• Philosophy and Spirituality
    Welcome Guest
    Posting Rules Bluelight Rules
    Threads of Note Socialize
  • P&S Moderators: JackARoe | Cheshire_Kat

The phenomonology of (good) music

i was going to post a rather long rant about iq (i even wrote it), but it made me look incredibly bitter (at fake star for no reason lol), and generally like a complete dick.
i'll save it for a new thread
 
ebola! said:
I've found that most people with genuinely high IQs are genuinely modest...but, whatever...
Click to expand...

:)

monkey, believe what you'd like. it doesn't honestly matter to me. i'd be interested in reading your iq rant sometime, though, if you ever decide to post it.
 
The musical emotion springs precisely from the fact that at each moment the composer withholds or adds more or less than the listener anticipates on the basis of a pattern that he thinks he can guess, but that he is incapable of wholly divining. If the composer withholds more than we anticipate, we experience a delicious falling sensation; we feel we have been torn from a stable point on the musical ladder and thrust into the void. When the composer withholds less, the opposite occurs: he forces us to perform gymnastic exercises more skillful than our own.
~ Claude Levi-Strauss 1908
Click to expand...
I think this has a lot to do with it. I've always noticed that a major function of our mind is to predict what will happen next. When something happens differently than we have predicted, it catches our attention. For example, have you ever been walking up the stairs in the dark and thought that there was one more stair than than there really was? That strange feeling starts the second your foot passes through the imaginary stair. Or doing a double take when someone has dyed their hair. How about not noticing a noise until it stops? Pay attentuion and you'll see examples of this all over the place. It would make sense that a good musician could keep us guessing with their music, and keep our attention.
 
ebola! said:
What is it about music that makes it music (at its best)?
As far as I've been able to gather, it is this intangible factor. This immediately empirically evident "it". It is melodic, rhythmic, and tibral. Its physical manifestation is a shiver running up the spine and out the arms. It is like MDMA or amphetamine in this way, only not contrived. It is highly elusive for me...present only some of the time in only the best works of art.

I'm wondering in what capacity my experience has been shaped by my particular history as a listener rather than a musician. I don't see music as meaningful. It doesn't refer to anything. The beauty is in the music in a very direct way. The musician herself is largely irrelevant to me. It's as if the music is its own world.

I also wonder if peak musical experience is so illusive because of my personality. I am cold and logical. Powerful emotion is in short supply...

ebola
np: haujobb's best song.
Click to expand...

That sounds like the Kantian view of art/aesthetics. You cannot explain this "art" with reason/logic, but you know when you are in the face of it.

"The judgment of taste in therefore not a judgment of cognition, and it is consequently not logical but aesthetical" -Kant, Critique of Judgment

Goddamn it, I just referenced a text in a Bluelight post. I need to get out more.
 
ebola! said:
The musician herself is largely irrelevant to me. It's as if the music is its own world.

I also wonder if peak musical experience is so illusive because of my personality. I am cold and logical. Powerful emotion is in short supply...
Click to expand...

1. I agree, the muscians/singers/performers are only there as the spark plug for the catalyst to emmerse you into another world/realm. Though let us not forget that these very same people are often times the world you are going into. (i.e. > Their emotions, perceptions, consciousness of the time)

2. What makes emotion powerful? Cold and logical is just as powerful as anything else; when it comes to music. It's all about how well you are able to express it through the sonic element of sound vibrations, rythym, etc.
 
LOL...perhaps he got one thing right. :)
Although I would be apt to further argue that the same culture out of which reason emerges also shapes the seeming immediacy of aesthetics.

ebola
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top