There are so many simple and moving sounds in the world, what do you want to use those difficult and difficult sounds?
This is an exclamation from Liu Sola's novella "You Have No Choice". In the story, a composition college student named Sensen painstakingly explores the modernist approach and wants to write a masterpiece with personality, but his efforts not only torture him, but also test the patience of musicians and listeners.
When he overheard someone playing a traditional, melodious and melodious tune, he asked himself this sentence. What this sentence asks is what the meaning of that kind of esoteric, niche music creation really is. Of course, the answer is not given in the novel. Ironically, after coping with the difficult final exams, this group of composition students invariably reveled in the excitement of rock and roll, as if it was only then that the absolute harmony between music and people, music and emotion was truly realized.
Yes, since there is so much simple and moving music in the world, why should we speculate and compose such difficult works? In fact, this is a problem that we all encounter – but for professionals, it is usually only radical modern and postmodern works that are difficult to understand, and for most people, serious music is probably difficult to appreciate.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" Data-track="6" is the purpose > of the music moving? </h1>
Serious music, sometimes called Art Music, takes Western classical music as the main body and model, and also includes all kinds of inherited and developed works around the world. It often has labels such as "strong artistry", "strong ideology", "composed by professional composers", "highly qualified appreciators" and so on. And these labels with an elite flavor will not only help us understand the mystery, but will deepen the doubts in the hearts of the public.
The most basic reason for doubt is that there is a contradiction between the difficulty of serious music and the lofty status it enjoys, and people's simple intuition about the function of music. This contradiction is not a unique theoretical discovery, it comes from the common experience of everyday auditory life.
Suppose you receive a questionnaire with only one question on it: What is the function of music? (i.e., why do people listen to music, why do they compose and perform music?) How would you answer?
There is a basic consensus that is intuitive, argumentless, and similar to conscience: music is meant to convey emotion and pleasure to hearing. If music is not for this primary purpose, it is for practical purposes, such as gymnastics and advertising soundtracks, preludes and background music of the program, birthday songs, labor trumpets, chanting in rituals, and so on. Of course, as far as the usual creation and appreciation are concerned, we still identify the existence of music as lyrical and pleasant. These two functions are naturally also the basic dimensions of our feeling and evaluation of music.
Yu Wenwen on the stage of "Good Songs of China"
In programs such as "Good Songs of China", the concept of "music for lyricism" can be said to be the most typical embodiment. A strange entertainer takes the stage with an original work and sings in front of the judges' chairbacks (which completely empties preconceived emotions), and his greatest success is to move the experts and the audience and the hundreds of millions of viewers in front of the screen to tears, at least "goosebumps". To put on the laurels of such authors and works and promote them to the whole country, no one will have any objections. The basic logic of people's treatment of music is revealed here, that is, the author is only creating because there is emotion to express, performance is a kind of communication, if the audience is deeply touched by the work and has a strong resonance, this is good music, otherwise it is not successful enough.
But when this idea meets serious music, there are some "anomalies". Take Bach's Piano Collection of the Average Rhythm and Beethoven's Thirty-two Piano Sonatas, which are of such high status that they are revered as the "Old Testament" and "New Testament" of music, respectively, but when they are played on stage, the audience is calm and motionless, not only does not shed tears, but even blood pressure and breathing are very stable. Judging from their psychological reactions, even "resonance" cannot be talked about.
The question arises: if the purpose of music is to move people, then why can the value and status of tear-jerking songs never catch up with these things that make people "indifferent"? For example, suppose you buy an album by Wang Feng, unpack it, and drop out a piece of paper called "Song Friends Card", and the first sentence on it asks: "Did Wang Feng's music touch you?" "Seeing this, you will not feel strange.
And if you drop a promotional page from a Brahms Symphony record, it asks, "Did Brahms' Fourth Symphony move you?" "It must be very weird, and even has a sense of mischief, because people are not likely to judge this kind of music from the perspective of "how touching", and the great composers have never been among the pantheons of music by stimulating the tear glands. For example, for Brahms's Fourth Symphony, the relevant information usually says:
...... The final movement is Brahms's favorite variation, adopting the ancient Pasakaria structural form, named after J. Brahms. The theme of S. Bach Kontata (No. 150) is repeated 30 times as a fixed bass.
Created in the 1880s, this symphony uses "outdated" forms and techniques to fully embody Brahms's pursuit of classical style.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > "pleasant" is good music? </h1>
Why is it so academic and complex?
In fact, if music wants to move people, it is not a difficult thing - perhaps it only takes a wooden guitar, a quiet place, a good singing voice, and then slowly pluck the chords, leisurely sing a nostalgic, lost love or homesick song, you can instantly touch the kind of universal feelings in the depths of the human heart, so that the listener is moved; or even the guitar and singing skills do not need - just let a young girl step on the stage and sing a song "Only Mother is Good in the World" in a slightly out-of-tune childish voice. In a few seconds, there will be a large number of viewers wiping their tears; even a lonely line of sound without lyrics can even be relied upon- just like the hole in "Former Chibi Fu", "its voice is whining, like a complaint, like a cry, like a cry, like a wisp", its appeal is so strong that it can "dance the hidden jiao, cry the wife of the lonely boat", making Su Zi sit in danger, from the ancient and modern long-term lamentations, leading to the philosophy of the constant change of my philosophy.
This kind of listening and appreciation reaction has reached the level of tremors and feelings, its emotional direction is by no means at the level of shallowness and ego, and its audience does not have a clear division of cultivation level, and the music stirs up the universal emotions of people with this heart. Since such a strong, deep and universal emotional touch can be achieved in simple musical form, then as musicians Brahms, if the ultimate purpose of their music is also to touch people, why should they spend so much effort and use such a complicated technique to write a piece?
In order to make a movement relevant to the audience, it was decided to adopt the Pasakaria structure, and selected a bass theme from Bach's more than two hundred cantatas to play, and then after trial and error, wrote thirty innovative variations and logically connected them, while dealing with every harmony and instrumentation problem at a level of complexity sufficient for a student to write a master's thesis, and finally the conductor got the score and repeatedly trained a huge band until it was proficient. Only then did the music finally come to the audience
——It is like a person who, in order to pick up his child at an airport not far away, actually set off half a year early, carried a heavy bag around half the world, and finally came to the pick-up port after experiencing a difficult and long run, physically and mentally exhausted, and picked up the child with a vicissitudes. In doing so, he can only show that the primary purpose of his travel is not to pick up people, but to do something more important.
By this analogy, I mean that serious music certainly has a touching purpose, but there are indications that it is not the ultimate pursuit.
In addition to touching, the audience's strongest expectation of music is pleasant to the ear - academically speaking, it is fast and suitable for hearing, commonly known as "good listening".
A piece of music may not be very moving, but it will also be popular because it is pleasant to the ear. Whether music is good or not (and how well) it is a rather intuitive feeling, almost like judging whether a person is beautiful or not, whether a dish is good or not, without any explanation or reason, and there is no possibility of rebuttal. Evaluation and likes and dislikes on this level also seem very natural and legitimate, because according to common sense, music is an artificial object used to meet the aesthetic needs of hearing, and if the result is unpleasant to hear and makes the audience guess, then what is its significance?
In the face of serious music, this legitimate need can be confusing, because these works are obviously not pleasant enough compared to popular music and folk music. Modern and postmodern music, which is difficult for even insiders to listen to, is the relatively bright and beautiful works written in the traditional way (such as Baroque, Classical, and most Romantic music) that are always limited in terms of giving pleasure.
Even for lovers of classical music, when he switches the music he plays from classical to pop, there is always a sense of release, just like the students in "You Have No Choice" revel in rock and roll. It seems that one of the vocations of a serious musician is to set up obstacles for the listener, to test his patience and attention, so that his psychological expectation is constantly experiencing accidents in the music, and there are few moments of relaxation and happiness. The auditory instinct, which tends to be comfortable and luscious, seeks satisfaction in serious music, and it is bound to be a difficult trek that is repeatedly frustrated, and eventually suffers more and less pleasure.
Some people may cite a series of famous songs - such as Beethoven's "To Alice", Mozart's "Turkish March", Brahms's "Hungarian Dance No. 5", Schumann's "Dream", St. San-Saùn's "Swan" and so on to refute it, saying that a considerable part of classical music is still very beautiful, and those masters have not failed to pursue auditory pleasure.
Stills from the movie "Copy Beethoven"
In fact, these "world famous songs" in the popular sense are only a very small part of the massive classical music that we extract according to the standard of "good sound", and do not represent its overall appearance. Moreover, none of this series of popular pieces has become the key works that have laid the foundation for the author's achievements because they are good. That is to say, in that field, what is pleasant to the ear is not necessarily the best work, and the best work is often not pleasant. It is like a coach selecting a number of people from a large group of scientific researchers to form a team, according to his vision of the talent is not the best talent in the scientific research team, and the talent recognized by the academic circle is not necessarily the team's preferred, because this is completely two standards, two angles. As long as you expand the scope of appreciation a little, and at the same time take a closer look at the history of music, you can appreciate this.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > melodic beauty is the primary consideration? </h1>
Speaking of "pleasant" we have to mention melody, because in serious music, it is instrumental music that occupies a prominent position, and for instrumental music, the intuitive feeling of "good listening" and the beauty of the melody often have a lot to do with it.
As if instinctively, we naturally feel good about the regular, song-like melody. The so-called regularity is the end of the structure, the sentence is clearly read, and there is a stable ending at the end. The so-called song is more lyrical, the rise and fall of the sound line is gentle but not intense, and its continuous and intermittent length is roughly in line with the rhythm of human breathing.
You only need to revisit songs such as "Autumn Whispers", "Erquan Yingyue", and "Homecoming" to understand each of the characteristics mentioned here. You can also feel that the piano, erhu and saxophone are not so much playing as singing. When listening to music, people always expect such "singing", and if they can't wait for it, they will feel dazed and struggling. Without much deep theoretical speculation, we can find that the closer an instrumental work is to an imitation of a song, the easier it is to be accepted by the public, and the less it will be complained about "not being understood".
Inexplicably, for this almost instinctive aesthetic need in melody, those instrumental pieces that enjoy a lofty status are very reluctant to cater to, and this non-pandering is manifested in many ways.
For example, in terms of technique, those composers often use some non-singing instrumental melodies or singing but incomplete fragmentary melodies as the core material. The so-called instrumental melody is the kind of music that often contains the characteristics of large jumps, fast running, dense semitones, strange changes, etc., which is very unlike singing and makes it difficult for people to hum (the first theme at the beginning of Shostakovich's Ninth Symphony is typical).
And the fragmentary melody is like the up and down links without the lower link, or a sentence only says half a sentence, itself has no sense of self-sufficiency and stability, and it just sounds like there will be a feeling of interruption and failure of thinking. However, using this nature of its nature to promote the development of music is something that serious composers are very fascinated by. There is also a shorter melodic material that is not even the scale of "half a sentence", that is, "motivation", which is often taken seriously as the embryo or soul of the music.
In terms of the value of the work, whether the melody is like a song and how beautiful it is has never been the primary consideration for judging such works. For example, Liszt's piano works most meet this criterion are "Love Dream", "Comfort Song No. 3", and "Nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies", but if he is the most famous contribution to piano music, it is the "Sonata in B minor", which is very inferior. For example, the genre of variations, the theme is mostly a complete singing segment, but the value of each variation lies in the various instrumental variations that follow, rather than the theme itself.
From the composer's point of view, these creators are far from focusing on the creation of the melody itself as pop musicians, nor are they successful in the success of the melody. In this field, people who are good at writing beautiful melodies do not necessarily have a higher status, such as Schubert often writes songs, Chopin is known for his gorgeous and charming tunes, but their position is under Beethoven, who is not good at melodies; and composers who have never written any beautiful melodies in their lives are often recognized as top masters, such as Scriabin, Berger, Ives, and so on.
From these facts, it can be seen that the value of serious music is not focused on good sound or melodic beauty.
The paradox revealed above is that we generally believe that music exists to meet the natural auditory needs of human beings, which require nothing more than empathy, pleasant sound and specific practicality, in fact, people have long mastered the effective means to fully meet these needs. However, in modern Europe, a "serious-artistic music" has developed, which is not as pleasing to the human ear as other music, but has been exalted to a supreme position, and this contrast is inevitably puzzling. And it's also incorporated into universal values and educational consciousness, becoming a symbol of ascension and transcendence —even the bandit leader in Let the Bullets Fly (played by Jiang Wen) encourages his son to listen to Mozart more, which makes us and our auditory nature even more confused.
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<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="5" > the "Four Laws" for understanding serious music</h1>
How can you appreciate the benefits of this type of music?
There have been many theories and writings on this issue, and the common goal of the authors is to use popular explanations to bridge the gap between popular interest and classical music. The methods they advocate can be roughly summarized as "feeling with the heart", "knowing people and discussing the world", "integrating into life", and "music theory support".
"Feeling with your heart" means to get rid of the fear of difficulties and the shackles often said by predecessors, "unload everything, and calmly oppose it", so that you can "hear the sincerity and desire in the music, and also hear the true echo of your heart at that moment", because "in a relaxed state, your hearing will be more acute, and your perception will be deeper". This method does not attach importance to rational cognition, and its spirit is similar to the internal kung fu of "everything is prepared for me, reflexive and sincere, and happy and great", as well as yoga and Zen meditation, that is, the belief that the mind itself has sufficient power to perceive the true meaning, without the help of external intelligence.
The inner line of thought is that classical music is the plethora of human emotions, and there must be parts of these emotions that fit you, and cultivating appreciation is to improve this sensitivity. Emotions are aroused, and music is understood. But it's hard to explain this logic, which is that there are so many people in the world (think about your side) who are extremely emotionally rich, deeply experienced, and extremely delicate, and they don't feel anything about this kind of music even if they calm down.
"Knowing the world" means that if you want to understand music, you need to do some homework—to understand the author and his person, to understand the time and environment in which he lived, and under what circumstances he wrote the piece. For example, to enjoy Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, it is necessary to know its relationship with the defense of Leningrad, to listen to Smetana's "My Motherland" is to connect it with czech history and culture, to understand the beauty of Chopin's "Puppy Round Dance" is to imagine George Sand's puppy chasing his tail in a circle.
This line of thinking seems to have its roots in the theory that "art reflects reality". Doing homework in this way can indeed make people constantly have some trance, some foothold, and some satisfaction, but it is also easy to story and semantic music. The difficulty is that most of the music cannot find the specific background and reason; the bigger problem is that the superficiality of the data itself and the rich details of the music cannot really correspond.
The method of "integrating into life" is mainly reflected in the sharing of experiences of classical music enthusiasts. "Audiophile" originally referred to audio equipment enthusiasts, and later generally referred to people who were obsessed with something. Classical music enthusiasts who are willing to share their experiences usually have unrelated musical backgrounds, their foundation is zero, and they did not intend to do so at first, but through a series of opportunities and years of accumulation, music is deeply integrated into their lives, so that the mystery of music is completely eliminated by the sense of intimacy.
Their stories are also full of materials of "knowing people and discussing the world", and they are familiar with music, but the focus is still on trying to prove that serious music can be intimate with real emotions through personal mental processes. For example, writer Yu Hua's "Music Influenced My Writing" frankly explained how he bought audio and records from a vassal to "falling in love with music" and "feeling the power of love". Taiwanese scholar Lu Zhenghui's "CD Wandering" is also a typical example of such essays. From one of the titles, "Mahler Saves Me in the Hot Summer," you can get a taste of how serious music can be any closer to real life. However, this kind of sharing is more like the communication between enthusiasts, not solving the problem of getting started.
Yu Hua, Writers Press, November 2012
"Music theory support" refers to the use of rational understanding of professional knowledge to deepen auditory feelings. There is a difference between the milder and the more thorough expression of this view.
A milder attitude is used as a bit of an aid, such as encouraging the listener to look at the score while listening, on the grounds that "many of the details that pass by in the music become clear and recognizable when reading the music, and some unnoticed music when listening to the music will make you clap your head in the reading." Of course, reading the score is not so simple, but he said this only as a suggestion, and did not see music theory as the only bridge to appreciation.
The more thorough attitude is to systematically take out the theory of composition as the first lesson of music appreciation, such as Alan Copeland's "How to Understand Music", Yoichi Iio's "Classical Music Instruction Manual", Takashi Yoshimatsu's "Classical Music Is Too Simple to Do" and "Classical Music To Understand at Once". These readings appear in the form of "popularity", and often deliberately dilute the difficulty from the title, but when you open the book, you will find that it is full of professional homework: what are the four elements of sound, what is tonality and scale, what is part, what is a segment, what is harmony, what is major and polyphonic, what is the melody and genre (sonata, variation, gyration, fugue, symphony, concerto...). ), how to distinguish genres (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, Ethnic ...) ), how to recognize the classification and performance of musical instruments (strings, woodwinds, brass, percussion, keyboards), etc.
This kind of introductory guidance is actually not much different from the undergraduate courses of the composition department, although it is much simpler than the professional textbooks, and it is not required to do exercises, but the layman cannot really understand these things by relying on this book alone - he must also prepare a keyboard and a software to verify the effect, and even need to find several sets of video tutorials or a teacher who can answer questions at any time.
[USA] Alan Copeland, Hundred Flowers Literary and Art Publishing House, New Classic Culture Productions, January 2017
Such a path is very compatible with the esoteric complexity of serious music, but it will naturally make beginners wonder: since music is an aural art, and our purpose is to gain enjoyment and taste emotion, then why do we have to carry so much intellectual burden outside of hearing? Who of the great composers said, "Only by studying composition theory can I understand my work"? In addition, pop songs, light music, jazz, rock, etc. are also written using scales, tonality, segments, harmonies, instruments (and even polyphony), etc., but why do we not need to know anything to fully understand them and revel in them? This is the deep contradiction contained in the "music theory support" method.
Of course, all of the above statements are beneficial to the audience, and they all come from practical feelings, and there is no deception. However, if we can think deeply about the root cause of the problem and pay more attention to making the concept conform to reality rather than to make the reality conform to the concept, we may be able to gain some new understanding.
This article is excerpted from
What makes it difficult for us to appreciate the art of music? 》
Author: Qian Hao
Publisher: Wuhan University Press
Producer: Deer Book deerbook
Publication year: 2021-3
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