Autistic people and music

[Madiel]

Replace "nonsense" with "oxymoron" and there are plenty of famous examples. For instance:

Corneille:

Cette obscure clarté qui tombe des étoiles

Shakespeare:

O brawling love! O loving hate!
  O anything of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness, serious vanity!
  Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
  Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.

Byron:

For checker'd as is seen our human lot
    With good, and bad, and worse, alike prolific
Of melancholy merriment, to quote
    Too much of one sort would be soporific

I, for one, can easily imagine someone who has no feeling for poetry, and no knowledge of how it works, crying "Nonsense!".

Yeah... you realise it's a person who is CLAIMING a feeling for poetry who is saying that poetry is often nonsensical? You've just made the exact opposite case.

Anyway, there is a big difference between saying something about poetry in general, and saying something about a particular poem (or song lyric). The fact that poems might do a variety of things artistically does not preclude a particular poem just being clunky and unplanned. The fact that a skilled poet might do a series of these oxymorons doesn't preclude the possibility of someone misusing a word because they have its meaning wrong.

Neil Diamond fans have a tendency to justify the chair line by going into the symbolism of giving the chair a voice. People who aren't Neil Diamond fans are more likely to consider the possibility that he really, really needed a word that rhymed with "there".

[Florestan]

I find it absurd to say that a person who, in adulthood, manifests a mild form or one of the deficits listed above has the same disorder as a person which has Autism as it was originally defined.

I wouldn't say that people currently diagnosed on the mild side of the Autism spectrum don't have a disorder. But I find it absurd to say it is the same disorder.

...

To say that the people who meet the original diagnostic criteria have the same disorder as people who are socially awkward or can't tolerate the feeling of wool on their skin is nuts, in my view.

Totally agreed.

[Florestan]

Yeah... you realise it's the person who is CLAIMING a feeling for poetry who is saying that poetry is often nonsensical?

He wrote "often nonsensical if taken literally". Quite different from "often nonsensical", I'd say.

[Madiel]

He wrote "often nonsensical if taken literally". Quite different from "often nonsensical", I'd say.

Actually lots of things besides poetry are nonsensical if taken literally. Including the way people now use the word "literally" to mean "figuratively"...

But here's the thing: it's perfectly possible to understand that chairs don't have ears and that Neil Diwmond knows this, and still think that Neil Diamond's line is a dumb line. Saying poetry is often nonsensical doesn't help. The reason people say the line is dumb is not simply because they object to the non-literal nature of the line, it's because of the lack of artistic justification for introducing the chair as a character. People can be perfectly happy with Jesus talking about stones crying out and still think the Neil Diamond line is bad. It's got nothing to do with an inability to deal with non-literal meaning, it's simply an assessment of quality. It's not a sign of autism, it's a sign of your taste in songwriting.

[Florestan]

But here's the thing: it's perfectly possible to understand that chairs don't have ears and still think that Neil Diamond's line is a dumb line. Saying poetry is often nonsensical doesn't help. The reason people say the line is dumb is not simply because they object to the non-literal nature of the line, it's because of the lack of artistic justification for introducing the chair as a character. People can be perfectly happy with Jesus talking about stones crying out and still think the Neil Diamond line is bad. It's got nothing to do with an inability to deal with non-literal meaning, it's simply an assessment of quality. It's not a sign of autism, it's a sign of your taste in songwriting.

All true. Yet, from the whole of @Mister Sharpe 's post, especially the subsequent example he offered, I inferred that his father always took everything literally, therefore his labeling Neil Diamond's line as stupid stemmed not from any discriminating taste in poetry but from a completely prosaic personality who probably would have labelled the Shakespeare and Byron verses above as equally stupid.

[Madiel]

Possibly my least favourite lyric in a hit song is in "Africa" by Toto.

The line is "Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti".

I don't hate it because of an objection to the geography. I wasn't even particularly aware that Mount Kilimanjaro is too far away from the Serengeti plain to rise above it.

And I don't hate it because I don't understand that "rises like" indicates a metaphor. I hate it because it's an appallingly lazy and white-centred metaphor. Oh, um, the song is called Africa so I had better mention some African things. Kilimanjaro! That's a cool word! It's a mountain, so it rises... what does this mountain rise like... it rises like a good old European mountain! The home of the gods! That sounds cool!

Rises like a tower. Rises like a phoenix. Rises like thunder. There were so many poetic metaphor options. I don't hate the line because I don't understand poetry, I hate it because I do and I recognise a bad example of the genre. An African mountain rising like a European mountain scarcely even qualifies as a metaphor.

[Madiel]

All true. Yet, from the whole of @Mister Sharpe 's post, especially the subsequent example he offered, I inferred that his father always took everything literally, therefore his labeling Neil Diamond's line as stupid stemmed not from any discriminating taste in poetry but from a completely prosaic personality who probably would have labelled the Shakespeare and Byron verses above as equally stupid.

And yet, the example offered was not Shakespeare or Byron. The example was a line that a LOT of people besides his Dad think is a dumb line. And they would express their critique in a very similar way. It doesn't demonstrate anything unusual about his Dad.

That's my point.

Similarly, not being able to follow one of Liszt's retroactively fitted programs for a symphonic poem does not make a person unusual. There is a very real possibility that the reason people can't follow the program is because Liszt made up the "story" afterwards. It might well be the case that people who say they CAN follow the program are the people who suspend disbelief / drink the Kool-aid a bit more readily than average.

[Florestan]

Actually, Liszt's tone poems are not even a good starting point for such a discussion, because apart from their titles and the prefaces he affixed to them long after composition (and which nobody reads, anyway) he provided no programs at all, be they sketchy or detailed. There is simply no "story" to follow.

Generally speaking, not seeing or imagining any picture, event or story while listening to music, even truly programmatic music, has got nothing to do with autism and there's nothing abnormal about it. 

[Madiel]

Yes. Let us not medicalise perfectly usual responses to art.

[Florestan]

Yes. Let us not medicalise perfectly usual responses to art.

Now, that's indeed a vast topic: the medicalisation of normality. 

[71 dB]

I don't quite understand it. Are there no psychiatrists or psychologists in Finland? Or is it all but impossible to get an appointment with one of them in order to discuss your condition and ask for an assessment?

Of course there are psychiatrists or psychologists in Finland, but they are not there solely for autistic people. On the private sector anything is possible I guess, but that costs money, something I am not willing to do.

[Florestan]

Of course there are psychiatrists or psychologists in Finland, but they are not there solely for autistic people.

How does getting an appointment i,n a public clinic work in Finland? In Romania, you phone them, ask for an appointment in the department relevant to your condition and they tell you "okay, come on date X at time Y, dr. Z will receive you". All you need apart from that is a letter from your GP specifying the putative diagnose and asking for a specialized assessment.

[Opus131]

Actually, Liszt's tone poems are not even a good starting point for such a discussion

Probably not, but they are a good starting point for his non-piano works.

Personally, i never found this idea of "programmatic" music really captured what the Romantics were trying to do.

I mean it was certainly one of their guiding principles but then programmatic music has existed long before them and it's not exactly the same. Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Beethoven's 6th symphony are also programmatic works and yet they aren't entirely analogous to the kind of music Wagner and his bygones were trying to make.

I would say the first distinction is that the Romantics were basically theatrical (in the case of Wagner literally as he mostly wrote for the stage). It's not so much that the music is trying to tell a story through sounds specifically, as if somehow musical notes can literally spell a narrative. It's more like film music, like a soundtrack to a story the composer may or may not be imagining in his head as he is writing those compositions (i mean i would assume this is what they were doing given the stated purpose of their music). 

So becuase of this the music feels more impersonal (and in some cases supra-personal). The subject is no longer the composer and his inner feelings, like in the case of a Beethoven (from the heart to the heart as he said). The subject of the music is something external to the composer, the music is in the service of something outside of itself, something that may have been seen as larger than anyone's single individuality (matter of opinion of course).

And then there's the fact the kind of expression the Romantics were aiming for is more akin to an experience. Normally in music you have things that are intended to affect a person directly, from melody to rythmn there's a very direct relationship between the organization of the sounds and the effect they are supposed to have on the listener. Something objective is being communicated. In the case of the Romantics, there's a lot that is just there to elicit sensations and feelings, usually by means of the imaginal. In a way the Romantics are asking the listener to give up his rational mind and merely give in to this dream-like tapestry of feelings. The music almost acts like a narcotic, like it's trying to induce a state of drunkness in the listener.

This aspect is actually what allowed me to appreciate those composers in the end. While i'm not "autistic", i'm actually an introvert and growing up i spend a lot of time alone, and when you are in seclusion you are very acutely aware of experiences and sensations coming from the things and objects around you, and in a certian sense the experience of listening to the Romantics sort of reminds me of that, including all the "dark" aspects as lonliness can often conjure up feelings of dread which are then captured by the Romantics by means of their use of chromaticism. Their music is at once a dream and a nightmare, and it's not surprising that it was with the Romantics that horror became common as a literary genre.

Because of this it so happens that often it is the adagios that i tend to enjoy the most in those Romantic compositions: