An Emotional Response to the Symphony

As one by one the musicians filed onto the stage, each one began practicing his/her part, touching bows to strings, blowing air slowly through mouthpieces, placing fingers on the ivory keys, as the anticipation of the audience continued to rise.

Then the lights dimmed, and the conductor raised his hands. It was time for the symphony to begin.

Throughout this semester, I have been privileged to attend three symphonies, one at Lincoln Center and two at Carnegie Hall. Though I am not yet an expert on symphonies, I’ve noticed that the music of the symphony often can trigger an emotion. It seems that feeling has a special connection with music, and the art of composing is trying to capture the music of a certain feeling or experience. Music has the unique ability to penetrate into the human experience and express a quality of meaning and depth that words cannot reach.  As Jewish composer Gustav Mahler said, “If a composer could say what he had to say in words, he would not bother trying to say it in music.”

As an audience member, I felt the need to connect to the music of the symphony, to make the music mean something. I designed stories and emotions that matched with the music that ranged from high heavenly notes to deep despairing sounds. Sometimes there was a plot twist as the music changed, like for example if the soft melody quickly turned into the thunderstorm of powerful and dramatic notes. The symphony is an emotional rollercoaster more than any Shakespearean play, as love and heartbreak, birth and death, joy and despair play across the musical notes, carrying the audience in its waves. Music reveals the nobility and greatness of the human spirit. As Fredrick Delius, an English composer, said, “Music is an outburst of the soul.”

One of the symphonies I attended was a choral symphony, which contained a choir and soloists besides the orchestra. The audience was given pamphlets containing the songs of the performance, translated into English from the original German. The singing element of the performance dramatically changed my experience. Instead of letting the music overwhelm me, I found myself meticulously following along with the words in the pamphlet. It was more about understanding the symphony as it was supposed to be, instead of about interpreting the symphony as I wished it to be. Instead of flowing through the music, unaware of what the future would hold, I could now flip ahead in the pamphlet. I felt that the words limited the meaning of the music, making it less all-encompassing. The instrumental symphony, as opposed to the choral symphony, falls better under Gustav Mahler’s definition of a symphony: “A symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.” However, the choral symphony did offer the wonderful synthesis of human voices with instrumental music that possesses its own type of beauty.

Often there were pauses in the music, in which the absence of music gave depth to the composition. As composer Truman Fisher said, “The pause is as important as the note.” After the final powerful notes were played and the last of the music reverberated in the air, the audience held their breath as a deep silence filled the room. They clapped and, as they turned to leave, the music still seemed to play softly in the silence.