Music: Entertainment? Culture? Or both?

[Grazioso]

Music is what it is.  It can be used as decoration, entertainment (and again, I attach no pejorative to those words), "culture"--whatever that word actually means--or many other things.  It can even be used as prophecy, in the sense that prophets speak uncomfortable but necessary truths; think Shostakovich in the Stalinist Soviet Union.  But ultimately, it is exactly and only music.

("The greatest of the arts"?  I'm not so sure about that; but it is the most imminent and evanescent of them.)

POLONIOUS

    What do you read, my lord?

HAMLET

    Words, words, words.

POLONIUS

    What is the matter, my lord?

HAMLET

    Between who?

POLONIUS

    I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.

[petrarch]

This is an outstanding series of essays on the subject of this thread. Highly recommended.

[asin]0520231597[/asin]

[bigshot]

My collection is massive... Tens of thousands of records, over ten thousand CDs and at least as many DVDs. It isn't a reflection of mental illness. It's a result of a different approach to experiencing and coming to terms with music.

Some people absorb and understand music by repeated listenings to a handful of great pieces. The familiarity reveals truth in the details that aren't apparent to a first time casual listener. This is a perfectly valid approach, but it isn't the only way. I find that for me, I learn new things about music best by taking a wide view, rather than a detailed one. I listen to a huge variety of music... Everything from classical to country western, jazz and ethnic music of all types. I learn things about classical music by listening to jazz, and I learn about jazz by listening to Latin music. It all illuminates everything else. Focusing on details and specific niches of music doesn't inform my listening as much as a broad approach does.

Also, there is a great deal of excitement in hearing things that are new. Having a collection that is too big to listen to in a lifetime means that I get to enjoy  the thrill of discovery every day. So many people get bored with music because they focus in so tightly, they run out of new music to explore. I'm open to listening to any kind of music, and that means I'm never bored. Music isn't boring. Listeners are.

[Mirror Image]

I don't see anything wrong with buying recordings that you know you can't listen to immediately. If I see something appealing or unusual that interests me, especially at a good price, I get it while I can to listen to when I have the time or the inclination. I think people who get bent out of shape at the large collections of others might be suffering from diskus envy, so if you do have a large one, it's a good idea not to flaunt it too much.   

I don't see anything wrong with buying recordings that I know I can't listen to immediately either.

[bigshot]

Every serious musician I have ever known (who get results) is bound to rate, judge & compare, including their own stuff. Getting hung up on labels & categories however, perhaps not so much .. but do I know a lot of musicians who still fall into that trapping and their potential and music suffer as a result.

Musicians are different than listeners.

"Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected." –Oscar Wilde

[Grazioso]

Musicians are different than listeners.

"Bad artists always admire each other's work. They call it being large-minded and free from prejudice. But a truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected." –Oscar Wilde

Also apropos:


Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things
are the cultivated.  For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things means only
Beauty.
...
All art is quite useless.

--Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

[bigshot]

The quote from Wilde explained my point. A listener can appreciate a wide range of things. But a musician has to make creative decisions in his own work. This makes him more critical and discerning because he is likely to only appreciate other artists who make similar creative decisions. You can call that getting caught up in labels and categories, but for an artist it's part and parcel with working within a defined aesthetic.

[Szykneij]

A listener can appreciate a wide range of things.

And being a listener is an essential element of being a musician.

But a musician has to make creative decisions in his own work. This makes him more critical and discerning because he is likely to only appreciate other artists who make similar creative decisions.

I couldn't disagree more.

[(poco) Sforzando]

So all serious musical culture merely equates to 'decorative' or 'entertainment' ... nothing deeper? Wow that's such an off base & typically empty perspective Grazioso (but no surprise though; as it's coming from you).

Not quite, James. And Grazioso doesn't deserve the slur. What he actually says is as follows:

That said, art can make statements or attempt to instruct. (Literature and the visual arts can say things literally or symbolically, music tries to communicate by eliciting sequences of emotions.) Art can inflame our animal passions, point our thoughts and emotions towards elevated things, or soothe us into passive tranquility. It can serve as an indirect way for people to connect with one another.

Pointing our thoughts and emotions towards elevated things doesn't sound to me like a bad description of the "appallingly mundane" St. Matthew Passion; come to think of it, it doesn't sound like a bad description of the C# minor Quartet or The Magic Flute either.

[jochanaan]

The quote from Wilde explained my point. A listener can appreciate a wide range of things. But a musician has to make creative decisions in his own work. This makes him more critical and discerning because he is likely to only appreciate other artists who make similar creative decisions. You can call that getting caught up in labels and categories, but for an artist it's part and parcel with working within a defined aesthetic.

I'm with Szykneij in disagreeing.  Sometimes I listen as a musician wanting to learn music; sometimes as a simple listener enjoying what I hear.

But there's another element that must be mentioned.  Like many musicians, I am deeply concerned about the future of my art.  (That doesn't mean I think it's dying; far from it!  It means merely that I want it to continue after I'm no longer around to participate and appreciate it.)  I am very willing to accept less-than-ideal work if the "workers" (composers and performers both) show that they are gifted, love what they do, and have passionate opinions about it.  So if I hear a young orchestra whose strings may not be perfectly in tune or time but dig in and love it, I'll clap and cheer.  If I hear a piece that's outside the mainstream, I'll whistle and howl. I love to encourage tomorrow's musicians whether they're just starting their journey or have already won prizes and other accolades.

[not edward]

Both. The answer really is that simple.

[(poco) Sforzando]

Why don't you present your own position on the topic first?

Lame, James.

[eyeresist]

I said in another thread that a work of art is a beautiful, made object. I arrived at that definition while trying to clear away the Romantic and Modern dross that has accumulated around the concept. In essence, art (deriving from the Latin, roughly meaning skill, craft or technique) is a thing created by a person (so a sunset may be beautiful, but it is not art). It is created to be beautiful, i.e. its function is aesthetic, not practical (hence Wilde's assertion that art is useless). And its virtues proceed from its being an actual thing that exists in the world, not a concept or ideal.

What do I mean by 'beautiful'? Obviously there are artworks which we can enjoy which don't necessarily fit the conventional idea of beauty. But if they stimulate us in a pleasant way, then I would call them beautiful. (And if we find them genuinely unpleasant, we avoid them.) But still, what is beauty?

Recall Pinker's description of music as "cheesecake for the mind". I think that fits with my materialist idea of what art actually does. In the case of music, patterns of vibrating air are received through the senses, and stimulate electrochemical activity in the brain which we find rewarding. Proportions and textures and interrelationships are arranged in patterns which we perceive to be "right", for whatever psychological or biological reason.

As you can see, I don't believe in a literally spiritual dimension of art. I don't think that a great artwork exists somehow beyond time, space and conventional morality. I also regard "profundity" as a product of perception, and not as a special mystical insight. I can reach the end of Bruckner's 9th with a sensation of intellectual and emotional ecstasy, profundity and insight - but what is this 'insight'? The world has not changed, and neither have I (except perhaps in becoming more sensitive to aesthetic experience).

I don't think this way of looking at art diminishes it or my experience of it. Art still affects me; it's just that I don't proceed from that effect to the notion that I have received mystical (or sociopolitical) insight.

[Chaszz]

Also apropos:


Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things
are the cultivated.  For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things means only
Beauty.
...
All art is quite useless.

--Wilde, preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

Is the death of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman a beautiful thing? Is an ugly crippled beggar in a Rembrandt etching a beautiful thing?
Or the murder of the John the Baptist Strauss's  Salome? Can art that is not beautiful but ugly have meaning?

[Grazioso]

I said in another thread that a work of art is a beautiful, made object. I arrived at that definition while trying to clear away the Romantic and Modern dross that has accumulated around the concept. In essence, art (deriving from the Latin, roughly meaning skill, craft or technique) is a thing created by a person (so a sunset may be beautiful, but it is not art). It is created to be beautiful, i.e. its function is aesthetic, not practical (hence Wilde's assertion that art is useless). And its virtues proceed from its being an actual thing that exists in the world, not a concept or ideal.

What do I mean by 'beautiful'? Obviously there are artworks which we can enjoy which don't necessarily fit the conventional idea of beauty. But if they stimulate us in a pleasant way, then I would call them beautiful. (And if we find them genuinely unpleasant, we avoid them.) But still, what is beauty?

Recall Pinker's description of music as "cheesecake for the mind". I think that fits with my materialist idea of what art actually does. In the case of music, patterns of vibrating air are received through the senses, and stimulate electrochemical activity in the brain which we find rewarding. Proportions and textures and interrelationships are arranged in patterns which we perceive to be "right", for whatever psychological or biological reason.

As you can see, I don't believe in a literally spiritual dimension of art. I don't think that a great artwork exists somehow beyond time, space and conventional morality. I also regard "profundity" as a product of perception, and not as a special mystical insight. I can reach the end of Bruckner's 9th with a sensation of intellectual and emotional ecstasy, profundity and insight - but what is this 'insight'? The world has not changed, and neither have I (except perhaps in becoming more sensitive to aesthetic experience).

I don't think this way of looking at art diminishes it or my experience of it. Art still affects me; it's just that I don't proceed from that effect to the notion that I have received mystical (or sociopolitical) insight.

Very well said. And for the benefit of James, who thinks I haven't answered the question (which really means "didn't parrot his conceptual muddle") those are the same points I was making earlier in the thread, viz.

That while art can attempt to instruct or influence, it is fundamentally entertainment, decoration for our lives, beauty injected into the practicalities of daily life.

That art is not a secular surrogate for spirituality.

That depth or profundity is something we project onto art, not something that inheres it. Those are valuations, not descriptions, and valuations come from man, not his cultural products.


I should also add that James's initial distinction between "entertainment" and "culture" is most odd. The Rite of Spring is both a form of entertainment and a manifestation of culture. So is professional wrestling (a form of theater or spectacle that plays out cultural values of heroism, revenge, etc.). I'm assuming that he means to distinguish between so-called high and low art, or art that someone pays little attention to versus analyzing carefully. If the latter, then that has little if anything to do with the art itself, but rather the person who encounters it.

[Lethevich]

This is an outstanding series of essays on the subject of this thread. Highly recommended.

[asin]0520231597[/asin]

I was under the impression that Adorno's views on music were deeply flawed? Perhaps I was reading partisan sources, though...

[(poco) Sforzando]

Recall Pinker's description of music as "cheesecake for the mind".

What a clumsy metaphor. A heavy, fattening dessert that lies like lead on your stomach.   

[ibanezmonster]

Noob, you're the lame one who is offering jack shit to the topic.

And the obsession with/motif of feces in Jamesism continues... 

[Szykneij]

What a clumsy metaphor. A heavy, fattening dessert that lies like lead on your stomach.

Maybe he meant this kind of cheesecake ...   

[(poco) Sforzando]

Maybe he meant this kind of cheesecake ...   

Yes, that must be it.