I am always asked about how to listen to classical music, a topic for which myself struggled for years. I have to admit my lack of musical education when considering the professional knowledge required for answering this question. But I do sometimes despise the ways academias approach classical music, the ways which convey unnecessary ideas with the backup of considerable amount of professional knowledge. I was bewildered to read once about a study on how performers can keep their own parts in time with others in a quartet without a conductor. I was amazed by how those simple facts about music can be told elegantly in a scientific style. But what is the point of reconfirming scientifically the facts known by professional musicians? Well, I don't want to start the topic of attacking or defending the spirit of Renaissance, so I'd better stop here my complaints.
Thinking about classical music, too many subjects emerge in my mind simultaneously. It is true, probably to most other forms of the arts as well, that music cannot be only considered through music itself, but through other forms of the arts, such as paintings, literature, architecture and dancing. Maybe it is not necessary to learn music in order to appreciate paintings(though it helps in my case), but it is of great importance to know about paintings in order to understand classical music in a deeper sense. A conspicuous example is Debussy's compositions which are, cannot be more obviously stated abstractly, derived from expressionism in art. Of course, a musician has to learn about the structure, chords and composition techniques used in each of his piece in order to have a full understanding of his music, but that alone is still barely enough. One has to learn about the(forgive my lack of artistic jargons, but I'll try to explain my terms as clearly as possible within my own ability) strokes, the light and shade, and the micro and macro expressions in, for instance, Monet's paintings to understand the beginning of Debussy's Clair de Lune. When I played the piece for the first time on the piano sometimes back, all I thought about was the strokes, the colours and the differences between the detailed expressions when you stand close to a painting and the contrary effect you receive when standing farther. (I will not, however, comment on the pointillism by itself musically!!)
Likewise, the lack of knowledge on architecture will to great extent disadvantage one's potential in understanding music. I was one time talking to a friend who was very keen on architecture, about Baroque music . In the end, he asked me, "are we talking about those extravagant baroque buildings, or about music?" I laughed while responded, "probably more about you, less about me" He thought I knew something about the history of architecture, in which case I knew nothing about. I just told him what knew about architecture through music-its extravagance and irregularity with great balance and structural importance, even more so than Rococo and Classical Era, though possesses much more creative freedom in a sense. The talk with him helped significantly in my understanding of architecture but, unfortunately, not his music.
I remembered each time how classical music was mentioned in literature. Some of them were appropriate, others were just like buying unnecessary decorations for an abandoned room to demonstrate its liveliness. Milan Kundera addressed several times about Beethoven and even includes some of his manuscripts in his writings. They fit well in his writings as some kind of feeling was thus expressed as underlines which, in another way, might not be able to be expressed at all. I think it was four to five years ago I read Kundera's works in which he mentioned how he was taught by his piano teacher about Beethoven when he was a boy, "why he laid grass down let you to walk? Because there is a huge tree awaiting in front" It was too obvious a way to conclude Beethoven's style, but it fitted so well in his writings. Needless to say, Friedrich Nietzsche's 'Thus Spoke Zarathustra" was a book based on music first of all. Its strength comes from the musical sense it made in German. We can hardly figure about this when it is translated. I was bored by its Chinese version six years ago and am still not satisfied with an English version I have now with me. However, Richard Strauss provided an alternative way for me to peek into Zarathustra's German version. His orchestration work under the same name as Nietzsche's book is another great example of the integration between music, literature, history and, most important, philosophy-the short opening part of the huge piece already outlined Nietzsche's idea of the Cycle. Another example for me was Jean Cocteau's 'Diary of an Unknown' which I read twice years ago. I have all the reasons to believe the music sense within his diaries would be more magnificent if they were in French, instead of Chinese which is the language which makes some sense to me. (Now I realised one thing that it was not my fault of not understanding some of the books I read in Chinese sometimes back, it was the translators themselves did not understand and translated them with twisted meanings. It is of interest to note that I learned Chinese through foreign books which were translated into Chinese which were, obvious, weird in Grammar. Then I learned English through speaking and listening rather than reading and writing, so my whole language system turned into chaos.)
Well, well, well. It was a quite long journey, though I haven't yet felt tiredness. I choose to stop here and to reflect what I just wrote, and correct, possibly, some grammar mistakes inevitably appear each time I write!
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