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新标准大学英语综合教程3课文原文
We all listen to music according to our separate capacities.But, for the sake of analysis, the whole listening process may become clearer if we break it up into its component parts, so to speak.In certain sense we all listen to music on three separate planes.For lack of a better terminology, one might name these: 1) the sensuous plane, 2) the expressive plane, 3) the sheerly musical plane.The only advantage to be gained from mechanically splitting up the listening process into these hypothetical planes is the clearer view to be had of the way in which we listen.
The simplest way of listening to music is to listen for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself.That is the sensuous plane.It is the plane on which we hear music without thinking, without considering it in any way.One turns on the radio while doing something else andabsent-mindedly bathes in the sound.A kind of brainless but attractive state of mind is engendered by the mere sound appeal of the music.
The surprising thing is that many people who consider themselves qualified music lovers abuse that plane in listening.They go to concerts in order to lose themselves.They use music as a consolation or an escape.They enter an ideal world where one doesn’t have to think of the realities of everyday life.Of course they aren’t thinking about the music either.Music allows them to leave it, and they go off to a place to dream, dreaming because of and apropos of the music yet never quite listening to it.
Yes, the sound appeal of music is a potent and primitive force, but you must not allow it to usurp a disproportionate share of your interest.The sensuous plane is an important one in music, a very important one, but it does not constitute the whole story.
The second plane on which music exists is what I have called the expressive one.Here, immediately, we tread on controversial ground.Composers have a way of shying away from any discussion of music’s expressive side.Did not Stravinsky himself proclaim that his music was an “object”, a “thing”, with a life of its own, and with no other meaning than its own purely musical existence?This intransigent attitude of Stravinsky’s may be due to the fact that so many people have tried to read different meanings into so many pieces.Heaven knows it is difficult enough to say precisely what it is that a piece of music means, to say it definitely to say it finally so that everyone is satisfied with your explanation.But that should not lead one to the other extreme of denying to music the right to be “expressive”.
Listen, if you can,to the 48 fugue themes of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavichore.Listen to each theme, one after another.You will soon realize that each theme mirrors a different world of feeling.You will also soon realize that the more beautiful a theme seems to you the harder it is to find any word that will describe it to your complete satisfaction.Yes, you will certainly know whether it is a gay theme or a sad one.You will be able, on other words, in your own mind, to draw a frame of emotional feeling around your theme.Now study the sad one a little closer.
Try to pin down the exact quality of its sadness.Is it pessimistically sad or resignedly
sad; is it fatefully sad or smilingly sad?Let us suppose that you are fortunate and can describe to your own satisfaction in so many words the exact meaning of your chosen theme.There is still no guarantee that anyone else will be satisfied.Nor need they be.The important thing is that each one feels for himself the specific expressive quality of a theme or, similarly, an entire piece of music.And if it is a great work of art, don’t expect it to mean exactly the same thing to you each time you return to it.
The third plane on which music exists is the sheerly musical plane.Besides the pleasurable sound of music and the expressive feeling that it gives off, music does exist in terms of the notes themselves and of their manipulation.Most listeners are not sufficiently conscious of this third plane.
It is very important for all of us to become more alive to music on its sheerly musical plane.After all, an actual musical material is being used.The intelligent listener must be prepared to increase his awareness of the musical material and what happens to it.He must hear the melodies, the rhythms, the harmonies, the tone colors in a more conscious fashion.But above all he must, in order to follow the line of the composer’s thought, know something of the principles of musical form.Listening to all of these elements is listening to the sheerly musical plane.
Let me repeat that I have split up mechanically the three separate planes on which we listen merely for the sake of greater clarity. Actually, we never listen on one or the other of these planes.What we do is to correlate them—listening in all three ways at the same time.It takes no mental effort, for we do it instinctively
Perhaps an analogy with what happens to us when we visit the theater will make this instinctive correlation clearer.In the theater, you are aware of the actors and actresses, costumes and sets, sounds and movements.All these give one the sense that the theater is a pleasant place to be in.They constitute the sensuous plane in our theatrical reactions.
The expressive plane in the theater would be derived from the feeling that you get from what is happening on the stage.You are moved to pity, excitement, or gaiety.It is this general feeling, generated aside from the particular words being spoken, a certain emotional something which exists on the stage,that isanalogous to the expressive quality in music.
The plot and plot development is equivalent to our sheerly musical plane.The playwright creates and develops a character in just the same way that a composer creates and develops a theme.According to the degree of your awareness of the way in which the artist in either field handles his material will you become a more intelligent listener.It is easy enough to see that the theatergoer never is conscious of any of these elements separately.He is aware of them all at the same time.The same is true of music listening.We simultaneously and without thinking listen on all three planes.
It is not surprising that modern children tend to look blank and dispirited when informed that they will someday have to “go to work and
make a living”. The problem is that they cannot visualize what work is in corporate America.
Not so long ago, when a parent said he was off to work, the child knew very well what was about to happen. His parent was going to make something or fix something. The parent could take his offspring to his place of business and let him watch while he repaired a buggy or built a table.
When a child asked, “What kind of work do you do, Daddy?” his father could answer in terms that a child could come to grips with, such as “I fix steam engines” or “I make horse collars.
is being made in this building and nothing is being repaired, including the building itself. Constructed as a piece of junk, the building will be discarded when it wears out, and another piece of junk will be set in its place.
Still, the building is filled with people who think of themselves as working. At any given moment during the day perhaps one-third of them will be talking into telephones. Most of these conversations will be about paper, for paper is what occupies nearly everyone in this building. Some
jobs in the building require men to fill paper with words. There are persons who type neatly on paper and persons who read paper and jot notes in the margins. Some persons make copies of paper and other persons deliver paper. There are persons who file paper and persons who unfile paper.
Well, a few fathers still fix steam engines and build tables, but most do not. Nowadays, most fathers sit in glass buildings doing things that are absolutely incomprehensible to children. The answers they give when asked, “What kind of work do you do, Daddy?” are likely to be utterly mystifying to a child.
”I sell space” ”I do market research.”,”I am a data processor.””I am in public relations.” ”I am a systems analyst” Such
explanations must seem nonsense to a child. How can he possibly envision anyone analyzing a system or researching a market?
Even grown men who do market research have trouble visualizing what a public relations man does with his day, and it is a safe bet that the average systems analyst is as baffled about what a space salesman does at the shop as the average space salesman is about the tools needed to analyze a system.
In the common everyday job, nothing is made any more. Things are now made by machines. Very little is repaired. The machines that make
things make them in such a fashion that they will quickly fall apart in such a way that repairs will be prohibitively expensive. Thus the buyer is
encouraged to throw the thing away and buy a new one. In effect, the machines are making junk.The handful of people remotely associated with
these machines can, of course, tell their inquisitive children “Daddy makes junk”. Most of the workforce, however, is too remote from junk
production to sense any contribution to the industry. What do these people do?
Consider the typical 12-story glass building in the typical American city. Nothing
Some persons mail paper. Some persons telephone other persons and ask that paper be sent to them. Others telephone to ascertain the
whereabouts of paper. Some persons confer about paper. In the grandest offices, men approve of some paper and disapprove of other paper.
The elevators are filled throughout the day with young men carrying paper from floor to floor and with vital men carrying paper to be discussed with other vital men.
What is a child to make of all this? His father may be so eminent that he lunches with other men about paper. Suppose he brings his son to
work to give the boy some idea of what work is all about. What does the boy see happening?
His father calls for paper. He reads paper. Perhaps he scowls at paper. Perhaps he makes an angry red mark on paper. He telephones another man and says they had better lunch over paper.
At lunch they talk about paper. Back at the office, the father orders the paper retyped and reproduced in quintuplicate, and then sent to
another man for comparison with paper that was reproduced in triplicate last year. Imagine his poor son afterwards mulling over the mysteries of work with a friend, who asks him, ”What’s your father do?” What can the boy reply? “It beats me,” perhaps, if he is not very observant. Or if he is, “Something that has to do with making junk, I think. Same as everybody else.”
It was snowing heavily, and although every true New Yorker looks forward to a white Christmas, the shoppers on Fifth Avenue were in a hurry, not just to track down the last-minute presents, but to escape the bitter cold and get home with their families for Christmas Eve.
Josh Lester turned into 46th Street. He was not yet enjoying the Christmas spirit, because he was still at work, albeit a working dinner at Joanne's. Josh was black, in his early thirties, and an agreeable-looking person, dressed smartly but not expensively. He was from a hard-working family in upstate Virginia, and was probably happiest back home in his parents' house. But his demeanor concealed a Harvard law degree and an internship in DC with a congressman, a junior partnership in a New York law firm, along with a razor-sharp intellect and an ability to think on his feet. Josh was very often been maligned, or its jazz orchestra, which had a guest slot for a well-known movie director who played trumpet, but because of the stellar quality of its sophisticated guests: politicians, diplomats, movie actors, hall-of-fame athletes, journalists, writers, rock stars and Nobel Prize winners – in short, anyone who was anyone in this city of power brokers.
Josh told him, and although the waiter refrained from curling his lip, he managed to show both disdain and effortless superiority with a simple flaring of his nostrils.
“Yes, Senator, please come this way,” and as Senator Rogers passed through the crowded room, heads turned as the diners recognized her and greeted her with silent applause. In a classless society, Rogers was the closest thing to aristocracy smart.
The appointment meant Josh wouldn't get home until after Christmas. He was not, however, unhappy. He was meeting Jo Rogers, the senior senator for Connecticut, and one of the best-known faces in the US. Senator Rogers was a Democrat in her third term of office, who knew Capitol Hill inside out but who had nevertheless managed to keep her credibility with her voters as a Washington outsider. She was pro-abortion, anti-corruption, pro-low carbon emissions and anti-capital punishment, as fine a progressive liberal as you could find this side of the Atlantic. Talk show hosts called her Honest Senator Jo, and a couple of years ago, Time magazine had her in the running for Woman of the Year. It was election time in the following year, and the word was she was going to run for the Democratic nomination. Rogers had met Josh in DC, thought him highly competent, and had invited him to dinner.
Josh shivered as he checked the address on the slip of paper in his hand. He'd never been to Joanne's, but knew it by reputation, not because of its food, which had
that America had. Alberto hovered for a moment, then went to speak to a colleague.
After two hours, Rogers and Josh got up to leave. There was a further flurry of attention by the staff, including an offer by Alberto to waive payment of the bill, which Rogers refused. As they were putting on their coats, Rogers said, “Thank you, Alberto. Oh, have I introduced you to my companion, Josh Lester?”
A look of panic, followed by one of desperate optimism flashed across Alberto's
face.
“Ah, not yet, no, ... not properly, ” he said weakly.
“Josh Lester. This is the latest recruit to my election campaign. He's going to be my new deputy campaign manager, in charge of raising donations. And if we get that Republican out of the White House next year, you've just met my Chief of Staff.”