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From: karn@petrus.UUCP (Phil R. Karn)
Newsgroups: net.music.classical
Subject: Re: Tone poems
Message-ID: <483@petrus.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 27-Aug-85 02:20:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: petrus.483
Posted: Tue Aug 27 02:20:52 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 28-Aug-85 20:50:50 EDT
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> One of the beauties of textless music is that it can inspire widely
> differing associations in the minds of listeners.  It doesn't seem too
> likely, though, that Shostakovitch, writing during WWII, intended to
> evoke images of nuclear war!

You're right. I'm fast coming to the conclusion that TRULY "descriptive"
music is actually quite rare. Virtually all of the visual images that come
to mind when I hear a piece are the result of past associations, some quite
conscious (e.g., from the title, or from having been used in a memorable
movie) while other associations were probably formed in events I've long
forgotten. The best example of "descriptive music" I could think of, the
storm in Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, is effective mostly because it
imitates a natural sound (a thunderstorm) with an artificial one (tympani).
Conjuring up a purely visual image with sound alone is probably much more
difficult.

I'm reminded of the Bloom Country strip a couple of years ago. Opus the
Penguin is talking with Portnoy the Groundhog about his favorite song, the
Beatles' "Yesterday". He says that this song has always been very
sentimental to him, in that it evoked images of his youth with porpoises
frolicking under antarctic rainbows. That was, until he saw the MTV version,
complete with half-naked women and explosions; afterwards all he could think
of were half-naked, exploding porpoises!

Phil