. A reasonable description is "expressionistic."

- Humans can have the experience of being with some amazing external
object or process, like watching a giant flock of birds fly over, or
witnessing a mountain. Such an experience might be terms
"impressionistic" because our own feelings and thoughts are not
directly involved.. it's about the impression made on us by this
external object. This is related to "splendor".

Music can relate to other categories of experience:

- intellectual

- spiritual (which we will define not as 'religious' but as being in
touch with some intangible yet very significant level that seems to be
much broader and encompassing. Note that 'spirit' means 'wind' or
'breath'... and the wind is not seen itself, only its effects are seen.
The breath is not visible, only its effects are visible, and yet it is
life-sustaining.)

- heart - love

- all the experiences that come from relating to another person - I
particular like music which evokes tenderness and acceptance in
relation to other people (Mozart often does this for me)

Music itself is a process.. it could be seen as machine-like, with its
cogs and wheels and movement and drones and ostinatos. But all this
machinery can evoke either

- machine

or

- animal

In other words, does the music evoke a giant mechanical device, or does
it evoke a jaguar running or a human dancing? Often this is a matter of
how it is performed.

I HATE when people perform Bach like a machine. To me, Bach's little
mechanical parts evoke dance or animal movement, or the flow of river,
or the flow of wind, so they are living bones and muscles, or swirling
currents in a river.

If I distilled my purposes down, they would be two part

(1) heartful expression of emotions
and
(2) fun

Recently Mozart has come to my attention more and more, for these two
reasons. I also think that the Brandenburg Concertos are tremendous
fun, like the finale of number 5. Those lightly separated quarters are
so dancy, and then when the triplets on the recorders play over them..
OMG what fun! (Neville Marriner conducting)

But then I heard Hillary Hahn and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra playing
one of the Brandenburgs... ugh! arrf! ick! Like a machine. No dance in
it, just a display of technique.

Mike

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