Judge Me By My Composition, Do You? (Part Three)

Today's post looks at Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music (1957), and grows out of two earlier posts on evaluating and critiquing new compositions:

• Judge Me By My Composition, Do You? (Part One)
• Judge Me By My Composition, Do You? (Part Two)

Some people are better at critiquing compositions than others, and, as discussed in my previous blog, there are undoubtedly different reasons for this.  Some may be related to personality type — some people are by nature more comfortable expressing opinions than others — but it may also be related to not knowing what to listen for.

Aaron Copland's What to Listen for in Music (1957) proposes that there are three ways (or levels) of listening to music, which he describes as "planes."  Below is a summary, all in Aaron Copland's words:

The Sensuous Plane — "The simplest way of listening to music is to listen for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself. … It is the plane on which we hear music without thinking, without considering it in any way. One turns on the radio while doing something else and absentmindedly bathes in the sound. … The surprising thing is that many people who consider themselves qualified music lovers abuse that plane of listening. They go to concerts in order to lose themselves. They use music as a consolation or an escape. … Yes, the sound appeal of music is a potent and primitive force, but you must not allow it to use up a disproportionate share of your interest. The sensuous plane is an important one in music, a very important one, but it does not constitute the whole story. 

The Expressive Plane — "Here, immediately, we tread on controversial ground. Composers have a way of shying away from any discussion of music's expressive side. … But that should not lead one to the other extreme of denying to music the right to be "expressive." My own belief is that all music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning behind the notes and that meaning behind the notes constitutes, after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is about. This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "is there. a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "yes." And "can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "no." Therein lies the difficulty.

The Sheerly Musical Plane — "Besides the pleasurable sound of music and the expressive feeling that it gives off, music does exist in terms of the notes themselves and of their manipulation. Most listeners are not sufficiently conscious of this third plane. Professional musicians, on the other hand, are, if anything, too conscious of the mere notes themselves. They often fall into the error of becoming so engrossed with their arpeggios and staccatos that they forget the deeper aspects of the music they are performing. …  The intelligent listener must be prepared to increase [their] awareness of the musical material and what happens to it. [They] must hear the melodies, the rhythms, the harmonies, the tone color in a more conscious fashion. But above all [they] must, in order to follow the line of the composer's thought, know something of the principals of musical form. Listening to all of these elements is listening on the sheerly musical plane."

Perhaps there are other planes than this, or at least sub-planes?

"Functional music" can be considered as a category of music (gebrauchsmusik, in German; learn more here) ; this would include music for marching, dance, exercise, meditation, etc.  This music is not limited to mere functionality, of course; any of these genres can be affective — which may arguably be part of their function — and musically interesting as well (meaning they can stand up to scrutiny on the "sheerly musical plane").

This makes me wonder if we also listen to some music on a primarily functional plane. We may march, dance, or exercise to the beat of the music, which is similar to Copland's "sensuous" plane, except that we are using the musical pulse to guide the pace of our movement. Our primary focus may not be on the "sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself" (Copland), but instead on the activity in which we are engaged (dancing, exercising, etc.); music, in this case, is essentially a tool that helps to get us moving.

Possibly there is also a background plane for music to which we pay little attention; it's just there, in the background, as we drive, shop, eat, clean, etc.  I am for the most part incapable of experiencing music on a background level; if there's music around me, I tend to listen (or rather, it tends to hijack my brain), which can make shopping and dining out a rather unsettling experience.

Copland's assertion that professional musicians are (often) overly concerned with the "sheerly musical plane" — the harmonies, melodic lines, structure, etc. — to the exclusion of the expressive plane is interesting, but this has not been my experience.  I suspect that many musicians would argue that they are intimately and passionately concerned with the expressive side of music when they perform, and that communicating this aspect to the listener is extremely important in preparing for performances.

And even though I love finding out how music works and teach many courses in which the majority of the work we do involves listening on what Copland calls the "sheerly musical" plane, I frequently find my critical faculties turning to mush as I get carried away by a particularly moving work, which presumably means I am listening on sensuous and expressive planes.

In any event, I present this as food for thought.  Returning to the issue of critiquing compositions (both others' and your own), perhaps one way to approach it would be to ask yourself how well the music works on each of these different planes.

• Does music have to work on more than one of these planes in order to be successful? 
• Is it valuable to learn to listen on different levels, or to be aware of the plane on which we experience music, at the moment we are listening to it?
• Are there other listening planes, beyond those suggested by Copland (or myself)? 

Judge Me By My Composition, Do You? (Part One)

Today's title is a reference to Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980), in which Yoda famously says, "Judge me by my size, do you? Hmm?"

Indeed, while many would probably agree that it is unfair to judge people by their size, and as Star Wars viewers knew, Yoda's mastery of The Force meant it was clearly a mistake to dismiss him based on his extraordinarily-diminutive stature (not to mention his peculiar sentence constructions), it seems to be a fairly common practice in the world.   Basketball and North American football coaches routinely consider size when choosing players for their teams, although they presumably take other factors into consideration as well, such as speed, and sport-specific skills.  According to some studies, in American presidential elections, "candidates that were taller than their opponents [usually] received more popular votes."  Other studies have suggested it is a factor in mate selection, and advancement in the corporate world.

Judging people based on their height is clearly unjustified in most instances (even in sports there are numerous examples of great athletes that happen to be shorter than average), but judging people based on other factors is a frequent practice that can often be justified.  Picking the best candidate for a particular job entails evaluating numerous factors specific to the execution of that job.  Selecting the best university for you, choosing friends, clothes, books to read, and music to hear — these all involve an evaluation process of some kind, even if we are not consciously aware of it.

In music, we routinely make judgements.  We do this if we prefer one performer's recording of Beethoven over another's.  Some people love Bob Dylan's voice; some people can't stand it.  I recently met someone who claimed to dislike all songs by Paul McCartney, but many regard him as the most successful songwriter in history (Google "the most successful songwriter in history" and see what you get).  I have participated in numerous performance "juries" wherein a panel of faculty members assess student performances, but I have always been aware that there is some subjectivity involved in giving a fair and balanced assessment of what I heard.  Different people can evaluate the same performance in slightly (or sometimes greatly) differing ways.

That said, I suspect that evaluating a performance of a two-century-old sonata by Beethoven is a more objective exercise than evaluating a brand new composition.  People familiar with a particular work notice immediately if wrong notes are played, and judge the performance to be flawed, even if it was otherwise very musical.  A performance lacking in "feeling" or "expression" — which may mean that the performance lacks dynamic nuances, subtle tempo alterations such as rubato or rallentandi, or the shaping of phrases — is usually judged to be weaker than a performance with these qualities, although too much of them may be said to be "in poor taste."  But how does a listener judge the performance of a new composition?  How does the listener of a new work know which are the right notes, and which are wrong?

The question is rhetorical; if the listener is unfamiliar with the work, they can't know.  However, the listener may be able to guess that some notes don't seem right based on an understanding of a composer's style, or even based on inconsistencies within a work.

How does a composer know which notes to use, and when to use them?  We make thousands of decisions during the composition process, and we don't always know why we make some choices and reject others, beyond liking or disliking them.  One way to justify compositional choices is to adopt a systematic approach, such as motivic unity, motivic expansion, using existing forms (such as sonata), any of various "-isms" (serialism, spectralism, minimalism), tonality, free atonality, polychords, or any of Messiaen's techniques such as modes of limited transposition, non-retrogradable rhythm, and added-value rhythms.

But whether you adopt a more-systematic or less-systematic approach, all of these approaches involve choices, or judgements, and good composers presumably make better choices than less-good composers.  The composition process involves continually evaluating the music we write, ideally until we reach the point where in our estimation we are unable to make it any better in the time allotted; at this point, the work is done.

To revise or to let it go?

A quick digression:  If we never review and revise the work we do, we are unlikely to write the highest quality music of which we are capable.  If we constantly revise, then the composition will never be finished.  Somewhere between those two extremes is the happy medium that every composer needs to find.  Deadlines help us in finding this happy (or at least practical) medium…

And so, to answer the question posed in the title of this blog, I don't know the degree to which people are, or should be, judged by their compositions; judging a person's compositional abilities based on their compositions seems fair enough, but judging a person's character based on their compositions seems more problematic, although it could be argued that a person's compositions tell us something about that person's character.

In part two, I will suggest twenty specific ways of critiquing compositions, particularly your own.