Cook's book, about music not cooking

Cook, Nicholas. Music: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. (Picture taken from Amazon)

This book is on the reading list for our first year students.  I tried a couple of times and found it hard to pull through the first two chapters.  It didn't quite appear to be very interesting.  However I was trying to find a quotation the other day and found out that the 4th chapter appears to be more adorable to my like.

Chapter 4 An Imaginary Object


p. 54-56


Many ancient civilizations, most notoriously that of Egypt, seem to have been haunted by a dread of decay and forgetfulness, and so attempted almost obsessively to give a permanent form to everything that their civilization embraced, to fix it for eternity; hence the existence of such time capsules as Tutankhamun's tomb.  Many cultures have been possessed by a similar desire to give music a tangible, enduring presence, and so the music of vanished societies survives to this day in the precarious form of fragile manuscripts in Japanese temples, European monastic archives, and American libraries.....


But 'survive' is perhaps too strong a word, for the music of the past exists in a kind of half-life.  Even if you understand how a notation works, there are aspects of the music about which the notation is silent.....


The same problems apply to far more recent music, too.  You might assume that we would know how a nineteenth-century composition like Gounod's Ave Maria, say, was performed in its own time; after all, it has enjoyed a continuous performance traditions, unlike earlier music that has had to be laboriously reconstructed from the original sources.  But  there is a very early recording, dating from 1904, which casts doubt on this.  It was made by Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, who was in his time called 'the angel of Rome'.  During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries boys with especially promising voices were sometimes castrated to prevent their voices breaking, and the resulting male sopranos took the lead roles in opera as well as singing in choirs.....

Actually found this on youtube, have a listen to the Castrato version of Ave Maria, very interesting.

p. 61


If we treated notation the way some Christian fundamentalists treat the Bible--if we said that anything that isn't in the score shouldn't be in the performance--then computer controlled synthesizers would by now have put performers out of a job: it takes a machine to perform the music literally, mindlessly, without expression.  But we don't treat notation this way.  The fact that the notation doesn't care about subtleties of temporal or dynamic shaping doesn't mean we don't care about them.  And if our notation simplifies the music by eliminating these things, that is because it is in the nature of notations to simplify.  A notation that tried to put everything in would end up being far too complicated to read.....


p. 64-67


Master of the Smallest Link


The pattern of what is determined by notation and what isn't, what is to be taken as given and what is a matter of performance interpretation, is one of the things that defines a musical culture; it defines not only how music is transmitted but also how the various individuals whose activities together make up a musical culture relate to one another.  It also largely determines how people imagine music within a given culture--most obviously how composers conceive their music, through you could say that it is shared patterns of imagination that bind all the members of a musical community together.  To composer within any given traditions, then, is to imagine sounds in terms of the particular configurations of determinacy and indeterminacy appropriate to that tradition, and this in turns means that notation is much more profoundly implicated in the act of composition than many accounts of the compositional process might lead you to believe.


There are two famous sources relating to the ways in which Mozart and Beethoven respectively conceived their music.  In a letter that only came to light at the beginning of the nineteenth century (it was first published in 1815), Mozart explained how musical ideas would come to him unbidden.....


And corroboration of this account of the compositional process comes from the composer Louis Schlösser, who at the age of 85 published an account of a meeting he had with Beethoven more than sixty years before, in 1822.....


The degree of consensus between these accounts is remarkable.  Both Maozrt and Beethoven emphasize how they can 'see' or 'survey' the music at a glance, and compare it to a picture.....


The explanation for the striking disparity between what Beethoven said and what he did is in fact depressingly simple, and the story has been told by Maynard Solomon.  The letter attributed to Mozart was almost certainly and invention of Friedrich Rochlitz, the journalist and critic who edited the magazine in which it first appeared.  And Schlösser's account of his conversation with Beethoven was almost certainly copied consciously or unconsciously from Rochlitz's letter; the two are just too similar for any other interpretation to be plausible.  Contemporaries believed these accounts were authentic not because they corresponded to how Mozart or Beethoven composed, nor even probably because they corresponded to what Mozart or Beethoven said, but because they represented what, in nineteenth-century eyes, the composers ought to have said.
  

It always fascinates me how human want to explain, identify, or try to understand what music values and what it is like behind the creative process.  As a part of the society, composers probably can't avoid to embrace the current culture or philosophical movements and the heritage from the past.  Nonetheless, comprehending those concepts not necessary teaches us how to write music.  Interesting.