Initial Steps In Understanding A New Piece
One of the things I always try and emphasize to people unfamiliar with classical music is the long, long process of getting to grips with a piece. I don’t know if everybody experiences this, but for me it takes significantly longer to “understand” even just one movement of a symphony, compared to music of other genres. I really have to slog away at a piece, listening many times over, before it starts to make sense. I think it’s a combination both of the extended length, and of the subtleties and complexities of the form.
While introspecting into the appreciation of my latest classical insinuations, I’ve been trying to identify some of the stages of understanding in the acclimatization process.
One of the most important milestones is becoming familiar enough with the piece that you can routinely identify where you are in the music. That is, having a vague awareness of all the little musical episodes, and approximately which order they come in. Initially when listening through a piece there are particularly strong melodies or musical textures which I can latch on to without really knowing anything about the piece. After a few listens I start to get a feeling for the musical structures around these catches, and anticipate them. For me this is stage one of understanding a piece. It’s somewhere around this point when I’ll be able to whistle a few snippets of the melodies.
However, at this stage most of the rest of the music sounds sort of blurred. I hear the music as a string of the standout sections mentioned above, connected together by material which is confused and not very interesting. The next stage of understanding is when melodies start magically popping out of these mires, when instead of a jumble of instruments playing pleasant but pointless interconnecting bridges, these sections start to crystallize into understandable forms. Each instrument seems to pull apart from the others, and melodic strands are illuminated like dewed gossamer. I think that’s stage two.
The rest of my stages will have to wait for some more introspection.
February 17th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
It’s also not a bad idea, I think, to learn a little about how classical music pieces are organized, and about the history of the subject–how these organizing principles developed. This is an aspect of classical music that has little similarity with popular music.
What is “sonata form” (or actually, what are “sonata forms”)? What is really going on with what the composer does with her/his themes? How and when did a genre like the symphony get started, and how did it develop through Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, and so on? Why exactly did 20th-century composers go all crazy? Did they perhaps have some good reasons for doing so, and might that be something worth looking into?
I don’t mean that one has to get very dry-as-dust theoretical about such questions, but in this case a little knowledge is not a dangerous thing. It can actually help clarify matters.
February 17th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
Hey Jon,
Yes, good point. Just knowing vaguely where you expect the same melodies to occur (i.e., minimally realizing that you are likely to hear very similar material at the beginning and the end of the piece, with variations on it in the middle) gives one an initial roadmap for earlier classical pieces, conversely, you know not to necessarily expect anything too predictable from the more recent stuff.
Right when I started it was definitely a complete shock when I discovered that all this noise had a structure to it. I suppose now I’ve come to automatically listen for it, but things might have become clearer a lot quicker had I been more aware then!