Music: As Feeling

What Makes Music Meaningful

Through reading the articles in this unit and from experiencing and playing music myself, there are many things that make music meaningful. Renee Fleming discusses in her introduction about how she had to shape her voice but how it shaped her as well. From The Philosophy of Music, we look at the similarities between reading/writing and music and how it educates us and makes us feel. From personal experiences, I can say that music is one of those things that can make you remember a certain time or bring you bake to a special memory sometimes more than reading or seeing a picture of that experience. Music also is a way to express yourself when composing, playing, or listening by what you choose to listen to. Music is meaningful is many different aspects, as much as other subjects we learn and sometimes even more meaningful.

Renee Fleming is a world known opera singer from New York. In the introduction of her book she discusses how learning music not only teaches but changes you. I like the comparison she makes with finding her voice and horse novels, as that she found her voice and worked to shape it, just as much it shaped herself. This is similar to when a girl finds a wild horse and sees potential in it and sticks by it no matter what and in return for her devotion it gives her a victory she never thought possible. Learning music doesn’t just teach us, but changes us was her main point.

When reading The Philosophy of Music, we see how music creates the ability to put our thoughts down in an intelligent manner, just as much as reading and writing the thoughts down are. The author, Bennett Reimer, discusses how you experience and share feelings through creating and listening to music. Also, there is a type of improvement where sometimes you can improve open a composed piece by changing a tone and making the feeling more real and clear to the listener. I think this is important because when conveying a mood, feeling, or idea through song, if it’s best to have the feeling clearly identified so that the listener can easily know what the composer was feeling and relate to it and identify with it. This is the same with reading or writing about feelings and experiences, and improvement is a key aspect to that.

Along with the comparisons of reading and writing to music, expressing yourself through music is a major way that it is meaningful. When you compose a song and can express yourself in that music style, with specific lyrics, the instruments that are used, etc., you create something unique and one-of-a-kind that is meaningful to what you want to express. This is like writing because you get to create something and put your emotions and feelings into it and words can be used with both, but unlike writing it is something you hear and feel. There are times when unlike a quote someone wrote or a lyric someone wrote, a certain guitar riff or melody in a song that someone wrote to express himself/herself will impact me more and be more meaningful that a story or poem.

Another way that music is meaningful is not only by the feelings and expressions it creates, but the memories it can remind you of. Music to me is meaningful because when hearing a song from a specific time it can remind me of a past memory in an either good or bad way. People in relationships pick songs, you listen to music at major events in your life- graduation, dances, weddings, funerals, or being at a concert and hearing certain songs performed are all ways in which music is a part of our everyday life. Hearing a certain song can remind me of good or bad times, unlike seeing a picture of that event or reading something you wrote about that event. Music definitely has an impact in your brain and reminds you of certain events and is very meaningful in that way.

There are so many things that make music meaningful. Renee Fleming wrote about how learning about her voice and trying to change it actually changed her own identity. We read about how improvement when composing music or hearing music is compared to writing and reading and can be meaningful to people. Also, music is a major way to express your feelings and identity. And music can remind you of past events and memories that sometimes pictures and words can not, which makes it an even more meaningful tool than reading and writing. Music is meaningful in so many ways, and in different ways to each person who hears or composes it.

Music History

The Red Violin and Music History

The movie, ‘ The Red Violin’, takes us though the history of music. It starts out in 1681 in Cremona during the Baroque era. The violin then travels to Vienna in 1793, the beginning of the Classical era. The story continues in Oxford, in the late 1890’s, where a talented composer owns the red violin. The violin is then in Shanghai during the Chinese Communist party movement which forbids Western music. The story ends in Montreal, during an auction for the red violin, in which a man switches the violin with a copy to give the original to his daughter as a gift. The plot of the movie takes us through what we learned about the history of music as well.

The story begins in Cremona, where a violinmaker and his wife are expecting a child. Bussotti had made many violins, but only considers this one (the one he’s making for his future son) a masterpiece. Anna, his wife, and the child die in childbirth because of her age, and Bussotti is extremely distraught. Bussotti uses his wife’s blood in the varnish to paint the violin giving it its red color. This compares a lot to what we read about Stradivarius violins and the amount of emotion and the dedication a violinmaker can put into a violin and make it a masterpiece.

The red violin is then donated to a German orphanage where a child prodigy is given the violin and impresses the monks enough to get a violin instructor, Poussin to come and adopt him. Poussin needs the child to make money because him and his wife are not well off financially, so he puts an enormous amount of pressure on the boy and has the boy, Weiss practice his piece slowly to then increase the tempo and play extremely fast. The strict amount of work that Poussin puts on the child leads to a heart defect and eventually leads to his death during the audition of a lifetime. This story reminds me a lot of what we learned about Mozart and how his father made him travel Europe as a child prodigy and how he eventually became one of the greatest classical musicians. The child played classical music very well, and the piece he played was very proper and orderly.

The violin ends up with grave-robber gypsies but Frederick Pope offers a place for the gypsies to live to own the violin. He is one of the greatest composers of his time, but he needs sex to inspire his compositions. This definitely brings in the era of Romanticism and ironically, the romance of Frederick and Victoria is the main idea of this part of the film. When Victoria is in Russia getting inspiration for her novel, Frederick cheats on her with a gypsy and Victoria returns and blames the violin for ruining their relationship and making Frederick cheat. These ideas are totally coinciding with the Romantic era of music.

Next, the red violin ends up in Shanghai in the late 1960’s during the Communist Party Revolution. It is forbidden for foreign ideology and western music to be used. Xiang, one of the party members, goes to get rid of the red violin, a gift from her mother, but wanting to prove her loyalty to the State gives it to a man named Chou. We learned a lot about the Cultural Revolution reading Listen to This, and about how communism affected classical music in China. The instruments used in Chinese classical music are different, however, and the musicians only use 5 notes instead of 7.

The final part of ‘The Red Violin’ shows a man named Duval who is an appraiser and restorer to antique instruments. Duval tries to play it off that the violin is not worth much even though he knows it is worth over a million dollars, but doesn’t believe other people can appreciate it like himself so switches it with a copy and then takes the expensive red violin as a gift to his daughter. This is the rebirth of the red violin.

So throughout watching ‘The Red Violin’ I learned a lot about music history and could compare it to what we learned in Listen to This. Violinmaking and the baroque era were the main focus of the beginning of the movie. The violin then was owned by a child prodigy who died from the stress, unlike the real child prodigy Mozart, and Beethoven. The composer Frederick Pope and his need for sex to inspire music showed the Romantic era of music. We also learned about the Communist Cultural Revolution and how western music was forbidden and the stresses it led to. ‘The Red Violin’ matched what we have been learning about music history and put it in a more emotional and real aspect with the fictional story.

History of Music- Stradivarius Violins

1. There are 609 violins, 12 violas, and 64 cellos of Antonio Stradivari currently accounted for throughout the world. 

2. The Los Angeles Philharmonic owns the Stradivarius that Martin Chalifour plays as concertmaster. The violin was made by Antonio Stradivari in 1729. 

3.  A concertmaster plays the crucial role as a mediator between the conductor and the musicians. They guide the orchestra toward an ideal sound. 

Music: in aesthetics, science, and "the spheres"

The Naked Saint and the Foundations of Ancient Greece relating to Music

The moral of The Naked Saint by Wackenroder is to explain how music can change us. Once the summer moonlight was so beautiful and the love created by the lovers on a boat nearby was so magnificent that music played. Once that music was heard, the naked saint was no longer tied to the giant wheel of Time, and the saint was released from the enchantment that gave it anxiety and made it crazy. It turned into a beautiful angel and danced up into the heavens. The moral of the story is to not let time overcome us, but that music and love can calm and change even the craziest being. Also, there is some irony in the fact that the naked saint was so angered by how others lived so carefree or by doing jobs he thought was worthless, when he himself was spinning a giant wheel of Time and so concerned about Time he couldn’t enjoy anything and was extremely unhappy.

This relates a lot to how the Ancient Greeks thought, even if it was talking more about aesthetics when the Greeks thought of music as more of a science. It especially related to a story about how the mathematician Pythagoras used music to save a member of his community from committing arson. Pythagoras played a different mode of music (not the Phrygian mode) and the youth became calm. This was another example of how music could change someone and the effects music has.

Also, in the story the naked saint is outside and the moonlight and probably the stars beauty was part of what created the music. In Ancient Greece, Pythagoras was an astronomer and musician, and music was viewed as a science as well as an art. When the stars and planets rotated in balanced proportions they made heavenly music- the music of the spheres, as said in “Music in Greek Philosophy,” just like in the story of the naked saint. Greek philosophers spoke of harmony throughout the universe, and how music on earth was simply the audible expression of that harmony. They believed by studying the ratios created by music we could comprehend the secrets of the universe. At the end of The Naked Saint, the saint travels to the heavens and it seems he fully understands the secrets of the universe now just like the Ancient Greeks believed music could.

Later, music was considered one of the seven liberal arts, still a science because all of the liberal arts required critical thinking and would free the mind. A Roman music theorist named Boethius also developed that music was divided into three general types: music of the spheres, music of the human body, and earthly vocal and instrumental music. He also showed a difference between someone who studies music and one who performs it, all in his manuscripts the Fundamentals of Music in the 5^th and 6^th century. The music from the naked saint would be part of the music of the spheres. 

Herman Being

The Main Characters of The Musical Ascent of Herman Being by Robert Danziger 

Herman Being is a 27 year-old computer processor living in New York trying to find love for a woman and especially for classical music. Jean is his love interest who is a bright grad student at NYU getting her masters degree in music. Ben Walden is a Brooklyn musician and longtime friend of Herman's Aunt Irene, and he helps Herman to better understand classical music. Lyall Pratt is the personnel manager at Herman's work, who takes the promotion Herman wants and eventually fights with Herman leading to a shooting and lawsuit. Other characters include Duncan Latren, an arrogant grad student and music critic at NYU, and Aunt Irene, a librarian at NYU.