On Musical Meaning
As we explained, the organization of sound within a music piece is ruled by what it represents, by it’s leading idea. Now, it should not be faulty understood that musical story-telling is like opera or movie music. It is not the same as program music. Music can be just music and still also successfully serve an extra-musical role. We are speaking about purely musical logic, absolute music, but we are viewing it as a meta-story, which is what every universal composition essentially is.
Now, what exactly music captures inside of it was always a tricky thing. In music, speaking about the actual content is not easy; all arts except music are directly connected with materials of life: literature, painting, theater. This is why musicians are usually content to treat pieces as pure form - even if not making clear what “pure form” actually means, even if aware that music always has meaning. But the nature of that meaning is principally strangely void. Music starts as sound, but we don’t actually know what it is. Musicologist acknowledge that brain scans show that there is no particular zone in the brain that processes music – although the auditory part is first to react of course, from there follows unpredictable activity involving any part of the brain, or the whole brain. Musical ideas principally start within a human mind as void ideas, not necessarily of some particular nature – visual, or verbal, or auditory; they then get converted to sound.
The same is with larger compositions, containing many melodies inside, only here the world “feeling” might not be most appropriate to describe what a longer musical work captures. This leading atmospheric thought, meaning of the peace we will here call aura. Beethoven’s work is maybe the best example. Every work of his has a different aura to it that actually holds it together. In his pathetic sonata, the three movements are not held together by some canonic form or stylistic cliché, but it leaves out the impression of the whole simply because it stands true in every moment to the atmospheric idea of the piece; there is atmospheric unity. Aura of moonlight sonata is that of night under gentle, silvery light and melancholy.
“For Pathetic sonata he didn’t need formal links. Unity is achieved thanks to content. Movements come one from another, as images of some saint legend string. From “Der Himmel Voller Geigen” by Rudolf Thiel
This atmospheric idea, aura, corresponds to something more concrete than idea of a musical style, and more abstract than idea of a particular melody, which corresponds to a moment of feeling; it is an overall feeling of a musical story, that is not something than can be captured in a single melody, nor it is so abstract as a musical style. Instead of particular feeling, an aura more correspond to a sublimation of a whole world an artist is trying to depict. In classical music, this world is often connected with history, mythology, or with collective memories, “archetypes”; in more modern music it is often an imaginary world. JM Jarre’s Oxygene has an aura of gentle, elegant floating, and of disorientation and indetermination. Structures of Oxygene have come out of it’s aural idea, and in correspondence with it, and not with some musical style.
Not only composer tries to find melodic material that stands true to the aura, but the aura also defines large scale structure of the work. Beaubroug of Vangelis has the frippery structure with twisted proportions that is following the surreal idea of the piece. Magnetic Fields from JM Jarre has sections connected with fade-ins and fade-outs, that is true to the collage, pop-art aura of the record.
Composing of longer works is a kind of musical storytelling, as was always seen by classical composers. Gustav Mahler used to say that “no music from the romantic epoch is only music”. Idea of music as storytelling was a holy grail of romantic classical composers. But not only romanticism; every music has “story” to it, even “absolute” music, it is only question how abstract one – we could call it “meta-story”. Absolute music also tells a story, but so abstract that we don't experience it as a story, but as something without a particular meaning.
That music is naturally felt as a kind of story, we see from our own listening experience - when we listen to music, we tend to invent stories to it. Opera composers wanted to avoid writing music as set arias, but to capture the story of an Opera within the music itself (for example, Debussy’s only opera Peleas Et Melissande has no set separate songs but flows together with the story told). A story in classical sense is drama. With impressionistic music, it's more cinematic, conveying moods.
When in XX century a wave of anti-romanticism came over musical circles, music was started being seen as pure form, with nothing to do with any expression. “Composers combine notes. That is all.”, said Stravinsky, that same Stravinsky who started with highly descriptive ballets. No doubt Stravinsky said this following his exhibitionist instincts, knowing such a saying will cause controversies. But it was an expression of consciousness of the time. Toscanini commented on Beethoven's Eroica, so much noted for it’s supposed political background: “Some say it’s Napoleon, some Hitler. For me, it’s just allegro con brio”. Certainly you can’t learn anything about Napoleon and Hitler from Eroica, but it’s also certainly more then just allegro con brio. It is full of mood, atmosphere and ideas. Beethoven evoked ideas and atmosphere of battles from his time; plains, sunsets and castles, landscapes with echoing battles, some of them from the distant past. Some parts of Eroica evoke the idea of battle as such; others are more like watching pictures of great heroes inside some gallery. But if it’s not exactly Napoleon of Hitler, than it is nothing – except the tempo marking.
Sublimity
As with form, there are certain basic desired higher qualities on the level of emotionality, and that are usually referred to as sublimity. Psychologist say there are four basic emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear, while other feelings (in narrow sense of the word) are derived from them. But our emotionality is much more complex than a few basic emotions we can easily communicate with words. It is full of subtle and surreal ideas. Music can be used to communicate many of those inner states that cannot be communicated otherwise.
- Sublime music is not basically emotional, that is, it’s meaning is difficult to capture in common words.
Music must not drive us to tears; it has to be a flint stone which will in a man fire up a spiritual fire. Ludvig Van Beethoven
Not only tears, but neither wild temper, that can be often felt from romantic classical pieces (but not so much from classicist, and even less so from baroque), or even more from Schoenberg’s atonal expressionism, or jazz and rock.
- Non-basically emotional character can thus be said to primarily be about absence of two things: pathos, and nervous, patchy outbursts of temper.
This is probably connected with the fact that good music is the expression and a reflection of the general, sensible and powerful, resulting in universal themes and positive emotionality and order, and not of particular, confused and weak, which results in pathos and frustration.