I do not consider, Marcus, you need be bashful about being a 'lay' musical amateur and as lacking the ability to offer discourse about music unimpregnated by an impressive array of technical terms. I am exactly in the same position, as are, I guess, several other contributers to this friendly (and indispensable!) forum. Yes, it would be nice to be able to offer erudite contributions studded with words like 'appoggiatura', get their meanings exactly right, persuade other people to think 'Ha, this chap knows of what he speaks' - and, perhaps even more fruitfully, enhance one's pleasure in hearing music by being able to read treatises on the Beethoven quartets without, several times in each paragraph, having to lay hold of a dictionary of music.
I am sure my life would be richer if I could do these things. And I would then be more confident in talking about music without risk of committing a howler or being declared a proper mountebank. However I console myself with the thought that a musical training and ready familiarity with 'technical' terminology aren't actually necessary. And I stick out my neck and offer the suggestion that a thorough musical background can sometimes be a hindrance. Dangerous waters these! What I think matters above all else is whether or not one has the capacity to respond to music. From your description of yourself as someone who has devoted years to the careful collection of thousands of recordings, and who, again like me, is positively itching to hear the Lionel Sainsbury concerto or the Gunther Raphael symphonies, I am assured you certainly possess that impulse for music. For why else would you willingly devote a small fortune to filling up the attic with several thousand circular pieces of plastic or metallic discs, or have severe palpitations that the forthcoming concert or recital might have already sold out?
Maybe the only relevance of this contribution to the 'objective/subjective' thread is my sense that a great deal of fog has drifted our way. I simply have no idea of what it is to achieve an objective apprehension of, say, a Beethoven quartet, as opposed to succumb to a merely subjective one. On Sunday afternoon I was lucky enough to grab a front row seat in a recital of piano trios given by a young and talented group (the Trio Dei Mezzo) in a converted barn, now an inspiring arts centre, close to home and set in the gently undulating hills of Suffolk. However familiar I am with the Brahms Op 8 Trio, and how many times I have heard it, as soon as the music commenced the rest of my life with all its petty preoccupations dropped away as being of utterly no moment, my whole being gave itself over to this supremely glorious music, and nothing mattered anymore save this wondrous arrangement of sounds and their internal development. I woke this morning with joy, the music still with me. Was my hearing of the piece subjective or objective? I do not know what to do with such a question. All I do know is that if I believed in the deity I would go down on my knees and thank him for having blessed me with the ability to obtain such rapture from (objectively) the scrapings of stringed instruments and the thumpings upon taut piano wires. Since there is no deity I suppose the only alternative is to express astonishment that my genes or shape of my ear and neuro-physiological apparatus can permit such experiences.
And that - if readers of this epistle can bear with me - gives rise to what I think is a far less time-wasting, but hugely perplexing, question. Namely just what is this 'capacity to respond to music'? How should we understand it? Is it something wholly determined, as is one's height or hair colour? Whatever it is, can it be taught or developed (as opposed to learning to read a score, or progressing from Three Blind Mice to a [very rudimentary] rendition of a movement of a Haydn sonata - presumably things that can be taught given lots of discipline and practice)? Why do some people, including Marcus and hopefully myself, have it in abundance, whilst others, irrespective of intelligence, seem to lack it entirely? I know such questions are hardly original, but they are deeply perplexing. And reading potential answers to them suggests to me that we have not much progressed in the treatment of them than 18th century aestheticians who kidded themselves by postulating some kind of curious 'inner sense' and thereby evaded any real confrontation with the actual question.
Ah, mere words, and the last 20 minutes would have been more fruitful had I devoted them to a piece of music, or at least the washing up. But I return to the suggestion that maybe a trained musical background and immersion in musicology can be a hindrance and can (oooh heresy, I hear others proclaim) actually get in the way of listening to music. An illustration may suffice. In teenage years I threw myself energetically into twanging electric guitars, bashing drums and making both musical mayhem and a hell of a racket. Progress at school became a trifling issue in comparison to working up our dubious catalogue of yells and ditties so that we could, one night in Birmingham, fulfil our desperate ambition to stand on stage as a support band to an emerging group from up the M6 in Liverpool known as the Beatles. An ambition achieved, although sadly from the next morning onwards the world turned out to be exactly the same as on any other morning. Then, at the age of 17, I had the quite unaccountable experience of hearing some piano music of Chopin and being overwhelmed by its utter beauty. Heaven knows what happened inside my head, but to the utter bewilderment of parents I marched home and promptly dumped a heap of treasured Elvis LPs in the dustbin. Within a fortnight I began to relish the Op 29 Suite for 9 instruments of Schoenberg. The rich stock of LPs in the local public library gave me a sight akin to that of Gerontius when he catches sight of his Almighty. I recall being apprehended by my Headmaster for skiving off games and being seen instead issuing forth from the public library [a] failing to wear a school cap, (b) clutching a cigarette, whilst [c] clutching in my other hand a cardboard carrying case containing Schoenberg. On account of [a] and I was chastised as a tiresome minor miscreant, but [c] led me to being viewed as a subversive and dangerous influence within the school, and that, along with a healthy interest in girls, led to an actual expulsion a few months later. Fortunately I had by that time gained entry to York University then setting up what became a marvellously exciting music department under Wilfred Mellors who, lovely man that he was, displayed equal hospitality to non-music students as to his own students. Music, and all sorts of music, was all about me and into it I plunged. Britten, Pears, Janet Baker, Brendel, Hans Keller and countless others were not only frequent visitors but happily chatted informally to students. The Amadeus was the resident quartet, and I happily got beaten at chess many times by Siegmund Nissel in the common room (he was a formidable player!) and spent a term with my ear pressed to the wall in my room in college listening to Martin Lovett endlessly practising when he was allocated the room next door. 44 years later here I am, like you Marcus, wondering whether the structure of the house can really stand the weight of musical material within it and hugely hoping that Gunther Raphael will become yet another treasured composer.
Anecdotes aside, the point to be made is that there I was at the age of 17, without a trace of any musical training (I had scoffed at an earlier offer of music lessons as a thoroughly cissy business), innocently unaware of the difference between a bass and a clef, and yet relishing all I heard in Schoenberg's music. (I have fortunately progressed beyond Schoenberg.) But all the way through my life so-called 'difficult' music has proved no difficulty at all for me (and Alan Howe take note!) Hugh Wood provides almost as much pleasure as Raff. The past few years have seen me joyfully anticipating the steady emergence of the 'Naxos' quartets of Maxwell Davies with as much sheer delight as when I first worked through all the Haydn quartets (well, to be truthful, not quite, for no quartets can be quite as good as those of Haydn). I also readily recognise (no names!) some music as simply awful, dismal, best swept under the carpet music. So I shall be rude to anyone who charges me with lack of discrimation.
Profuse apologies to others: I did not intend to be so long-winded, but having started, out flowed the words. And thus a general question to others: here you have someone with a deep love of music and with, like Marcus and others, no musical training whatsoever. I also squirm and wince at ugly non-musical sounds. Hopefully we have in abundance a natural capacity to listen to music and to properly and fully respond to it, as opposed to merely hearing it along with all the other noises that impinge upon the ear. So what on earth is this capacity? How should we think it? As for me, I am perpetually astonished that humanity seems to be built such that it is not at all the case that for a good number of people there is no recognition or awareness that there is simply no alternative but to be utterly halted in one's tracks and to stand spellbound and marvel in a simple phrase in, say, a Schubert song. How could that be?
Peter
