Explanations accompanying classical music and other live performances

The most lasting memories from my undergraduate days in the classroom come from Leonard Ratner’s courses at Stanford on an introduction to music and on the concerto. To this day I remember and enjoy the explanations of Eroica, Don Giovanni, Mozart’s String Quintet K. 614, the quartet singing in the last movement of the Ninth, and Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta. It was so interesting to go to the class to hear the music explained (with pauses introduced by lifting the needle from the record). The essential feature here was dynamic explanation, right in parallel with the music. That form of explanation was much better than reading about the music in advance, which provokes uncertainties about linking the program notes to the appropriate part of the performance. Ever since at opera and ballet I have yearned for such dynamic parallel explanation.

In opera, a translation of the words in parallel with the performance is one good step.

Here is a recent possibility.

Of course the parallel explanatory channel must be done with care, unobtrusiveness, and quiet precision. It will be tempting for some explainers to place themselves above the music, to create a personality presence, to celebrate a technology, to look like television. But done with an appropriately self-effacing quality, such parallel explanations can be helpful, greatly increasing the intensity of listening. Probably a visual channel (written words, musical score) should be used to explain a sound channel in order to avoid interference. The Music Animation Machine (elsewhere on this board) uses the visual to diagram the music.

Indeed, for 35 years now at a half-dozen disastrous Dylan concerts (broke my heart every last one of them), it would have been helpful to know what the words were instead of asking at the end of the song: Was that “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Every Grain of Sand”?