Hell, I could develop a taste for it with that as the model. Why aren't the essays I read as enjoyable as that? *sigh*
I also have an unhealthy love for texts I have to permute and restructure in my head until all the nested clauses make sense. Probably that helps.
I always saw the two forms as...not being competitive, but rather working along parallel tracks. They evoke the same emotions, but in different ways, and whether you respond better to one or the other depends on you as a person, your mood that day, or other factors peculiar to the one doing the responding.
"I believe that music surpasses even language in its power to mirror the innermost recesses of the human soul." --George Crumb
Sometimes I worry my disagreement with this belief means either I don't really undersand music, or I don't really understand the human soul. :D
I think a lot of musicians (at least, the ones I'm in classes with) see the relationship between music and language in terms of performance vs. theory/musicology, not music-as-a-whole vs. text-as-a-whole, and that doesn't help. (Although I'd argue that reading a text has more to do with performance/analysis than with listening -- that the reader's job is to temporalize text.) But -- I remember reading through some Celan awhile back and thinking that it would be a travesty if a text like this were set to music (or used as the inspiration for music) because it communicated something intrinsically pre-timbral, if that makes sense -- something that had to be communicated through silence. I've never in my life heard or performed a piece of music I thought communicated something text couldn't.
One of my classes this week was on Boulez's third piano sonata, which was inspired by Mallarme's belief that whitespace has a critical role in text. The Boulez was nifty and interesting, and I've ordered a recording of it (there's exactly one on Amazon, and it's only available used) -- but the Mallarme I understood, immediately and viscerally. I couldn't even pretend to be analyzing it, because I was too busy experiencing it, and could find no way to distance myself from it. I don't think anyone can claim that about the Boulez sonata, awesome as it is.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-03-28 08:18 pm (UTC)I also have an unhealthy love for texts I have to permute and restructure in my head until all the nested clauses make sense. Probably that helps.
I always saw the two forms as...not being competitive, but rather working along parallel tracks. They evoke the same emotions, but in different ways, and whether you respond better to one or the other depends on you as a person, your mood that day, or other factors peculiar to the one doing the responding.
"I believe that music surpasses even language in its power to mirror the innermost recesses of the human soul." --George Crumb
Sometimes I worry my disagreement with this belief means either I don't really undersand music, or I don't really understand the human soul. :D
I think a lot of musicians (at least, the ones I'm in classes with) see the relationship between music and language in terms of performance vs. theory/musicology, not music-as-a-whole vs. text-as-a-whole, and that doesn't help. (Although I'd argue that reading a text has more to do with performance/analysis than with listening -- that the reader's job is to temporalize text.) But -- I remember reading through some Celan awhile back and thinking that it would be a travesty if a text like this were set to music (or used as the inspiration for music) because it communicated something intrinsically pre-timbral, if that makes sense -- something that had to be communicated through silence. I've never in my life heard or performed a piece of music I thought communicated something text couldn't.
One of my classes this week was on Boulez's third piano sonata, which was inspired by Mallarme's belief that whitespace has a critical role in text. The Boulez was nifty and interesting, and I've ordered a recording of it (there's exactly one on Amazon, and it's only available used) -- but the Mallarme I understood, immediately and viscerally. I couldn't even pretend to be analyzing it, because I was too busy experiencing it, and could find no way to distance myself from it. I don't think anyone can claim that about the Boulez sonata, awesome as it is.