Showing posts with label life enhancement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label life enhancement. Show all posts
11 April 2013
When We Listen To How Much of What, and Why
"...but would you rather listen to Bach or Vivaldi after a long day at work?"
Um...is this a trick question?
My name is Stefan and I have a problem. I listen the most to the music that is most important to me. Parties are not welcome respites from talking about music, but in fact welcome opportunities to talk about the music I really want to talk about. I've been known to "chill" at the end of a long day with my friends Shostakovich and Lutoslawski. Like everyone else, when I have leisure time, I do what I want; unlike everyone else, what I want to do most of the time is hear/read/write/contemplate that which gives my life purpose.
I'm struck by some recent comments and events here at school implying that there's something wrong or unusual about this. It's not the first time, but it still gets under my skin. If you almost never listen to a style of music, it is not "important" to you, no matter what you say. If certain "heavy" composers are set aside only for special occasions and rare states of consciousness, those are not your favorite composers, no matter what you say. The music that is important to you is your daily nourishment, not a delicacy to be ascetically reserved for special occasions. The things in life that are important to you are the things you confide in your friends, not those which you hide from them for fear of coming off a square. (Or are they your friends after all?)
Everyone needs a break. Even I retreat to the basketball court or the Scrabble board from time to time. Maybe it'd be nice if the rest of y'all that I have to live and work with didn't look quite so eager to get away? Maybe just humor that guy at the party who won't leave music behind when he leaves campus? Be yourself, of course, but dare I say maybe don't be quite so openly proud for not being like that guy if you really think this is what you want to do with your life?
How peculiar this all looks to someone of my sensibilities, accustomed as I am to being bludgeoned over the head with the insistence that art and life must be joined at the hip; that Art without Culture is just gymnastics; that "making pretty things" for their own sake is merely an adolescent phase; that the most important thing about art is its social message; that beauty and craft are merely Trojan Horses, used by elitist ideologues to seduce, hypnotize and disenfranchise the common folk; that silly white musicians err in treating their sound as an external "artifact" where they might more properly seek a "voice"; that music "matters" because it makes kids smart; in other words, that autonomous art is degenerate art, specifically because "autonomy" means severing the work from all of the things which make it "relevant" (if not always "beautiful," which is of course is strictly optional).
Having thus shoehorned Art into Life, Life does the Dosey Do! What a drag! Of course you don't talk about anti-aesthetic art any more than you have to! Of course you need a break from it twice a day! Of course you put on something else when your friends are over! You made it to be life, but not your life! You made it to teach society a lesson you were born knowing! Let them sort out your dogpile while you enjoy your teeny-bop techno music and totally epic wall hangings! Real life is, like, totally important to who you are as an artist, but it's not like anyone is going to live it all the time!
One of my favorite ambiguous statements is one I first heard uttered earnestly: "The only reason to do music for a living is that you can't do anything else." I ask any musician reading this to stop for a moment and consider which, if either, sense of this statement applies to you.
31 October 2011
How Improvisation Enhances Life/Spirituality Through Sound
How Improvisation Enhances Life
The optimist says, "Life is an improvisation!"
The skeptic says, "There is no such thing!"
We can recognize a certain obvious truth in both of these seemingly contradictory statements, and without resorting to the physiological (i.e. neurological) explanation, be that line of reasoning as it may rather incontrovertible. Put more simply, the term "improvisation" is an exceedingly imprecise one: it describes only our sensation of the act, not the act itself. The "enhancement" in question, then, might be most readily schematized not by setting Improvisation and Life as x-y axes and then seeking points of optimization, but rather by considering the myriad degrees and types of improvisation we engage in; where we were and what we were doing when the act of improvisation seemed impossible; and, by the same token, when it seemed inescapable. This is the empirical approach; for a cultural analysis, substitute matters of taste for those of mere possibility in the preceding sentence.
Performing these two exercises for myself, what I find first and foremost is that improvisation is a useful foil to much "business as usual." This requires, of course, that normalcy be defined as tending toward the premeditated, which is certainly not true in every culture, but my sense is that it is true in those which I have been thrust into most often (and even if premeditation is not truly the norm, it is still, perhaps, overutilized, if not just in my humble opinion). I suppose I'll know that this is no longer a constructive viewpoint when I am being assigned to write a short reflection on "How Planning Ahead Enhances Life." I should reiterate, though, that this dynamic of contrast also exists between specific degrees and types of improvisation, perhaps more powerfully than it does between the premeditated and the spontaneous more broadly construed (overbroad categories, actually, which, as hinted at above, are not always what they seem).
Spirituality Through Sound: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony
It is crucial that I preface my explanation for choosing this piece with the fact that I knew almost nothing about it or its composer when I first heard it, and that it immediately became my "new favorite piece" in absence of any such historical perspective. Spirituality being for an agnostic like me an earthly concern with a finite duration, I think it's valid to respond to an assignment such as this with one's most favorite music, whether or not that music is particularly spiritual in some other way; after all, it is this music which is, literally, all we have to live for. This is a piece of music which I find just this compelling in the abstract, and yet the circumstances of its creation also lend it an intensely spiritual dimension.
Shostakovich had already begun composing his Fourth Symphony when the infamous Pravda article appeared (in January, 1936) condemning his work and putting his very life in danger. His work in progress was if anything more subversive of the party agenda than any which had preceded it, and though he completed it anyway and had even secured a premiere, this was canceled after "...a series of unsuccessful rehearsals clearly influenced by the new condemned standing of its composer." Shostakovich's subsequent contrition, genuine or not, was adequate to save his career (and his life), but he would never truly return to composing in the vein of the Fourth Symphony, a piece which he himself once considered a watershed in his creative development. Shelved by the political climate, the orchestral score was lost during World War II; it was only the later rediscovery of the parts from the canceled premiere that allowed the original version to be reconstructed piece by piece. The work was premiered only in 1960, 24 years after it's completion, and not published until 1984, nearly a decade after the composer's death1.
It is, in other words, a miracle that the piece exists at all. What lends this history a spiritual profundity, I think, is that it points to the transient, impermanent nature of art, and by extension, of life. The saying goes that you don't truly appreciate what you once had until it's gone, and I think that a similar dynamic exists where the object's provenance will not permit its being taken for granted, even by those who have not actually been deprived of it (and especially with the knowledge that there are many who were.)
Notes
1. Anderson, Keith, "Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43." Liner notes. Shostakovich: Symphony No, 4 in C Minor. Naxos Records, 1993.
The optimist says, "Life is an improvisation!"
The skeptic says, "There is no such thing!"
We can recognize a certain obvious truth in both of these seemingly contradictory statements, and without resorting to the physiological (i.e. neurological) explanation, be that line of reasoning as it may rather incontrovertible. Put more simply, the term "improvisation" is an exceedingly imprecise one: it describes only our sensation of the act, not the act itself. The "enhancement" in question, then, might be most readily schematized not by setting Improvisation and Life as x-y axes and then seeking points of optimization, but rather by considering the myriad degrees and types of improvisation we engage in; where we were and what we were doing when the act of improvisation seemed impossible; and, by the same token, when it seemed inescapable. This is the empirical approach; for a cultural analysis, substitute matters of taste for those of mere possibility in the preceding sentence.
Performing these two exercises for myself, what I find first and foremost is that improvisation is a useful foil to much "business as usual." This requires, of course, that normalcy be defined as tending toward the premeditated, which is certainly not true in every culture, but my sense is that it is true in those which I have been thrust into most often (and even if premeditation is not truly the norm, it is still, perhaps, overutilized, if not just in my humble opinion). I suppose I'll know that this is no longer a constructive viewpoint when I am being assigned to write a short reflection on "How Planning Ahead Enhances Life." I should reiterate, though, that this dynamic of contrast also exists between specific degrees and types of improvisation, perhaps more powerfully than it does between the premeditated and the spontaneous more broadly construed (overbroad categories, actually, which, as hinted at above, are not always what they seem).
Spirituality Through Sound: Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony
It is crucial that I preface my explanation for choosing this piece with the fact that I knew almost nothing about it or its composer when I first heard it, and that it immediately became my "new favorite piece" in absence of any such historical perspective. Spirituality being for an agnostic like me an earthly concern with a finite duration, I think it's valid to respond to an assignment such as this with one's most favorite music, whether or not that music is particularly spiritual in some other way; after all, it is this music which is, literally, all we have to live for. This is a piece of music which I find just this compelling in the abstract, and yet the circumstances of its creation also lend it an intensely spiritual dimension.
Shostakovich had already begun composing his Fourth Symphony when the infamous Pravda article appeared (in January, 1936) condemning his work and putting his very life in danger. His work in progress was if anything more subversive of the party agenda than any which had preceded it, and though he completed it anyway and had even secured a premiere, this was canceled after "...a series of unsuccessful rehearsals clearly influenced by the new condemned standing of its composer." Shostakovich's subsequent contrition, genuine or not, was adequate to save his career (and his life), but he would never truly return to composing in the vein of the Fourth Symphony, a piece which he himself once considered a watershed in his creative development. Shelved by the political climate, the orchestral score was lost during World War II; it was only the later rediscovery of the parts from the canceled premiere that allowed the original version to be reconstructed piece by piece. The work was premiered only in 1960, 24 years after it's completion, and not published until 1984, nearly a decade after the composer's death1.
It is, in other words, a miracle that the piece exists at all. What lends this history a spiritual profundity, I think, is that it points to the transient, impermanent nature of art, and by extension, of life. The saying goes that you don't truly appreciate what you once had until it's gone, and I think that a similar dynamic exists where the object's provenance will not permit its being taken for granted, even by those who have not actually been deprived of it (and especially with the knowledge that there are many who were.)
Notes
1. Anderson, Keith, "Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, Op. 43." Liner notes. Shostakovich: Symphony No, 4 in C Minor. Naxos Records, 1993.
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