本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛If you like music at all, you'll find out the meanings for yourselves, just by listening to it.”


以下段落节选自伯恩斯坦在其青年音乐会What Does Music Mean一节中的解说：

No matter how many time people tell you stories about what music means, forget them. Stories are not what the music means at all. Music is never about anything. Music just is. Music is notes, beautiful notes and sounds put together in such a way that we get pleasure out of listening to them, and that's all it is. When we ask "what does it mean - what does this piece of music mean?", then we're asking a hard question.

Why should they be fun to listen to? I don't know; it's a part of human nature to like to listen to music.

Now we can really understand what the meaning of music is; it's the way it makes you feel when you hear it. We don't have to know a lot of stuff about sharps and flats and chords and all that business in order to understand music; if it tell us something - not a story or a picture - but a feeling - if it makes us change inside, and have all those different good feelings music can make us have, then we are understanding it. And that's all there is to it. Because those feelings aren't like the stories and pictures we talked about before; they're not extra; they're not outside the music; they belong to the music; they're what music is about.

And the most wonderful thing of all is that there's no limit to the different kinds of feelings music can make you have. And some of those feelings are so special and so deep they can't even be described in words. You see, we can't always name the things we feel. Sometimes we can; we can say we feel joy, or pleasure, peacefulness, whatever, love, hate. But every once in a while we have feelings so deep and so special that we have no words for them and that's where music is so marvelous; because music names them for us, only in notes instead of in words. It's all in the way music moves - we must never forget that music is movement, always going somewhere, shifting and changing, and flowing, from one note to another; and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can.

The meaning of music is in the music, in its melodies, and in the rhythms, and the harmonies, and the way it's orchestrated, and most important of all in the way it develops itself. But that's a whole other program. We'll talk about that some other time. Right now, all you have to know is that music has its own meanings, right there for you to find inside the music itself; and you don't need any stories or any pictures to tell you what it means. If you like music at all, you'll find out the meanings for yourselves, just by listening to it.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net