Should we try to build a musical discourse or does the music speak for itself?
In "The Musical Dialog", written in 1994, the conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt, specialist in baroque music (and now deceased), exposes numerous data concerning this music, in order to help performers to understand it better. In a specific section of this book, he addresses the question of the transition from baroque music to classical music.
He compares the ancient vision of music (that of composition and performance in the Baroque era), based on the use of a complex musical rhetoric, perfectly mastered by the performers and understood by the listeners (even when those ones had little musical education), with the vision developed in the Romantic era, where it is all about "absolute music". This latter vision asserts that music is good as long as it touches the heart of the listener, who does not need to have any musical knowledge to appreciate it.
Nikolaus Harnoncourt explains that the change of vision between the Baroque era and the Romantic era is due to the fact that Romantic music is essentially based on melody, whereas Baroque music had a subtle rhetoric, and, therefore, relied upon a theory called "theory of passions": the musician immersed himself/herself in given passions, in order to transmit them to the listeners, so that the link between music and public speaking went without saying.
The conductor goes on to say that, since the middle of the nineteenth century, musicians have been taught that rhetorical music has less value than pure, absolute music. He deplores this situation and considers that this kind of statement is responsible for the lack of motivation among musicians, who no longer want to study the nuances of baroque music. He says that this has negative consequences during music performances, like an incorrect punctuation of musical phrases.
For overcoming the opposition between baroque and romantic visions
We cannot embrace the idea of an impoverished Romantic music, compared to Baroque music, and we do not want to say that the structure of any baroque piece of music is, by nature, more complex than that of romantic music. Furthermore, we cannot develop more in-depth considerations related to questions of interpretation. Nikolaus Harnoncourt's reflection is however of immense value, because it questions the idea of musical structure as it has been thought since the middle of the nineteenth century.
As a specialist in baroque music, the conductor, who however also directed the performance of romantic works, notably scores written by Beethoven, wants, of course, to restore a certain discipline among performers. Let us notice that the conductor, in his book, does not speak at all about contemporary classical music and even less about popular music genres, even the most elaborate ones, such as jazz and folk music.
For our part, since we are developing a search engine, a music search engine called YMusic, rather than making a value judgment on visions of music which, to a certain extent, contradict each other, we would rather nurture them, renew, and make others emerge. Indeed, contemporary music and popular genres, including ethnic and folk music, also have a structure. In addition, the analysis of musical content as practiced by academic musical circles is perhaps not, or no longer, as uniform as the comments of Nikolaus Harnoncourt suggest.
First of all because more and more musicology departments within universities have one or another research project in music computing and are sensitive to new musical elements, such as synthetic sounds. Then because there is, among musicians who write for popular genres, an increasing interest in the analysis of their own music.
Beyond these debates related to musical genres, we wish, with the help of the YMusic search engine, to enhance the analysis of all musical content, whatever it is, and to provide musicians with new types of data, such as the range of the pitch for a specific piece of music (or for an ensemble of titles) or the harmonics present in the whole work of a composer.
We are convinced that these data can shed a new light on already known problems, bring new solutions and raise new questions.
Written by Françoise Delsaux, Marketing designer and product designer
Arpege Music Software Development
hello @ music-search-engine.info
http://www.arpegemusic.com
Arpege's mission is to develop sheet music composition and notation software, in an environment now completed by the YMusic search engine, an intelligent technology which provides musicians with quantified insights, via music visualizations and similarities graphs.
What can you do with this information?
Each music (re)searcher has his/her own targets, in various contexts and we providing guidelines for research or publishing is not our mission.
Our role is rather to help researchers to renew the manner in which they can see and assemble musical elements to get a deeper understanding of music, exploiting all new information into their specific framework and transforming it into knowledge.
We wish you great hours and interesting finds with YMusic.