Quote of the Week...from Igor Stravinsky

I haven't understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.      ---Igor Stravinsky.

I feel tempted by this quote from one of the greatest composers of all time to put myself squarely by his side and justify my own shortcomings in intellectually understanding music, especially its very intricate technicalities.  After all, it is the feeling I get...just as Stravinsky stated it...upon hearing an especially compelling song or classical piece.  But I'm sure that Stravinsky knew quite well all there was to know about reading and writing music and that his "understanding" of it far, far surpassed mine...or the great majority of people in the world, for that matter.  Instead, I think his quote was intended to emphasize that the feelings and emotions that music elicits are much more significant than the nuts-and-bolts of the art and that while his often very complex compositions may have opened themselves up to much technical scrutiny and analysis, he did not create them from his mind, but rather from his heart...

Sometimes at night I listen to my local classical music station and it broadcasts various syndicated shows that discuss and play various pieces of the featured composer.  And sometimes I feel frustrated by their analysis, which often is over my musically-untrained head, and I just want them to shut up and play the entire work, not just snippets interspersed with drawling, affected chatter.  On a different level, I grew up listening to rock and roll, in particular during that time in the 1960s called the British Invasion.  Rock bands from Britain were forming in multitudes and the members, many of them teenage kids untrained in music theory and incapable of reading it, would imitate songs off records until they could cover them well and record them...and then later came up with their own compositions,.based on how they felt...someone else was given the job of writing them down.  Yet it was music all the same, and some of my favorite songs come from people who didn't know much of the technicalities of music beyond what they could do on their own instruments to create the effects that brought out the feelings they sought...

So while music lends itself to intellectual scrutiny, that isn't what makes it tick.  Feeling music, as Igor Stravinsky stressed, is by far more important than "understanding" it...