this week’s writing I ask you to step back from the specific works that you have listened to and written about, and to write about the experience of listening to music. Particular works of art demand, or propose, or activate, particular kinds of interaction with the work of art. Music, of all the art disciplines, provides a wide range of possible uses and interactions – live, recorded, danced to, played for personal pleasure, background, very loud, very close, far away, encountered on the street, etc. – there are not so many ways to look at a painting or read a book.
Specifically, I want you to reflect on the kinds of interactions with a listener that our class selections have prompted. We have gone through a lot of music, and you should point to specific pieces to give examples of the listening experience you are writing about. These can (hopefully should) include the selections you have encountered in class, and the listening assignment for this week. But the focus shifts from describing the musical work to describing you and your interactions with the work(s).
The readings should also be helpful to you in this writing, especially the Proust excerpt, which is in part an essay that partially answers my writing prompt.
I suggest that you think also from the standpoint of your usual, habitual listening practices, and extrapolate from there to the listening experiences of our works, and how these may differ from what you customarily do with music. Also, certain kinds of listening experiences are intended by the composer, and others almost certainly are not. So take into consideration that there may be inadvertent kinds of interactions. For example, Schoenberg’s music shocked his listeners, but he felt that they should have been leaving the auditorium whistling his “tunes.” And we can observe that his music to some extent still shocks us. One might ask, what is the nature of this shock? how can mere sounds shock, or disturb, or lead to a riot? What does this say about our expectations of music? In the Proust excerpt, Swann refers to the direct, “material” impressions of music. These may be devoid of emotional or expressive content. In another vein, Schoenberg wrote of an artistic “seismograph” which traces or registers emotional or psychic tremors. Does music mirror the workings of the nervous system, or does it actively stimulate and manipulate us?
Don’t be vague and general, point to specific works and specific attributes of the works to support your observations.
Also: This week, if you have failed to turn in any of the writing assignments, I will accept them under a general amnesty.