RE: Music
August 18, 2017 at 1:30 am
(This post was last modified: August 18, 2017 at 1:38 am by Thumpalumpacus.)
(August 17, 2017 at 5:16 pm)Alex K Wrote: Wow that's quite an accomplishment, nice!
Not too long ago I watched a performance on YT by some prog metal supergroup, and they have very complex arrangements, jazz elements, polyrhythms, they are all world class virtuosos on their instruments, and studied at Berklee or whatever.
All I got from this musical tour de force was a weird feeling of emptiness and pointlessness. It's hard to put into words, it's like...if there's no meaning, no heartfelt communication of something, the greatest technical achievement in performance and composition just falls flat without a lasting effect. Is that music better than some two chord punk rock? If you go by my music theory book, there's no competition. But in reality, it's just the other way around.
That's why I am a J.S.Bach admirer - having both technical perfection and deep humanity at once is rare.
This is how I feel about music, and other forms of art: it might be judged technically better, but the most important aspect is the emotional effect, because art in its many forms lives in the conversation that happens between the artist and the audience. If your words, or pictures, or music do not communicate to others, what sort of conversation can there be?
(August 17, 2017 at 5:51 pm)bennyboy Wrote: We both have a real respect for each other. We sometimes joke that we are yin to each other's yang or whatever. In the end, I think it's that balance between the Apollonian and Dionysian that gives music life.
That apposition between the cerebral and the emotional is what drives my taste in any art. And of course the line dividing the two sways back and forth as the moment demands -- sometimes I want intellectual satisfaction, other times I want gutbucket stank. And from my own view, that tension between the two makes up my own part in the communication that happens between artist and audience. Sitting in both chairs, myself.
(August 17, 2017 at 5:51 pm)bennyboy Wrote: I'd definitely rather listen to good 3-cord punk than Yngwie Malmsteen. That being said, I probably wouldn't want to listen to multiple albums of 3-chord punk, either, because it all starts to sound the same to me. But get something technical with real passion, like Beethoven, and I'm down. Or get something with real feeling and at least a little complexity to grab the brain, like a lot of 60s rock bands (I'm thinking Rolling Stones) and I'm down.
Man cannot live on bread alone ... and art is food for the mind.
