Bill Pirkle, on the 2nd movement to Beethoven's 4th piano concerto:

>Also concerning your comment in the above "People and armies and forces
>"struggle".  Music does not" I think one might find many examples of
>struggles in music, especially Beethoven's.  But maybe "conflict" is a
>better word.

"Contrast" is probably even better, in that it tends not to promote a
listener's program.

Most of us hope that music stirs emotions within us.  I'm sure most
composers spend all that time and tedium making those little marks on
the page for reasons other than the reasons for which they work out
crossword puzzles.  But, unless they provide some sort of extra-musical or
conventional clue, we can't really say what the music means emotionally,
except to ourselves.  I don't agree that this is unimportant.  To me, it's
the most important thing about any piece, and talking about it provides
metaphor for the emotions stirred.  But it's a metaphor rather than a
linear correspondence.  As I've said, I really doubt that the emotions
stirred in me by a Josquin mass are the same as those of its first hearers.
I also doubt that those first hearers' emotions agreed with one another.

Our vocabulary betrays us.  We say music is expressive, which implies that
it expresses something, whereas it's probably more accurate to say that
it's a catalyst for something inside us.  Bill says rightly that nobody
understands what random is.  We want to find patterns within our
experience.  Music seems to me like a Rorschach blot or whatever
you add to silver nitrate that grows silver hairs on a copper wire.

Steve Schwartz