Originally Posted by
CplFerro
Thanks, aggle, you're helping deepen the mystery of classical music for me.
Cpl Ferro
Maybe this will help.
There's a tradition of Western Classical music that we're talking about here.
It has several things that make it what it is. These are its achievements, in a way:
1) Notation, allowing a piece to be specified without it being part of an oral/aural tradition. This is, basically, writing or literacy, and all that goes with that.
2) The "miracle" of harmony that moves. (Think of a Bach chorale, or even a barbershop quartet.) The relationship of all the voices sounding at once is harmonious, but the harmonies change over time into different harmonies while remaining harmonious. And, very important, each voice has some independence from the others. This independence is called
counterpoint, when it reaches a certain level.
("Voice" here means a musical part, not necessarily literally a human voice.)
These two things, separately and together, help provide the foundation for the sense of musical narrative that AR is emphasizing.
Long forms can be written down by individuals and performed by others who the composers have never met. The long forms are made possible by this 2-dimensional (vertical + horizontal) combination of movement and harmony.
Other musical traditions have other aspects developed to a wonderful degree, but it's notation and independent-voiced harmony -- among other things -- that make Western Classical music unique.
I'm not particularly good at talking about this.