What is Music About?

Does Art, especially Music, have to be about something, or can it simply exist?

As a teenager, I was drawn to the symphonies of Gustav Mahler, chiefly because of their autobiographical angst. This was music definitely “about” something—not a pictorial illustration of an event (a la The Storm movement from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony), but about powerful emotions & personal philosophical conflicts.

The danger lies in trying to search for something identical in every composer’s work—these were all different people, remember, so what they felt and how they expressed themselves in their Art, doesn’t have to be similar. So a Bach movement may be full of emotion, yet not “be” about some life event in particular. Music can be intensely passionate and personal , without being a series of Facebook status updates!

Indeed, before the Romantics came along with their emotional baggage, it was just not the done thing to reveal your personal issues through your work; rather, composers like Mozart strove for immaculate (and often inscrutable!) formal perfection. This was not mere gloss, mind you; and sometimes, even the perfect exteriors can be torn apart in works like the A minor Piano Sonata or the C minor & D minor Piano Concertos. But the chief wonder of Mozart’s music is the way it internalizes what was happening to him ,like a prism & expresses them in a way that is no mere slavish “diary”, but an infinitely complex distillate. When we hear the 39th symphony of Mozart , we hear music that is beyond joy or grief; yes, his infant daughter passed away during its composition, yet this music is no mere dirge, but a work of transcendental genius, all the more affecting because you can’t quite get a handle on its elusive “message”.

Being well past teenage now, I can see that this indirect approach is actually more empowering & less inhibiting—music doesn’t have to have a programme, it can just exist and still be a treasure-trove of personal experience for composer and listener alike. This is perhaps music’s chief strength, compared to the other Arts, that it can be what you make of it, that it can be something completely other each time you listen & different to everyone who listens to it.