Satoshi Akima <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Ulvi Yurtsever wrote:
>
>>I never understood why "pure" music is seen as intellectual or cerebral
>>etc.  To me it feels exactly the other way around, if anything, opera is
>>more intellectual.
>
>I hope I am not expected to believe that La Nozze di Figaro is more
>intellectual than say, die Grosse Fuge, die Kunst der Fuge, or Boulez's
>Pli Selon Pli.

Your hopes are dashed; that's exactly what I expect you to believe (I
haven't heard the Pli Selon Pli, though; that could very well be highly
intellectual music, so far as I can tell from my experience with Boulez).

>>But what is this "intellectual rigor" in the works of the great masters?
>>It sounds so unappetizing; I would never want to listen to intellectually
>>rigorous music knowingly.
>
>You do this all the time listening to your beloved Bach Ulvi.

Well, we seem to be talking past each other.  As far as my definition of
"intellectual" goes, no activity is further from being intellectual than
listening to or playing Bach.

>>Bach did not have counterpoint books from which to learn rigorous
>>composition procedures; instead, those books came later from scholars who
>>tried (and miserably failed, in my opinion) to encode what made Bach's
>>music great in a manageable number of algorithms (or "rules").
>
>....  I am sure Bach would have at some time been drilled in the study
>of the counterpoint of composers like Palestrina.

I don't have deep knowledge of this history, but I would be very surprised
if formal scholarly learning and study had any influence on Bach as a
creative composer.  CPE Bach states in his biographical notes on Johann
Sebastian that JS "became a pure and strong fuguist" mainly by improvising
on the organ.  When Bach studied other composers he mostly did so to
acquire ideas for his own music, not to school himself in rigorous
composition.

>Lastly it does depend on what one means by 'intellectual'.  If this means
>something merely calculating then this is a misunderstading.  I use the
>term in the sense of the German word 'Geistlich' which can just as much
>mean 'spiritual'.

I think we have here the root of our (mis)communication problem.  The way
I see it, 'spiritual' is the opposite (or antithesis) of intellectual; not
in the sense that these two are contradictory, but in the sense that black
is the opposite of white.

What still bothers me, though, is, assuming you are using the word
"intellectual" to really mean spiritual, then it seems that you believe a
composer can learn to write spiritually deep music through formal scholarly
training.  Do you really believe that?

Ulvi
[log in to unmask]