Last night I watched TÁR.
Without giving away any spoilers, the film is about a renowned composer named Lydia Tár who is preparing to record Mahler’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra. Leading up to the recording, the relationships in her life twist into a complicated spiral of impulse and mistrust.
I’ll leave the description of the film there, so that you can watch the rest of it yourself.
However, there is one scene in particular that stood out to me. In the scene, Tár is watching a recording of Leonard Bernstein, one of her idols, giving a lecture about the meaning of music. Piqued with intrigue, I looked up the lecture to see if it was online anywhere.
Sure enough, it was. When Leonard Bernstein arrived as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, he decided to create a concert series that would be televised called the Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein ended up recording 53 concerts in total, all of which were telecast on CBS.
The clip that is featured in the film comes from the very first Young People’s Concert episode, which is titled “What Does Music Mean?”
You can watch the full episode here.
Throughout the video, Bernstein discusses the meaning of music; first he explains what to listen for and then immediately after the New York Philharmonic plays an example of what he’s talking about. I found this to be rather coincidental, since I wrote about how to listen to classical music a week ago (Bernstein is obviously much more qualified and much better at doing this than I am).
After about 40 minutes, Bernstein has this to say about music, which is the snippet that is shown in the film (the exact timestamp of the YouTube video is 42 minutes and 25 seconds):
“Now we can really understand what the meaning of music is. It’s the way it makes you feel when you hear it. Prior to taking that last giant step, and we’re there, we know what music means now. And 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 tells us something, not a story or a picture, but a feeling, if it makes us change inside and have all those different good feelings that music can make you have, then you’re understanding it. And that’s all there is to it. Because those feelings aren’t like the stories and the pictures we talked about before. They’re not extra, they’re not outside the music, they belong to the music. They are 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 that 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, pleasure, peacefulness, love, hate. But, every once in a while, we have feelings that are 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.”
Music is quite an elusive thing. I can never quite explain why I like or don’t like a song. I just do. There are of course certain artists or types of music that I have an affinity for, but that doesn’t guarantee that I will like a song.
Bernstein understood that even if you could explain it, there wouldn’t be any point in doing so anyway. Because music, like all art, is subjective. No two people are ever really hearing the same thing.
So when you find music you love, let it speak to you. Because it’ll say more than words ever could.
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Last night I watched TÁR.
Without giving away any spoilers, the film is about a renowned composer named Lydia Tár who is preparing to record Mahler’s 5th Symphony with the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra. Leading up to the recording, the relationships in her life twist into a complicated spiral of impulse and mistrust.
I’ll leave the description of the film there, so that you can watch the rest of it yourself.
However, there is one scene in particular that stood out to me. In the scene, Tár is watching a recording of Leonard Bernstein, one of her idols, giving a lecture about the meaning of music. Piqued with intrigue, I looked up the lecture to see if it was online anywhere.
Sure enough, it was. When Leonard Bernstein arrived as conductor of the New York Philharmonic in 1958, he decided to create a concert series that would be televised called the Young People’s Concerts. Bernstein ended up recording 53 concerts in total, all of which were telecast on CBS.
The clip that is featured in the film comes from the very first Young People’s Concert episode, which is titled “What Does Music Mean?”
You can watch the full episode here.
Throughout the video, Bernstein discusses the meaning of music; first he explains what to listen for and then immediately after the New York Philharmonic plays an example of what he’s talking about. I found this to be rather coincidental, since I wrote about how to listen to classical music a week ago (Bernstein is obviously much more qualified and much better at doing this than I am).
After about 40 minutes, Bernstein has this to say about music, which is the snippet that is shown in the film (the exact timestamp of the YouTube video is 42 minutes and 25 seconds):
“Now we can really understand what the meaning of music is. It’s the way it makes you feel when you hear it. Prior to taking that last giant step, and we’re there, we know what music means now. And 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 tells us something, not a story or a picture, but a feeling, if it makes us change inside and have all those different good feelings that music can make you have, then you’re understanding it. And that’s all there is to it. Because those feelings aren’t like the stories and the pictures we talked about before. They’re not extra, they’re not outside the music, they belong to the music. They are 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 that 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, pleasure, peacefulness, love, hate. But, every once in a while, we have feelings that are 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.”
Music is quite an elusive thing. I can never quite explain why I like or don’t like a song. I just do. There are of course certain artists or types of music that I have an affinity for, but that doesn’t guarantee that I will like a song.
Bernstein understood that even if you could explain it, there wouldn’t be any point in doing so anyway. Because music, like all art, is subjective. No two people are ever really hearing the same thing.
So when you find music you love, let it speak to you. Because it’ll say more than words ever could.
