ktran
Unregistered
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Posted: April 16 2005, 01:08 |
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It's a very difficult thing to explain in words, and it's also a very difficult thing to understand logically.
We can try to explain things like mood and emotion by deconstructing down to electromagnetic impulses being fired off in the brain, electrochemical reactions, and interactions down at an atomic level if you wish, but that doesn't change the fact that we have them and that we feel them.
There is a time for orchestrating and arranging series of themes and charting out melodic development, but there are other times, and sometimes in the course of a planned-out composition, where something much more primal is appropriate.
It's something that's impossible to understand until you experience it for yourself. You allow all of these synapses to fire and your knowledge of music theory and scale positions and modal systems to just settle in the back of your mind, and you "pluck" music from out of the air. You allow your mood to dictate what you play. Sometimes, what comes out isn't spectacular, but sometimes, great beauty can come out of it.
I used to play with a classically trained violinist friend of mind, and she couldn't wrap her head around the idea that in improvisation, the point is that you don't know what you're going to play next.
I'm not a religious man by any means, but when the notes just come and flow from the "ether" through my body and into my fingers, and when everything just "clicks," it's as close to a divine feeling as I've yet felt.
The engineer and scientist and the semi-trained musician in me all know that there's a logical, if infinitely complex, reason for it to be working, but in the end, it really doesn't matter.
MO himself said, during what were probably his most technically competent days, that "the mark of a good musician is to be able to play one note and mean it."
Even the most technically-minded 12-tone composers (Schoenberg, etc) were trying to evoke an emotional response with their work. TS Elliot, the great modernist poet who embraced logic and form over the emotion of romanticism, at the same time was trying to shock and awe his audience. Humans are not logical beings. At some point, all of the reasoning in the world will boil down to how it makes us feel.
Sir M, you strike me as a very talented young man who is very intensely passionate about his work, both in music, and in writing about music. But at the same time, your intensity might be standing in the way of some truly great stuff. Music shouldn't be a task, nor a mere occupation. If that's truly how you feel about it, then I can't help but weep for you. Slow down. Take a breath every so often. Realise and understand that the world isn't out to get you, and that you don't have to go out and prove to the world every time how brilliant you are. It will find its own way. It's already there.
There is so much more to it. Early man "discovered" music in the air, the sounds of the water, the thunder. He found that one tone followed by another conveyed one feeling, whereas a dissonant progression conveyed another. At its core, music is ALL about feeling. We don't just take in ideas and concepts, we "perceive" them, we filter them through our consciousness.
Don't deny that. What makes/made MO such a great composer is that he was able to use his innate technical ability to channel what were some very intense feelings in his music.
I've rambled on for quite a bit, and I do apologise. I've done what I've said I wouldn't do. I've left myself wide open too, I realise. Please be kind. I wish you nothing but the best.
rgds,
Khoa
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It happened to me (at least) once that while programming subconsciously I noticed that I wasn't listening to any music, so I put something in the playlist, not watching what I was doing, and after 35 minutes I noticed suddenly that I was listening to Orabidoo and was quite amazed that I had listened to half of Five Miles Out without even noticing what I did. Not that it didn't feed well my brain. 