Weather Reports: Discourse and Musical Cognition

Abstract

The concert referred to in the journalistic quotation above comprised meteorological works such as Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony, György Ligeti’s Atmosphères, Claude Debussy’s Nuages, before the Bartok concerto. In the history of written music, the Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern writing, monumentally demonstrated by Beethoven’s “Pastoral” 6th symphony, has allowed rather explicit references to aspects of meteorology as constitutive elements of the meaning of music, of musical semantics. Composers, critics, lay listeners, and remarkably also musicians, find it meaningful to describe what music is ‘about’ in terms of such visionary experiences of nature and its elements, and thus find it relevant to account for properly musical events in terms of more or less lyrical ‘weather reports’.