Quote:
Originally Posted by haydnfan
I can only conclude that you don't listen that much to classical music, and you thought you were being clever positing what you believed to be an oxymoron. For the above in order, counterexamples: (a) is just not logical, (b) Haydn, (c) Shostakovich. String Quartets are not intrinsically positive or negative, but instead run the whole gamut of emotional language, as they stand as the pinnacle of musical expression.
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The thing I enjoyed most about your response was your conclusion about my background: Failing to grasp the paradox in my analogy, you concluded I mustn't be qualified to make one!
"Mr. Christ, I've been mulling over your hyperbolic statement about a camel passing through the eye of a needle and, since I don't understand it, I can only conclude you know nothing about camel husbandry."
About the meaning of my comment: A string quartet is instrumental, therefore no words are involved unless the piece is very non-traditional (an exception being the suppressed version of Berg's Lyric Suite, which has corresponding autobiographical content that wasn't made public until the 1970s). The majority of compositions for string quartet fall into the category of absolute music, meaning that there is not content in the representational sense. To criticize a string quartet composer for not being a positive thinker would therefore be ridiculous, since no specific manifestation of positive thinking may be deduced from absolute music.
Instrumental music by a composer like Bach is often described as joyful, but that is because the
tone of certain of his pieces seems exuberant, not because his compositional solutions to formal, harmonic and contrapuntal problems may be said to espouse literal positive thoughts. (Just the idea of it makes me laugh!)
For that, Bach would need to argue his point in words and, as John Ashbery once said, "Music is like a philosophical discussion in which
the terms of the argument are not known."
The point of the joke is that literary accomplishment has as much to do with politics as absolute music does with an agenda of positive thought: Absolutely nothing. Ezra Pound was a Mussolini-worshiping fascist and T.S. Eliot was an anti-Semite, yet even the most humane critics do not condemn their work based merely on their beliefs. Richard Strauss was Hitler's pet composer, yet we still listen to him and his music is no worse for his personal toadying. Ditto Heidegger's more lasting ideas.
Now, about my background:
Normally, I wouldn't bring this up, but I'm the son of a violin and English teacher and began playing the piano when I first learned to walk. I received my first lessons a year after. I have a degree in classical composition and a minor in performance, have taught both piano and composition professionally, and have worked as a studio musician and arranger for most of my life. A few of my essays on music have been published by university presses; my most commonly quoted contribution concerns prosody and music notation.
Anyway, thanks for the laugh!