CLASSIC MUSIC BIBLE ART
Listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well. We listen to music with our muscles, as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the 'narrative', of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it provokes.
We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one. This takes many different forms. All of us (with very few exceptions) can perceive music, perceive tones, timbre, pitch intervals, melodic contours, harmony, and (perhaps most elementally) rhythm.
We integrate all of these and construct music in our minds using many different parts of the brain. And to this largely unconscious structural appreciation of music is added an often intense and profound emotional reaction to music.
The inexpressible depth of music, Schopenhauer wrote, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain. Music expresses only the quintessence of life and of its events, never these themselves."
Much that occurs during the perception of music can also occur when music is played in the mind. The imagining of music, even in relatively non-musical people, tends to be remarkably faithful not only to the tune and feeling of the original but to its pitch and tempo.
Underlying this is the extraordinary tenacity of musical memory, so that much of what is heard during one's early years may be engraved on the brain for the rest of one's life. Our auditory systems, our nervous systems, are indeed exquisitely tuned for music.
How much this is due to the intrinsic characteristics of music itself-its complex sonic patterns woven in time, its logic, its momentum, its unbreakable sequences, its insistent rhythms and repetitions, the mysterious listening to music is not just auditory and emotional, it is motoric as well.
We listen to music with our muscles, as Nietzsche wrote. We keep time to music, involuntarily, even if we are not consciously attending to it, and our faces and postures mirror the 'narrative', of the melody, and the thoughts and feelings it provokes.
Most people with an interest in music beyond that of youthful excursions into the Top 40 are aware of names like Bach and Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, Liszt and Wagner, Tchaikovsky and Debussy its up to discover not only the unique quality of composers, but their similarities and differences, even the individual way they reacted to the same external events.
For example, it is of more than passing interest that Haydn was a friend of both Mozart and Beethoven, and that Schubert was a pallbearer at Beethoven's funeral. The connections, personal and musical, continue to spiral out from there.
It was only with the slow advance of humanist thought during the Middle Ages, and a gradual acceptance that serious music could be pleasurable as well as serve the spiritual and ceremonial needs of the Western Church, that individual figures came to be routinely named and eventually revered for their talents.
By the time the French 'ars nova' and the latter Renaissance had arrived in Italy and Northern Europe, the process had begun which, by the mid-19th century, raised composers from their position as paid servants and established them as charismatic icons in their own right.
Since that relatively recent occurrence little has changed, apart from the fascination developed by many lesser mid-20th century composers for scaring away potential admirers of their music by making it as unapproachable as possible.
Meanwhile, great creative talents such as Stravinsky, Bartók, Britten, Copland, Shostakovich and Berg strove to write music which had something urgent to communicate to the world. This page is covering some backgrounds of their creations over the last 900 years, written by many and digital recovered sins then.
Music rhythms and stories with the intention of communicating to its listers and readers the nature of each composer's achievement and the way in which it relates to that person's life and character.
After all, composers and their writers have always been just as intensely human and as prey to life's pitfalls, prizes, illusions and realities as the rest of us, their brilliance with music often belies their ability to deal with life's wider challenges.
Their uniqueness lies in how they transformed these circumstances through their dedication and artistry into works of art, written by many and digital recovered sins then, which continue to bewitch and fascinate each succeeding generation.
For this reason, particular stress has been given to the social and personal context of each composer's life. A proper identification of their outstanding works and an attempt, on occasion, to explain why a particular work is outstanding in a composer's output is also central to the usefulness of this volume.
Lenny would could it parameters that reveal some of the most interests of music supplies as answer to those wondering why people not have listed to music, our their composers, according to chronology allows assumptions common to a particular age to become clear and the interconnections between composers, countries and styles easier to follow.
However, attentive readers will be able to find their way with confidence through the most significant Western Classical music of the past 900 years and identify what they would like to listen to and why. If this object is attained, I shall have succeeded in my aims.
People who have been greatly donated in making this pages as good as it is and helping me over many hurdles-in so doing winning my undying gratitude-include the following: Caroline Chapman, one of my most beloved writers, whose precision and perspicacity averted many a bear-trap.
Richard Milbank, who commissioned before me in the first place: Helen Weller, who guided some of the pieces through with unerring deftness and civility; and my hunt to score the notes, reminded me that at all times in life a sense of humour helps.
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