why is there music? just thinking about this, about why people through time have created music and musical dialogs, ensembles, even large choirs and symphonies and gamelan, masses and festivals to share the musical phenomena. The need to communicate is basic to social creatures but accustomed to speech we'd ask what musical communication does for us that speech does not. Is music a forerunner of speech from early human development - if so why keep it alongside, music accompanying even overshadowing the words to the songs. The specificity of words satisfies us in a way that music cannot reach, yet the breadth of sound, the rhythms and harmonies echo reassurance, well-being, intelligence, intelligiblity basic to our nature. And why play instruments? Why make sounds together, blowing, banging, rubbing, shaking, scraping logs and hairs, sticks and water bowls? Why form tubes, stretch skins, carve wood and pound metal, all for the purpose of audio display? What does this do for us? How does it aid our survival?
Music is differently felt and experienced by different people. Those educated in music apprehend structure absent from the experience of those without formal background. Those who play understand in more detail than those who merely listen. But no greater degree of musical enjoyment, emotion or thought is necessitated by the devotion of the artist over the casual understanding of any of the rest of us: musical connection of some kind or other is accessible to and attainable by any and all. It varies between individuals of course, but nearly all walks of life make room for the practice and enjoyment of rhythm and melody and the mysteries of harmony in one way or another.
What is it good for? Feeling at one with music or sharing an exchange of tones and beats with others produces short-term happiness and common enjoyment of a controllable objective reality. It's like a game in that sense. Shared or alone, music is a power to affect our surroundings. Expression but also mutual recognition of something expressed. Apprehension of meaning is secondary to experiencing the sound, but in emotional terms we get close to an outer understanding of our inner minds, wherein I can see that my most primal impressions resemble yours, and you can see the same in the world you see me in. In that music is like painting.
If one is alone, music is not far away. Through music the mind and body reach out and through music receive signs of other beings, the potential for exchange of further harmonies, melodies, and rhythms. Otherwise how would our hearing sense provide evolutionary advantage or divine insight?
Is it right to say that all perception of sound is music? It seems so to me but others surely must disagree. If instead music is heard only as a distinctly structured arrangement of sound, requiring artifice to be true music, elevated beyond the mere noises and random vibrations that bombard our hearing most of the time, the question only gets more interesting. Why would we need such a thing? If our minds must differentiate patterns of sounds in such a way, what elevates music to such importance? Why does music occur in one form or another almost anywhere people are? Again, why do we make instruments to produce sounds of one kind or other? And why do some devote their lives to delving deep into the art of creating and organizing sounds to be submitted for the approval and questioning of others?
The effects of music solo or in concert are attention and examination, communion and, alternately, mental exercise. Feelings of well-being or reassurance, consonance and rightness attend the presence of music in the mind. For those playing there are a multitude of subjective and intersubjective avenues to travel. For all involved imbalances of emotion are resolved by externalizing attendant fears and discomforts, answering dissonance with consonance. Greater comforts and pleasures are explored in the repetition of patterns. The mind travels in sound with other minds, perceiving the presence of higher planes of reality, greater or subtler structures, deeper colored or wider expanses of its own mentality. In this music is like hypnosis or meditation, individual or collective.
So it remains to ask is music a function of mind or of the universe? A medium or a thing in itself? A valuable commodity to be owned or a transcendent force beyond our grasp? Information that wants to be free or very expensive? And why can't anyone do better than MySpace?
Music is differently felt and experienced by different people. Those educated in music apprehend structure absent from the experience of those without formal background. Those who play understand in more detail than those who merely listen. But no greater degree of musical enjoyment, emotion or thought is necessitated by the devotion of the artist over the casual understanding of any of the rest of us: musical connection of some kind or other is accessible to and attainable by any and all. It varies between individuals of course, but nearly all walks of life make room for the practice and enjoyment of rhythm and melody and the mysteries of harmony in one way or another.
What is it good for? Feeling at one with music or sharing an exchange of tones and beats with others produces short-term happiness and common enjoyment of a controllable objective reality. It's like a game in that sense. Shared or alone, music is a power to affect our surroundings. Expression but also mutual recognition of something expressed. Apprehension of meaning is secondary to experiencing the sound, but in emotional terms we get close to an outer understanding of our inner minds, wherein I can see that my most primal impressions resemble yours, and you can see the same in the world you see me in. In that music is like painting.
If one is alone, music is not far away. Through music the mind and body reach out and through music receive signs of other beings, the potential for exchange of further harmonies, melodies, and rhythms. Otherwise how would our hearing sense provide evolutionary advantage or divine insight?
Is it right to say that all perception of sound is music? It seems so to me but others surely must disagree. If instead music is heard only as a distinctly structured arrangement of sound, requiring artifice to be true music, elevated beyond the mere noises and random vibrations that bombard our hearing most of the time, the question only gets more interesting. Why would we need such a thing? If our minds must differentiate patterns of sounds in such a way, what elevates music to such importance? Why does music occur in one form or another almost anywhere people are? Again, why do we make instruments to produce sounds of one kind or other? And why do some devote their lives to delving deep into the art of creating and organizing sounds to be submitted for the approval and questioning of others?
The effects of music solo or in concert are attention and examination, communion and, alternately, mental exercise. Feelings of well-being or reassurance, consonance and rightness attend the presence of music in the mind. For those playing there are a multitude of subjective and intersubjective avenues to travel. For all involved imbalances of emotion are resolved by externalizing attendant fears and discomforts, answering dissonance with consonance. Greater comforts and pleasures are explored in the repetition of patterns. The mind travels in sound with other minds, perceiving the presence of higher planes of reality, greater or subtler structures, deeper colored or wider expanses of its own mentality. In this music is like hypnosis or meditation, individual or collective.
So it remains to ask is music a function of mind or of the universe? A medium or a thing in itself? A valuable commodity to be owned or a transcendent force beyond our grasp? Information that wants to be free or very expensive? And why can't anyone do better than MySpace?
posted by rich solomon at 5:57 PM
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