Per comprendere la musica non guardare alla musica ma a chi la comprende.
Non guardare alle fonti ma alla destinazione. Non guardare allo strumento che la produce ma all’orecchio di chi ascolta.
E’ questa l’idea principale che Roger Scruton illustra nel suo “Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation”.
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L’ Abbe Charles Batteux è stato il primo pensatore a formalizzare nel 1746 un’ estetica musicale nello scritto “Les beaux-arts reduits a un meme Principe”. Per lui…
… music, like the other arts, derives its significance and its appeal from the imitation of nature…
La diatriba sorse quasi subito, con i puristi da un lato e i “contaminati” dall’altro…
… By the end of the century a contest was being fought on behalf of absolute music (absolute Tonkunst) by those who thought that music’s significance as an abstract art was being diluted by ballet, opera and song…
Una diatriba che perdura anche oggi in forme solo leggermente diverse, ci si divide sulla domanda: la musica ha un significato?…
… The dispute is between those who affirm, and those who deny, that music has a meaning other than itself…
Ci sono alcuni termini che molti trovano insensati se riferiti alla musica…
… `imitation’, `representation’, `expression’, `content’…
Eppure, nella montagna di sproloqui che questa contrapposizione ha prodotto, c’è un concetto chiarificatore che tutti invariabilmente trascurano: quello di suono. Cos’è un suono musicale?…
… the true subjects of musical aesthetics: sound and how we perceive it…
C’è una lacuna evidente nella batteria di argomenti proposti dai puristi…
… Yet even Hanslick-with Edmund Gurney the most competent of the nineteenth-century writers in this field-failed to see that he had not given such an explanation and that, without it, his theory of music as an `absolute’ art was as unwarranted as the romantic idea of music as `the language of the emotions’…
La stessa definizione di “musica” data da Hanslick è infatti contraddittoria…
… music as forms moved in sounding…
Ma nei suoni non c’è niente, assolutamente niente che si muova!
Il bersaglio di Hanslick erano gli approcci espressionisti. Il suo intento era quello di confutarli…
… a refutation of the theory-increasingly popular in the wake of E. T. A. Hoffman’s music criticism and Schopenhauer’s `Metaphysics of Music”-that music is an expressive medium, whose purpose is to give voice to the inner life…
Il nemico di Hanslick è la visione della musica come metafora e poi, nel momento in cui è chiamato a definire cosa sia la musica, usa una metafora. C’è qualcosa che non va…
… reference to movement is in some sense figurative. For nothing in the world of sounds (nothing that we hear) moves… a theory which tries to explain music in terms of musical movement is not a theory of music at all… If we allow Hanslick to get away with assuming the existence of musical motion, why not allow his opponent to assume the existence of musical emotion?…
Il resoconto metaforico è inevitabile, se lo usa anche il castigamatti delle metafore possiamo ben dirlo.
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Il primo passo per comprendere la musica…
… The first step towards understanding music, therefore, is to understand sounds as objects of perception…
… Sounds, I argue, are secondary objects, which is to say objects whose nature and properties are determined by how they appear to the person of normal hearing…
L’oggetto secondario è qualcosa che emerge dal contatto con l’opera senza essere fisicamente nell’opera.
Facciamo un esempio impreciso ma con una valenza didattica, consideriamo che l’Arcimboldo sia un mero pittore di nature morte (frutta e ortaggi). Eppure, nei suoi quadri, emerge chiaramente un oggetto secondario: i ritratti di persone (in questo caso si ricorre a bassi trucchi per creare questo effetto). Qui l’esempio potrebbe anche essere fatto al contrario: Nell’Arcimboldo ritrattista emergono frutta e ortaggi.
La musica è compresa a prescindere dalle sue cause. Che è come dire: i ritratti si vedono a prescindere dalla conoscenza che abbiamo della frutta. Potremmo anche non sapere cosa sia un cetriolo e la cosa non è di ostacolo alla comprensione…
… can be understood without reference to their physical causes…
In questo senso il suono musicale è un fenomeno, non un oggetto con proprietà descrivibili. E’ qualcosa che si realizza attraverso la nostra interiorità, non nel mondo fisico. Un’immaginazione, non una realtà fisica.
Un sordo puo’ conoscere a menadito le caratteristiche esterne del suono (proprietà) poiché possono essere descritte e lui puo’ impararle. Ma poiché non potrà mai riprodurre il fenomeno del suono (che è interiore e si crea con l’ascolto) non saprà mai cos’è…
… Because sounds are pure events we can detach them, in thought and experience, from their causes, and impose upon them an order that is quite independent of any physical order in the world…
Allo stesso modo: la musica non è una sequenza di suoni ma un movimento, questo anche se solo la sequenza puo’ essere descritta…
… What they then hear is not a succession of sounds, but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that resides in the musical line…
I suoni (fisicamente immobili) filtrati dall’immaginazione generano la realtà secondaria del movimento.
Il significato della musica è quindi un “oggetto intenzionale”, per essere sperimentato richiede “intenzione”. Analogia: per vedere in una nuvola la forma di un dinosauro io “devo” volerlo perché dalla descrizione di quella nuvola la cosa non si evince.
In questo senso la destinazione della musica è il soggetto razionale (l’usignolo e il robot sono estranei alla musica)…
… Only a rational being-one with self-consciousness, intention, and the ability to represent the world-can experience sounds in this way; hence, although we can hear music in the songs of birds, whales and bonobos, they themselves are deaf to it…
Non esiste alcun bel paesaggio se non esiste chi lo osserva. Senza l’osservatore esiste solo un’accozzaglia di elementi (minerali, vegetali, animali…) senz’altro ordinabili ma né belli né brutti.
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L’esperienza musicale sembrebbe universale…
… The particular musical syntax that children learn may be the product of their culture; but the disposition towards music is a transcultural constant. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that music, like language, is a human universal…
In un’ottica evoluzionista la musica ha una sua funzione…
… Comparisons with bird-song, conceived as an element in sexual display, give rise to the suggestion that music might have emerged through the process of sexual selection.’… Take any feature of music, boil it down until it is all but indistinguishable from a feature of animal noise, rewrite both in Darwinese and-hey presto-you have a perfectly formed functional explanation of the musical life.’… The evolutionary psychology of music invariably describes music as pitched and metrically arranged sound, of the kind that might be produced by a bonobo or a gorilla….
Ma la musica non puo’ essere ridotta alla sua funzione (riproduttiva) evoluzionista…
… even if it is true that music, as we know it, emerged over time from such sounds, it is not in fact reducible to them…
Quando allora possiamo parlare di “musica”?…
… Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures, I argue, who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is a music that no nightingale has heard…
In questo senso lo psicologo evoluzionista non è in grado di aitarci e dobbiamo salutarlo (bye bye) per rivolgerci ad altri…
… Hence, although music may have emerged from an evolutionary adaptation, it cannot be understood by referring it to its supposed genetic function…
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La musica così come l’abbiamo descritta più sopra si astrae dalla struttura da cui emerge…
… I claim that sounds heard as music are heard in abstraction from their physical causes…
Allo stesso modo in cui la sua comprensione si astrae dalla sua produzione…
… When a violinist strains to produce Bach’s great D minor Chaconne, it is not the strain in producing sounds that we appreciate…
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In molti contestano questo approccio: troppa poca enfasi sulla fisica dei suoni…
… Certain commentators-notably Andy Hamilton?-have objected that the account does not give sufficient emphasis to the way in which the physical reality of sounds enters into the experience of them, when we hear them as music…
Poca attenzione sui timbri, per esempio…
… The acousmatic experience does not, it is suggested, account for timbre. It does not give sufficient weight to the performers and their physical actions or to the ways in which we must attend to the physical location of sounds if we are to hear their full musical potential…
Inoltre, un approccio del genere – dove il centro di tutto è l’ascolto e l’opera – è troppo legato alla musica occidentale…
… It has been said in this connection that the emphasis on what we hear imports a cultural context, and that this context is by no means the universal condition…
Da qui l’accusa di eurocentrismo…
… we give undue prominence to our own tradition-or to that part of our tradition which is contemporary with the Romantic movement and its aftermath-misleading ourselves into thinking that a transient application of music is really the essence of music in all its forms…
Non si puo’ negare che la funzione della musica sia cambiata nei secoli…
… there was a point in history when audiences fell silent. Thereafter music took on a new meaning, as an act of solemn communication, occurring in another space from the space of everyday life. Instead of being a background, something that was never more prominent than when being danced to or sung, music became an object of attention for its own sake, a `real presence’ before its own hushed congregation… the shift of attention from performer to composer…
Ma “chi” accusa “chi”?…
… That kind of argument might be levelled by the defender of popular music against the classical tradition; by the advocate of `mechanical reproduction’ against the traditions of musical performance; by the ethnomusicologist against the defender of `Western art music’; by the believer in song, dance and improvisation against the denizen of the concert hall…
Un posto privilegiato tra gli accusatori ce l’ha poi chi accusa la musica tonale equiparandola ad un’ideologia…
… Adorno’s radical defence of atonal music against the `ideological’ products of the tonal system…
Come rispondere?
E’ innegabile che la musica occidentale abbia delle sue particolarità altrove non riscontrabili ma probabilmente si limita ad approfondire un aspetto della razionalità umana senza escludere approcci alternativi…
… In giving a theory of music we are accounting for a certain human experience and the interests that have grown from it. This experience is an aspect of our rationality…
In questo senso le altre tradizioni non sono molto differenti: anche loro creano opere, anche loro non possono prescindere dall’ascolto.
Esempio della musica indiana…
… there are traditions like the Indian, in which melodies and their elaborations are memorized, but in which notation is schematic and incomplete. This does not mean that there are no `works’ of Indian classical music. There are plenty of them: but they are not identified through scores… Nevertheless, even though imperfectly notated, the ragas have existed, some of them for centuries… And although many of these works are anonymous, not a few are attributed to specific composers like Tyagaraja (1767-1847), whose works, memorized by his pupils and disciples, have been passed on and revered not merely as interesting musical objects, but as the creations of an interesting soul.’… the All-India Musical Conferences were established in 1916 in order to rescue and perpetuate the classical repertoire…
Esempio del jazz, della musica improvvisata e della musica commerciale…
… Jazz too makes room for the work concept, even if the work is often used as the starting point for a series of improvisations… We should therefore respond with a certain measure of scepticism to those who dismiss the work concept as a fleeting and in some way accidental imposition on the endless flux of musical inspiration.”… Of course, when improvisation by the performer is a fundamental component in what the audience enjoys, the work takes on another character-less the music itself than a template for producing it. And since the invention of recording, and the mass reproduction of the result, individual performances can acquire a kind of eternal and transcendent character comparable to that of the classical masterpieces. There then arises a new kind of work-the work composed as a template for improvisation, of which perhaps only a few recordings achieve the status of classics. An obvious example is Thelonious Monk’s ‘Round Midnight, rightly esteemed for its authoritative harmonic sequence and soulful melody, but existing in countless performances, some by Monk at the piano, some by the Monk Quartet, some by other musicians using other forces, all differing in every respect that the tradition of jazz improvisation allows and encourages… Nevertheless there really is a musical work which is ‘Round Midnight, and the work concept is as usefully applied in such a case as in the case of a Mozart symphony…
Anche questi approcci alternativi alla musica classica tradizionale non rifiutano affatto il concetto di opera, sebbene lo ritocchino.
Come ovunque il concetto di ascolto resta centrale…
… Indeed, even if there are sound ethnological reasons for believing that music originated in dance and song, listening, I maintain, is the heart of all musical cultures. You cannot sing or dance if you do not listen…
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Spendiamo due parole sulla questione della tonalità come paradigma dell’organizzazione musicale.
Molta musica atonale – e persino rumoristica – non presenta problemi, resta parente stretta di quella tonale e i riferimenti alla seconda si adattano bene anche alla prima…
… if atonal music is addressed to the same interest as tonal music, then it must be heard as moving forward in a similar way, unfolding an audible argument… successful experiments in atonality recreate, often in defiance of the theory which allegedly inspires them, quasi-tonal melody and harmony…
Ma come difendere la tonalità?
C’è una difesa semplicistica che punta sulla sua naturalezza…
… There is a way of arguing for the primacy of tonality which I think arrives too easily at its foregone conclusion. This is the argument from `natural’…
Da Pitagora alle ricerche di Helmholtz, senz’altro c’è una base naturale nella tonalità. L’ottava e la quinta ricorrono in tutte le culture…
… There is no musical culture that I know of that does not recognize the octave as equivalent to its fundamental, and most traditions acknowledge the fifth as a metastable position on the scale, and the drone on the fifth as a stabilizing harmonic accompaniment…
Ma su questa base naturale la creatività e la cultura umana costruiscono edifici che possono allontanarsi di molto dal punto di partenza…
… as soon as people begin to sing creatively, convention displaces nature, and shapes what we hear according to laws of its own. The `natural’ relations among tones are at best raw material, from which scales, modes and harmonic devices emerge by habit and experiment…
Il che non significa che esistano dei limiti alle convenzioni…
… it does not imply that there are no limits to musical conventions. There are a priori constraints on musical syntax that derive from the very nature of musical movement…. We cannot hear musical movement without seeking for points of stability and closure-points towards which the movement is tending or from which it is diverging, and to which it might at some point `come home’…
Più che la lontananza dalla tonalità conta la qualità della cesura: fare tabula rasa di questa origine naturale (rinnegandola) ci porta su territori che difficilmente potremmo ancora considerare “musica”.
La musica di Schoenberg, per esempio, puo’ essere apprezzata, purché la si ascolti “contro” il piano mortifero di serializzazione elaborato dall’autore…
… this search for a permutational order in place of the elaborational order of the familiar tonal syntax is profoundly anti-musical… Schoenberg’s music, whose merits I would be the first to acknowledge, is almost invariably heard against the serial organization, by listeners who search for closure, repetition, imitation and elaboration, and who strive to hear harmonic progressions rather than sequences of `simultaneities’…
La tonalità evolve ma non puo’ esserci mai del tutto indifferente…
… Tonality is an evolving tradition, arising from the modes of medieval music and evolving through medieval and Renaissance polyphony to the contrapuntal idiom of the Baroque and thence to the four-square triadic syntax of the classical style…
La tonalità è la base di armonia e melodia, e quindi della musica come racconto ed evento interiore…
… tonality should not be regarded as a fleeting, arbitrary or merely stylistic episode in the history of music. It tells us something essential about music-in particular about the nature of musical movement, about the dimensions in which movement operates, and about the way in which vectors combine, so as to change music from a monologue to a conversation…
La tonalità abolita produce non-musica. Tuttavia, la tonalità puo’ essere rimpiazzata…
… At the very moment when Schoenberg was dismissing tonality as an `exhausted’ idiom, a wholly new form of it was breaking forth on the musical horizon-one influenced not only by the principles of classical harmony, but also by the modes and rhythms of Negro music…
Non a caso Adorno – che riteneva la tonalità un caposaldo dell’ordine borghese – odiava questa musica in un certo senso trasgressiva ma che manteneva un residuo di tonalità.
Esempio di neo-tonalità nel pop…
… Much contemporary pop music is modal-using the various church modes as melodic devices, supported by stacked chords, such as the so-called `phrygian’ chord (a minor ninth on the tonic) which incorporates a flattened supertonic into the melodic minor scale. This device is familiar from Heavy Metal, and can be heard at its most exhilarating in Metallica’s `Master of Puppets’….
Inoltre, la tonalità genera il ritmo…
… Perhaps the greatest mistake involved in the marginalizing of tonality, however, has been the failure to perceive that tonality is also a rhythmic system…
Esempio…
… folk songs and pop songs make the point sufficiently clearly. All such music is strophic in organization, and strophes can be understood only in terms of the experience of closure, which divides the music into repeatable sections…
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Ma torniamo al concetto centrale da comprendere per comprendere cosa sia la musica: quello di “suono”.
… Sounds, I suggest, are objects in their own right, bearers of properties, and identifiable separately both from the things that emit them and the places where they are located…
Il suono musicale prescinde da quello fisico: è un evento a sé.
L’approccio alternativo, quello del suono come proprietà degli oggetti è più legato al fisicalismo…
… those authors take a resolutely `physicalist’ approach, repudiating all suggestion that sounds might be essentially connected to the experience of hearing things… Robert Pasnau, for example, who thinks of sounds as properties of the objects that emit them, is also a physicalist in my sense…
Il suono è un evento in sé, non è la proprietà di alcuni oggetti risonanti.
In quanto tale i sordi non possono conoscerlo…
… Hence they are absent from the world of the deaf person in the way that colours are absent from the world of the blind….
Il suono come proprietà è invece alla portata dei sordi…
… The physicalist view has the consequence that deaf people could be fully acquainted with sounds (for instance by using a vibrometer which registers pitch and overtones), and also that people could see sounds without hearing them…
Esempio:
… When I hear a car passing what 1 hear is the sound of a car passing, an event caused by the car’s passing but distinct from any event involving the car….
Suono e vibrazione…
… The information conveyed by sounds is not, typically, information about a vibration in any object…
Esiste una psicologia dei suoni ben precisa…
… Psychologists have studied auditory grouping, asking themselves what evolutionary function it might serve.’ For example, we tend to group quiet sounds interrupted by bangs together, as though they formed a continuous sequence, just as we continue in imagination the lines on a page that are interrupted by blots…
Albert Bregman…
… Albert Bregman, perhaps the most noted researcher into these phenomena, is of the view that `the perceptual stream-forming process has the job of grouping those acoustic features that are likely to have arisen from the same physical source’….
Il suono-evento si astrae anche dallo strumento che lo produce…
… Sounds can be detached completely from their source, as by radio or gramophone, and listened to in isolation…
L’ evento-suono non è meramente soggettivo ma è meglio descritto come oggetto secondario (oggetto che si crea passando dalla soggettività)…
… It seems to me that what we hear, both when we hear sounds in our day-to-day environment and when we listen to sounds acousmatically, is not merely a subjective impression but a real part of the objective world. That is what I mean by describing sounds as secondary objects…
Un esempio di oggetto secondario: l’arcobaleno. La sua descrizione puntigliosa non rende in nulla il fenomeno. Saperlo descrivere alla perfezione non significa conoscerlo…
… there are other examples of secondary objects? It seems to me that there are, and that they include two extremely important instances: rainbows and smells…
Il cieco non puo’ sapere cosa sia un arcobaleno anche se è in grado di descrivere alla perfezione cosa lo genera. Ad essere decisivo è l’osservatore, non il descrittore…
… To say that there is a rainbow visible over the hill is to say that a person located in a certain place and looking towards the hill would see the arch of a rainbow lying over it…
E tuttavia l’arcobaleno resta un oggetto.
Il descrittore cieco e sordo (di musica e arcobaleni) si limita alle qualità primarie…
… None of that implies that we could not give a full explanation of rainbows in terms of the primary-quality…
Il fisicalismo dell’arcobaleno non ci dice nulla dell’arcobaleno…
… There is every reason to treat sounds as audibilia, in just the way that we treat rainbows as visibilia. In doing so we deny nothing that the physicalist affirms, other than a statement of identity…
L’evento dell’arcobaleno è altra cosa…
… Once we acknowledge the existence of events which are also secondary objects, the way is open to the `pure event’: the event which happens, even though it does not happen to anything…
Il riferimento e la conoscenza della sorgente non è essenziale…
… This gives me another reason to be dissatisfied with the physicalist view. For it seems to tie sounds too firmly to their sources… In particular it does not recognize the `pure event’ as a distinct ontological category, and…
Chi è in grado di descrivere la musica? Il musicista? No, se lo fa riferendosi alla sorgente (alle tecniche necessarie per produrla).
La cosa si chiarisce osservando che una descrizione ancora più accurata avrebbe potuto fornirla un fisico dei suoni. la descrizione del musicista è una stenografia grossolana della descrizione fisica in termini di megahertz. Era, poiché diamo per scontato che il fisico dei suoni comprenda i suoni ma non (necessariamente) la musica, lo stesso possiamo dire del musicista qualora imbocchi quella via.
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Detto questo, torniamo ora al senso dei suoni…
… It is here that we should return to the psychologist’s investigations into auditory streaming. Our ears are presented at every moment with an enormous perceptual task, which is to group sounds together in such a way as to make sense of them-either by assigning them to their causes, or by discovering what they mean…
Il senso della musica è l’oggetto secondario che si forma nell’esperienza musicale.
Unite i puntini. Cosa ne esce?…
… Suppose you are looking at a dot-picture, and unable to make out the figure that the dots compose… It seems that we have an inherent tendency to group sound events as `auditory figures’, without making bridges to the physical world…
Il filtro della soggettività fa sì che l’oggetto secondario possa variare da persona a persona poiché dipende dal vissuto di ciascuno e dalle esperienze personali.
Comunque sia, uscirà qualcosa di molto diverso dalla sorgente sonora di partenza. Nell’Arcimboldi, dai frutti escono ritratti…
… The physical events that cause my auditory perceptions are not represented within my auditory field, so a description of the intentional object is not a description of the physical events. The auditory field, unlike the visual field, does not depict its cause.”… examples show that this correspondence is not what we hear, even when it explains what we hear…
Un’analogia significativa è quella che possiamo istituire con la voce umana…
… There is another matter that needs to be touched on in this connection, which is the effect on hearing of the human voice… voice is the sound of the soul…
La voce della mamma è descrivibile in termini di megahertz ma probabilmente è compresa appieno da chi non sa neanche cosa sia un megahertz.
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Detto questo, qual è allora la benzina che dobbiamo avere in noi per comprendere la musica?
Cosa occorre per produrre oggetti intenzionali? Cosa occorre per vedere delle forme sensate nelle nuvole?
Occorre immaginazione…
… The intentionality of perceptual experiences is determined by the concepts that inform them-either through perceptual beliefs or through acts of imagination…
E’ questo che si chiede all’ascoltatore. Attenzione e immaginazione.
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Dicevamo all’inizio che il segreto della musica è celato in chi la comprende. E’ questo personaggio che noi dobbiamo studiare.
Ma il dibattito ha storicamente preso un’altra direzione…
… discussions of musical meaning have followed the path laid down by Hanslick and Gurney in the nineteenth century, debating whether music is capable of expressing, representing or in some other way conveying extra-musical emotions, and whether-if so-this is an important part of its value. Musical meaning has been seen, in other words, as a relation between music and something else…
E’ Wittgenstein il filosofo che più ha cercato un approccio alternativo più vicino al nostro…
… In his later philosophy Wittgenstein awakens to the true importance of Frege’s insight, that we can speak of meaning only where we can also speak of understanding.’…
In lui il concetto di comprensione musicale spiazza quello di significato della musica.
Comprendere la musica – per W. – è come capire una faccia…
… In many places where Wittgenstein raises the question of musical understanding he connects it with two other subjects that obsessed him: facial expressions, and the first-person case…
In cosa consiste il seguire una musica comprendendola?
Cosa ci fa dire che Tizio comprende la musica?
La familiarità è centrale…
… is not knowledge of a fact, but familiarity with it. Wittgenstein’s hostility to the Cartesian habit of `looking inwards’ in order to discover the meaning of a word, the reality of an experience, or the sense of a work of art, is revealed in the second section quoted above. In effect he is saying that we can never discover what we mean by musical understanding from our own case alone…
Chi comprende la musica è realizzato nella suo incontro con la musica, lo cerca di frequenze, trova una sua pienezza esistenziale.
Ci accorgiamo, per esempio, che la conoscenza di un certo accordo esula dalla comprensione della musica…
… the knowledge that G sharp must follow, in my hypothetical example, is no sign of musical understanding. I can have this knowledge, even if the passage makes no sense to me. And it can make sense to me, even though I have no knowledge that G sharp is required by the grammar. The grammar of twelve-tone music is not a musical grammar…
La conoscenza musicale non è di natura tecnico-formale…
… Musical understanding is not a form of theoretical understanding, and the kind of necessity that we hear in a musical phrase or sequence, when we hear that it must be so, is not the kind of necessity that we know from rule-following or mathematical proof…
Chiediamoci – in parallelo – quando una persona conosce il significato di una parola…
… A person demonstrates his understanding of a word by using it…
Ma cosa significa “usare bene la musica”? Qui bisogna fare attenzione agli equivoci…
… It is in listening, not playing, that the average musical person exhibits understanding…
Esecuzioni impeccabili ma comprensione estetica nulla…
… Moreover, musical understanding is not revealed in performance in the way that linguistic understanding is revealed in speech. A person who speaks woodenly, unfeelingly, grotesquely, may nevertheless show that he has understood the words he utters. A person who performs woodenly, unfeelingly or grotesquely may make all the sounds prescribed by the score, but he will show nevertheless that he has understood nothing. Musical understanding is a form of aesthetic understanding… it is not only the performance that is being judged: there is the music itself…
Ci sono ottimi disegnatori che restano pessimi pittori e cattivi disegnatori che diventano ottimi pittori…
… Surely you could be an expert at transcribing the observable features of a face, and yet miss the expression, and vice versa. (Picasso could capture an expression in a few lines and an eye; photographs capture everything, except the expression.)…
Prendiamo il caso dei due tipici ascoltatori…
… Consider two people listening to a grossly sentimental song, one naively enjoying it, the other turning up his nose. The first says to the second: `you just don’t understand this music’. `On the contrary,’ the second replies, `I do understand it. And that is why I hate it.’ Do we say that they have both understood the music, but understood it differently?…
Torniamo all’interpretazione delle facce: si puo’ vedere la stessa cosa e reagire diversamente… Poiché il senso della musica è un oggetto prodotto dal soggetto, ci sono soggettività differenti.
… it is certainly true that two people can understand a person’s expression and yet react to it differently. The grim disaffection on the face of the teenage pop-star, for example, is understood equally by the one who identifies with its pseudo-defiant aura, and by the one who is repelled by it. It is not that they understand the expression differently; it is rather that they understand it in the same way, and react differently….
La reazione diversa puo’ essere dovuta a interiorità differenti, alle nostre esperienze divergenti. Un ragazzino con poca esperienza reagirà diversamente ad un pezzo che chi è rotto a tutte le esperienze (musicali e no) giudica sdolcinato.
Ma cosa intendiamo per “espressività” della musica?…
… When we speak of `recognizing the expression’ in a piece of music, or playing with expression, the term `expression’ is being used `intransitively’…. Expressions can be ambiguous in something like the way that aspects can be ambiguous…
La musica esprime “non si sa bene cosa”. L’oggetto della musica è vago. La musica è un’espressione sostanzialmente intransitiva.
Cio’ non significa che questa espressività non dia il via ad un’indagine…
… We do not merely recognize expressions. We look behind them to what they mean. We seek and find character, mood and emotion in faces, as we do in gestures and words. And if understanding music is like understanding facial expressions it too must admit of this search for a meaning beyond the immediate Gestalt…
Ad un tentativo di riconoscimento…
… Likewise in art, the act of recognition is the first stage in a process of imaginative involvement, the end point of which is familiarity with a character or a state of mind…
Negarlo – come fanno i formalisti – significa perdere un pezzo decisivo di cio’ che avviene durante l’ascolto.
Riconoscere e selezionare. Di fronte ad un evento espressivo intransitivo noi tentiamo di renderlo transitivo appellandoci alla nostra esperienza del mondo. la musica si mette in relazione col mondo. Von il “nostro” mondo…
… It is surely one of the roles of taste or aesthetic judgement to discriminate between the expression with which we might identify, and the expression that invites us to sympathize with a state of mind that in our better moments we seek to shun. But this discrimination would be impossible if we did not advance, in our thinking, from the intransitive to the transitive idea of expression…
Esempio…
… At least we can recognize that Mahler is, for us as for himself, a problem, and that this problem can be fully understood only if we allow ourselves a richer conception of musical understanding than Wittgenstein, in his more austere remarks, is prepared to offer. That richer conception requires us not to dismiss the first-person case, but to give a fuller account of it-to recognize that there is such a thing as first-person knowledge, even if the object of that knowledge must be described (should we wish to describe it) from the third-person perspective…
Il riconoscimento avviene rinviando a qualcosa di esterno, ma il rinvio che facciamo dipende pur sempre dalla nostra interiorità e dal nostro vissuto…
… Nevertheless, even if we are looking outwards, our ability to understand what we are looking at depends on what is happening within…
***
Robin Hollow parla di Schubert in questi termini…
… Schubert is at the very heart of music. More: definition of what he is, account of what he did, in music, are tantamount to a description of music itself in its most normative and widely shared sense-what it is, how it works, what it is for. No composer is less dispensable, more essential and intrinsic. `Essential’ meaning closest to the art’s grammar, syntax, language, which he employs with extraordinary purity and exactness even while… they undergo in his hands the most radical extensions ever made by one individual. Their purpose, of course, to expand, to deepen, intensify expression: to which the same superlative applies-no other single composer has added so largely to what music, in its innate nature, not foisted upon it, can say. This is just as essential and intrinsic as the linguistic usage. They can’t be separated: the wider key-relationships, the major/minor ambiguity, the enharmonics, the enhanced dissonances, equally with the exploration of the most basic facts of diatonicism, and every motive, melodic, rhythmic, textural element; all this is in such perfect fusion with the affective ends that he has to be called Apollonian, whatsoever is being frenzied, doom-laden, angstvoll, erotic, pantheistic, radiant, desolate, God-forsaken, weary-unto-death, furious, frustrated, fragmented, nihilistic, nostalgic, or just cold!… Many more words could thus be adduced, for Schubert covers a wider range of emotion than any other composer and most other artists in any medium; but they would be mere signs and ciphers apart from the way their every nuance within the comprehensive coverage is imprinted into the notes.’…
Evidentemente si tratta di un autore che esprime l’intera gamma delle emozioni umane.
… he is able to express the whole range of human emotions, and to do so by `imprinting’ those emotions `into the notes’…
Ma abbiamo noi una teoria dell’espressione in musica?
Non si direbbe.
Da quanto detto prima una teoria dell’espressione deve superare il test del semaforo…
… The `semaphore test’. Musical meaning is not established by convention, assigning meanings to musical objects in the manner of a code of semaphore signals. The meaning of a work of music is given only in the aesthetic experience, and is not available simply by applying rules…
C’è poi un altro test che deve superare: quello che lega il significato della musica alla sua comprensione più che a proprietà fisiche degli oggetti (Kivy è fuori)…
… The `understanding test’. The meaning of a piece of music is what we understand when we understand it as music. (This parallels a well-known thought of Frege’s concerning the meaning of a sentence.) Most existing accounts of expression fail to pass this test-or at least, fail to show that they can pass it. We just do not know what is proved by them, or whether anything important is being said-for instance by Peter Kivy, when he points to the way in which the shape of a musical phrase may `resemble’ the shape of an emotion.2 As I pointed out in Chapter 3, it was Wittgenstein’s important insight that the key concept in the philosophy of music is not that of expression or meaning, but that of understanding…
Naturalmente, il formalismo non elabora teorie soddisfacenti dell’espressione (Hanslick e Stravinsky sono fuori)…
… it seems quite possible to understand an expressive piece of music and at the same time to deny that it is expressive-or at least, to deny that there is anything, besides itself, that the music means…
Il fuoco va messo sull’ascoltatore…
… My contention is that, if we are to develop a concept of expression which passes those four stringent tests, and which also explains the two observations that I have appended to them, we must in the first instance remove our attention from the musical work and focus it instead on the response of the listener…
Capire e descrivere sono attività irrelate…
… It means only that understanding and describing are two different activities-just as they are in human relations (of which our relation to music is after all only a special case)…
Dare un significato alla musica è come dare un significato ad una metafora. La descrizione invece si concentra sui termini impiegati per costruirla, un’attività interessante ma extramusicale. L’esperto di pianoforti non è esperto di musica dal punto di vista estetico.
***
Le emozioni sono cio’ che ci motiva all’azione e l’uomo si esprime facendo appello alle sue emozioni. Le emozioni umane sono il contenuto dell’espressione. Le emozioni sono l’oggetto della musica.
L’obiezione di Hanslick…
… Hanslick regarded the intentionality of emotion as posing an insuperable objection to the expressive theory of music. Music could express an emotion, he thought, only if it could also depict the objects of emotion. But music is an abstract (i.e. non-representational) art-form, in which genuine depiction is impossible…
Per lui la musica non puo’ rappresentare delle emozioni poiché le emozioni non hanno qualità formali e la musica è pura forma. Ma…
… When we respond to another’s emotion we don’t necessarily know anything about its object… If our responses to music are forms of sympathy, then Hanslick’s objection is without force…
E’ dura togliere ogni legame tra emozione e musica. Anche l’ascoltatore più formale non puo’ restare indifferente alla bellezza di una musica che lo emoziona.
Il fatto è che noi “reagiamo” alla musica, non la decodifichiamo. La musica non si presenta a noi come un codice ma come una faccia familiare che ci “provoca”, che ci dice senza dire niente di specifico.
Da qui il tradizionale uso della musica per creare coesione sociale…
… Plato and Aristotle emphasized the character-forming nature of music partly because they thought of music as something in which we join. When we dance or march to music we move with it, just as we move with other people in a march or a dance…
Eppure, nonostante una montante evidenza, il problema resta: in molti negano alla musica una sua espressività…
… Why is it that so many musical people deny the expressive character of music, and why is it that we find it difficult, and usually unnecessary in any case, to put the meaning of music into words-to…
Quando avviene il “riconoscimento musicale”, quando si ha la sensazione di aver compreso la musica che si sta ascoltando, non si hanno parole per esprimere questo riconoscimento. Se avessimo semplicemente “decodificato” un messaggio le parole non mancherebbero…
… When this recognition occurs listeners may have no words for what they recognize…
La musica compresa è una musica “simpatica”…
… You are not merely noticing analogies between the movement of the music and some state of mind: you are entering into dialogue with it, fitting your own emotions to the rhythm that it conveys, as you might when experimenting with inter-personal sympathies…
Adam Smith collegava la simpatia con la vita sociale, e qui torniamo alla musica come collante sociale…
… As Adam Smith plausibly argued, sympathy lies at the heart of our moral nature, and is our primary resource in the regulation of social life.4 We are therefore alert to the corruptions of sympathy, such as sentimentality…
Se la musica è tanto vicina alla nostra vita interiore non puo’ essere completamente scollegata dalla nostra vita morale…
… This explains something which many people have found puzzling: the attribution of moral virtues and vices to purely abstract music. The `heroic’ quality of Beethoven’s Fifth, the `sentimentality’ of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, the `narcissism’ of Skryabin’s `Prometheus’ Symphony-and so on: all such judgements take on definite sense if we see them as reflections of sympathetic responses to musical movement… The invitation to sympathy that is uttered in the voice of pure music is one that we are eager to accept; but the slightest borrowing of some stock effect makes us doubt the voice’s sincerity…
Un’ultima cosa: sia chiaro che l’anti-realismo (interiorità) dell’estetica proposta non implica relativismo estetico…
… That anti-realism does not imply that moral or aesthetic judgements are merely `subjective’ is well demonstrated by Simon Blackburn in Ruling Passions, London 1997….
Se l’uomo ha una sua natura, infatti, anche le sue elaborazioni interiori avvengono in conformità ad essa. Il relativismo irromperebbe piuttosto negando l’esistenza di una natura umana, ma questo è un altro discorso.
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