Connection between meaning and form

In a good piece there is always a connection between form and content and they cannot be viewed separately. Quality and purity, the truthfulness of form, is always the outcome of purity, quality, truthfulness of meaning contained within. The reason why composer wants the perfection of form is, that he doesn’t want to be undefined and incomplete and then misunderstood.

Good writers always take effort to force their’s readers to think exactly what they meant; for who has to say something important, he will care very much that not to get lost. Therefore good style mostly comes from one really having to say something. Arthur Schopenhauer

The more composer has to say, the more he will want the perfection of form. Who doesn’t have anything important to say, his forms will be less precise. The same goes in the sense of complexity and scope of a piece: a piece can be as epic as it has things to say, as the richness of basic idea allows, taken that composer has the capacity to recognize and bring out all of it’s facets.

Ultimately, what makes form right, is that it is a truthful expression of will and emotions of a musician; and the more noble that will and emotions are, the more complex and perfect the form can be. This is what we call correspondence between form and substance,and which is nothing else than honesty. If this correspondence is high, there are no problems to evaluate a piece of art: it is as good as it is formally good. In times of classical music this correspondence was much higher than today; it was easier then to rely on purely formal analysis. Musicians today long for lost common practice of classical music, and therefore criterias to establish who is who in music; but it is impossible to have such criterias, if composers don’t stick to here presented true aims of music, of musical purity. Base of common practice is this purity, and there is no more important “rule” in any world of music, than all the artist to speak only when they honestly have something important to say. It is easy to judge music if purity is there, so great idea sounds great while a lesser idea comes out obvious sounding. But if, like in XX century, composers choose to go towards artificially complicating things, supposedly applying firm “composing theories” while actually allowing arbitrariness – then every means of comparing authors is lost. Great ideas are relativized when their’s real complexity is compared with false complexity. – of course negatively, since you can be as complex as you want if you allow arbitrariness.

So perfection of form is the same as truthfully and precisely depicted deep message. Superiority of form comes from having much important yet still unsaid to say. Therefore the most emotional music is in the same time the most formally admirable. And in our time when potentials for creating music have advanced thanks to electronic technology, musical language should advance further to became even more able to mean.