Week 8 assignment: essay – interrelationships reflection apa format | Applied Sciences homework help

1. Listen to a piece of church music, such as Sergey Rachmaninov’s Vespers. Describe your emotional reaction to the music. Is there such a thing as religious music? If so, what are its identifying qualities?

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MUSIC

two tHeories: formaLism and expressionism Music may not only evoke feelings in the listener but also reveal the structures of those feelings. Presumably, then, the form of An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss not only evokes feelings analogous to the feelings a day climbing in the Alps would arouse in us but also interprets those feelings and gives us insight into them. The Formalists of music, such as Eduard hanslick and Edmund Gurney,3 deny any connection of music with nonmusical situations. For them, the apprehension of the tonal structures of music is made possible by a unique musical faculty that produces a unique and wondrous effect, and they refuse to call that effect anything that sug- gests alliance with everyday feelings. They consider the grasp of the form of music so intrinsically valuable that any attempt to relate music to anything else is spurious. As Igor Stravinsky, one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century, in- sisted, “Music is by its very nature essentially powerless to express anything at all.’’4 In other words, the Formalists deny that music has a subject matter, and, in turn, this means that music has no content, that the form of music has no revelatory meaning. We think that the theory of the Formalists is plainly inadequate, but it is an important warning against thinking of music as a springboard for hearing, for nonmusical associations and sentimentalism. Moreover, much work remains— building on the work of philosophers of art such as Langer and Scruton—to make clearer the mechanism of how the form of music evokes feeling and yet at the same time interprets or gives us insight into those feelings. Much simpler—and more generally accepted than either the Formalist theory of hanslick and Gurney or our own theory—is the Expressionist theory: Music evokes feelings. Composers express or communicate their feelings through their music to their audiences. We should experience, more or less, the same feelings as the composer. But Mozart was distraught both psychologically and physically when he composed the Jupiter Symphony, one of his last and greatest works, and melancholy was the pervading feeling of his life shortly before his untimely death. Yet where is the melancholy in that symphony? Certainly there is melancholy in his Requiem, also one of his last works. But do we simply undergo melancholy in listening to the Requiem? Is it alone evoked in us and nothing more? Is there not a transformation of melancholy? Does not the structure of the music—“out there’’—allow us to perceive the structure of melancholy and thus understand it better? If so, then the undoubted fact that the Requiem gives extraordinary satisfaction to most listeners is given at least partial explication by our theory that music reveals as well as evokes emotion. sound Apart from feelings, sound might also be thought of as one of the subject matters of music, because in some music it may be that the form gives us insight into sounds. This is somewhat similar to the claim that colors may be the subject matter of some abstract painting. The tone C in a musical composition, for example, has its ana- logue in natural sounds, as in a bird song, somewhat the way the red in an abstract 3Eduard hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (London: Novello, 1891), and Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (London: Smith, Elder, 1880). 4Igor Stravinsky, an Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936), p. 83. jac16871_ch09_224-253.indd 233 12/11/17 9:02 PM 234 ChAPTER 9 painting has its analogue in natural colors. however, the similarity of a tone in music to a tone in the nonmusical world is rarely perceived in music that empha- sizes tonal relationships. In such music, the individual tone usually is so caught up in its relationships with other tones that any connection with sounds outside the music seems irrelevant. It would be rare, indeed, for someone to hear the tone C in a Mozart sonata and associate it with the tone C of some bird song. Tonal relationships in most music are very different in their context from the tones of the nonmusical world. Conversely, music that does not emphasize tonal relationships—such as many of the works of John Cage—can perhaps give us insight into sounds that are noises rather than tones. Since we are surrounded by noises of all kinds—humming machines, talking people, screeching cars, and banging garbage cans, to name a few—we usually turn them off in our conscious minds so as not to be distracted from more important matters. This is such an effective turnoff that we may be surprised and sometimes delighted when a composer introduces such noises into a musical composition. Then, for once, we listen to rather than away from them, and then we may discover these noises to be intrinsically interesting, at least briefly. PERCEPTION KEY The Content of Music 1. Select two brief instrumental compositions you enjoy. Choose one that you believe has recognizable emotions as its primary musical content. Choose another that you believe has sounds rather than tones as its primary musical content. Listen to both with a group of people to see if they agree with you. What is the result of your experiment?