Quote of the week
S. Wallace, commenting at Rand Simberg’s place:
Context does matter, pro and con. I can no longer listen to Copland’s Rodeo without “Beef: It’s what for dinner” popping up, and Gershwin is now permanently linked to American Airlines, unfortunately. Land of Hope and Glory is no longer recognized as such, and if you played it trying to evoke the original context people might think you were instead doing a satire on college graduations, and would miss the meaning entirely. On the plus side, the fourth movement of the Pines of Rome is made stronger by knowing what it is supposed to represent.
But you don’t necessarily need a connotation, though it truly helps. Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica is powerful and evocative even by itself, even though I have never seen the movie the score was written for. And I do not know what great sorrow Beethoven was trying to evoke with the second movement of the Seventh Symphony, but my mind has supplied scenes enough. Music is the calculus of the soul. No words are needed. Every human emotion, every human thought can be brought forward via pure music, and can be made ultra powerful with but a slight connection to a visual picture, even if in but the mind’s eye. And that naturally leads me to wonder if analog vibrations are somehow the fundamental unit of human thought, instead of digital bits.
The Seventh has long been my favorite of Beethoven’s nine, precisely for the opening of that second movement. Is it the slow unwinding of someone gravely ill, the transition from autumn to winter, a march to the gallows? I will never know for sure, and I delight in that lack of certainty.
Digitalization, as the hardcore audiophiles will tell you, is always at best an approximation. And the electrical signals, or whatever they are, that power our brains seem to have many more states than simply On and Off.
(For a similar take on pop instrumentals, try this.)
fillyjonk »
31 October 2009 · 7:58 am
It took a while after watching Soylent Green for me to be able to listen to the Pastoral Symphony (and the other pieces they played in the “going home” center) without feeling sad and a sense of dread.
Yes, I understand it’s now fashionable to laugh at Soylent Green as overblown, but the movie just made me feel sad and twitchy.
McGehee »
31 October 2009 · 10:29 am
Regardless of what other contexts I ever encounter for Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue,” I will always picture James Caan and John Beck on roller skates.
Apparently I had never seen the classic Phantom of the Opera before Rollerball showed up on TV.