Whether music 'says' something to us or not, we cannot completely understand. Its ability to evoke a wide range of emotions, feelings, and ideas and connect with listeners on a non-verbal level is mostly based on the firing of our imagination. So, music tells us nothing unequivocally understandable, even at the emotional level (see Eduard Hanslick - Vom Musikalisch-Schönen. 'The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouses no emotion whatever...') And that means that everybody has their paroxysmic, private, singular reaction to music (also see Wittgenstein on private language).
Within that framework, music provides a powerful outlet for expressing and exploring states of mind that might be difficult to articulate with words. But at the same time, those states are vague and not closely connected with any particular intelligible content.
In short, music is unable to convey a single sentence. Music doesn't communicate in the same way as spoken language, human postures, poses, gestures, or mimicry, or through other means of non-verbal communication that can be translated to language to a higher or lesser degree. So, no matter how rich and beautiful it might appear, it remains tongue-tied, since it cannot be incorporated within our knowledge of the world.
With music we change ourselves, we enrich our experiences and sensitivity, but we don't get any knowledge.

 

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Again Foster, the type of practice you refer to as "the icing on the cake" belongs to classical music. Theese amazing human beings were erudite composers. Since we are in a popular music forum (which includes several genres, sub-genres and their different stylistic patterns-ALL REFERRED TO POPULAR MUSIC),

1) Do you suffer from some type of depersonalization/derealization disorder??
2) Are you trying to recruit someone into new music aficionado cult?
3) Are you just trying to make everyone here extremely annoyed?
4) All alternatives?

 

Foster is incredibly afraid to show us his production and/or his role models. It would be so fucking fun to see/hear that! A shame that fear, in this case is the winner!

 

Of everything that has already been said about music and its limited capacity to provide references, one thing is to say that it doesn't allow clear and direct references, as occurs in a linguistic verbal utterance. But music is a form of language, a symbolic one, and has its own "grammar", structure and "vocabulary". It is capable of emotional expression (see everything that has already been written about music and emotion from a cognitive point of view - not just musicological/ethnomusicological writings), storytelling (critical commentary on events through the use of genres and styles; association between gestures, form and pairing via metaphorical mappings with narrative theories) and communicating ideas using other brain systems (when you play traditional african music, and you know something about it, you are able to reference a musical object to a certain geographic space - not absolutely precise, but still possible to identify some kind of cultural identity; when you listen to the song "Trololo" and know a little about postmodern popular music, you "feel" that this music conveys some kind of ridiculous humor (you may not know the context, but you get some chunks of the joke!), and some of us are able to perceive a period more or less situated between the 60s and 70s (memory, nostalgia - time reference, via the recognition of technical aspects, such as the type of recording, arrangement and stylistic detection).

So, instrumental music does not allow communication with the absolute precision of a compass, but it can evoke a whole range of meanings (fractions and chunks of information) that goes from emotional experiences, reference to traditions, values and specific narratives of a society along with critical commentary (very specific real events that had some type of music associated), highlighting memory and nostalgia (evocation of memories and feelings associated with music connected with specific moments in a person's life) and the part that interests our twat Foster so much, artistic expression (melody, harmony, rhythm, dynamics, articulation and timbre as "enunciators" of moods that often go far beyond what can be expressed with verbal language (extrapolation of traditional conventions and challenging established expectations through exploration of sound and musical form; deconstruction aiming at recontextualization; a higher level of subjectivity that requires greater interpretative participation from the listener [at the expense of greater cognitive effort]; criticism of the dominant culture (irony, hyperbole, etc.); and multimodality and/or interdisciplinarity [music that incorporates elements from different modalities and sources]).

Example of composer who tries to dialogue with this wandering meaning universe (which seeks a balance between choice of notes and accessibility).

 

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One of the last giants of classical musical composition (in the sense of impacting common sense—even the Hollywood industry recognized his serious repercussion and tried to co-opt him) and a pianist of average and satisfactory quality (not a concert player!) who composed a lot on the piano!

(I say one of the last giants 'cos, in the post-modernity, other big names (that used this, that, yada, yada) didn't come close to the impact that the old fox had...)

 

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Oh our dear Lady of Space, this thread is getting fairly high in the Frank Zappa "rock journalism"-quotient(*), maybe, just maybe there's an a thin sliver of an original thought buried there somewhere, but it's buried under a whole lot of stupid not to mention expressed in a very obtuse manner, for us mere mortals who can't be arsed to parse through these "clever" mind-games to see that small glimpse of thinking. In sort, we're not going to be the birds picking through turds to find those small seeds.

So please, Fost... King, "The". Please go and monarch away at your leisure in your imaginary ancap hellhole pacific island micronation (preferably somewhere far out away from the closest port and internet access), and leave us boring normies be in our mundane surprisingly note-full existences.

*) "People Who Can’t Write Interviewing People Who Can’t Talk for People Who Can’t Read"

 

If he understood even remotely how some composers can write an entire Orchestral score with only a pencil, going nowhere near an instrument, he'd understand that to do that, they have to hear the music playing in their head before they write one note. There is no point, it is beyond his comprehension as one of many things. In the movie "Amadeus" on his deathbead, the scene with Mozart and with Solieri, he is humming the bassoon lines to Solieri and then asks to look at the score Solieri wrote to check it is correct. Dead giveaway that what people have been trying to tell him that he is wrong, were all correct. It has been happening for centuries. You cannot teach any person who refuses to learn anything. It's also interesting that he assumed I am a player only. I've made my living and raised a family, house and car mainly on my compositions, even though I have done many performances. Hilarious. He is a living testament to the saying "Assumptions are the mother of all fuckups".

 

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if only Joe Meek were still alive, I'm sure he would be able to enlighten us..

 

In Turkey they have a saying that roughly translates into something like "A fool threw a rock in a well, a thousand geniuses couldn't get it out"

Foster is the fool. I'm not sure there are a thousand geniuses here though.

 

yes, I think listening to something would be nice and instructive!

 

The number of times in performances and compositions after them when someone approached a way of playing or writing something from a completely different angle (over decades), I learned something new. That in itself is gained knowledge, so I cannot agree with you. How many people have said "I didn't think of doing it that way?" Countless.

 

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Lucky might describe us and our situation, for today no less a musical authority, than the Daily Mail, the world's most prestigous music publication has deigned to weigh in our dilemma. They have published an article, that finally tells us, WHAT OUR MUSICAL TASTE SAYS ABOUT US.

"When we choose music, we often choose music by people who we think are like us, a 2020 study showed.

So for example, David Bowie fans are drawn to him because of his slight weirdness and neuroticism, and Radiohead fans are drawn to the band because of their ‘open’, experimental nature.


People who listen to David Bowie are similar to his public image (and neurotic)

The research based on 80,000 fans and 50 famous musicians asked fans to give personality ratings for the public persona of each artist - and found that people naturally gravitate towards artists that are similar to themselves.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...ually-says-personality-according-science.html

 

There are two counter-intutive schools of thought about music.
1. is you learn music theory and composition through playing an instrument and studying compositions and how they utilize music theory.

2. you just get on with it. you pickup an instrument and learn to make sounds, and if you are smart you try to figure out why the instrument makes sound and why other instruments in the same family make different sounds. why does a les paul, sound different from a Telecaster? Why does a Yamaha Grand sound different from an Upright or a spinet piano. You learn how to make pleasant sounds and not so pleasant sounds and then you learn how to mix these to produce a composition.

There is also the third way, which reveals more than either traditional method. A prodigy. Someone who has an innate sense of music and tone and pitch. Someone who can play a piece after hearing it once. Thus providing us that the mind does indeed possess a native musical resource, has a need for music and can be directly induced to produce music, without learning beyond understanding how to play an instrument.

Probably the more successful musican/composers have a bit of all 3 learning methods intertwined in their musical understanding.But at the bottom of it all is a desire to produce and hear music that is much stronger than their peers by magnitude. This constant desire eventually produces results.

Most of the world is more than happy to merely listen, rather than create.
Only musicians will produce music, we like to think we are like everyone else, but we are a breed apart.
We possess a spark.

 

The Shaggs is music that defies all categarization, it's just it's own. Completely, utterly unique. Kind of sad story behind it though.

 

To a large extent, what you're discussing demonstrates that situating music within any frame of reference necessitates supplementary information beyond the music itself (such as geographic space, era, ideology, or stylistic discourse). Further, mathematics is also a form of language, a symbolic one, and has its own 'grammar,' structure, and 'vocabulary,' but it only represents itself. You can arrange any quantity of numbers according to mathematical 'grammar,' structure, and 'vocabulary' and still cannot connect it to anything outside of itself.
One can only approximate and primarily express emotions metaphorically in relation to music because music doesn't directly elicit specific emotions but rather evokes unique perceptions (qualia), to which we may respond with emotions (though not always and not consistently) or random associations, resulting in a multifaceted, mixed experience. Consequently, as music doesn't represent any specific object, it cannot be seamlessly integrated into any body of knowledge, unless we consider solely the memory of its performance (viewing music as an experiential object). You can listen to music all of your life and learn nothing about the world as it is.

 

Consider music as a stimuli, to the brain, rather than a language. It produces a result and based on the characteristics of the individual, the response is different,varied in result and degree, and degree of result.
Like food or the wind on our skin.
on a sunny day, a pleasant breeze, caressing our nervous system results in pleasure - as response to stimuli.
on a frigid day, a biting breeze, stings, arousing our survival mechanism to search for shelter, as response to stimuli.

Perhaps in another environment, music was used to inform or stimulate the nervous system to action.
nothing in the body remains without a purpose according to evolution, though we may refute that as merely a theory.

art and music in particular seem to be useless human characteristics from a survival standpoint, but they remain and propagate through the population, rather than receding from our genome.

 

Speak for yourself, without my making of music and art in different forms, mine would be a slow and agonizing death.

 

we are as a species, most peculiar. we really don't fit in our environment.
we are cold and heat sensistive, requiring special clothing to exist in our "native" environment. Unlike all other species around us. yet we survive and flourish

we require our food be "cooked" - specially processed through heat and other processes - requiring technology, unlike every other species on the planet. yet we survive and flourish.

we produce art and music, the closest we come to such action, is tones produced by animals to communicate between members of a herd, our products are far superior and much more complicated yet fail to communicate much that we can quantify to the rest of the herd. yet we survive and flourish.

We are constantly in reproductive mode, unlike most plants and animals that have a season, or require special conditions to replicate, this probably helps us overcome so many of the problems presented by our other needs and lack of native ability regarding self sufficiency in our native envrionment.

we don't seem to belong here on this planet, yet here we are. some suggest we were placed here for reasons unknown and were programmed with tools and abilities to supercede our frail physical abilities. perhaps music and art were part of that programming for reasons as yet unknown.

perhaps a symphony will be written that stimulates a metamorphisis of the genome and we exit our cocoons and become more than we were, the next step in the program. or maybe we just blow ourselves to kingdom come because Bob has a nicer car than me or whatever game of one upmanship grabs the thoughts of the ruling class. Its a strange world, I'm just here for the ride...

 

Music isn't ink on paper. I am sure everyone already said it though.