Mother is out of town and Dad had an extra ticket to the symphony, so we went and heard a Brahms's concerto for the violin and cello and Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5. The guest violinist Giora Schmidt was very good. He is only 25 years old and quite good looking, although he has deep set eyes and combined with a head tilt downward and a looking up from under his brows turns his eyes into pockets of shadow. The cellist also seemed good, but her portion tended to get lost in the orchestra and I had a hard time hearing her. David Itkin, our musical director/conductor, said there was a problem with "balance" in the Brahms's piece, by which he meant you can expect the cellist to get lost. He also used words like "texture" and "palette" and "wash" in a little pre-concert lecture walking us through the movements of the music. What other words was he supposed to use? Dad and I didn't know, but we both agreed it was borrowed language and not very precise anyway. How are you supposed to describe music? English is insufficient to it, and maybe human language generally. Maybe we should go through Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century and circle all the adjectives.
Dad said in advance he was more excited about the Brahms, but when it was all over I liked the Shostakovitch best. I closed my eyes as it started and tried to place myself in the Mikhailovsky Theater, which according to an article I read this week on the neoplasticity of brains, is possible to a surprising degree. So why not? And then I tried to recapture the street outside the Mikhailovsky, because if you were there at the theater that is the place you would have come from and the world that would be waiting for you as you listened. The 5th Symphony started out angular and hard edged (again with the non-pertinent adjective problem, but how do you describe music?) and then develops a softer theme, and the whole symphony plays out those two ideas. It was over before you knew it and left me wanting to hear it again.
2 comments:
Not to disappoint, but the actual musical descriptive terms I was taught in undergrad and that I teach at high school include words such as texture, balance, and line. I have to remind the kids what timbre means. "It's like color." And they say, "Oh, okay."
I wouldn't have said "wash", though. Probably "wall of sound", even though it's not very classical in the images it evokes.
I enjoyed the Shostakovich as well. And as we were leaving, we heard a high school boy declare, "That's better than the Lakers!" Ha.
Thanks Rachel! Actually I was thinking of you during Itkin's talk and wish I had mentioned when we ran into each at the Capitol Hotel. Of course terms like "balance" and "line" are more literally descriptive, and even terms like "texture," "palette," and "wash" are commonly used. I didn't mean to say Itkin was making them up. But I am curious at what point they entered musical vocabulary. I associate terms like that with visual art, and while they are certainly evocative when applied to music, they still feel inexact. It is as if aural experience is constantly switching back to the vocabulary of sight or touch to hone in on an aspect of world (sound) that is similar yet quite distinct. Why is music ineffable in this way? It is like spiritual life in this respect, which we consistently describe in metaphorical terminology from other areas of life.
Post a Comment