On Listening

On one place on Internet, I encountered the following input:

Virtually every adult I know who is deeply involved with classical music also plays or sings as an amateur, or used to. It's an analogous situation to professional sports. What's more boring, for example, than golf on television? That's what I always thought, until I took up golf. Then it became fascinating. When I stopped golf due to back problems (and being horrible at it), it didn't take long before it was boring again. /…/ Do you know if there are studies that show the correlation between having played classical music at one point in life and attendance at classical concerts? I bet it's pretty high.

But since beauty is self-content, this is exactly what it doesn’t need. True beauty functions outside of context, without help outside of musical form itself. Saying the piece is self-content, is same as saying it contains what makes it interesting inside of it, and needs no relations towards something that is not a part of a piece. The only thing vic-a-verse a piece makes it’s meaning is how we are built organically, and our memories. Confucius, the prime ancient wise man of China, said: “What is god given we call human nature”; true music so flows from our nature. That beauty is self-content, means among other that it is grasped intuitively; however it is composed, it has to come naturally to us when we listen to it.

Certainly The Art Of Fugue means more to one who himself struggled with counterpoint, and thus is in a position to recognize the diabolically ingenious way Bach solved the problems, than it means to a listener who can’t even read music. From “The Lives of Great Composers” by Harold C. Schoenberg

Musical piece which becomes admirable only together with something which is not written in the piece itself has no direct value. I visited a classical music forum to ask a few questions, and one of reactions from the visitor was “have you actually ever played an instrument? Not that it matters, but it would help”. The case is I don’t play instruments, but I sing well and programed and arranged some music on computers as a teenager, but that is not important right now. The point is, a listener needs to participate in music-making in order to find a work interesting. But we must not participate in making music in order to feel its beauty – if we have to, that means it is not beautiful.

Of Immediate Effect

The frequent question is, whether beautiful music is necessarily liked immediately. Shortly, no. But as every short answer, this one also tends to be misunderstood. A lot of manipulation has been done around the fact that some more complex music demands a period of getting to know with it, which also means a listener interested in advance, concentrated on the piece despite not particularly liking it on the first listening – or being constantly exposed to a music piece until some of it’s parts catch his ear and then he decides to listen to it whole carefully. The manipulation that ensued, is that good music, from the reasons of it's complexity, always remains in this phase of demanding something from a listener. Actually, ideally a piece catches instantly. We tend to feel that prime beauty catches instantly; maybe we can compare this with human beauty too.

Sometimes however, a period of getting to know is needed before we recognize the beauty for which we were blind on the beginning. But when we recognize it, it then comes to us effortlessly, same as it would ideally come if we liked the piece on the first listening. We always discover beauty suddenly, and afterwards it remains natural for us. It’s not like we slowly start to kind of “like” it, without ever experiencing this break-through of understanding. Maybe we are confused by the fact that we haven’t recognized the obvious beauty immediately, but this should be understood in an analogy with geometry. We might need to look a long time in geometrical problem without grasping it at all; but when we finally grasp it, it comes at once, and we suddenly understand it completely and we are so sure that we understand it completely.

But unlike this, in our times it is often understood that the complex piece is never liked on this way, but is always demanding pain-staking concentration of a listener. It is a picture in which a piece forever demands from the listener, both in intellectual and emotional sense, to milk content from it. If it is not like that, it is “easy-listening”.

The grasp of these facts was always shaky, even among aestheticians of art themselves. An example from Hartman's aesthetics:

There are two kind of musical pleasure. One is in letting oneself be lulled and carried; it grows in certain great music to sinking into the musical movement, swimming in it. An example for that is “Melting in Tristan's mood” painted by Nietzsche. The one who listens like that, misses the structural finesses of the composition. He takes them easily. The other kind of enjoyment is more strictly following the structure of the musical piece, penetrating it and giving oneself to pleasure only after coping with articulated and maybe complicated whole.

Here Hartman equates “swimming” in the piece - probably referring to romantic semi-improvised meanders - and immediate listening – as if strict classicist structure or baroque pieces can not come immediately to us. Although Hartman mentions on the end giving away to pleasure, it remains unclear that this is completely separate from “penetrating” and “coping with”. Once we like a piece of music, it’s “structural finesses” come to us as easily as being “carried away in musical movement”; good music never remains in this phase in which it demands some penetration from our side. If a composition remains forever for us in that phase, that can mean only two things: either it’s bad, either we simply can’t understand it. But how much different this is from, simply, a mess that can not be liked by anyone – and many compositions that go for complexity achieve just that.

Finally, let’s resume that like in any other profession, job of the composer is to produce finished product, that is easy to use. If it’s not easy to use, that means something can be bettered. True beauty is difficult to invent, yet easy to listen to. Like with the car, it is the aim the car to be easy to drive, but it is difficult to make the car that are easy to drive. Composer can’t expect to remove weight from composing to listening.