I just listened to La Mer by Debussy for, oh, I don't know, about the 100th time. I first heard it around 1970 on a horribly scratched vinyl LP on an equally horrible mono cabinet record-player. I wanted to write "stereo" but it was pre-stereo. But it still sounded great. Just now I listened to a recording by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Pierre Boulez in 1993 on a really good harmon/kardon system. With this recording I can pretty much hear everything, but it would be better if I followed in the score. It was still great. And I'm pretty sure that the other hundred times I listened to it, it was also great. This is the odd thing: you can listen to a great piece of music an indefinite number of times without getting bored. In fact, the tendency is to enjoy the piece more each time you listen to it. Of course, with a bad piece of music, the effect is the opposite.
But I don't want to talk about that; instead I want to talk about how the same is not true of, for example, television series. With very few exceptions (cough**Firefly**), I don't find that you can watch a tv show very many times before it becomes tedious, annoying and predictable. Sure, you can watch a favorite show or series two, three, maybe five times and still enjoy it, but then the tediousness kicks in and you go watch something else. With music, the depth just seems to increase with each hearing. Mind you, it has to be a really great piece of music.
Is this just me, because I am a very music-oriented person? Or do others feel the same? I bet that Swifties can listen to Taylor many, many times without boredom. Could they watch a tv show as much? I suspect not. With some music, if I have listened to it five times I feel I am just scratching the surface and need to listen to it several more times before I feel I am really hearing what is going on. In the private concerts that Schoenberg arranged in Vienna, they would often repeat a composition which seems an excellent policy.
Indeed, there is something about music and repetition that is inherent to the form. Some music is very repetitive, while other is not at all. I think that means that we need to listen to the latter a lot more times before we really "get" it.
Poetry is a bit similar as you can read a poem many many times without boredom. Is the same true of novels? Plays?
Anyway, just some Sunday afternoon musings...
Plenty of people watch the entire seven series of Seinfeld multiple times over the years. I’m told that Frasier is similarly revisited and has even be rediscovered by young people today. However, those program’s writers had some amount of background in theatre, which resulted in quite a few scripts that are just as much fun revisiting as any play by Pinter or Coward. Perhaps a problem with TV writing (besides the tokenism, and the needs to maximize the immediate profit of the streaming platform) today is that it lost the connection to the theatre, and thereby to the literary tradition in general?
ReplyDeleteOh yes and I have to confess that I have watched all of Buffy the Vampire Slayer at least five or six times. But could I watch it one hundred times? I rather doubt it. Strawberry Fields Forever I'm sure I have listened to a hundred times. Also the whole White Album. And the B minor Mass of Bach. I haven't listened to the Art of Fugue a hundred times, but I'm sure I could.
ReplyDeleteBut you raise an excellent point, because you could certainly read a Shakespeare play a hundred times (and probably should). Could you watch a hundred performances of it? Possibly.
How about movies? I think there are a number of movies I could watch twenty or thirty times: High Noon, A Bridge Too Far, Lost in Translation, The Professional, lots of others. But I think it is the very abstraction of music and literature that makes more repetition possible. Because each time, with music or poetry, a great deal of the enjoyment is provided by your own active imagination. You can cloth the experience with different sensations each time. With movies and tv shows you are presented with a fully realized concrete reality so the contribution of the imagination is less.
Just more musings!