MUSIC AND MEANING

Jerry Harkins

Some years ago I attended a concert the highlight of which was Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto in G Major, Opus 58.  Here is a close paraphrase of the description of the first movement given in the program notes:

The concerto begins in the strange key of B major, then flirts with A minor, an odd choice.  It pays a call on the less remote key of B minor but moves quickly to an amazing surprise, a dream episode in the completely strange key of B-flat.  There follows a second dream episode in the most unexpected key of C-sharp minor, and then a third in yet another strange key, E-flat.  The cadenza begins with a violent excursion in a blatantly wrong but unspecified key and then offers a peace-making gesture in the completely irrelevant key of A major.

In spite of the colorful words and phrases, the author clearly knew that he was writing about a work of genius.  Perhaps he was trying to make the point – dubious but debateable - that this concerto presages the movement away from strict tonality, and that certain key changes might have sounded strange to contemporary ears.  But by referring to what he called the composer's "dream episodes" he seemed also to acknowledge that the music actually means something.  This too is controversial.  The composer and essayist Ned Rorem for example has written, "Music has no intellectual significance, no meaning outside itself" and he explicitly includes what he calls "so-called programmatic" music. I believe Rorem is wrong.  His own remarkable organ piece "Mary Dyer Did Hang as a Flag"  is obviously programmatic and arresting in its invocation of the sounds accompanying Mary's martyrdom.  He might not have intended it but even listeners who know the story only from the title of the piece are sure to be disturbed by the music.

Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto simply cannot be appropriately described as strange or odd or unexpected or irrelevant or wrong in any way.  Moreover to do so creates self-fulfilling expectations which encourage careless errors.  For example, the concerto does not begin in the “strange” key of B Major;  it begins with a lovely 5-measure tune for solo piano in, of course, G Major.  The strings then repeat the same theme in B major.  The woodwinds follow and you will hear hints of the tune in different keys throughout the fifteen minutes of the first movement.  But the movement ends exactly where you would expect it to, solidly on the tonic chord, G major.  The "blatantly wrong" but unspecified key with which he says Beethoven began the cadenza is also G major although both cadenzas he wrote quickly abandon the tonic.  The second which was performed the night I attended begins with the G major chord before tripping down a two and a half octave run flatting the B's, E's, A's and D's as it goes thus winding up in A-flat major.  The first E-flat certainly calls attention to itself but, in the couple of seconds it takes to complete the run, your ear is fully adjusted and ready for the A-flat major.  You didn't have time to think "wrong."

And you shouldn't.  Anyone who thinks about such matters during a performance is missing the point of the composer and wasting the price of the ticket.  Indeed "thinking" about music in a verbal sense may be a bootless exercise.  I have no idea what was going on in the mind of Beethoven when he composed the Fourth Concerto.  All I know is that hearing it gives me great pleasure.  My problem is that, as verbal as I think I am, I am unable to articulate that pleasure with any precision or even much confidence.  It's not simply that words fail me although they do.  I suspect it's more that emotional information inherently resists description by words. 

Granted that part of my pleasure derives from fairly obvious characteristics.  For one thing, Beethoven wrote tonal music which means that the sounds follow a set of rules which the human ear perceives as relationships that are pleasing and predictable.  Consider the famous opening of his Fifth Symphony in C minor:  four notes in two measures, three eighth notes on G and a half note on E flat.  Da Da Da Daa.  For several physical and biological reasons, that E flat is very satisfying.  With the three G's, the Da Da Da Daa is the C minor chord without the C.  The two remaining tones are, however, mathematically related and provide a sense of inevitability and completion or resolution. 

Almost all traditional Western music is tonal.  It "resolves" which is what makes the songs of the "Great American Songbook" memorable and comfortable.  Obviously the words help but there is also an entire genre of classical instrumental music, tone poems, composed explicitly to tell a story or set a mood with music only.  Among the most famous examples are Debussy's "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun" which is a modernist evocation of sexual awakening, Sibelius' "Finlandia" which is a patriotic description of Finnish history, and Gershwin's "Cuban Overture" the title of which is self-explanatory.  But there are also many compositions in traditional genres that were deliberately composed to address narrative or emotive purposes.  Among them are the following which I have tried to list on a spectrum ranging from obvious to subtle:  Tchaikovsky's  "1812 Overture," Copland's "Appalachian Spring," Bach's "O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden," Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition," Ravel's "Bolero," Williams' incidental music for "Schindler's List," Holst's "The Planets," Mendelssohn's incidental music for "A Midsummer Night's Dream," Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons," and Beethoven's "Symphony No. 6 in F Major."

It is impossible to miss the celebratory theme of the "1812 Overture" which proclaims a great Russian victory over Napoleon's Grand Armée.  It begins by quoting a somber Russian Orthodox hymn, "God Preserve Thy People," which reflects the anxiety of the people on first hearing the declaration of war.  Tchaikovsky then uses Russian folk tunes to describe the Battle of Borodino which was a defeat for the Russians and a pyrrhic victory for the French.  A dance tune, "At the Gate, at My Gate," describes the French arrival at the gates of Moscow but there is a quick transition to church bells, trumpets and cannons to proclaim a great Russian victory.  In case you are deaf to these, there is also the quotation of "La Marseillaise" which begins pridefully and fades to embarrassed defeat and then to a quotation of the national anthem of the Russian Empire, "God Save the Tsar."  This telling of the story, as Tchaikovsky knew, is greatly exaggerated.  The Russian Army did not win the Battle of Moscow.  Rather it burned Moscow to the ground and withdrew.  The bitter winter weather did the rest.  Still, 1812 works brilliantly as nationalistic propaganda.

The music for Bach's hymn "O Haupt Voll Blut und Wunden," was taken from an earlier work by Hans Leo Hassler.  Bach used it for five different arias in the Saint Matthew Passion, each of them a dirge.  This is the fourth version in F Major and is an unmistakable expression of unspeakable grief.  The lyrics are saccharine in both German and English but the music is a convincing definition of the emotions aroused by the crucifixion.

Throughout its history, Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" has encountered a bewildering storm of critical interpretation, much of it negative.  The scholar Anne Barton, writing in the Yale Shakespeare, points out that, "…condescension to the comedy as a matter of gossamer and moonshine, a charming trifle to be eked out theatrically by as much music and spectacle as possible, dominated both the criticism and the stage representations of this play until the second half of the twentieth century."   The incidental music by Mendelssohn has always fared better among the critics perhaps because it translates the Elizabethan rhetoric of the play for Victorian audiences and accurately captures the exuberance, the humor and the magic of the play.  When the Wedding March was played as the recessional at the marriage of the Princess Royal Victoria to Frederick III of Prussia in 1858 it instantly became a worldwide standard because it fit so perfectly with the joy and hope of the occasion.

I think of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony as subtle because it is so perfect one can listen to it without ever thinking of its program.  But it certainly has one.  Beethoven himself, a Romantic and a lover of nature and natural history, gave it the title, “Pastoral Symphony, or a recollection of country life.  More an expression of feeling than a painting.”  It is in five movements each of which he also titled:  “Awakening of cheerful feelings upon arrival in the country,” “Scene by the brook,” “Merry gathering of the country folk,” “Storm, Tempest,” and “Shepherds’ Song."  Happy and thankful feelings after the storm.”

Beethoven wrote a fair number of programmatic pieces, some like the Third Symphony, "Eroica," and the Ninth explicitly so, others like the famous Sonata 14 in C-sharp minor not.   Eroica is Italian for heroic and the symphony was composed to honor Napoleon.  Beethoven retracted this dedication after Napoleon declared himself emperor and used instead "Eroica" as the title.  Several weeks later however he informed the publisher that the real title was still "Bonaparte."  The C-minor Sonata, on the other hand, became "Moonlight" only five years after the composer's death;  he had titled it "Sonata quasi una fantasia."  The re-naming took hold in the popular imagination probably because the first movement calls to mind an emotion akin to Lorenzo's attempt to romance Jessica in "The Merchant of Venice."  He tells her, "How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! / Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears.  Soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony."  Beethoven himself probably had no such thought.  A German critic was the first to connect the music to moonlight and soon the sonata was being called that universally.

And it is doubtful that Beethoven was thinking of victory when he wrote the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony.  Nor was Samuel F. B. Morse thinking of either victory or Beethoven when he decided the letter V should be represented by three dots and a dash.  But early in 1941, the BBC began its "V for Victory" campaign and on June 27 of that year, it added Beethoven's four notes as an audio symbol. Previously those notes had been referred to as "Fate knocking at the door" in deference to a remark attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Beethoven himself.  The Fifth is ultimate Beethoven, a masterpiece that is dramatic and, in the view of many commentators, "heroic" in the sense of the composer vowing to conquer his encroaching deafness.  To me it seems heroic also in the sense that it recalls Winston Churchill's V for Victory salute adopted in response to the BBC campaign.  It expresses courage in the face of the existential challenge of the Battle of Britain and is, therefore, but a small step from representing the classical idea of the hero.  Unlike the Third Symphony which refers specifically to the death of a hero in its second movement, the Fifth passes over the tragic element of classical heroism and is triumphant from start to finish.

I think of Beethoven's titanic struggle with his impending deafness while he was composing both the Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, the Fifth a kind of metaphor for the struggle itself and the Sixth for serenity in the face of inevitability.  The Pastoral is not acceptance.  It does not imply a surrender like that of Job, "I know that you can do all things;  no purpose of yours can be thwarted."  But now the composer is composed.  For the rest of his life his work will reflect Wordsworth's description of poetry as "emotion recollected in tranquility."  Even when it is dramatic, it will be more introspective, more complex and more profound.  Always the composer is speaking to himself but is also sharing his feelings with all of us.  The hearers then impose their own understanding of the work, sometimes overriding that of the composer.

The bugle call we know as "Taps" was composed as "Lights Out" during the Civil War to replace a drum tattoo of the same name.  Although it is still used to end each day at U.S. military posts,  soldiers immediately noted its appropriateness as a salute to their fallen comrades and that is how the whole world now knows it.  It is surely funereal but its ascending major chords speak also of pride.  Joyce Kilmer picked up on its stately, assertive, prideful cadences in the two refrains he wrote for his poem Rouge Bouquet.   "Comrades true, born anew, peace to you! / Your souls shall be where the heroes are / And your memory shine like the Morningstar / Brave and dear, / Shield us here, / Farewell!"

It seems beyond dispute that music – or at least music based on the diatonic architecture familiar to my ears – is a language and that it exists primarily to express emotional knowledge that words are not well suited to.  Victor Hugo thought so.  He wrote, "Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent."  It can also tell a story but simple narration is not its strong suit.  It is only when emotion is the subject of the story that musical expressiveness can transcend mere words.  Then the music can describe and almost resolve the mystery, ambiguity and uncertainty of so much of our experience.

What theologians call mystery and scientists call uncertainty are not the same thing but they derive from the same problem, the great truth that nothing is unequivocal.  Saint Paul tells us that we see only through a glass darkly which is not so different from what Heisenberg discovered about quantum events – that any attempt to simultaneously measure complementary variables such as the position and momentum of a particle necessarily involves errors the product of which cannot be less than Planck's Constant h.  The more precisely you measure one, the less precisely you can measure the other.  We attempt to overcome these ambiguities with the tools of language and mathematics– vocabulary, grammar and semantics or statistics, algebra and calculus.  Both are metaphorical systems and all metaphors limp, possibly because words and numbers limp.  The word chair for example is not something you can sit on but a symbol for a thing called a referent which you can sit on.  When Robert Burns says, "My love is like a red, red rose," he is trying to communicate the meaning of something he cannot point at:  the intensity, urgency and fragility of the emotion he calls love.  When James Joyce writes of the "hithering and thithering waters of the night" he is painting an impressionistic picture in your mind of the disquiet of the dark hours.  There is, however, no metaphor that can describe the color green to a person who has never seen it.  And when words fail, we are left with musical tones, a language made up of  rhythm, melody and harmony.

When a bugler at a grave site sounds the different inversions of the C-major triad that constitute Taps, we hear an impression of grief, love and respect.  The notes are neither complete nor precise definitions but they constitute a powerful intimation of what people are feeling.  Most musical statements of course are not nearly as unambiguous as Taps for the simple reason that most emotional knowledge is not as acute as that occasioned by a funeral.  Most feelings are innately vague.  They do not lend themselves to simple verbal explication which is why traditional psychotherapy is so difficult and why we need poetry.  All coding systems are insufficient and create a penumbra of uncertainty around all attempts at communication.  An essential task of the writer, the diplomat, the judge, the preacher, the artist and the composer is not to eliminate the uncertainty but to embrace it mindfully.  The language of music isolates and heightens such knowledge so we can experience it more keenly in spite of the uncertainty.

Uncertainty is not the enemy of comprehension any more than any answer is the enemy of any question.  Knowledge – the most important knowledge –  is what it is:  elusive and often evasive, beguiling, playful, seductive and even devious, difficult to uncover and even more difficult to communicate.  The challenge is to get closer to the truth, to revel in the pursuit, to satisfy curiosity, to be bemused by the veil beneath the veil, and to share hard won wisdom.  Music, like all the arts, exists to enrich both knowledge and the process of acquiring it.