Hey, Science...you're making me feel like I did when I was,...'experimenting', back in the day...honestly, man, it is what ultimately matters. Along with family and love and friendship it is what truly makes life worth living.

 

I know exactly what you mean, and, lately, I've felt my priorities and grievances shifting all the time. The attribute that I cherish music for most is the renewed and expanded perspectives it gives me, and the way it diminishes the pettiness of other problems.

Having said that, I wouldn't place art on a special pedestal, at least certainly not music (literature perhaps). The very reason that I have these amazing feelings with music is because it sinks into my brain and plays about with all kinds of neurological facets - tickling them and exciting them. It's an aural drug to be abused, and there's nothing intrinsically special about it - it doesn't, and wouldn't, work on any other animal with differently evolved brains.

So, because music is, to me, a visceral pleasure, an emotional cascade, a neurological indulgence, I don't think it can be placed front and centre of human experience and importance. What I care more about is the satisfaction of our curiosity about the world, finding our place in it, explaining how things work, coming to understand the beauty of natural processes - science trumps all else, and, what's more, it doesn't go straight for the amygdala like music, it nourishes the uniquely cerebral aspects of the human brain, as well as satisfying our yearning for beauty. Give me an image taken by the Hubble Telescope, and all politics, all suffering, all entertainment, and all art shrivels pathetically.

 

Having said that, I wouldn't place art on a special pedestal, at least certainly not music (literature perhaps). The very reason that I have these amazing feelings with music is because it sinks into my brain and plays about with all kinds of neurological facets - tickling them and exciting them. It's an aural drug to be abused, and there's nothing intrinsically special about it - it doesn't, and wouldn't, work on any other animal with differently evolved brains.

Poley, I have to say, this rubs me the wrong way. I don't think it should be analyzed and minimized. Its powerful to me, as it is to you, don't think about what it is, who cares? To me its more interesting than nature at the moment, regardless of intrinsic value. No need to put a price label on things after all. But if that's how you personally feel for the time being, that's okay, its just not how I feel.

 

 

May Scriabin's Prometheus, poeme de feu, to go along with that image? Here is part 3/3

 

Oh kv, you've touched my heart!

 

Some of God's creations are pretty impressive, eh?





:devil:

 

I do believe politics, wars, economic crises, and all the shattered remnants of life are all absolutely important.

Reason being:

They will keep art and music from continuing.

Thus, with that in mind, we should all work for unity and prosperity in the world so that art/music will continue to encourage/refresh us. AND, let's USE music and art, among other things, to help us accomplish that.

As a musician, I take latter role, the encourager/nourisher of those that make the big tangible differences in society.

So all you non-musicians out there, I'm not here for myself and my gratification alone. I'm here for you.

I am your servant. Which I hope you will pay amiably. :tiphat:

 

Friedrich Nietzsche - "Life without music would be a mistake ". I heartily agree !

 

What matters is making this world a better place for it's future inhabitants to discover love, sincerity, and beautiful things

 

The problem there is figuring out cockroach esthetics.

 

And the hounds are behind--
Gunmen around every tree,
And if it's all in our minds,
Well, where else would it be?

(Mike Scott)

 

...
I generally feel scorn/pity for people when, in the midst of some kind of tragedy like WWII or living under some horrible totalitarianism, they say something like, "Art is what matters." I feel like I wouldn't contradict them to their face - may I never disturb any myth they need to get through the bombings and purges! - but my own attitude has been that big ideas and ideals matter, and art/entertainment matters primarily in the way it relates to them. In their shoes, I hope I'd have the courage not to settle for art...

Continuting what you say there, I think art can kind of change the world. Or be one of the driving forces of change, positive or (unfortunately) negative.

I mean there's many examples. Things like Benny Goodman inviting vibes player Lionel Hampton as a guest for one of his concerts in the Carnegie Hall in New York, in the 1930's. Hampton was black, and America was still under segregation system. But New York was more liberal than, say, the Southern USA. However, what Goodman did was still controversial.

Fast forward to 1968 and the morning after the assasination of Dr. Martin Luther King, who was instrumental in ending segregation in USA. James Brown, the legendary R&B singer, was scheduled to give a concert that night in Boston. A live television broadcast of the concert was hastily arranged. Brown appealed to his fellow African Americans in Boston to desist from rioting, looting and burning the town to revenge Dr. King's death. It basically worked, there was less of that stuff going on that night, most people stayed at home to watch his concert, and heeded his wise words of unity and healing. More info HERE.

So these two anecdotes show that both Benny Goodman and James Brown were in tune with their times and they were working to make positive changes for the society through their music.

So what I'm saying is that even in the worst of times like that, of division and the worst side of human nature (eg. politics & other things getting out of hand, prejudice, discrimination, etc.), music can make a difference. Musicians can make a difference, so can composers and listeners of music. I think most if not all musicians are positive people, at least those I've come across over the years. Music is a kind of energy as people above have said, it can be harnessed to do good, history has proven this...

 

What you sad, Sid, makes me think that music has the power to bring people together, rather than to actually push change as well. That takes rhetoric, politics, and literature. I think this power is actually one to be wary of, because it can make propaganda a thousand times more tasteful than without a soundtrack.

 

Well I do admit it can be misused, this power of music to bring people together. It can bring them together for the wrong purposes & create division and not unity (eg. what various dictators of 20th century did with music and the other arts - we don't even have to name them). However, one can argue that these are like aberrations or manipulations of music and not "real" music, they are the few rotten apples in the big bunch.

When I think of music & musicians producing positive changes for the world at large I think of, for example -

- Raising awareness - eg. of various charitable or humanitarian causes musicians inevitably get involved in, some with a good deal of passion for these causes (a lot of classical musicians here, from Albert Schweitzer in early 20th century, or Pablo Casals, who was advocate for a free Spain during the Franco dictatorship)

- Helping people to heal and reflect after various tragedies - again, we know many of these works in classical music, one most profound one is R. Strauss' Metamorphosen, which I think says in music that which was kind of taboo in Germany after the war (eg. head in sand attitude, let's go on as if it never happened), a more recent one is Steve Reich's marking of tenth anniversary of the Twin Towers tragedy of 2001, but I have not heard this work, & I can give you numerous Australian examples, eg. Peter Sculthorpe writing pieces for Aussie victims of Bali bombings and for 2009 bushfires in Victoria, etc.

- Becoming role models for minorities & society at large - eg. obvious one is black musicians in USA, of all musical genres. Same here with Aboriginal Australian musicians. & also with musicians coming from any minority group, be it with a disability, or gay, or various ethnicities...

 

Do you think, that my blindfold, as you call it, that prevents me from reducing music to the cold facts of what we are capable of understanding it to be, is universally applied? I have things that I am quite critical about sometimes, as well as certain views that I'd often like to remain untampered with. At this time, I would prefer not to be highly critical about music as a concept and phenomena. Its not as though I insist on viewing it as something magical, I don't know what it is, but I often think of it like a oddly affecting abstraction, still I choose to focus on in the way that I do, because its what I'm good at focusing on, and I don't want to mess with that.

 

Two things:

1) Facts are not cold.
2) I don't know what you meant by the rest.

 

BTW, Huilu and Polednice, we should transplant parts of this discussion to the discussion group.

 

Nabokov couldn't appreciate any music at all.

Did his life have meaning?

 

I'm with you, Clavi. And so is Einstein. He said imagination is more important than knowledge.

 

I think science can help appreciate things, to be sure. But it can also ruin some things. Imagine sex or eating under scientific inquiry! Its not attractive to think about all these things and its not appetizing to ruin your meat by thinking about animal carcasses. Same with music, its more fun just to enjoy it. Mystifying isn't the same as emotional. There is an emotional side of things that is natural, both human and animal and there's nothing wrong with owning it.

I'm not 100% this way. I'm not entirely a hedonist or fufu artist/mystic. Nor are you an antiseptic rational entirely, not even close(you are Polednice, and unless I've been misinterpreting your sense of humor all this time, you are definitely not entirely dominated by literal rational realizations). This is just our position in this argument. And I'm convinced that neither element can be factually proven superior. Fact is so limited, because we can't possibly know a fraction of everything.

 

You know that I like both of you very much and agree with almost everything either of you say.

In this discussion, I have to say that I'm unaware of anything that is ruined by scientific knowledge - rather, as far as I'm aware everything is actually enhanced by scientific knowledge. Optics reveals the rainbow as a far more fascinating tapestry than naive poetry ever could, and Keats and Whitman were at least in their anti-scientific moments idiots who ought for their own sakes to have been flogged vigorously by their loved ones. As for sex, I can understand not wanting to conduct it under scientific scrutiny, but one of the very best books I've ever read is Sex and the Origins of Death.

On the other hand, I think music may be more than solely emotional: music theory is certainly a rigorously intellectual field.

But even if it were merely emotional, I have for almost a whole day now felt that it might be second to absolutely nothing as a meaningful activity. I didn't think so previously - I would have ranked it highly but below things like politics and family - but I'm probably changing my mind.

 

My words of wisdom : Everything matters but nothing matters more than people.

 

What does matter is culture in society. Art music is one. I'm not talking about the individual level (you can enjoy listening to cacophonic random mumbo jumbo industrial noise and or to Beethoven, that's all fine), but I think if the society you live in doesn't have and nurture culture with the arts at its core, it's likely a place I wouldn't want to live in. That is challenging these days of course, as governments are either broke and or pressured to cut back subsidies on the arts.

 

Yes art is the ultimate thing we must have

 

At any rate, I'm pleased that my steam has been blown, as I don't get into internet arguments often these days, since they cause a peculiar kind of discomfort.

I don't know though. Maybe nothing is ruined by scientific inquiry. But its certainly not the only approach to have in one's life, its a process that requires brain cells, which are exhausting to consciously exert all the time.

 

... scientific inquiry [is] certainly not the only approach to have in one's life....

That's a good point.

 

I'm not going to argue any more because it will just make me angry. Everything about my previous post still stands; science makes everything more beautiful to me.

 

OK, then take off that plastic piggy mask now!

 

Science vs. art? Just another of those false dichotomies that humans manage to create from the ether.

 

Hate to be one of those people, but:

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom." ~Einstein

 

Well if you are not going to look at it I will remove it !!! it was the wrong one anyway and I can't find the right one.

 

Einstein's quote sounds like he underestimated the degree to which humanity's activities - including art, religion, and science - are about power (such as status).

Sometimes Nietzsche was right.

 

^^^^^^^^^^
I'm certain he was well aware of that aspect and the collective abuses.

 

Aware enough to flee the Nazis, eh?