Among other things, I’m constantly thinking about the classical music communication problem (that being: why don’t most people get much out of classical music?) and like anyone with a fixation, I frequently imagine that other topics relate to this topic. So here’s my imaginary connection of the day.

I was looking at a German sentence just now and thinking about the how the infamous verb-at-the-end construction creates a flavor of structural logic quite different from English. Different syntax might not mean different thoughts, but it does mean different thought-architecture. The German infinitive that waits until the end of the sentence is the coordinating truth that remains unspoken while its necessary underlings are arrayed before it. For me it’s a bit like an arch whose keystone must be fit in last, to sustain that which rises below it. Or something. Anyway, it’s not at all like English, where as much as possible, we try to have each thing lead to the next thing in an elegant line. Each German sentence loops back on itself and is tied up in a bow at the end; each sentence is a discrete hard nugget, a brick, and a paragraph is a wall of bricks. English readily breaks down into a flow of loose clauses, one after another…the difference between a period and an ellipsis is easily smooshed away…each verb might be the peak of a wave, but the waves just roll on in a line. This is how it seems to me, anyway, a fluent English speaker and a non-German speaker. Obviously my opinion here is suspect; fluent Germans very likely feel it quite differently. But hold on, it may not make a difference to my point.

Do I even need to make my point? I think you probably get it. But here it is.

The great 18th-19th century heap of works at the heart of “classical music” is mostly by German-speaking composers, and there’s something syntactically confusing about it to English-speakers. Like German, it’s cadence-oriented; phrases are meant to be evaluated as a whole, in light of how they end, rather than parsed in a steady linear stream. A central idea in musical construction is that something is introduced but not dealt with fully until later – that something can exist in an “unresolved” state, holding out for its coordinating fate to come. German speakers, unlike English speakers, are always holding big chunks of information in parsing limbo, waiting for the verb to consummate it all. English speakers, I imagine, have a much smaller buffer.

The whole notion of sonata form can be seen as based on a parenthesis – the exposition is waiting around for the recapitulation; the opening tonic is waiting around for the closing tonic. German speakers hear the auxiliary verb as a promise about the future, and they’re willing to wait a long time if need be; English speakers don’t make promises like that.

So no wonder classical music seems counter-intuitive and obscure. Listening to it without awareness of the arches, the bricks that build walls, means missing the point. I think we have a lot of English speakers today listening to classical music and hearing a boring endless series of waves stretching off in a straight line to the horizon when they should be hearing an arch that rises and falls from a single stationary keystone.

This might all be silly, but hey, it’s a thought I had.