Music can be a bit like storytelling; first there is one sound, then another and we wonder what is going to happen next, and so on until a sound tells us the adventure has ended. Just as obviously, all this, like storytelling, depends on overlearned traditions about how sounds are put together, how sequences start and end. Performers can then delight or confuse us by playing with our expectations, confirming or subverting the conventions, extending them to new sounds or subtly undermining them. Moreover, we can easily imagine music originally accompanied real stories, as in song or ritual. Even today a lot of music, perhaps most, plays this role, especially in popular music and film.
Nevertheless, music has always had an obviously independent character. It is still mysterious how certain sequences of sound can be heard once and never be forgotten. For individual sequences, this might be culturally dependent, but the strangeness of the phenomenon is universal. It happens when you hear the melody of “The Long and Winding Road” once, and it stays in your brain for life. In traditional folk music, a tune can have so much of this power that new words and new uses are produced for it - indicating the independence of the music.
Another obvious feature of music is it’s ability to stir (and manipulate) our emotions and thought, often independently of any song or narrative or drama. In these circumstances we might invent our own narratives to explain our emotions to ourselves, but this not necessary and usually not adequate. The music seems to be saying so much more.
And of course, music isn’t really the sound of anything; we hear it directly. It is a particular arrangement of heard tones, organised around principles that have now been well mapped out, but are still mysterious. These include tone, pitch, timbre, rhythm, dynamics, harmony. The “science” of musical theory can rival physics in its complexity, but it is dealing with the heard (and felt) sounds of the musical world. Of course, these are all produced by processes studied by physics and musical technology (and heard by processes studied by physiological science, in contexts studied by the social sciences) but they are not about these processes, they are about the world of music, a world which powerfully acts on us, but which is entirely autonomous in its logic.
This world has been investigated by performers since the beginning of time, and over the last few centuries by composers, but still seems inexhaustible and wondrous, with no end in sight to the discoveries yet to be made. It is hard to say what this world is they are exploring, other than “music”, and hard to say how they go about discovering anything in this world other than to say “they create” new music. After listening to the Jupiter Symphony, you’d be tempted to call it a revelation.
By now there are worldwide communities and networks dedicated to investigating, performing, listening to, studying and commenting upon the phenomenon of music in buildings ranging from the magnificent to the insignificant. It has millions of followers ranging from the lukewarm to the fanatic. It could almost be a religion.
The same is true of all other artistic activities of human societies, such as dancing, drama, painting, pottery, sculpture, jewellery, and many others. All depend upon rich traditions of production and participation, coupled with innovation and invention. All involve grappling with issues of feeling, expression, fittingness, appropriateness and other values related to a general concept of beauty. Most artists feel there is logic and structure to their art, though in none has the abstract structure and logic been so well worked out as in music. Even here it is clearly not fully understood, and is only the precondition of the art. Least of all understood are the mysterious processes of the imagination in creation and invention, or the perception f the work as saying something not sayable in other ways.
Wednesday, 30 May 2018
Tuesday, 29 May 2018
Sceptical Christian 1 - Storytelling
I am a Christian in the same way that I am an English speaker. I learned to be both in exactly the same way. I was born into an English-speaking Christian family. I began to learn to speak English with my mother and developed my abilities over the years with the help of my family and friends neighbours and workmates, school and university and the wider world of books, plays, film, television and radio. I am now pretty competent at it, and although I have made some progress in other languages, it is still the crucial medium in which I think, reason and pursue many of my interests. Without the English language I would have little or no social or intellectual life, and all other aspects of life would be so much sparser or more opaque, without the ability to think about them or talk about them in English. I am a tourist in other languages but I am at home in English. I sometimes have a dream of feeling equally at home in French for Spanish but this is just a dream, available only to those born into a bilingual family or who move permanently or for a substantial time to another linguistic community.
For this is how you learn a language; you are inducted into a community. Of course, you learn to pronounce the sounds of the language in your own way, using the vocal apparatus you were born with, along with your own natural preferences . You develop your own distinctive voice, recognisable to all who know you. Nevertheless, you will not be able to wander too far away from traditional sounds without becoming unintelligible to all other people. Similarly, with words, expressions, grammar, tones of voice, and all aspects of language use, you will develop your own preferences and peculiarities, but all recognisable as English, and, so long as they don’t wander too far from the usages you inherited, you will be able to communicate with all others born or inducted into the same linguistic traditions.
Most of the activities these linguistic traditions will be concerned with will be the practical and personal business of everyday life. However, one of the traditions you will be inducted into will be that of storytelling, starting with conversation and folktales and progressing to gossip,jokes, stories, soap operas, series, films and novels, all of which will continue to form part of daily, personal conversation and gossip, though this latter might then be called ‘news’. All of these activities will have great public traditions associated with them (most obviously in films and novels). Many people will try to make their own contribution, maybe asa career, to one or other of these traditions. They will be successful only to the extent that they are recognisably part of the tradition (even if only as a challenge to, or inversion, negation or extension of some of its elements).
One of the streams of the traditions will be to entertain and delight, often with novelty, more often with surprised recognition. Another one will be to attempt to say the unsayable, or at least to grapple with difficult issues, especially of feelings and emotions. Both streams are evident in the attempt to create something beautiful from the resources of the linguistic tradition, whether in the sounds and structures of phrases, as in poetry or prose, or stories, or whole narratives. Beauty seems to be important in all aspects of linguistic activity, though in everyday life it is probably more thought of, when it is noted, as the aptness, or fittingness of a phrase or anecdote.
Most stories are told in a recognisably story-like fashion, to guide as through the narrative, and none so obviously as in the heightened and artificial language of poetry. This is based, of course, on the meanings and structure of phrases, but also very obviously on the their sounds and rythms. Poetry is often associated with song, but, of course sequences, structures and rhythms of sounds have long been found to delight and entertain on their own, without the aid of words. Indeed they seem to be expressive of something beyond words and do indeed say the unsayable, it is claimed.
All human societies have developed traditions of narrative, poetry and music. In order to appreciate any story, poem or piece of music, you need to be familiar with the tradition. In order to contribute to the tradition, you need extend it, challenge it, invert or negate it using any new resources within the framework of the tradition. Music seems peculiarly to be ‘about’ nothing but expression.
For this is how you learn a language; you are inducted into a community. Of course, you learn to pronounce the sounds of the language in your own way, using the vocal apparatus you were born with, along with your own natural preferences . You develop your own distinctive voice, recognisable to all who know you. Nevertheless, you will not be able to wander too far away from traditional sounds without becoming unintelligible to all other people. Similarly, with words, expressions, grammar, tones of voice, and all aspects of language use, you will develop your own preferences and peculiarities, but all recognisable as English, and, so long as they don’t wander too far from the usages you inherited, you will be able to communicate with all others born or inducted into the same linguistic traditions.
Most of the activities these linguistic traditions will be concerned with will be the practical and personal business of everyday life. However, one of the traditions you will be inducted into will be that of storytelling, starting with conversation and folktales and progressing to gossip,jokes, stories, soap operas, series, films and novels, all of which will continue to form part of daily, personal conversation and gossip, though this latter might then be called ‘news’. All of these activities will have great public traditions associated with them (most obviously in films and novels). Many people will try to make their own contribution, maybe asa career, to one or other of these traditions. They will be successful only to the extent that they are recognisably part of the tradition (even if only as a challenge to, or inversion, negation or extension of some of its elements).
One of the streams of the traditions will be to entertain and delight, often with novelty, more often with surprised recognition. Another one will be to attempt to say the unsayable, or at least to grapple with difficult issues, especially of feelings and emotions. Both streams are evident in the attempt to create something beautiful from the resources of the linguistic tradition, whether in the sounds and structures of phrases, as in poetry or prose, or stories, or whole narratives. Beauty seems to be important in all aspects of linguistic activity, though in everyday life it is probably more thought of, when it is noted, as the aptness, or fittingness of a phrase or anecdote.
Most stories are told in a recognisably story-like fashion, to guide as through the narrative, and none so obviously as in the heightened and artificial language of poetry. This is based, of course, on the meanings and structure of phrases, but also very obviously on the their sounds and rythms. Poetry is often associated with song, but, of course sequences, structures and rhythms of sounds have long been found to delight and entertain on their own, without the aid of words. Indeed they seem to be expressive of something beyond words and do indeed say the unsayable, it is claimed.
All human societies have developed traditions of narrative, poetry and music. In order to appreciate any story, poem or piece of music, you need to be familiar with the tradition. In order to contribute to the tradition, you need extend it, challenge it, invert or negate it using any new resources within the framework of the tradition. Music seems peculiarly to be ‘about’ nothing but expression.
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