Do you play a musical instrument?

Amen to that - and well said.  There are a number of forum members that frequently bring out their muso credentials to support their side in a contentious debate and I think, as you eloquently point out, you don't need to be an expert to enjoy music, no more than you need to be an expert to enjoy a good wine or beer.

BTW - I've played brass for more than 45 years on and off, in several types of large and small groups_ and I am just about to join a brass band again for the first time in 25 years

I'll have a pint of whatever Loki is drinking please.

Bluedog, I raise a glass of Bollinger to you and your new brass exploits!

Char Wallah, I hope you're not suggesting I would label Bluedog elitist? 

I applaud the musical tragedy but can't help wondering whether by writing said operetta, you run the risk of raising the homunculus still further into view, potentially immortalising him! Better to let him go and ruin his own career and watch him fade. Focus your ears on the decent musicians instead, like Bluedog!

Hmm. They might have a point.

Exactly.

Good re-quote Fred. Actually, if we're honest, we all talk to ourselves sometimes, and sometimes we like the sound of our own voice, if only to practice our speeches for public interaction. Which brings me back to one of my core questions about music making and music listening. 

If we allow that one doesn't have to be a musician to appreciate music, does it help if one is a musician?

Or, in the same vein, does it help the listener of recorded music to have had experience of live music-making, with or without his/her personal input?

But when we make these refined nuanced judgements about PRAT and the Naim 'live concert' effect, with every tweak, piece of kit etc, do those judgements not require a foundation of actual (rather than recorded) experience in order for them to hold?

I can appreciate the landscape painting in an 'art for art's sake' kind of way,  but when I have seen the real trees, river, haywain etc, then I have an even greater appreciation of the created work.

It's the difference between natura naturans and natura naturata (Actively creating and passively created Nature: see S T Coleridge, Spinoza, Bacon).

I'm not suggesting that you have to experience both, but that the response to the work of art is augmented if you have.

I would argue that my reaction to music (and other art) is essentially emotional. A knowledge of the technique is irrelevant. This is of course personality dependent. We own a large abstract painting of 'just a few lines' on an unusual textured backing. It is very large and to be appreciated needs viewing from way back. my brother (a concrete thinker if ever there was one) responded to it by exwmining the surface from 2 cm and asking 'how did they do that'. Me, I just love it for what it is.His reponse ois of course no less valid. I suspect he deconstructs music when listening too.

Bruce

Cheers Bruce and Char Wallah.

I agree that Art (Drama, dance, sculpture, painting, music, creative writing etc) elicits an emotional response, and that it can be appreciated for itself. Knowledge of the work itself or indeed live experience of its constituent parts/images is unnecessary for an interaction at some level. However, does live experience (the closest of which would be being an 'artist') enhance our reception and response to the artwork? 

I think that if talking about classical music you are in essence talking about a live recording. I would guess 80% of what I listen to is from a recording studio and contains substantial elements of the production process therefore (often unreproducible live).

Bruce

Char (if I may): good point, although all the musicians I know seem to spend all their no playing time listening to music of all genres, recorded and live. But, i have a feeliing that the live performance is the thing. But if  may paraphrase that CBS advert from the sixties, it's cheaper to buy the recording and you have the advantage of listening to it as often and wherever you like. And as we HiFi hobbyists know, we can keep improving the experience.

Bruce: that depends. Many classical recordings are done in a series of takes. It's why some can sound a little lifeless, and lacking fluidity and feeling sometimes. A true live recording, with all the mistakes, extraneous noises (you can always hear London traffic in recordings made at St Martin's in the Fields) and relative lack of fidelity. But you make a valid point differentiating between live, single-take recordings (Clapton Unplugged being a great example), and those which are spliced together. Is a virtuosic live recording better than a mediocre live performance? 

It definitely helps me. This is a big part of what I had said earlier about being grateful for the ability to receive the full message of the music I listen to ... understanding what's going on in musical terms amplifies and reinforces the emotional connection.

Just one small example: in Leonard Cohen's brilliant song Hallelujah, the first verse talks about "a secret chord," and then goes on:

It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift

Obviously, the song in and of itself is powerfully emotional, but even more so when you understand that Cohen pairs the phrase "the fourth, the fifth" with the IV chord and the V chord respectively, and then "falls" to the minor VI chord on the phrase "the minor fall" and "lifts" back to the major IV chord on the phrase "the major lift" which gives an extra dimension to the contextual content of the words. And it helps to know that a minor chord is literally a "fall" from the corresponding major chord, just as a major chord "lifts" from a minor chord.

And this is just a relatively simple example of what I'm talking about here ... just the tip of a very large iceberg.

Oh, I know it ... that's why they call me Grateful Fred. (insert emoticon here)

when you understand that Cohen pairs the phrase "the fourth, the fifth" with the IV chord and the V chord respectively, and then "falls" to the minor VI chord on the phrase "the minor fall" and "lifts" back to the major IV chord on the phrase "the major lift" which gives an extra dimension to the contextual content of the words. 

Brilliant Fred. I never knew that. You have now enhanced my understanding and appreciation of a song I already knew and appreciated. This is the sort of thing my father in law could do, even though he was not a trained musician. Perhaps we should all try a little theory as you gently hinted earlier. It's like using apostrophes. Once you understand the formal grammatical reason for their existence, it makes using them simpler and  adds to our understanding when read.

I think you are confusing a finished product with the process of creating a product,

Sorry to be thick, Char Wallah, but I genuinely don't know to  which of my posts you are referring. Would you mind quoting? Sorry.

Thank you for clarifying. 

I like the way you've extended the argument back to the creative roots, because, as you say, composing is an active part of creating the music, but unlike the musician or the Hifi, it's not generating sound. 

So, could we refine the question about whether musicians enjoy an enhanced listening experience further to include composers? And, by further extension, could we say the same about sound and recording engineers?

He neither writes good songs nor is he a pleasure to listen to/watch performing. As to whether he enjoys listening to music, I don't know. I've never asked him

I think being a musician at some level can definitely enhance your enjoyment and/or appreciation of music, but it is in no way requisite for listening, enjoying, and being knowledgeable about music.

As for Miley Cyrus; if she could get high from sucking on a penis, she'd only have 2 wishes left.  That little trollop can't go away fast enough for me.  Of course, they'll just bring in the next pop culture train wreck.

She, Bieber, and their ilk prove that the music (?) buying public is a bunch of morons. (Queue Idle Americans, er, American Idol.)

This is a fascinating topic.

It is certainly true that music is almost entirely meant for listening to, and playing it is not essential to appreciating and enjoying it. 

Unfortunately for music composers, and in a completely different way for music players, their perspective for listening to music is different. They know which bits are really difficult to play for example, and cannot but help assessing the quality of the performance from a technical angle. 

A compser's insight will even include a sort of "on the fly" analysis of questioning exactly why the music was written this way or that.

In many ways these insights are disruptive to enjoying the music in the innocent way of the non-player, who has in many ways a tremendous advantage, it may be argued. 

My perspective on this was that as a child of eight I started piano lessons, and really hated my stupid fingers! I knew what should come out, and was most impatient that it was coming out wrong. This was because I had already started listening to music on the radio. Radio Three, and before that the Third Programme. 

Though I never played the piano well, by the aged of eleven, I had taught myself to read the full score in Symphonies by Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. I soon learned to recognise the place in the structure of the music in Sonata, Rondo and other musical forms. And my listening soon could discern where the music was in structural terms,, and what the composer was doing in the architectural and formal sense.

In other words even as a very young child I was becoming a student of music in the broadest sense out of sheer curiosity. 

The question might just why this was so. 

Because I loved and still love the emotional sweep of the great music. Eventually this would lead to me learning to play a musical instrument, the double bass, to a standard of professional quality that meant I was invited to perform in such august company as the Birmingham Festival Choral Society and gain a nice fee [and porterage on top], as well as teach the bass to a few students at a private music school in Worcester ...

Does this make me a better listener than someone who has never played a music instrument, let alone played it well enough to play in professional company? 

My answer is an emphatic no it does not. At least not in every case. There are those who naturally comprehend the music comprehensively, who have never played at all!

As a side light, until I gave up playing the bass, because of injury to my left hand [which is otherwise not a problem], I never had a top quality replay system. I was not happy to stop playing though without question playing to a critical audience is stressful, but when I saw the end coming, I bought my first Naim pieces, as a sort of substitute for the experience of playing. Of course it was no substitute as playing and listening to recordings are two completely different things!

But I do get a great deal of pleasure from listening to music on a respectable system. 

I don't think there are any certain conclusions to draw on this. Some people are fully capable of a sensitive appreciation of music even though they have never played a note in their lives, and yet there are musicians, even at the highest level sometimes, whose genius resides in their technical ability far more than their comprehension of the music that they are playing!

ATB from George

Fred's Hallelujah example is absolutely bang on the money, especially the bit about it being the tip of an iceberg. Char Wallah's response brought me up short though: the musical references in that verse were so obvious to me on first listening that it had never occurred to me - idiotically - that there are countless people who would listen to that song and not get them.

Following on from earlier references to 'bum notes', classical recordings being essentially live and the studio being an instrument, I was staggered to learn recently from a professional choral singer (works with Gabrieli Consort and others, knows his stuff) that pitch-correction is regularly used on such recordings. He said that the producers have to do it, even when they're only shifting the pitch by a few cents (for non-musos, a cent is one-hundredth of the difference between the closest notes on a piano or frets on a guitar), because they get complaints from the buyer otherwise.

He also referred to a recording he made where the group just couldn't quite nail a short piece of Gregorian chant, so they recorded each individual note separately and stitched them together in ProTools for the final recording. Apparently this was only a slightly extreme example of a very common practice - long takes (more than a minute or so) are practically unheard of these days.

Make of that what you will! It certainly surprised me.

Mark

George, your comments are entirely consistent with my own thoughts and experience.  I've played trumpet at semi professional level for many years, and played jazz at a very 'basic' level.  Knowledge of both possibly gives me an insight in to the sheer level of technical achievement displayed by players like Dizzy Gillespie but neither ability was required to experience the sheer excitement of listening to somebody who combined those technical skills with a level of creative inventiveness I do not believe I would ever be capable of achieving.

With respect, I do not believe Fred's example of the Cohen song takes us forward much: being able to name the chord progression, which is clearly evident to any listener, surely does not add a great deal to the emotional / intellectual experience?

George, thank you for your excellent post. A strong contribution with much food for thought. I need a little time to digest . However, if I may just pick up one point:

Does this make me a better listener than someone who has never played a music instrument ... Some people are fully capable of a sensitive appreciation of music even though they have never played a note in their lives

I wonder if we are moving to a shared understanding here about music appreciation: that our different experiences are no less valuable in helping us appreciate the music to which we listen?

If this is the case, do we accept that each individual has a valid response to the music regardless of their background?  ( I think we do).

And following on from this is it simply the case that immersion in music production lends a more specialised understanding?

And, if so, ( and this is where the discussion seems to be heading at the moment) does close association with music production give such people's opinion on all matters musical a higher order of value than those people without it?

You see I think it comes down to whether we accept or deny that experience of, and training in, music appreciation enhances the listening experience. As an avid listener, do I hear more in the music than before I started listening critically? And does this enhance my pleasure? 

Not so much round and round / circular as spiralling!

In my opinion, playing music deepened my understanding of music in a way that makes me less easily pleased either with the music itself or the performance, but I am not sure that it made my appreciation greater overall! It made my appreciation of the greatest music deeper, and most profound performances of it but also led me to reject a lot of music that others enjoy. It is a double edged sword in my experience.

Some performance other people really like seem not so very fine to me as a result of my having played.

This is not always on a technical level, but often on the level of the way the music is characterised emotionally and spiritually in performance, because I have always studied the full score of any music I love. That gives me the involuntary habit of analysing performances in a way that many would not. And sometimes disliking something often regarded as rather good by others ...

ATB frpm George

It is a double edged sword in my experience.

Some performance other people really like seem not so very fine to me as a result of my having played.

This is not always on a technical level, but often on the level of the way the music is characterised emotionally and spiritually in performance, because I have always studied the full score of any music I love. That gives me the involuntary habit of analysing performances in a way that many would not. And sometimes disliking something often regarded as rather good by others 

I know exactly what you mean. Working in a music school has raised my expectations of performance. I used to enjoy hearing buskers on city streets, now i can't help myself be critical of their playing. There is no enjoyment there, unless there is a trained professional supplementing their income.

There's a parallel for me regarding books. I am trained in literary criticism and teach English for a living. As such I find myself automatically analysing the writer's style in everything I read. I can't read quickly for pleasure as I simply cannot turn off the critical faculty. I really enjoy great works, but  never without appreciating the technical brilliance of the piece. But lesser works leave me cold. 

However, my essential message to my students is that they should bring themselves to the book. After all, it is the interplay between their life experiences and certain  threads of the book  which the relationship between reader, the created work and the writer. Knowledge of the writer is not particularly important, but a relationship with the artwork is. 

Thus I would argue that to be fully engaged with a piece of music one must open oneself up to it in order to experience the magical interaction between performers, performance and self.