A composition student attended a performance of Mozart's horn concertos.
Concertos for a solo instrument and orchestra usually take advantage of the expressive possibilities and agility of certain instruments —piano, violin, flute, clarinet—, so that a concerto for horn, an instrument slower and with a less brilliant aura than those others , is a kind of prank;
the way in which Mozart makes the horn run, asks for trills and levity and assigns melodies that "do not belong" made the student laugh, who had just spent a semester studying the compositional techniques of Mozart and Haydn, while the goofy assistants Those around him looked at him badly, wondering what that irreverent young man was laughing at.
But for irreverent, Mozart,
adagio
) and the orchestra to play fast (
allegro
), probably laughing at the horns' tendency to be late to notes (due to the characteristics of the instrument at that time in its development);
furthermore, in the original manuscript of one of these works, all written for a horn player friend of his, Mozart includes a series of very humorous annotations encouraging him, telling him to regain energy during the passages in which the orchestra plays alone and making fun of how he imagine that he is going to interpret certain melodies with words that can be read as comments on what he is playing at any given moment or on a rather ridiculous sexual encounter: “My God, how fast”, “Take a breath”, “Bravo”, "You're done?
Thanks god".
Jean Cocteau explains that, for the creators, the game can be the origin of a new beauty, but that in many cases the public rejects this playful element, considering that the artist must be a solemn person "with his head in his hands".
This idea, which in the case of those attending a Mozart concert prevents them from grasping the comic dimension of the work —which is perhaps its essence—, in many other cases works as something of a deterrent.
I am referring to the idea that what is fundamental in music is the intellectual, which is false, but above all it is harmful.
Musicians of any genre or culture study and learn with tools that are partly intellectual, of course, but when it comes to making music—whether it's composing, performing, or improvising—they leave all that aside.
“Learn everything and then forget everything”, advises Charlie Parker.
And also: “Don't think.
Stop thinking".
Anton Webern, one of the main exponents of twelve-tone music, says that the method that generates it was an "instinctive" discovery.
Nevertheless,
both musicians have been criticized by intellectuals and their work produces a great rejection in some people who try to "understand" it.
I am convinced that if they just listened and opened up to the unknown, many listeners could broaden their tastes as well as their register of emotions and their vision of the world.
In other disciplines we find numerous creators who defend this same point of view.
Paul Cézanne, for example, who with his conception of painting paved the way for non-figurative art and is the origin of a whole lineage of “intellectual” painters, explains it this way: “If a theory drags me now contrary to that of the day before, if I think while I paint, if I intervene, everything collapses”.
But not only artists — those irreverent ones, after all — defend this approach.
Kant maintains that aesthetic ideas are opposed to the ideas of reason, since they exist "without any concept", and that there are two kinds of beauty: adherent beauty, which presupposes how the object should be and is conditioned by said presupposition, and free beauty, which does not presuppose anything about the object.
Music, of course, is for him an example of free beauty.
Schopenhauer affirms that the aesthetic experience is like a violent storm that overwhelms us and that we must let ourselves go without resisting if we want it to be complete.
Nietzsche declares that in music "something never felt aspires to externalize itself" and that the listener can surrender to it by abandoning his ideas and even his identity, in an experience he calls "forgetting oneself".
Listeners, for their part, if they think a piece of music is too intellectual, may feel intimidated or reject it with disdain, but in both cases they are allowing an inappropriate idea to come between their ears and the work.
It should be remembered that the word "aesthetic" comes from the Greek
aisthesis
, which refers to sensory perception.
The aesthetic experience originates in the senses.
Picasso says that, when faced with a work of art, “I wish we could take away our brains and use only our eyes”.
Duke Ellington also expresses it clearly: "I don't think people have to know about music in order to appreciate or enjoy it."
It is a prejudice that, in reality, fulfills a very conservative function: it prevents us from having new aesthetic experiences, always keeping us in familiar territory, in which we know what we should think and feel.
All music, including the simplest, has an intellectual dimension: it is the result of a very complex process of evolution.
But when we are used to its language, its sound characteristics, the intellectual does not bother us at all.
On the other hand, when something disturbs us, surprises us intensely, proposes an inner journey towards the unknown, it is very easy to reject it, arguing that it is too intellectual.
We should get rid of that need to control and understand everything rationally in order to enjoy a freer and fuller listening, with our ears.
And later,
when we have already got used to the sound world that each work proposes, maybe we can try to focus on other things.
As Thelonious Monk says, "If you can't hear it, there's no use having it explained to you."
Debussy forcefully insists: “There is no theory.
You just have to listen.
Pleasure is the law."
Much of the music that is branded as intellectual deliberately seeks to put the listener in a position where the intellectual is of no use: it is saying that it has to be heard with the ears, abandoning the frame of reference that the listener knows and with which it feels safe.
What music usually asks of us is a disconnection from the intellectual, a permanence in the plane of the senses and an unprejudiced listening, three things that we are used to not giving.
A small awareness, a slight change in attitude, can allow us to get closer to many things that we are missing.
Mariano Peyrou
(Buenos Aires, 1971) is a musician and writer.
His last one is 'Ears that don't see' (Taurus, 2022).
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