by Ruoying Zhu
In early 2022, I was invited by a friend to see a classical concert performed by a London orchestra with a choir. It was my second classical concert in a long time, and I had no experience or knowledge in this area. The performance started immediately after I was given the brochure, and I had no time to read the introduction. So I had to hastily turn to the lyrics page of the piece and follow the lyrics to understand the music.
As a non-native English speaker, Keeping up with the performance was tough while checking out the many vocabulary words. As someone without any classic music foundation, it was also challenging to appreciate a concert simply through the music itself without lyrics and introduction. So as you can imagine, the result of this was that as hard as I tried to immerse and enjoy the concert, I ended up fighting the desire to sleep most of the time and failing.
After returning home, I re-opened the brochure and saw the following passage：
” Here, in Raphael’s accompanied recitative for the sixth day, we hear the roaring lion evoked by blaring brass; the leaping tiger, lightfooted stag and prancing horse, each depicted in an appropriate string figure; docile cattle and sheep represented by traditional pastoral music; swarms of insects in fidgety string tremolandos (scrubbing the bow on the strings); and the slow-creeping worm in music suitably low-to-the-ground. In each case, in defiance of expectation, Haydn places his musical description before the verbal one.
How the sounds were depicted in language immediately took me back to the first lesson when Adam had us trying to describe the sounds in words. These verbal descriptions are, in fact, closer to what is understandable to the typical person; it is more like a way of translation. I mean, even if you don't know classical music, if you've heard the music, you can imagine the sounds through these. The sweeping strings, the bass, the drums, the field music, elements that are just as frequently applied in modern music, allowed me to easily imagine what the piece would look like, a power of language that I hadn't realised before.
After matching each musical description to a lyric clip, I searched for the track - The creation - on YouTube and listened to the hook again. And this hearing experience opened up my understanding of the song completely. I had missed so many details, so many different musical expressions in each verse and lyric, and so many variations, yet each change was so relevant. And through this little parsing and deeper reading, it was as if I had learned to acquire Joseph's (the composer's) musical language.
It was such a delightful experience. So I am keen to pass on my experience through the Max patch I am currently working on to beginners who, like me, are interested in classical music but have difficulty understanding it. To use a perhaps inappropriate metaphor to describe the work I want to present, if the composition "The creation" is defined as an IKEA product, then my work is the instruction booklet for that product. It is simple enough to be used well even if the user does not speak English. After practising with the book, the user can even pick up on some of the rules of IKEA product assembly and flexibly apply them. I hope that my work will become such a tool to help beginners learn the language of classical music.
My initial idea was that I wanted the audience to hear the corresponding music clip by touching the lyrics. At the same time, I tried to edit the sound through Max MSP to enhance the expression of the music itself and highlight the use of musical elements.
As a student from a design background, I found it easier to think in visual terms, so I started with the design of the touchpoints. What inspired me was the phrase "musical description before the verbal one". When I can't understand a musical description, a visual description will be before the musical one, then is a verbal one. Even when I listen to a concert, I will always try to confirm which instruments are playing at the moment through my eyes. So I guess that when people cannot understand music, they try to understand it through visual stuff. The visual aid of words alone might be counterproductive as a distraction, so I wanted to use more abstract and less distracting images to help the audience imagine and understand the music in context.
In the end, I drew these graphics by describing the animal movements and lines of motion in each phrase of the chosen clip.