Thoughts on Music

Performing - and composing - music, and generally studying it academically, encourages the appreciation of 'good' music in terms of certain compositional criteria. Music is analysed in terms of themes, fugal figures, variations, metronome marks, etc., yet to most ears it is not heard in these terms. A certain snottiness and superior vision surrounds musicians when listening to people in the street talking about music in quite unmusical terms ('I like that one', 'That's nice', 'It makes me think of flowers'). But first and last comes the listener in music, surely? Technical musical analysis has an aural starting point; it has only really come about as a result of people investigating the things they have heard. And the listener comes at the end of the process too, for it is for an audience that every piece is written, though each may fulfil a different function. So surely there is no more profound statement on a piece of music than the emotional reaction of a listener?

My point: studying music and wanting to understand it in technical terms has a tendency to mean deconstruction, and discourages raw emotional reaction to a piece. However, these are not necessary consequences. It is easy to get wrapped up in writing a fugue which conforms to all rules of fugue writing, and pieces which follow the hundreds of rules of harmony, but adherence to these for their own sake makes no sense and denies the existence of the listener. I will attempt to keep in touch with the sounds and emotions that music conjures up - most of which still lies outside the bounds of our understanding or analysis and probably always will - and put them at the forefront of my work and studies.

Tags: music, listener, listening, composition, composing, thoughts