Does Music Need Words?

Johannes Brahms – Some Thoughts,

By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

Brahms and Words

Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography, speaks of a perhaps little known instance o the intersection between the musical and visual arts as understood by the great German composer Johannes Brahms. 

More often than not believed to have been a composer of absolute music, or music that was not allied to an external or extra-musical program – whether musical or aural – Brahms was nevertheless sent art that was said to have been inspired by his music, to which he reacted. 

Brahms, for example, is said to have believed, and on seeing this art, that an image should ‘touch the eye’ in ways that transcended the need for words – very much in the manner of the wordless working upon the mind of absolute music. As Brahms had written, the image should work ‘without [one’s] having to explain or describe the effect with words’ (593).

This seems strongly to suggest that Brahms believed that music did always not need words or verbal referents to work on the imagination, and also that various forms of art – visual art and music, for example, or respectively – should not need any intermediaries to create an emotional or sensorial response in the viewer or auditor. 

Art, as Brahms said, should ‘touch the eye’ and without need for words.

Music, as Brahms seems also to have composed – given his strongly non-programmatic musical bent – appears so to work likewise.

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By Orion Music and Arts, Cambridge MA, 2023-2024

Copyright, ©, Orion Music and Arts MA 2023-2024, 

All Rights Reserved

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To purchase a copy of Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography, highly useful for violinists hoping to improve their musical insight through music history, please click on the link for purchase here.