attitude to the non-musicians

[Tash]

i had a thought this past week after my aunt (who drives my insane) commented on playing the cello as like having a love affair. now my initial reaction to this was 'well how would you know you've never played an instrument before'. i just find that you can't properly comment on something you've never experienced before, like imagining it is one thing, but doing it is another.
but then i thought, hmm maybe that's a bit harsh. like i don't really know if my musical appreciation is enhanced by playing the piano or not. so my question is aimed kind of at those who are late starters in learning new instruments, did you find that your musical appreciation increased when you started actually playing the music? am i being too harsh on those deprived of playing instruments?

[lenny]

i often dont understand your style of prose

your aunt plays cello or not?

i dunno...

[whynot]

Your question to late starters on different instruments applies to me, and yes, each instrument I work on changes my experience of music, sometimes profoundly (I don't usually talk about it).  But I found the rest of your thoughts interesting, as well.  I, too, know many people who are very interested in the arts but don't perform (or act, paint etc), and they have strong opinions on the romantic nature of it all.  They imagine a very passionate relationship with the instrument or the repertoire, and when musicians play well together, they comment on how we "feel" the music together or we understand each other so well.  It used to bother me, people trying to assign all this tempestuous (sp?) emotion to what I do.  Maybe sometimes it's like that, but a lot of what I do is just the job at hand, doing the best I can, not feeling particular passionate, maybe not liking the people I'm playing with, possibly even hating the music (gasp).  Anyway, I just wanted to say that as I get older, I'm getting more relaxed about letting people have their fantasies, because maybe they can't participate in any other way, and it seems to make it more special for them.  But again, I do understand your being aggravated when someone tells you how it feels to do what you do.        

[ted]

I always pay very close attention to the comments of listeners who are not musicians. Over the years I have received many profound insights from them. For one thing, they are usually less inhibited about what they say because they have no idea about musical "rights and wrongs". Being ignorant of all social, musical, theoretical and historical associations they react intuitively to the sound itself and are usually honestly explicit about what pleases and what irritates them. They are not inhibited by wishing to say the correct or fashionable thing;  neither am I so inhibited, and I therefore interact easily with them and often learn a thing or two.

[Tash]

sorry i probably don't make sense, my thoughts are a jumble and only makes sense to me. so no my aunt doesn't play the cello, or any other intrument.
but whynot and ted you're on the right track. i agree with both of you, especially with the non-musicians commenting on what they like and dislike. i get that when i take friends to music concerts with me and they express their opinions and that's always interesting. so i have nothing against that. just when they start yapping on about how it must feel to play that piece of music or whatever, because in my personal opinion, thinking about what it's like to play an instrument and actually playing it are very different. maybe i get annoyed because they ignore all the technical aspects of playing, which is what interests me most. like when i joined the choir, choral music suddenly sprung to life for me because i knew what was going on when listening to it, and i could see how everything worked. and now i'm fascinated by singing techniques and how to develop your voice further, ie. just thinking about it more than just singing the right pitch and making it sound expressive. and i suck at singing, but i feel better off than those who think they have great voices and have never thought about more than singing in tune and copying the voices of famous singers like you get in aussie idol etc.
so yes, i think i'll let darkwind if he's reading catch his breath now!

[lostinidlewonder]

my aunt commented on playing the cello as like having a love affair. my initial reaction to this was 'how would you know? you've never played an instrument before'. i just find that you can't properly comment on something you've never experienced before, like imagining it is one thing, but doing it is another.

I have have taught so many late starters, people who played when they where very young but never again for even up to 50 years! But some of them say exactly the same thing, it is a love affair etc. You dont need to be a musicain to make that understanding. Music must move them in a special way to say something like that. They can imagine playing the sound themselves, and how amazing that would feel, as if you had another person who you love there with you. They experience it through listening to music, and they experience it through watching people play. Music is so much more omnipresent than we suspect. Even the deaf are effected by music (see beethoven for instance). Where there is no sound, sound still exists. So too, if you never played an instrument before you can feel the powerful effect it has as well as those who are musicians.

[Muzakian]

Hmm... I think one can become an intelligent listener even if they have never touched an instrument before. All you need to do is listen a lot. But it does annoy me when people who have never given classical music any airtime still talk about it as though they have the last word on it. Mum's told me before that "all chamber music is old", "Chopin's the best composer.... his music is all runs" and "all classical music sounds the same".
See I think of music as tempered sound.... order made out of the chaos of all the background noise around us. However, this "order" only exists in human consciousness.... it takes people to perceive it; without people, music would cease to exist. But one's ability to perceive the music varies from person to person. Some, like Rachmaninov, have extremely highly developed auditory perception and others, like my mother.... do not.  So I take the opinions of musical laymen on matters concerning music with a grain of salt. I don't mean to offend anyone but that's just how I feel. Listening to music should not be a passive activity - the musicians expect the listener to be musically literate enough to perceive everything they're doing, and to give part of themselves as well.

[galonia]

The only time I ever get annoyed is when we get to the slow movement of works, and people say things like, "The performer must be so patient to play this slow stuff" when it has nothing to do with patience at all - and when I try to tell them it's about the intensity of the emotion and sound during the slow sections, they give me this blank look.

Personally, I blame techno.

[ahmedito]

Tash!

Im sorry, but even though your ideas are always extremely interesting to me, your posts are a nightmare to read!

I give up!

[lenny]

Tash!

Im sorry, but even though your ideas are always extremely interesting to me, your posts are a nightmare to read!

I give up!

lol, me too!

but you have to excuse a sexy girl like that, she probably doesnt have much time to type her messages! 

[Tash]

lol sorry people! there's a reason as to why i play the piano and do art- expressing myelf without the use of words! i hate having to express ideas through words cos they never say what i'm really thinking
but really even though it's just a jumble i was hoping people'd get some kind of jist of what i was thinking and express their own thoughts on something similar, which is was people have done so i'm happy:)

[willcowskitz]

I don't find reading tash's flow of thought difficult, but in contrast to that maybe even easier than usual. It just has to be read different way, not word by word, but scanning through the text quickly, sensing the shape of it instead of trying to understand every detail individually - kind of how it was output into text anyway. 

Regarding the subject itself;  Before I started playing, I also did have this over-romanticized image of what it would be like to produce that unbelievelably beautiful music with your own fingers, altering it as you press the keys, and letting yourself vibrate with the music. When I actually sat down at the piano and played the first bars of räkhthree, it really did feel amazing, until I reached the part where the left hand opens up the piece like a flower - that's where I picked another score and started tackling that instead. The image of amazing experience vanished little by little, but whenever I learnt something new, it came back to me because I was able to express myself more freely on the instrument, having developed technique to make it possible. I'm certainly not interested in the "numbers" of music - the mathematical, theoretical, technical side of it. They're nothing but descriptive laws of means to open new doors for myself and others. I really love the Horowitz quotes, so I'll insert one here: "I only know that in the music itself I found out what the fingers had to do." - The need for self-expression makes technique come real, the fingers follow the music, the body follows the fingers and helps the musician to adapt to the needs of the music by finding the shortest route from a key to key, chord to chord. Prior to playing piano, I had no clue of what difficulties I would come to face when trying to seek myself within all that beautiful music, but the technical side of it came by itself like a side effect, and that's all the attention it deserves in my opinion - something essential, but definately secondary to music itself. Because technique makes expressing myself so strongly possible, I do of course value it, but if it became the driving force or a motive in itself, I would just end up thinking "Why am I even doing this?"  Because people so often ignore the technical aspect of playing an instrument when romanticizing the effects of the instrument and music that comes out of it, this image of wonderful relationship with the instrument, etc., is more pure than in case of someone who does play the instrument and is highly aware of the sometimes frustratingly long distance to the level where creating that music becomes possible, hence why it irritates when someone tries to "teach" you about that relationship despite how ignorant they look in your eyes. In order for me to truly enjoy the music I play, I have to live the music and let my body follow, not teach the body to push the music forwards.

[pianostudent99]

Ted, you said a very good comment.  The people who don't know music will give an honest opinion about how they feel about the music.  What you said is great.