Picking up the pieces
May 4th, 2008 Posted in classical music, music
In my last post I wanted to see if anybody could guess a particular classical piece from hearing a single note, the single note in question being:
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Two listeners (Miss M. and ACD) impressively pinned this down to Beethoven almost immediately. Given just a slightly longer rendition of the sample resulted in a correct guess of the particular piece, the part in the presto of Beethoven’s 9th in which — as another commenter, Mitch, described — “it goes from brooding to joyous”.
I find it really interesting trying to determine at which point a series of notes changes from being, well, just a series of notes into being a universally recognizable melody. Everyone reading this probably has a certain section of their brain reserved for that particular theme, but when listening to music when does your brain kick in and scream “I know this!”?
It’s probably not quite here:
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Or here:
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But maybe now?
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It’s particularly fascinating that after listening to the whole theme:
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if you go back and listen to the short ones they seem a lot more obvious. Apparently, consciously knowing which music is about to be played makes your brain give that sharp recognition response with far fewer notes than would ordinarily be needed. Obviously it’s not terribly surprising that you can “recognize” a piece from a single note when you are told what that piece is going to be, but it isn’t just consciously recognizing a piece. It’s not just like someone telling you “you are about to hear the Ode to Joy theme” and you listen to that one note and confirm that indeed, it is the beginning of the theme. When you hear that single note again it is a primal feeling, a low level blast of recognition. Once you know what music the note is from it is almost impossible to avoid that recognition. It’s like trying not to read writing: once you see a written word you instantly identify it with a concept, it’s impossible to see it as just a bunch of lines.
Listening to a new piece of music is sort of like learning a new language. You initially get faced with all these sounds and melodies which you can sort of follow, but don’t have their own bit of brainspace. If you hear the notes which make up the melody one by one, there probably would not be a sudden moment of recognition, they are all just notes because you do not yet understand the piece. They are like a foreign word, which you understand is a word, but you do not have any mental object associated with it. If it were spelled differently you wouldn’t notice. It’s non-meaning would not be affected. In the same way you probably couldn’t tell if one of the notes in the music were altered.
Eventually you get to the stage in which those melodies provoke an instant response. The words make sense. The music has been imprinted into your head in such a way that it has become a piece of you. You can hum the melodies.
I can sort of feel this process happening sometimes. When a piece has first managed to burrow into my head and stake out a bit of territory for itself, I will sometimes have stress dreams in which it is endlessly looping in the background. It’s an almost unpleasant experience, but it’s also almost a given that this music will then become one of my favorite pieces, so all the not-quite-sleep trauma is totally worth it.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
Paul Hindemith, a favourite composer of mine, talks about this phenomenon in “A Composer’s World”. He writes that a single note has no musical properties, but becomes musical through its interaction with other notes. He argues that the entire meaning of music is self-referential; music has no predetermined meaning or emotional content, but instead gains personal resonance by its association with emotions that the listener has previously experienced.
This is a book I think you might be interested in, based on what you talk about on this blog – it goes into a lot of detail on the philosophical and psychological basis of music. Tough going at the beginning, when he talks about medieval philosophies of music, but well worth your time.
May 4th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
By repeatedly calling your first example “a single note” you’re missing the clue(s) that permit the instant identification of the piece from which it comes. It’s NOT “a single note.” It’s a single CHORD, and not merely a chord, but an ORCHESTRATED chord. If, for example, one heard that same chord played on a piano and not orchestrated, the identification of the piece from which it comes would be hugely more difficult if not absolutely impossible. Only if that chord was something fairly unique, like, say, the famous “Tristan Chord” from Wagner’s T&I could its source piece be quickly identified. The major chord of your first example played on a piano could have been identified as coming from any number of works in the Classical period, not to mention from periods before and after.
Understand the difference?
ACD
May 4th, 2008 at 10:24 pm
My guess of 9 was mostly based on probability rather than recognition. 3 and 5 were out, and 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8 didn’t seem as likely as 6 or 9.
It’s interesting that you are writing about this now, as I’ve been giving this idea a lot of though these last few days. I had to review a premiere after only hearing it once. My main reaction was confusion, something I think perhaps would be less of an issue in subsequent hearings. Sometimes it’s too bad the newspaper can’t wait.
May 4th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
Oops.
My sentence,
“The major chord of your first example played on a piano could have been identified as coming from any number of works in the Classical period….”
is missing a word. It should have read:
“The major chord of your first example played on a piano could have been identified CORRECTLY as coming from any number of works in the Classical period….”
ACD
May 5th, 2008 at 11:33 am
Osbert:
Thanks for the reading recommendation! I just bought it used off of Amazon for $10. Hopefully it won’t just be sat in my “to be read” pile for too long once it arrives.
ACD:
Come on, of course I understand the difference between an individual note and a chord, I’m just using language loosely. Otherwise we’d be playing “guess which piece starts with an E” which would be pretty much the least awesome game ever.
Miss M.:
I thought it might be 3/5/9 type deduction, as that’s what I would do too. You get credit to, errr, revel in anyway. I’ve always been kind of curious as to how easy it is for critics to judge a performance they have only heard once. It seems like a totally different job than critiquing a piece you have heard fifty different performances of before.
May 6th, 2008 at 4:32 am
Ben: My, “Understand the difference?” referred not to a chord versus a single note (I of course knew you knew the difference between the two), but to the difference between an orchestrated chord versus the same chord played on the piano in a challenge such as the one you posed.
ACD
May 10th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
My feeling with Beethoven has been singular until recently. Since I love his music so much, when I hear anything, the Overture to Leonore, Fur Elise, any of the symphonies, the Emperor piano concerto, his one terrific violin concerto, it feels like my heart expands. His music hits me so hard, it’s usually too much to feel and the tears come. In my car, at home, with people or alone. I can’t listen to him at work. It’s too hard to come back to the world.
But other pieces have their hold on me. Mahler’s first (and I will debate the merits of that piece with anyone; it’s glorious), The Pines of the Appian Way, Styrian Tarantella, by Debussy (the theme to the New Releases on NPR), the Overture to Russlan and Ludmila, by Glinka, they all just…get me. And I couldn’t recgnize them all given that one note that my brain loves to hear.
Thanks for the post, and the great blog.
May 10th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Thanks for the very heartfelt comment Mitch, and the compliment.
I find that sometimes a piece will really cut into me, and sometimes it will sort of flit over, depending on the environment and state of mind I am in. As far as Beethoven goes (and I still don’t think I’m anywhere near appreciating him properly) the Grosse Fugue, the Op. 111 piano sonata, the first movement of the 6th symphony all really hit me pretty hard.
ben