Exactly. Although the musician is not the interpreter, the listener is. The musician of the grand days aimed his music to influence what the listener would interpret. The excerpts here seem to inform the listener on how this was accomplished rather than the musician. The musician who can play in this grand style knew one thing. Humans see the world in two main ways, what they see and what they hear. The musician creates in the world in sound, and he uses this craft to give the listener a certain sensation or sense that tells the listener's subconscious what is going on in the world at that particular moment. The musician is only doing one thing and that is creating a new world in the fourth dimension. So when you hear the music of a composer you hear a new world as he/she created through sound and time. The listener is then left to interpret what the world is, sometimes directly sometime indirectly.

This is still practiced and it is no more apparent than in Film scores. The music in films directly portray what is happening in the movie, Even if you close your eyes and just listen to the music you can tell what is going on. Take the Jaws theme, you know something is going happen and you know it isn't going to be good just by the way the music is played.

As a composer the foremost goal when writing music is to transform a experience in everyday life into music. The problem with musicians of intelligent nature is they try to create a perfect composition in their style, usually by trying to make it more technical and mind-blowing. The truth is the effect of music can be done with two notes playing back and forth, like the Jaws theme.

That's my interpretation of the "grand style" and what made the great composers so great.

[Edited by noticingthemistake on 08-19-2003 at 10:42 AM]