Moral Maze - British Places : Better Represented By Classical Music Than Other Forms

[vinteuil]

But they do! This is a sense in which the listening part of the musical experience can be as creative as any other. Listening is always potentially a form of (re)composition, to the exact extent that it isn't a matter of passive reception.

... yes, I get that totally

But I think (self-delude) that I'm a bit aware of what I 'bring' to the experience (the smells of the market - ah, that's cos this was one of five records we had there that year, and the room overlooked the market) and what is more intrinsic to the work or the performance (ah, I love the percussive attack here - o, it's great how he slightly delays before bringing in the second subject - gorgeous combo of oboe and basset horn there... ).

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[Serial_Apologist]

It isn’t that I want to do this. I am trying to find out how it can be done because, from this thread and the one mentioned up-thread by Richard T on Sibelius BaL, that some people are able to depict or see/hear dark forests in Finland or the sea and Eastbourne in the music. Also, there are apparently some decipherable Japanese elements in the Turnage’s prom work. I am very intrigued.

Presumably these elemets are referenced by the Takemitsu influences remarked on by others, though I have not yet heard the Turnage.

[Serial_Apologist]

[...] It's not so much a question of music possibly being "about" something, as of music possibly taking the shape it does in the process of discovering/inventing a connection with that something. So then it needn't matter to a listener whether he/she is aware of that connection, since, like the notated score, it's been a means to an end. But, again like the notated score, getting to know more about it might well deepen your appreciation and understanding of the music. Often the title is a pointer in that direction.

Bingo! - the "numinous" brilliantly outed!

[Richard Barrett]

the Takemitsu influences

But there again, how much of Takemitsu's music (excepting the pieces written for Japanese instruments) actually sounds recognisably Japanese? Maybe in its avoidance of regular rhythms or forms... but you could say the same about Debussy.

[vinteuil]

... Cardew's "My attitude is that the musical and the real worlds are one. Musicality is a dimension of perfectly ordinary reality. The musician's pursuit is to recognize the musical composition of the world" - that is, it's not so much a question of music possibly being "about" something, as of music possibly taking the shape it does in the process of discovering/inventing a connection with that something. So then it needn't matter to a listener whether he/she is aware of that connection, since, like the notated score, it's been a means to an end. But, again like the notated score, getting to know more about it might well deepen your appreciation and understanding of the music. Often the title is a pointer in that direction.

... I like this a lot. I have recently been re-reading a lot of Perec - and a consciousness of how a work of art takes the shape it does thro' an armature of which the eventual reader may be (consciously) completely un-aware is a great help, whether in the obviousness of the lipogrammatic la Disparition or the much more complex ludic structures girding la Vie: Mode d'Emploi.

Thank you for this.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec

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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Perec

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[Richard Barrett]

consciousness of how a work of art takes the shape it does thro' an armature of which the eventual reader may be (consciously) completely un-aware is a great help, whether in the obviousness of the lipogrammatic la Disparition or the much more complex ludic structures girding la Vie: Mode d'Emploi.

Yes. And in fact techniques like those are I think more often met with in musical composition than in literature.

[Serial_Apologist]

Re Wordsworth, I think I would see something akin to colour actually and certainly it is there in other poetry. There are dark words and there are light words. Clearly there are shades in juxtapositions. However great the precision in verse, its main intention is surely to provide at the very least a haze, otherwise one would just look at what was being described directly on without someone else's interpretation. Focussed, objective approaches - the "I appreciate it purely for what it is" - is a momentary blocking out of everything else whereas running everything else through a partial, different lens is a momentary semi-blocking or more. That does mean there are differences. Perhaps the former is more honest. The latter can have the pretence of wider accommodation. But I am not sure why that should necessarily be inferior. In each case, there is a negotiation of how to deal/cope with external influence via art.

Alfred Noyes - The Barrel-Organ - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...e-barrel-organ

Brilliantly put. As for trustworthiness in wider accommodation, Alan Watts expresses this idea in the concept of "peripheral vision", in The Philosophy of the Tao - Chapter 1 of his classic, "The Way of Zen":

"The linear, one-at-a time character of speech and thought is particulary noticeable in languages using alphabets, representing experience in long strings of letters. It is not easy to say why we must communicate with others (speak) and with ourselves (think) by this one-at-a-time method. Life itself does not proceed in this cumbersome, linear fashion, and our own organisms could hardly live for a moment if they had to control themselves by taking thought of every breath, every beat of the heart, every neural impulse. But if we are to find some explanation for this characteristic of thought, the sense of sight offers a suggestive analogy. For we have two types of vision - central and peripheral, not unlike the spotlight and the floodlight. Central vision is used for accurate work like reading, in which our eyes are focused on one small area after another like spotlights. Peripheral vision is less conscious, less bright than the intense ray of the spotlight. We use it for seeing at night, and for taking 'subconscious' notice of objects and movements not in the direct line of central vision. Unlike the spotlight, it can take in many things at a time.

...

'Now the general gendency of the Western mind is to feel that we do not really understand what we cannot represent, what we cannot communicate, by linear signs - by thinking. We are like the 'wallflower' who cannot learn a dance unless someone draws him a diagram of the steps, who cannot 'get it by the feel'. For some reason we do not trust and do not fully use the 'peripheral vision' of our minds. We learn music, for example, by restricting the whole range of tone and rhythm to a notation of fixed tonal and rhythmic intervals - a notation which is incapable of representing Oriental music. But the Oriental musician has a rough notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of a teacher, getting the 'feel' of it, and copying him, and this enables hm to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched only by those Western jazz-artists who use the same approach.

'We are not suggesting that Westerners simply do not use the 'peripheral mind'. Being human, we use it all the time, and every artist, every workman, every athlete calls into play some special development of its powers. Bit it is not academically and philosophically respectable. We have hardly begun to realize its possibilities, and it seldom, if ever, occurs to us that one of its most important uses is for that 'knowledge of reality' which we try to attain by the cumbersome calculations of theology, metaphysics and logical inference'. (Watts, A, The Way of Zen, Pantheon Bos NY 1957, Reprinted Arkana, London, 1990, PP28-29).

[Richard Barrett]

'We are not suggesting that Westerners simply do not use the 'peripheral mind'. Being human, we use it all the time, and every artist, every workman, every athlete calls into play some special development of its powers. Bit it is not academically and philosophically respectable. We have hardly begun to realize its possibilities, and it seldom, if ever, occurs to us that one of its most important uses is for that 'knowledge of reality' which we try to attain by the cumbersome calculations of theology, metaphysics and logical inference'. (Watts, A, The Way of Zen, Pantheon Bos NY 1957, Reprinted Arkana, London, 1990, PP28-29).

Very interesting. It's many years since I read that book. I was however recently looking at Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" which contains this somewhat related passage: "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of
art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

[Serial_Apologist]

But there again, how much of Takemitsu's music (excepting the pieces written for Japanese instruments) actually sounds recognisably Japanese? Maybe in its avoidance of regular rhythms or forms... but you could say the same about Debussy.

By whom he was influenced, of course. Others have spoken of the Japanese qualities in Takemitsu's music - its rhythmic fluidities, as you say; it's avoiding of conventional climaxes and feeling of "narrative inevitability"; and the sensibilities he brought to themes taken up by many Western artists, and not only those associated with the Arts & Crafts movement.

(Edit: it since occurs to me that Takemitsu said himself that in his early attraction to Western musical forms he was in reaction against cultural influences in general that he saw as having taken his country in the catastrophioc direction pursued by its ruling classes in the 1930s).

[Serial_Apologist]

Very interesting. It's many years since I read that book. I was however recently looking at Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" which contains this somewhat related passage: "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of
art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art - and, by analogy, our own experience - more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.

At the risk of misrepresenting Ms Sontag, for art to be "authentic" there's an inevitability to growing complexity, I believe. It's implicit from the putative evolution from monody to polyphony, by way of the growing chromaticisation of the diatonic-based harmonic language of 19th century music, and eventually on to serialism and stochasm, etc. Attempts to inveigh against this seeming "historical inevitability" seem either intended to be part of a dumbing down mind-shaping process that keeps general populaces under control by numbing their critical facilities in general, or as part of a utopian intention, which was what drew me briefly in the direction of some progressive rock music in the early 1970s, thinking it could "complexify", then going back to jazz and improvised music, as doubtless have genuinely creative people. Every so often have arisen movements directed to idiomatic re-simplification, or re-elementarisation, but like blocked off compressed air needing escape channels elsewhere, complexity reasserts itself, as in the moves to establish the primacy of the diatonic over all the old modes, counterweighted by the expansion of music's emotional and functional remit at the start of the C17, and the turn away from contraputal complexity exercised in the hands of the sons of JS Bach and their contemporaries leading through to the collossal scope embraced within the variants of sonata form. In retrospect, speaking personally, getting to grips with complex music has played an important part in consciousness raising more generally.

[Richard Barrett]

I don't think Sontag was advocating a "back to simplicity" approach, but rather speaking against the kind of critical "interpretation" that becomes an end in itself.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I don't think Sontag was advocating a "back to simplicity" approach, but rather speaking against the kind of critical "interpretation" that becomes an end in itself.

I'm not sure what this means.

[Richard Barrett]

I'm not sure what this means.

She writes that an appropriate critical approach "would serve the work of art rather than usurp its place", that is, wouldn't reduce it to a network of symbols and thereby bypass its sensual qualities. The last sentence of the essay is "In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." It came up during a discussion at home of the work of David Lynch, which I prefer to appreciate for its sensual/formal qualities rather than try to work out "what it all means".

[Lat-Literal]

Brilliantly put. As for trustworthiness in wider accommodation, Alan Watts expresses this idea in the concept of "peripheral vision", in The Philosophy of the Tao - Chapter 1 of his classic, "The Way of Zen":

"The linear, one-at-a time character of speech and thought is particulary noticeable in languages using alphabets, representing experience in long strings of letters. It is not easy to say why we must communicate with others (speak) and with ourselves (think) by this one-at-a-time method. Life itself does not proceed in this cumbersome, linear fashion, and our own organisms could hardly live for a moment if they had to control themselves by taking thought of every breath, every beat of the heart, every neural impulse. But if we are to find some explanation for this characteristic of thought, the sense of sight offers a suggestive analogy. For we have two types of vision - central and peripheral, not unlike the spotlight and the floodlight. Central vision is used for accurate work like reading, in which our eyes are focused on one small area after another like spotlights. Peripheral vision is less conscious, less bright than the intense ray of the spotlight. We use it for seeing at night, and for taking 'subconscious' notice of objects and movements not in the direct line of central vision. Unlike the spotlight, it can take in many things at a time.

...

'Now the general gendency of the Western mind is to feel that we do not really understand what we cannot represent, what we cannot communicate, by linear signs - by thinking. We are like the 'wallflower' who cannot learn a dance unless someone draws him a diagram of the steps, who cannot 'get it by the feel'. For some reason we do not trust and do not fully use the 'peripheral vision' of our minds. We learn music, for example, by restricting the whole range of tone and rhythm to a notation of fixed tonal and rhythmic intervals - a notation which is incapable of representing Oriental music. But the Oriental musician has a rough notation which he uses only as a reminder of a melody. He learns music, not by reading notes, but by listening to the performance of a teacher, getting the 'feel' of it, and copying him, and this enables hm to acquire rhythmic and tonal sophistications matched only by those Western jazz-artists who use the same approach.

'We are not suggesting that Westerners simply do not use the 'peripheral mind'. Being human, we use it all the time, and every artist, every workman, every athlete calls into play some special development of its powers. Bit it is not academically and philosophically respectable. We have hardly begun to realize its possibilities, and it seldom, if ever, occurs to us that one of its most important uses is for that 'knowledge of reality' which we try to attain by the cumbersome calculations of theology, metaphysics and logical inference'. (Watts, A, The Way of Zen, Pantheon Bos NY 1957, Reprinted Arkana, London, 1990, PP28-29).

Yes - I like that - and it makes sense to me.

There is something here about the generalist and the specialist. The few of us who are ever paid to be generalists - "are you the engineer or the environmentalist?"......."no, I'm one of the many generalists here" - are generally happy to be where we are but we also recognize it comes with a wince. I do think the peripheral mind can go a bit when time is slipping and the instinct is to find words to comprehend all that has happened or is occurring in the present day. There are gains as well as losses but I will probably never be fully convinced that my appreciation of a plant is any greater by knowing all the labels that man has attached to its machinery. I am reminded of a poem from a long way back. Henry Reed's "Naming of Parts".

https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/naming-of-parts/

With impressionism, every indication may be that the music is drowned out by inner chatter but the associative language is virtually silent and there is no inner discourse on structure. I am not suggesting that those who comprehend form and consider it important are full of words themselves but there is an awful lot of silent language that goes in to intense focussing on what is being received and funnelling it all down. Probably as much as what it takes in other appreciation to make the vaguest blend and turn it into something perceived as location.

[Lat-Literal]

Two Pop Songs With a Bristol Connection

A place I barely know.

Just once went to a meeting there in a building immediately outside the main station.

That is it.

The first says little to me although it might play well with some locals. I get the jokes about the names. I don't know the places. The second in the absence of any classical music about Bristol is the closest music has come to depicting Bristol in an associative way. In defence of the Wurzels, though, new knowledge of the early West Indian scene improves its resonance while a tattooed Samantha and David hanging out with Tricky and Co in their first youth detracts a little from the impressive colours produced by the Massive contingent in the 1990s:

The Wurzels - The Bristol Song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS_DC_T_RpU
Massive - Unfinished Sympathy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTQ6JjAEdGA