How to Listen to Classical Music: Expression and Emotion

How can we listen for expression in classical music, and what separates most classical music from most pop music? You might say the instruments or the musical style, and you're right to an extent. But I want to say something more, and hopefully by the end of this video I'll convince you. I want to show you that classical music relies chiefly on the movement, forces, and musical arguments of its tones to express itself. In other words, it relies primarily on using the flow of So let me try and explain this bit by bit. We'll look quickly at different types of expression, and then musical movement, qualities, forces, and most importantly, the idea of the dance of sympathy. There are many ways that we attach emotion to music. For example, we might catch ourselves tapping our foot, bobbing our head, or even dancing to a funky beat. And sometimes this is actually a biological function called entrainment. Our bodies naturally sync up with a Another thing we do is associate music with something else. For example, a piece of music might remind us of a film, a game, or a memory. And so we bundle music with a separate experience. Similarly, music can refer to other things, like this bird song in Beethoven, which might cause us to imagine a countryside scene. Again here, we're bundling music with In the same kind of way, I think we often take emotion from the lyrics of a good song, over and above the actual music. In the best of songs, music and lyrics complement each other beautifully and enhance each other, though often in pop music, the lyrics take the emotional weight, while the music cycles through the same four chords and doesn't express much on its own. We also feel emotion from the way the performers express themselves. Here, Beyonce sings ecstatically, Chester sings with rage, while Alice sings in some kind of erotic torment. Even without vocals, we can recognise physical expression in performance. And I think as human beings, it's quite natural for us to recognise how someone is expressing something and feel a sympathetic reaction to it, whether it's rage or empowerment or something more indescribable. All these different types of expression can come together in music, and so often our response to music is a mixture of these things and others. But I said earlier, classical music relies chiefly on the movement, forces and musical arguments of its tones to express itself. Of course, the things that we've just looked at are relevant too, but the musical flow and forces are the first and most powerful means of expression in classical. So let me try and explain this to you. And some of the following ideas are influenced by Roger Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music, which is a pretty intense read, but it's definitely shaped the way I think about music. If you're interested, then read it, because he goes much deeper into his philosophy than I have time to hear. First off, we perceive movement in music. Take this example from Swan Lake. We hear it as moving upwards, surging, and then returning back down for a second attempt. We perceive this as movement, not just one sound followed by another, but as a long moving line, flowing up and down, moving around some imaginary space, giving a sense of life to the music. And actually, musical notation does a good job of depicting this movement visually. As well as movement, we also hear qualities in music. While pitch sound itself cannot literally be graceful, foreboding, tense, exciting, joyful, devastating, music can be all of those things. For example, we can and should describe this work as heavy, or even lumbering. But I can also say that this music has a great weight, a heaviness and foreboding, even though it's not loud, and it's totally different from the first example. On another level, it's right to say that this music is graceful, while this has an almost panicked intensity. We often describe music in terms of moral character. It's normal to call a piece of music sad or playful or sinister, just as we would a person. But pitch sound can't literally be playful or heavy or panicked, so why do we use these words? Essentially, when we're doing this, we're using metaphor to describe music. Why? Like with great poetry, sometimes the most adequate way to describe a human experience is through metaphor. You take a quality of something else, like heaviness, and apply it to whatever you're describing, because you experience that thing as heavy, even though it can't literally be heavy. And so we can say this music is sad or graceful or breathless, because that's how we experience it. And this kind of musical experience is actually very intuitive. We don't feel music's heaviness because teacher said so or because of the society we live in. It's much more of a gut feeling than that. And that's why metaphors like these, if chosen well, can sometimes be the best ways to describe and understand our musical experience. So, as well as movement and qualities, we also experience forces in music. Forces like tension, climax, building energy, flow. There are these forces at work which make some notes feel right, some notes feel wrong, some moments feel at home and others shocking, for example, and forces which create an effect of interconnectedness, almost as if the notes are magnetised or somehow related to each other. The specific musical styles might be different in Mozart, from say, Debussy, or Jazz, or Indian Ragas. But all of these cases rely on musical forces at work, binding the music together, creating a sense of movement, push-pull, tension, flow and connectedness. If these forces sound a little metaphysical, then that's because they are. On the one hand, we can understand some of this by looking at physics. We can understand the pitches, how they're related, how we have consonants and dissonance, and from these fundamental principles we can actually derive a lot of the traditional musical laws. On the other hand, we experience these musical forces like tension, flow and energy, which are not based on the actual forces of physics, but we do perceive them, and so we can think of them as metaphysical forces. I didn't want to get too tangled up in philosophy here, but if you need more convincing, then Roger Scruton's book explores these ideas in a lot more depth. But I want to show you a little more about tension. The way we experience musical tension is not actually unlike physical tension. The music holds back from resolving longer and longer, building more and more tension, holding back from climax, until finally we feel release and relief as the music resolves, just as we would with physical tension. Here's the example we heard earlier from Swan Lake. The melody is trying to break its limits, once, twice, a third time, but it doesn't quite get there, and then it returns and tries again, but this time it soars into new terrains. This whole finale of Swan Lake is a great example of musical tension, where he just keeps building and building until the final, beautiful apotheosis. If you can start listening, not only listening for, but feeling tension and climax in music, as well as movement and flow, then I think you're well on your way to listening with a greater emotional depth and understanding. To start, try listening to the whole finale of Swan Lake, and I mean really actively listening to it, and follow the movement, flow, tension and climax. And if you feel like it, here are some other pieces that you can try when starting out. So finally, how can we actually experience musical expression? In great music, when we hear movement and flow, we might even experience it as being almost alive, as living, breathing, as reaching out to us through some imagined space of music. And again, these metaphors of life and movement are indispensable to understanding the musical experience. And so, we start to realise that there is life in this music, free-floating emotion waiting to be captured and taken hold of by the listener. But how can we take hold of this musical life? Scruton says, through some dance of sympathy, which I think is the key to this all. Why is sympathy important? Whenever we see someone expressing something, whether it's a friend, an actor in a film, or a work of art, it's human to feel a sympathetic response. Normally, our emotions are related to our hopes, desires and goals, and they also normally have reasons for being there. We feel this way because of something, and they often motivate our actions, so we can directly connect our emotions with an understanding of ourselves. But when we feel a sympathetic response, we come to share in an emotion, without these personal qualities. For example, when I observe someone's fear, I come to share in it, while not being afraid for myself. In this sense, many great works of art, and many of the greatest actors, are considered great because they are expressive, in a way that elicits our sympathetic response. And so, with the best art, we get to exercise our emotions, without needing to act from them, and thus we can develop our sympathies and emotional understanding. In this sense, art is one of the most powerful forms of emotional education. So what about music and the dance of sympathy? Scruton uses the example of dancing to show us how we might listen. He writes, when someone dances to music, he responds to the way it sounds. You respond sympathetically to an imaginary movement, and you might even feel that you are being led by the music from gesture to gesture. That is why there are different ways of dancing to different styles of music, and some dancers feel inherently right, while other dancers feel quite wrong. We hear this imaginary movement in the music, and we respond sympathetically with our own physical movement. And moving with the music, Scruton says, is one way of recognizing expression. For example, when we look at great conductors, they're not just time beaters. They've developed a way of showing musical movement, musical ideas, musical expression, through their own physical movement. They've developed a way of communicating music through something which is not music, but movement. And so, you can see how music and physical movement are connected. But we don't have to dance. We can also experience the expressive character of music through some kind of latent dancing, a sublimated desire to move with the music. You're not literally dancing, but your sympathetic response is moving with the music. It's being led by it. You are in the music's hands, and the music compels your sympathies to move along with it. As the musical argument unfolds, develops, and resolves itself, we're taken on this emotional journey, exercising our sympathies in parallel with the music. We might not always be able to find the right words to describe the musical expression, but that doesn't matter, because the true understanding lies in the dance. But with music, we're not just observers of someone else's emotion, as we might be in the theatre or in film. When we experience music in this way, as a dance of sympathy, we take some sort of leap into subjectivity. We are the first person, and we experience emotion as abstract from any reason or purpose, but as simply being. Through our latent dance, as our sympathies move in parallel with the pushes and pulls, rises and falls of tension, the expressive emotional outbursts, and the quiet moments of beauty, we acquire a first person acquaintance with emotions which, without the existence of great music, might always have been just out of reach. For a moment, we might transcend ourselves, and live with the music, moving, soaring, floating through. you