Compositional Technique and Musical Expressivity
Edward Levy · Journal of Research in Music Education · 1970
IN HIS otherwise excellent article, D. N. Camp belll set up four separate criteria for aesthetic judgment: the formal, the technical, the expressive, and the sensuous. He then proceeded to recommend an order in which these aspects should be taught, with the sensuous and expressive coming first, so that Ravel and Tchaikovsky, for example, would be considered before Mozart and Bach. This sequence would disregard the evaluations of the experts who, somehow, consider the music of the latter two more formally and tecilnically valuable, but less expressive than the music of the former. This concept creates real problems in aesthetics, in semantics, and in practice. Most people would probably agree that a purely sensuous pleasure can be derived from art in general and from music in particular. One may listen to any music and merely revel in its transient colors and sonorities. But if this is all that is involved, then the level of the auditor's aesthetic enjoyment will be slight when compared to the intensity derivable from more concentrated and directed efforts. Music teachers should not be satisfied with a low degree of student effort, for it results in as sur)erficial and nondiscriminating an experience of Ravel's music as the same kind of listening would get from movie background music. Rather, they should urge their students toward a more perceptive apprehension of the music's organization, for it is this organization, and not the sounds per se, that makes music response-evoking. If the musical experience is to be truly educative and not just a fun thing, the sensuous should be related as soon as possible to the formal and technical aspects of music. This organization is the only means of differentiating between, for example, the music of Ravel and movie background music; therefore, it is also the means for determining the relative aesthetic worth of a musical work. It might be possible, if not desirable, to separate the sensuous from other ways of experiencing music. The essential problem arises, however, in trying to separate the formal from the technical and, more particularly, in trying to separate either from the expressive. This problem inheres in the suggestion that Tchaikovsky's music be considered before Mozart's because the former is more expressive. A semantic confusion