| musical meaning
An excerpt from a book I am reading at the moment, 'Musicking' by Christopher Small:
'A score, of course, is not a musical work. It is not even the representation of it. It is a set of coded instructions that, when properly carried out, will enable performers not only to make sounds in a specific combination, called a musical work, but also to repeat that combination as many times as they desire. Players and listeners learn to recognize that combination and to give it a name, which may be Symphony no. 5 in C minor or 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini' or 'Scheherezade', but the fact that this title appears on the cover of the score does not mean that the musical work resides in its pages. We find there only a set of instructions for performing.
'Nor does the identity of the musical work lie in the sounds of which it is made. Individually, sounds are only sounds; their aural characteristics of timbre, pitch, intensity, duration, and attack and decay may allow us to attribute certain meanings to them, but nothing like the complex meanings that are carried out by even the simplest combination of sounds that we call a melody. Until they are placed into a relationship with one another, they do not yield even a melody, let alone a whole musical work, whose identity lies in the relationships that exist between the sounds.'
This, to me, could lead to very interesting description of the task of the interpreter: to identify, and bring into being, the relationships between the individual sounds we are playing. That is where resides musical meaning.
thoughts?
TW |