Having rambled my way around the question of whether or not visualization can compensate for the fatigue that tends to arise when listening to a long and challenging piece of music, such as the original version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 130 string quartet in B-flat major with the “Große Fuge” as its final movement, I realized that the recital by Calidore String Quartet that prompted these thoughts had a “punch line” that I had overlooked. Having felt as if I had been pushed to some limit of endurance by the “Große Fuge,” I discovered that my attention span was not going to get a break during the encore. The selection served up more Beethoven in the form of the second (Adagio ma non troppo) movement from the Opus 74 (“Harp”) quartet in E-flat major. My reaction at the time was to describe this selection as pushing too-much-of-a-good-thing beyond the limits of “reasonable endurance!”
To be fair, I have a rather unconventional history with this particular movement, which dates back to when I had been using a music data-entry system on an early Macintosh laptop. Unless I am mistaken, I was using an early generation of Lime™ software, whose manual demonstrated a notational “acid test” taken from that particular Opus 74 movement:
An example of challenging data entry from the second movement of Beethoven’s Opus 74 string quartet (from the Dover Publications reprint of the 1863 Breitkopf und Härtel edition, from IMSLP, public domain)
It is relatively easy to see that there is a lot going on in this excerpt, all of which could be handled in Lime™ by a patient user.
On the other hand, this is the sort of composition that poses as many challenges to the listener as to the performers. Even the most avid score-follower runs the risk of letting his/her eyes glaze over during this passage. As a result, I was very curious as to what Stephen Malinowski would present to the attentive listener in the visualization he created for this particular movement.
The good news is that he was spot-on in accounting for every note and aligning it properly with the accompanying recording of the Alexander String Quartet playing this movement. On the other hand my own subjective impression was that watching this single movement tended to impose significantly more fatigue than I had encountered in yesterday’s exercise with the “long version” of Opus 130. Was this a matter of my personal state of well-being; or was it actually a “content-related” issue?
I suspect the answer has much to do with what the attentive listener knows about this music and what (s)he expects of the experience of listening to it. Let’s not kid ourselves. Even the most attentive among us will probably confess to incidents of “tuning out” for some reason or another, perhaps for something as trivial as checking to make sure that the phone was turned off. We are all all-too-human; and mind can wander off on its own without our necessarily paying much heed to it.
However, I would conjecture that, when an auditory experience is reinforced by an animated visual one, attention is less inclined to wander, simply because so much of the “space” is now being “covered.” After all, even the slightest movement tends to draw attention; and, in accounting for the many subtleties in this one Adagio ma non troppo movement, attention is being not only prompted but also drawn to many different loci on the screen. In other words keeping track of what is happening on the screen is more demanding than watching the activities of a gathering of four musicians.
Mind you, every now and then we come across evidence that suggests that such a high level of attentiveness is not always necessary. There is an old joke that Igor Stravinsky claimed that the music of Franz Schubert would consistently put him to sleep. However, he then continued by observing that, when he awoke, he discovered he was in Heaven! The reader is free to decide whether this is nothing but a joke or a suggestion that attentive listening may involve some kind of subconscious substrate in the background that complements the wealth of detail one encounters in the foreground.
Another old joke is the observation, “Sometimes I sit and think, and other times I just sit.” Perhaps we all need to come to terms with the relationship between sitting and thinking. I have no idea how to begin to approach that relationship, but I am pretty confident that it is not a static one!
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