Think
about this. Music is invisible. Yes, it may be there as a background to
visual images on television or the movie screen. And yes, music may cause you to conjure
visions in your mind, but it is always delivered to your sound receptors (your ears!)
in...invisible wave patterns.
This
makes music distinct from painting, sculpture and photographic art. I occasionally remind my listening students
that if they go to an art museum, they may gaze at a Monet painting for a few
minutes or even a half hour. At any time
during the process if they wish to look away, they may do so. The painting is not going anywhere. It is fixed on the wall of the museum. You can look back at it again whenever you
wish that day – next week or next year!
But
a movement of music by Beethoven or Bach is delivered to us in time - real time, one sound or group of
sounds at a time and always invisibly.
True, the composer has given us written shorthand for the music, the
musical notation read by the performers which they translate into a musical
performance. However, whether the
performance is a live one we are attending or a recording being played back to
us, it all happens in time. Of course,
if we are controlling the playback we can stop and start it at will and achieve
the museum painting’s “not going anywhere” attribute. But the intent of the composer is always to
have a continuous, non-stop presentation of their musical ideas.
The
invisible aspect of music is one that has always fascinated my mentor, Dr. Saul
Feinberg – so much so that it spawned one of his important contributions to the
teaching of music listening. Why not
give listeners - especially new listeners - what he called a ‘picturization’ of
the music? This question led him to
create his ‘Blueprints for Musical Understanding’ which inspired my own
‘Listening Guides.’ These visual guides
are a vehicle for making an invisible art form visible.
The
guides contain a mixture of brief, numbered descriptions such as: “Trumpets
enter loudly,” actual pictorial representations of instruments, musical symbols
and tiny segments of musical notation.
All of these numbered events can help the listener follow and ‘stay
with’ the music as it invisibly progresses through real time. Often, after years of listening with full
attention, one may well find that listening guides are no longer
necessary. But many of the individuals
that Saul taught, as well as the majority of students I have worked with, have said
that they found listening guides to be really helpful.
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