What is music for?

[kriatina]

I am wondering if anyone else has been thinking about the following questions:

The early composers up to and including Mozart appear to have composed music for the pleasure of the listeners to get out of it what they wanted with the beautiful sound and as an beautiful elaboration to our life to enhance it and enjoy music and even to “build us up again” if we had the bad luck to go through bad times and hardship.

In comparison, most of the composers from Romanticism onwards indulgenced in their own experiences, like, for example to describe in detail their own personal miseries and “playing on our compassion”, even though many of them were sponsored like for example Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or they lived of other people like Chopin who relied on a woman who lived with him, to provide for him.

It seems to me Romantic composers composed more for their self-indulgence and did not really bother about the listener. They became famous through their self-indulgence into their own live and their own desires etc. and in that they seem to use their own talent, gift and genius to compose music for their self-indulgence only.

But if we compare, we can see that composers like Bach, Haendel, Vivaldi, Mozart and many others had a pretty hard life themselves and most often real hardship, but they never connected the listener of their music with their own trials and tribulations and experiences of life.

Whereas the Romantics indulged in their own trials and tribulations and experiences and the music the listener hears is the result of this. And the listener to fully appreciate their compositions must understand the trials and tribulations and experiences of the composer and this is a totally different concept of music. The danger here is that music can become extremely assaulting to the ear when some composers indulge in horrendous personal experiences which they had to go through.

Is this then music? And it begs the question what is music for?

What made me think about all this is the remark of Chopin that he has to lock himself up with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to, as he put it, “cleanse himself”. I wonder what it was he had to cleanse himself of and then I read that he lived with a woman who provided for his welfare. He obviously did not enjoy himself whilst doing that.... what do you think?

It also makes me wonder whether some composers were confused having been weened on the great composers like Bach, Vivaldi etc. and later they were faced with composers like Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and others and these conflicting musical experiences caused them to be unsettled with their own music direction as composing. Here I am thinking of Clementi and Furtwaengler.

Thanks from Kristina.

[dima_76557]

What is music for?

Down-to-earth functions:
1) Certain music heals (can make pain go away);
2) Certain music opens channels and possibilities in other spheres of the brain by lowering your heart beat and by tempering the Alpha waves in the brain;
3) Music can be used to attract a potential partner from a distance;
4) Music can be used to flirt (music for four hands with a potential partner);
5) Touching the keyboard with the fingertips and get wonderful sounds as a result is in itself a pleasurable process;
6) Music can help you deal with very deep emotional problems (confirmation, for example an immigrant with homesickness listening to Rachmaninoff - "Yeah, brother, that's when your heartaches begin" - that kind of confirmation);
7) Music can confirm good old memories;
8 ) A lot of classical music was simply ordered by the Church for liturgy purposes.

P.S.: Anybody can fill in any higher goals of what music does to/for them.

[outin]

I am wondering if anyone else has been thinking about the following questions:

The early composers up to and including Mozart appear to have composed music for the pleasure of the listeners to get out of it what they wanted with the beautiful sound and as an beautiful elaboration to our life to enhance it and enjoy music and even to “build us up again” if we had the bad luck to go through bad times and hardship.

In comparison, most of the composers from Romanticism onwards indulgenced in their own experiences, like, for example to describe in detail their own personal miseries and “playing on our compassion”, even though many of them were sponsored like for example Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, or they lived of other people like Chopin who relied on a woman who lived with him, to provide for him.

It seems to me Romantic composers composed more for their self-indulgence and did not really bother about the listener. They became famous through their self-indulgence into their own live and their own desires etc. and in that they seem to use their own talent, gift and genius to compose music for their self-indulgence only.

But if we compare, we can see that composers like Bach, Haendel, Vivaldi, Mozart and many others had a pretty hard life themselves and most often real hardship, but they never connected the listener of their music with their own trials and tribulations and experiences of life.

Whereas the Romantics indulged in their own trials and tribulations and experiences and the music the listener hears is the result of this. And the listener to fully appreciate their compositions must understand the trials and tribulations and experiences of the composer and this is a totally different concept of music. The danger here is that music can become extremely assaulting to the ear when some composers indulge in horrendous personal experiences which they had to go through.

Is this then music? And it begs the question what is music for?

What made me think about all this is the remark of Chopin that he has to lock himself up with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to, as he put it, “cleanse himself”. I wonder what it was he had to cleanse himself of and then I read that he lived with a woman who provided for his welfare. He obviously did not enjoy himself whilst doing that.... what do you think?

It also makes me wonder whether some composers were confused having been weened on the great composers like Bach, Vivaldi etc. and later they were faced with composers like Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and others and these conflicting musical experiences caused them to be unsettled with their own music direction as composing. Here I am thinking of Clementi and Furtwaengler.

Things tend to look very different from our modern perspective. Looking back we like to give meanings to older works that may not really have nothing to do with the reality of the time. Composers have always had different motives, we just tend to clump them together by era and try to find more common in them than just the musical conventions of their time. I am often quite doubtful of this type of analyses...But I would say that all the way to the 20th century composers aimed to please their listeners...

[outin]

P.S.: Anybody can fill in any higher goals of what music does to/for them.

Don't really think much about it...music is like food...it's just hard to live without it...

[gregh]

Which music?

I'm thinking now of the band Corvus Corax, whose interest is the profane music of the Middle Ages. Profane as opposed to courtly or sacred music-- they're interested in the music that was played in the streets and taverns. But the people who played that music didn't know how to write it down and probably saw no reason to, while the people who could write music weren't interested in that type. Much of what is known about it comes from complaints made of it! So the band sings historical lyrics to original compositions in a style that might have been used in that period.

What is music for? More than Bach used it for, more than Wagner used it for. The art music that is still played today is just one part of the historical phenomenon, and is not sufficient to answer the question.

[senanserat]

Chopin was a P. *nods*

Music I think is a way of expressing that which cannot be said by words and shouldn't remain silent.

[j_menz]

What made me think about all this is the remark of Chopin that he has to lock himself up with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach to, as he put it, “cleanse himself”. I wonder what it was he had to cleanse himself of and then I read that he lived with a woman who provided for his welfare. He obviously did not enjoy himself whilst doing that.... what do you think?

I think he enjoyed himself a great deal. Not always with Ms Sand, either, which is probably why he needed a little Bach now and again.

[muleski]

As someone has already said, people create from a whole spectrum of motives.  If you find the music of someone who draws inspiration from their own misery, to be an assault on your ear, then it is simply music that does not suit your taste and is certainly no basis to bring into question the validity of it as 'music'. 

You infer that music created from inner turmoil is invalid. Music is probably one of the most wondrous of all human creations.  Why the need to try & disqualify the integrity of someone's work as something as 'not being music', just because you are suspicious of their self indulgent motives?  Aren't all people self indulgent to some extent?  What about the motives of the composer who creates music for the masses.. does he hope to gain nothing from that, other than pure enjoyment, to know he has brought pleasure to the ears of millions?  Even on it's purest level (and no-one is pure), that would be indulging a desire of the self.  People need money to live after all & I'm sure any composer would have hoped to have made a living from their art. 

Personally, music from the self as opposed to music created for others, in principle, is preferable to me.  Anything else, whilst definitely 'music', can come across as devoid of passion.  This is over simplified I know, but my gut instinct & preferences lie with real life rather than commercial aims. 

[kriatina]

I am very sorry to say this, but you seem to miss my point:

A good architect knows the materials which make the building and he creates beautiful architecture and this is the music of architecture.
 
To the left of this, there are architects who misuse the same materials for financial gain by creating boring buildings, like for example massive glass blocks and tower blocks.

To the right there are self indulgent architects who misuse materials to create only buildings which are the result of self-indulgence and these architects are not bothered whether or not people can live or work in such buildings... and these buildings may or may not have a degree of merit.

This is similar to composers of music. I am interested in those composers who take all the building blocks of music and understand how they can be used to create beautiful harmonious music.

I am not interested in those composers on the left who misuse musical building blocks to create boring music, even though it is often a great commercial success.
 
I also find it difficult to adjust and accept those composers on the right who are self-indulgent and use the same musical building blocks to create compositions which are only an extension of their self-indulgent nature.

Beautiful music for me comes from those composers who use all the materials of music to create and build a beautiful work of art. Like Bach, Haendel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Corelli, Mozart etc.
 

[j_menz]

I am very sorry to say this, but you seem to miss my point:

beautiful harmonious music.
 

Beautiful music

There's more to music than beauty. If that's all you're looking for, fine, but you are seriously missing the breadth of potential that music represents.

[pianoplunker]

I am wondering if anyone else has been thinking about the following questions:

The early composers up to and including Mozart appear to have composed music for the pleasure of the listeners to get out of it what they wanted with the beautiful sound and as an beautiful elaboration to our life to enhance it and enjoy music and even to “build us up again” if we had the bad luck to go through bad times and hardship.

In comparison, most of the composers from Romanticism onwards indulgenced in their own experiences, like,

Hi,
what you are touching on is the ever lasting question of a musician. Do we play music for ourselves or do we do it for others. If you knew you would never perform your music for anybody would you still work at it ?  But that question is not defined by genre or time. It has alwyas been that way. We cant say if they indulged in their own experiences or not.  Same thing with modern music.   

[muleski]

I am very sorry to say this, but you seem to miss my point:

A good architect knows the materials which make the building and he creates beautiful architecture and this is the music of architecture.
 
To the left of this, there are architects who misuse the same materials for financial gain by creating boring buildings, like for example massive glass blocks and tower blocks.

To the right there are self indulgent architects who misuse materials to create only buildings which are the result of self-indulgence and these architects are not bothered whether or not people can live or work in such buildings... and these buildings may or may not have a degree of merit.

This is similar to composers of music. I am interested in those composers who take all the building blocks of music and understand how they can be used to create beautiful harmonious music.

I am not interested in those composers on the left who misuse musical building blocks to create boring music, even though it is often a great commercial success.
 
I also find it difficult to adjust and accept those composers on the right who are self-indulgent and use the same musical building blocks to create compositions which are only an extension of their self-indulgent nature.

Beautiful music for me comes from those composers who use all the materials of music to create and build a beautiful work of art. Like Bach, Haendel, Telemann, Vivaldi, Corelli, Mozart etc.
 

You seem to be be missing the point that there is a vast array of music, not all of which has been created just for your ear. 

Your architecture analogy further demonstrates your belief that what is not to your taste lacks validity, because you believe it lacks beauty.  After all, you said 'is this then music?' It's also very presumptuous of you to allude to knowing the exact motives of a composer.  How do you know something was created purely out of self indulgence?  You simply don't.  You also miss the point of fact that all people, to varying degrees, are self indulgent (especially artists), musical or otherwise!  If you continue to believe a composer is as awful to draw inspiration from within, then don't listen listen to them, there will still be a multitude of other people who will take pleasure in their work. 

Can you not just accept that what one person sees/hears in one thing, is not necessarily perceived the same by another?  Can you not just like whatever you like & allow the same courtesy to others without trying to discredit people?  I'm not a great fan of Mozart, but I wouldn't dream of saying because I don't enjoy his music, is it even music at all?  What a nonsense that would be. 

[brogers70]

Certainly it's true that some Romantic music can be self-indulgent, like some Romantic poetry. But just as in poetry I wouldn't let distaste for Wordsworth ruin Keats or Tennyson, likewise in music I wouldn't let Schumann ruin Beethoven or Brahms (and even Schumann does something right once in a while).  If a composer represents his emotional experience well, and if it's reasonably universal, then what's wrong with that? Music about one's self isn't self-indulgent unless it makes no attempt to communicate with anyone else, or uses an idiosyncratic language with no meaning except to the composer. We're all human, so a musical expression of a composer's individual human sorrows can resonate with the listener. To go back to poetry, do you think that all lyric poetry is self-indulgent? Everything from Sappho to Li Bai to Sylvia Plath?

As others have pointed out, beauty is not necessarily the objective, even among composers in the periods you like. I think Vivaldi and Chopin really aimed at beauty as a primary goal. But Bach sure didn't. For him, beauty was a welcome side effect of exploring relations between lines and the contrapunctual potential of different themes. There's lot's of beauty in A Musical Offering, the Art of the Fugue, and the Well-Tempered Clavier, but it's a by-product, not the goal. If anything, Bach was, at least in those works, not all that interested in how they'd appeal to listeners, but in how they revealed his skill. Beethoven also seems often not to aim at beauty and sometimes not even particularly at the expression of his own feelings. Instead he seems to be interested in what you can do by breaking a musical idea into its smallest components and rearranging them, or in setting himself problems of how to get back to the tonic from a remote key at the end of the development section in a sonata form movement.

Plenty of Romantic music doesn't much appeal to me either, but to write it all off as self-indulgent goes a bit far, I think.

[outin]

As others have pointed out, beauty is not necessarily the objective, even among composers in the periods you like. I think Vivaldi and Chopin really aimed at beauty as a primary goal. But Bach sure didn't. For him, beauty was a welcome side effect of exploring relations between lines and the contrapunctual potential of different themes.

I am not a connoisseur of Bach, but it is really so? Wasn't the idea of composer's skill during the Baroque era to be able to create beautiful music? They just had a very different idea of what beauty is (just like we have different ideas today). Their idea of beauty was more about rules, harmony and order, not hights of emotions or pretty melodies. Emotions were not such a big thing before the enlightment anyway. If you look at Baroque things in general, they look rather awkward form our point of view, but I don't think they were created to look ugly.

And IMO Chopin was looking for beauty in musical perfection and harmonies in a similar way, while breaking old conventions as well. I think one is missing something in his music if one sees it as just seeking to be beautiful sounds and melodies to aim to please the listener.

But what do I know...

[brogers70]

I am not a connoisseur of Bach, but it is really so? Wasn't the idea of composer's skill during the Baroque era to be able to create beautiful music? They just had a very different idea of what beauty is (just like we have different ideas today). Their idea of beauty was more about rules, harmony and order, not hights of emotions or pretty melodies.

Sure, if you include within the meaning of beauty things like harmonic relationships, mathematics, clever relations between series of intervals, numerology, and the like, then you can say that Bach's aim was beauty.I was thinking of a more limited, sensuous idea of beauty, the pleasure in the sounds and melodies, the sort of thing Vivaldi seems to have aimed at.

[gregh]

Eh, my fingers slipped and saved this. Then I decided I didn't really have anything important to say in this thread, after all, but I don't see an option to cancel my message.

[outin]

Sure, if you include within the meaning of beauty things like harmonic relationships, mathematics, clever relations between series of intervals, numerology, and the like, then you can say that Bach's aim was beauty.I was thinking of a more limited, sensuous idea of beauty, the pleasure in the sounds and melodies, the sort of thing Vivaldi seems to have aimed at.

I don't like Vivaldi at all...not my kind of beauty then I guess...