为什么我们忧伤时喜欢听忧伤的音乐？zt

为什么我们喜欢在忧伤时听伤感音乐？  


译者： RGMUSG 原作者：Kat Austen

发表时间：2010-07-22

 

Kat Austen, Letters and Comments editor

责任编辑：吉奥斯丁

August, 1942. Leningrad, besieged and filled with starving inhabitants, barely holds out against the force of the Nazi invasion. People are queuing up for soup made of boots and book bindings. Hitler has chosen the 9th of the month to celebrate the fall of the city, and a ball has been planned in advance.

　　1942年8月，深陷重围，饿殍遍野的列宁格勒勉强抵抗住了纳粹入侵力量。人们排队领取由皮靴和书封皮煮成的汤。希特勒原定于这个月9号庆祝攻陷列宁格勒，并且提前取得了突破性进展。

But in a symbolic act of defiance, the Russians decide to hold an orchestral concert. To do so, they have to fly in extra musicians, because only 15 members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra have survived the war. The piece of music they choose for the finale is Dimitri Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony.

　　但在一个象征性的挑衅行为里，俄国人决定举行一场交响乐音乐会。举行音乐会，他们得找几个额外的乐师，因为战争中列宁格勒交响乐团只幸存了十五位成员。他们选择了迪米特里·肖斯塔科维奇的列宁格勒交响曲中的片断做为结束曲。

At the Cheltenham Music Festival's The Sound of Melancholia last week, classical music composer Stephen Johnson repeated this story, describing Shostakovich's compositions as "some of the bleakest, darkest, saddest, most vile and sardonic music" he had ever heard

　　在上周的切尔滕纳姆音乐节的忧郁之声中，古典音乐作曲家史蒂芬·约翰逊反复说着这个故事，认为肖斯塔科维奇的作品是一些最阴郁，最黑暗，最悲惨，最悲鄙和嘲讽的音乐，是他从未听过的。

He went on to recount the story of Viktor Kuslov, who had played in the 1942 performance, who was moved to tears by the recollection of the music's powerful effect on that night. Indeed, the final page of the ink-written score that was used at the world premiere is smudged and run with the tears of Yevgeny Mravinsky, the conductor.

　　他接着讲述了维克多的故事，维克多曾在1942年的音乐会上表演过，回忆起当晚音乐的巨大影响，他感动得热泪盈眶。事实上，在世界首演上使用的手写乐谱的最后一页，就被当时的指挥家叶甫根尼·姆拉文斯基的泪水浸湿了。

It's counterintuitive, but Johnson's story suggests that the desolation in Schostakovich's music, resonating with the desolation in their hearts, served to bolster the spirits of the Russian populace at the time. The premise postulated by Johnson and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who co-hosted the event, is the oft-repeated idea that music, by conferring a narrative structure to emotion, brings emotion closer to thought. "There is something about seeing your own mood reflected that allows you to let go of that feeling," says Johnson.

　　这是违反常识的，但约翰逊的故事表明，恰恰是肖斯塔科维奇音乐中的荒凉感引起人们的共鸣，支撑起了俄国民众的精神。由约翰逊和神经学家雷蒙德·塔利斯假设的前提，过去经常提到的，即音乐能通过授予情感以叙述结构，使情感更接近思想。“审视你所表现出来的情绪，似乎有一种力量可以让你忘掉那种感觉”，约翰逊说道。

But it is not so simple. As Tallis, who was standing in for an absent Robert Winston, pointed out at the start of the evening's conversation, there is a complex interplay between the emotion the composer attempts to write into the music, that conveyed by the music, the listener's interpretation, and the listener's mood. This was resoundingly reflected in the results of an experiment carried out on the evening's audience

　　但这没这么简单，正如塔利斯站在缺席的罗伯特温斯顿立场上指出，在那晚的交流之初，作家意图写入音乐，通过音乐传达的情感与听众情绪之间产生了复杂的相互作用。这成功反映在了那晚在观众中进行的实验的结果中。

We were each given a response sheet, on which we marked our response to three clips of classical music. Asked to gauge both the emotion we thought the music was meant to convey and the emotion we ourselves felt, we were given the choice of "joyful", "sad" and "neither". The experiment was not very rigorous: the demographic of the room was certainly biased towards the more senior generations, and the respondents from this group were all self-selecting. Also, looking at the numbers, it was clear that not everybody answered every question.

　　我们每人发了一张调查表，在表上我们写出对三段经典音乐的感受。当被问及我们认为音乐意图传达的情感和我们自身感受时，我们有三个选项“快乐”，“忧伤”和“非上述两者”。这实验并非十分严格：房间里的人们肯定偏向年长的一代，并且团队里的受访者均为自愿。并且，从数字上来看，很显然，并不是每个人都得回答全部问题。

Still, the results were interesting. Broadly, people seemed to be fairly sure about the emotion a piece was meant to communicate - for instance 91 per cent agreed that a clip from one of Shostakovich's work was meant to convey sadness. They were, however, far more divided about the emotion it elicited within them. The most conclusive agreement was that a clip of Paul Schoenfield's Dog Heaven made 56 per cent of the audience feel joyful - not an overly compelling figure.

　　结果还是很有趣。概括地说，人们似乎相当清楚音乐剪辑所意图传达的情感。例如，91%的人们赞同肖斯塔科维奇作曲传达的是悲伤的情绪。然而，他们各自的感受却有很大不同。最明显得就是保罗舍恩菲尔德的小狗天堂音乐剪辑让56%的听众感到快乐——这区别并不明显。

That experiment was the substantial scientific component of the evening, possibly thanks to Winston's absence. A scientific explanation of how music and mood interact was sadly lacking. When asked to talk about the brain processes involved, Tallis replied that while brain scans can show us which parts of the brain are receptive to music, they do not take us much further.

　　这个实验只是大量科学实验的一部分，或许多亏了温斯顿的缺席。很遗憾还没有关于音乐和情绪相互影响的科学的解释。当被问及到谈论一下涉及的大脑处理研究，塔利斯回答说脑部扫描能告诉我们大脑哪个部分会对音乐产生反应，但他们没有透露更多内容。

The response was reminiscent of Tallis's New Scientist article on consciousness, where he stated that there is a "deep philosophical confusion embedded in the assumption that you can correlate neural activity with consciousness".

　　这些回答让人想起塔利斯在《新科学家》发表的关于意识的文章，他在文章中指出，在你可以把神经活动同意识联系在一起的假设中，有着严重的哲学困惑。

Disappointing though this is, Tallis might have a point. If the evening's pop-up experiment is representative of the variety and range of responses that the same piece of music elicits in different people, it can hardly be expected that a brain scan will explain what is happening.

　　尽管有些让人失望，塔利斯也许是有道理的。如果这个实验是不同人群听到相同音乐片断时的典型反应的话，这将很难预料脑部扫描能解释到底发生了什么。

While we may have plenty of proof that music moves us emotionally, the conclusion of the evening's discussion seemed to be that scientific research has a long way to go to understand the complexities of our interaction with it. And if that isn't enough to make you feel melancholy, have a listen to some Sibelius.

　　虽然我们或许有许多证据证明音乐能影响我们的情绪，但实验讨论的结论似乎表明，要弄懂音乐与情绪的复杂关系，科学实验还有很长的路要走。如果这还不足以让你沮丧，听点西贝利厄斯吧。


http://article.yeeyan.org/view/161848/119361