I have a lot of stuff I could talk about on the subject of music and perhaps I will in future posts, but for now I guess I want to express some of my gut-feelings rather than just quote interesting facts.
A while ago I wrote about wonder and the sort of music I enjoy most has this element. Andrew Marr writes about music and mystery and the ineffability of music. There are not too many things that are "too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words" so when one finds one it would seem to me to be especially worthy of attention. I suppose it is this quality above all that has attracted me to Bruckner and the same sentiment is in the quote "It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it" from my last post.
A necessary ingredient in ineffability is the element of surprise. Like when you make it to the top of a hill and a glorious panorama lays before you. Or when “Great globes (gourds) of yellow fruit hung from the trees—clustered as toy-balloons … He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger… But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed more pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men… For one draught of this on earth wars would have been fought and nations betrayed.” (Perelandra, Lewis).
Surprise, in turn, implies variety. I look forward to and greatly enjoy eating good old British fish'n'chips or iced doughnuts but can you imagine having them for every meal?
And variety is sadly missing in so much popular music now-a-days. Art (music is art) should explore the whole gamut of expression available to it. Pictures might use vivid colours or pastels, flat or exaggerated perspective, soft or hard lines - but not always the same, please. Marr says "Complicated mechanical structures in music, in themselves, offer little sense of mystery and some of the simplest folk melodies sound as if they were whispered at the dawn of creation." Scarborough Fair being one such melody.
So - what makes some music ineffable whilst other is a monotony of noise? That is what I want to explore in future posts
Previous post
Next post
A while ago I wrote about wonder and the sort of music I enjoy most has this element. Andrew Marr writes about music and mystery and the ineffability of music. There are not too many things that are "too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words" so when one finds one it would seem to me to be especially worthy of attention. I suppose it is this quality above all that has attracted me to Bruckner and the same sentiment is in the quote "It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it" from my last post.
A necessary ingredient in ineffability is the element of surprise. Like when you make it to the top of a hill and a glorious panorama lays before you. Or when “Great globes (gourds) of yellow fruit hung from the trees—clustered as toy-balloons … He had meant to extract the smallest, experimental sip, but the first taste put his caution all to flight. It was, of course, a taste, just as his thirst and hunger had been thirst and hunger… But then it was so different from every other taste that it seemed more pedantry to call it a taste at all. It was like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures, something unheard of among men… For one draught of this on earth wars would have been fought and nations betrayed.” (Perelandra, Lewis).
Surprise, in turn, implies variety. I look forward to and greatly enjoy eating good old British fish'n'chips or iced doughnuts but can you imagine having them for every meal?
And variety is sadly missing in so much popular music now-a-days. Art (music is art) should explore the whole gamut of expression available to it. Pictures might use vivid colours or pastels, flat or exaggerated perspective, soft or hard lines - but not always the same, please. Marr says "Complicated mechanical structures in music, in themselves, offer little sense of mystery and some of the simplest folk melodies sound as if they were whispered at the dawn of creation." Scarborough Fair being one such melody.
So - what makes some music ineffable whilst other is a monotony of noise? That is what I want to explore in future posts
Previous post
Next post
No comments:
Post a Comment