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The reviewer writes, "[h]istorically informed experts, however, point out that in Mozart’s time (most) music was not ‘classical’ in the sense as we see it now. It was first and foremost ‘entertainment’. Audiences liked excitement, as they still do in our time.
I found this comment a bit strange. If music is not entertainment, what then is it? Art for art's sake?
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Post by Vaan August 13, 2013 (2 of 36)
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What do you mean? The review says that it is entertainment. I have all the cd's in this series and find them highly entertaining.
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Vaan said:
What do you mean? The review says that it is entertainment. I have all the cd's in this series and find them highly entertaining.
Read it again. When is music not for entertainment?
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Euell Neverno said:
When is music not for entertainment?
A lot, if not most, of times? Think the more abstract Bach à la the Art of Fugue, late Beethoven, later Scriabin, religious ecstatics like Messiaen, and the neomediaevalist reactionaries like Arvo Pärt, for starters. Or anyone in the modernist main current, most obviously. Or anything in general as performed by Sviatoslav Richter. :-)
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Polarius T said:
A lot, if not most, of times? Think the more abstract Bach à la the Art of Fugue, late Beethoven, later Scriabin, religious ecstatics like Messiaen, and the neomediaevalist reactionaries like Arvo Pärt, for starters. Or anyone in the modernist main current, most obviously. Or anything in general as performed by Sviatoslav Richter. :-)
Music is always for entertainment or it serves no purpose whatsoever, even when written for religious ceremony. If there is no audience, there is no purpose. And, the audience is not there, at least usually, to be tortured. Hence, the lack of popularity of much atonal composition.
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Maybe it's semantics, but to me the space between entertainment and torture accommodates a lot that doesn't fit the definition of either. Why do we study anything, to begin with, or reflect, try to get to know or understand something? For entertainment or torture?
By the way, there is much music -- some very famous and well-known today -- that was not written for any audience or even to be performed necessarily.
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Polarius T said:
Maybe it's semantics, but I think the space between entertainment and torture accommodates a lot that doesn't fit the definition of either. Why do we study anything, to begin with, or reflect, try to get to know or understand something? For entertainment or torture?
If it's entertainment, it's not torture. If it's torture, it's not entertainment, unless one happens to be a masochist. Music without performance is merely academic. Performance necessarily requires an audience. If a tree falls in the forest, but no one is there to hear it, is there a sound? Well, yes, but who cares?
I think what you are referring to is a question of accessibility and that varies. Romanticism is said to have arisen in the 19th century, because people wanted to feel the music, in contradistinction to the more academic compositions of, for example, JS Bach. Nevertheless, I challenge one not to "feel" the B minor Mass.
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Polarius T said:
By the way, there is much music -- some very famous and well-known today -- that was not written for any audience or even to be performed necessarily.
Really? Do tell.
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Euell Neverno said:
Really? Do tell.
Like, the very first example I already suggested for you above.
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Euell Neverno said:
Music without performance is merely academic. Performance necessarily requires an audience.
No, it doesn't. That entirely ignores a quintessential function of music as self-expression and even philosophy or a mode of knowledge. And that's just to begin with. There's a vast literature out there on the subject if you're interested. Or as a ritual (where there are only participants = performers). The music-as-diversion function has historically been very marginal, even though those were usually the works that were written down, bought and sold, and thus maybe more often transmitted to posterity and made popular. I don't get your point in obsessing about this.
Don't you ever play just for yourself?
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