The Refuge of Music

I mentioned that Richard Taruskin's main battlegrounds were ones that, in some cases, are no longer critically important. One of them was insisting on the social and cultural context of music against those who, like Schopenhauer, believe that music exists in its own separate world:

The inexpressible depth of all music, by virtue of which it floats past us as a paradise quite familiar and yet eternally remote, and is so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain.

Taruskin spent much of his career railing against those who would want to insulate music from the world because he believed that in so doing, they simply made music irrelevant. There is a great deal of truth in this, of course, and we can be gratified that he largely won that battle.

But.

But.

When I sit down to compose, I do go off into another world, one without the distractions of this one. I close my ears to the sounds of construction next door, the barking of a neighborhood dog, the distant strains of a car radio and so on. I close my ears to these and other distractions because they are not relevant to my task which is to open myself to musical ideas that may float past (where do these come from?) and try to follow where they lead. It is as if I am, intentionally, insulating myself from the everyday world. This is pretty much how every composer works. Now this is while I am acting as a creator, a producer, where Taruskin is talking more about music as it is received by the listener who may be much more engaged with it in a social and cultural context. But even for a lot of listeners, while they may be aware and inspired by the context of the music as much as its abstract content, they may also choose to listen to music as a refuge from, yes, exactly that everyday world of politics and confusion.

Taruskin mentions that in the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven he chooses instruments, kettledrums, piccolo, trombones, that have military associations. This is nothing new, Haydn also has military references in some symphonies, but it is an undeniable bit of referentiality. But if we choose to listen to a string quartet or a piano sonata, there is not necessarily the same kind of contextualism. Well, you could argue for it, I suppose, but I'm pretty sure that most listeners are immersed in the music qua music and not in terms of whatever external things might be referenced.