“…an aspiration for me as a musician: to create an aural space, if you will, that is not only structurally and esthetically satisfying, but that also allows for the individual listener or player within it to have her own experience—an experience that perhaps leaves one feeling alone, but that brings one back to one’s Self, that affirms one’s deepest feelings and longings.”
Myra Melford in “Aural Architecture: The Confluence of Freedom”,
Chapter 8 of Arcana: Musicians On Music, edited by John Zorn, page 119
I open with this quote for a couple of reasons.
First of all, it aptly mirrors the experience and resulting motivation that I recently described in a blog entitled “The Lamb Played Piccolo.” (C.f. my blog on April 2, 2012.)
Secondly, her title references architecture. I’ve been thinking a lot about architecture-music connections of late. Consistent with my normal modus operandi the energy of my thinking attracted a source of further thought and inspiration. (Sort of the opposite of school where you are plied with sources that all too often don’t stimulate energized thinking.)
I’ve long had a fascination with architecture in a very practical sense. I love to be in built spaces. The ones that work best for me create a response very much like the music experience that Melford and I have described. The experience is most sublime when I am the only one in the structure. I very much enjoy walking through downtown indoor urban labyrinths on Sunday mornings when the only ones there are me and a few homeless folks seeking shelter. There’s nothing like rounding a corner and coming upon a fabricated canyon that stretches above and below me with snakes of stilled escalators reaching from one level to another. I could spend time analyzing and contemplating my response, and have done so, but it has virtually nothing to do with my appreciation.
It’s been said that architecture isn’t “about something.” A rich man may build a mausoleum in memory of his wife, but it isn’t “about” her. An overpass may be constructed to be graceful and to fit the landscape (wouldn’t that be nice?), and it can be fun to traverse a cleverly made one, but it’s not “about” a trip across town. The “meaning” is in the use.
There’s a wonderful old adage that gothic architecture is like frozen music. An inversion of that thought also makes sense to me—music is liquid architecture. The comparison leads to a reasonable question. Why are we constantly deluged with the insistence that music is about something? Someone might say “because music is emotional”. My proposition is that architecture is, too. But it doesn’t matter because emotion isn’t a meaning it’s a response.
Igor Stravinsky famously said, “Music is powerless to express anything at all,” and “My music is best understood by children and animals.” I like the implication that arises when these two quotes are brought together—while music can’t express anything it can be understood. It can be understood in the same way that a child “understands” a toy, or a dog “understands” a head stroke, or that I “understood” the Cathedral Basilica of Salvador in Bahia, Brazil or a mosque I entered in the city of Male in the Maldives or the center court of the old Marshall Fields in Chicago.
It’s a virtual deal breaker when I hear someone say that their instrumental composition is “about this great breakfast my girlfriend made me,” or “about the faint smile on my father’s lips when we reconciled at his deathbed.” At that point I’m back in grade school trying to see sheep on a hillside.
This has nothing to do, of course, with the effectiveness of sounds from “real life” used in music. It’s not contrary to the beauty of Don Vliet using the rhythm of windshield wipers to create a song, or Harry Partch using elements of his hobo life to structure his music, or Steve Reich’s applying recordings of street preachers and the pulse of train rides for musical form. The music isn’t “about” these things; it uses them as raw material.
This all leads to issues of intention that we’ll address soon.
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