Saturday, April 7, 2012

ecstasy of music

When pleasure reaches to extremes, we sometimes describe it as "ecstasy." But ecstasy can be more than extreme pleasure, more than merely raising gooseflesh. Ecstasy melts the boundaries of our being, reveals our bonds to the external world, engulfs us in feelings that are "oceanic."


Many people say that it is beauty alone that draws them to music. But great music brings us even more. By providing the brain with an artificial environment, and forcing it through that environment in controlled ways, music imparts the means of experiencing relations far deeper than we encounter, in our everyday lives. When music is written with genius, every event is carefully selected to build the substructure for exceptionally deep relations. No resource is wasted, no distractions are allowed. In this perfect world, our brains are able to piece together larger understandings than they can in the workaday external world, perceiving all-encompassing relations that go much deeper than those we find in ordinary experience. Thus, however briefly, we attain a greater grasp of the world (or at least a small part of it), as if rising from the ground to look down upon the confining maze of ordinary existence.

It's for this reason that music can be transcendent. For a few moments it makes us larger than we really are, and the world more orderly than it really is. We respond not just to the beauty of the sustained deep relations that are revealed, but also to the fact of our perceiving them. As our brains are thrown into overdrive, we feel our very existence expand and realize that we can be more than we normally are, and that the world is more than it seems. That is cause enough for ecstasy.

- Robert Jourdain


Sunday, April 1, 2012

modulation





modulation: moving from major/minor key to another during the course of a piece; good method of mood manipulation.



Saturday, March 31, 2012

how do we use chords and harmonies?

Rhythm guitarists in rock or pop bands play chords most of the time to provide the harmonies which accompany the melody of the song. Their job usually involves strumming several strings at once to produce a chord, which they repeat a few. times before moving on to another one. The notes which make up the chords are chosen to support the notes within the melodies, and this means that the chords and melodies often use some of the same notes. For example, if a certain bit of the tune uses the notes A—B—C--D---E, then a typical accompaniment would be the chord made up of the notes A, C, E. We don't slavishly follow, every note used in the tune; we just pick suitable ones which fit. This chord would obviously give most support to the notes within it (A, C, E), so we would use it if those were the notes we were emphasizing in the song. If we had wanted to giveprominence to the notes B and D in the same bit of tune, we could have used the chord which uses the notes B, D, F.

You may have noticed that I am not using consecutive letters for my chords. The simplest chords don't involve notes which are right next to each other in the scale because, as I've discussed, notes that are too close together produce harsh combinations. Consecutive notes of a scale are either a semitone or a tone apart in pitch, and I mentioned earlier that notes a semitone apart compete for our attention rather than support each other. The same is true, to a lesser extent, for notes a tone apart, so any consecutive notes from a scale will clash if they are played at the same time. For this reason, a chord made up of the notes A, B, and C, for example, would sound very anguished indeed, as the B would clash with both the A and the C. This sort of chord would not be of much use in accompanying a melody, but it would be right at home in something very tense like "The Devil's Staircase."

The notes in simple, harmonious chords need some breathing space between them in order to support each other, and three alternate notes from whatever scale is being used gives us the commonest type of pleasant combination. However, even in pop songs it is customary to add a little bit of spice to occasional chords by first building a "nice" team of three notes and then adding a single clashing note. So we might use C, E, and G, with a B thrown in to add a bit of tension because it will clash with the C. Our rhythm guitarist (who should really be called the harmony guitarist) provides these groups of notes as a background to the melodies produced by the lead guitarist or singer.

In other musical situations we don't have one person providing the melody and another giving us the harmony. Solo pianists, for example, do both jobs at once, generally playing the melody with their right hand and the chords/harmony with their left. On the other hand, classical music often involves a large team of orchestral players. When an orchestra plays, only a few of the members will be playing melodies at any one time, and the other musicians will play harmonies to accompany them. The composer will often pass melodies around from one group of musicians to another to keep the listener interested. In Bolero by the French composer Ravel, the music gradually gets louder as the tune is passed around the orchestra and more instruments join in. The harmonies are kept pleasant and warm until just near the end, where the composer injects a lot of tension for a dramatic final climax.

- John Powell






arpeggio

Arpeggio: a chord played as a stream of its individual notes. They add a layer of complexity and subtlety to music because you can choose exactly which notes from the chord will coincide with particular notes in the tune and also add a rhythm to the arpeggio pattern. Common in classical music, particularly anything with romantic in the title.




















as opposed to the use of full chords:


















Thursday, March 29, 2012

music and pleasure

Clearly, we need to view pleasure and pain more broadly. One way of regarding pleasure of any kind is to see it as inherent in the satisfaction of anticipations. This is a variant on what philosophers call "motivational" theories of pleasure. We've seen how our nervous systems forever model the world they perceive, spawning a flux of anticipations at every level of perception and action and understanding. Stress and anxiety occur to whatever degree reality collides with anticipations, making the brain struggle to quickly reassess the world in a way that makes sense (that is, in a way that can it be anticipated more successfully). Conversely, perfectly fulfilled anticipations are resolved without friction, and this resolution is what we call pleasure. Even "animal" pleasures like sex and eating fit this conception in that they are led by strong anticipations ("desires") that become intensely pleasurable upon their fulfillment.

This conception implies that pleasure is really no more than a retreat from pain, and so suggests that our lives must be pretty distressing for us to find so little opportunities for pleasure. On the surface, life's moment-to-moment pains don't seem so grand; but then neither do life's moment-to-moment pleasures. The world is an untidy place. Where we would like to find simple patterns and deep connections, we encounter complexity and conflict and confusion. And so all ordinary existence is accompanied by a certain amount of strain. When trains of anticipation go consistently well, we register pleasure of well-being. When resolution is consistently rocky, we register broad anxiety. Only in a handful of activities, including music and the other arts, do our minds partake of experience that is so perfectly organized that every anticipation is roundly satisfied, filling us with intense pleasure

The matter of pleasure and pain is complicated by the fact that most activities take place at many levels in the nervous system. Someone derives pleasure from cooking, but not from the sting of peeling onions. And the pleasure of cooking may be overshadowed if the cook had anticipated going to a party that night but had been disappointed. Similarly, in music we encounter pleasure or distress in the quality of a clarinet's tone, in the melody it plays, in the harmony that supports the melody, in the rhythm that drives it all along, and in many other factors we've touched on in earlier chapters. When we speak of "the" pleasure of music, we are actually referring to the sum total of all music's pleasures and disappointments, a sort of running average of the good and the bad.

From this standpoint, it's easy to see how we take pleasure in musical devices. As music's promises (anticipations) are fulfilled, we experience pleasure; as they are betrayed, we feel anxiety or worse. When skillful composition arouses strong, far-reaching anticipations, intense pleasure accompanies their fulfillment; by comparison, the weak anticipations generated by poor composition hardly touch us.

Yet the deepest pleasure in music comes with deviation from the expected: dissonances, syncopations, kinks in melodic contour, sudden booms and silences. Isn't this contradictory? Not if the deviations serve to set up an even stronger resolution. Banal music raises common anticipations that immediately satisfies them with obvious resolutions. There's pleasure to be had, but it is the pleasure of the bread roll, not of caviar. Well-written music tales its time satisfying anticipations. It teases, repeatedly instigating an anticipation and hinting at its satisfaction, sometimes swooping toward a resolution only to hold back with a false cadence. When it finally delivers, all resources of harmony and rhythm, timbre and dynamics, are brought to bear at once. The art in writing such music lies less in devising resolutions than in heightening anticipations to preternatural levels. If this process sounds as much like the recipe for good lovemaking as for good music-making, it's because the nervous system functions the same way in all its reaches. The same basic mechanism applies to all pleasures, artistic and otherwise, for the simple reason that this mechanism is pleasure.

Consider harmony. Once we've mastered the harmonic system of our culture and know how to follow tonal centers and anticipate harmonic resolutions, we bring a flood of anticipations to all our listening. Particular chords lead in particular harmonic directions, and so long as harmony travels in that direction we register immediate pleasure. Conversely, an inappropriate change of key can be quite jarring, even painful. However, carefully controlled dissonances are frequently employed to postpone the resolution of harmonic anticipations, and thus to make them larger, sometimes integrating many smaller anticipations into a towering hierarchy. Most such dissonances are related to the underlying harmony so that they will not be too jarring. They do not so much violate anticipations as reshape them.

Melodic pleasure arises in similar fashion, but through the anticipation of melodic contour. When contour rises and falls "naturally"—that is, in ways that we anticipate—we register pleasure; when contour wavers recklessly, we register distress as our brains struggle to make sense of the patterns before them. To some degree, melodic anticipations originate from the gestalt rules we considered in Chapter 3. But anticipations also arise from culturally acquired vocabulary of melodic devices.

The role of anticipation in rhythmic pleasure is equally clear. We enjoy meter by anticipating a train of pulses. Any sudden deviation in tempo, or in the number of beats per measure, sends our nervous systems reeling. But carefully controlled syncopations can set us up for a pleasurable reaccentuation of the underlying beat.

The rhythm of phrase is more elaborately constructed, relying on a panoply of cues that make us strongly anticipate phrase boundaries. Composers meticulously construct sequences of evolving phrases, each suggesting the next, but sometimes deviating toward the unexpected, then moving to reaffirm the overall form.

This way of thinking about pleasure may explain the surge we feel in the climax of a Beethoven symphony, but what of the "simple" pleasure we find in the individual sounds of instruments. Because the experience of music arises as our brains model hierarchies of relations among sounds—hierarchies that are "invisible" in the sense that they can't be readily shared with others, or even described to oneself—it's impossible to sort out the degree to which the pleasure we find "purely" in instrumental sound actually arises from surrounding musical relations. Any three notes on a viola can sound uninteresting when heard as the violist tunes up, yet might ravish us when they appear at the climax of a piece. Although pleasure appears to be embodied in the "sound" of the notes, it mostly resides in high-level relations that we keenly experience, but to which we bring little self-awareness.

Still, just a lone note from a viola can bring bliss to a keen ear. How is this possible? In truth, no one has a clue. But it's likely that, at the micro-scale of music cognition where auditory cortex assembles individual sounds, somehow anticipations are suggested and fulfilled, but too quickly to be consciously observed. Significantly, we find no pleasure in a pure-frequency tone generated by a computer. Lacking variation of any kind, such sounds have no basis for generating anticipations. As we saw in Chapter 2, musical sounds are complex, constantly changing entities of many undulating components. The architecture of such sounds varies with the skill of the musician. We celebrate a violist who "has good tone." Somehow, through years of practice, such a violist learns to tease sounds of a particular structure out of the strings. He does this without understanding how, just as we tie shoelaces without having to think about it. Conversely, a novice violist can torture a sensitive ear by producing sounds that are "grating"— that is, sounds broken into disconnected segments, where one moment does not lead to the next, where every nascent anticipation is foiled.

Music's large structures can as readily result in wincing pain. When a well-trained but overambitious composer generates strong anticipations and then fails to deliver on them, we're soon in agony. Most such music quickly disappears from the concert repertory. But new music often inflicts pain upon its audiences until they learn how to anticipate it properly—or until they realize that the fault is not theirs and that the composer has failed to achieve his aims.

We also experience pain in music—even very good music—when we apply the wrong vocabulary of devices to it and anticipate it wrongly. Thus one style of melody will be pleasurable to those who are well-acquainted with its twists and turns, but unpleasurable to those who bring to the melody a different style of anticipation that produces one jarring mismatch after another.

Such arguments may clarify how we derive pleasure from musical emotionality, but they don't explain why we seek out the experience of negative emotions in music, such as melancholy or grief or violence. After all, most of us prefer to avoid negative emotional states in our daily lives. But in music we somehow enjoy such experiences—and not as remote spectators, as one might view a Shakespearean tragedy, but by being made to feel melancholic or grief-stricken or violent, as if something unpleasant had happened to us.

In his The Critic as Artist, Oscar Wilde wrote:

After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one's tears. I can fancy a man who had led a perfectly commonplace life, hearing by chance some curious piece of music, and suddenly discovering that his soul, without his being conscious of it, had passed through terrible experiences, and known fearful joys, or wild romantic loves, or great renunciations.

Wilde alludes to the reputed "meaning" of music that we considered in the last chapter. As we saw, most compositions lack a specific, agreed-upon reference to the contents of the world. But when we bring our own life situations to music, we make of what we will. Music idealizes emotions negative and positive alike. By so doing, it momentarily perfects our individual emotional lives. The "meaning" we feel is not in the music as such, but in our own responses to the world, responses that we carry about with us always. Music serves to perfect those responses, to make them beautiful. By so doing, music imparts dignity to experience that is often far from dignified. And by imparting pleasure even to negative emotions, music serves to justify sufferings large and small, assuring us that it has not all been for nothing.

Wilde could not be more wrong about how a man "who had led a perfectly commonplace life" would be propelled to such emotional extremes. Music most affects people who already have a deep emotional existence. It is the force of our own lives that drives musical anticipation, and our own joys and pains that are rewarded by musical resolutions.

- Robert Jourdain


Wednesday, March 28, 2012

tension-resolution in music

It has often been remarked that there is no such thing as a neutral emotion. All emotions are either negative or positive. Negative emotions arise when experience falls short of anticipation. You expect your car to start and it doesn't. You expect your cat to greet you at the door and find out that it has been run over. Conversely, positive emotions come about when experience exceeds anticipation. You expect to work all day but are given the day off. You expect to pay a lot of money for something and find that it has been marked down. Because most anticipations are minor ones, and most discrepancies are small, little of our emotional life registers as surges and outbursts. Most emotion bobs up and down as small waves on a sea of motivation. But we experience a feeling of well-being when small positive emotional events occur continuously, and we become depressed or irritable when a train of small negative events accost us.

From these principles, it's easy to see how music generates emotion. Music sets up anticipations and then satisfies them. It can withhold its resolutions, and heighten anticipation by doing so, then to satisfy the anticipation in a great gush of resolution. When music goes out of its way to violate the very expectations that it sets up, we call it "expressive." Musicians breathe "feeling" into a piece by introducing minute deviations in timing and loudness. And composers build expression into their compositions by purposely violating anticipations they have established.

Musical expression is forever at odds with musical structure. Every deviation from an anticipation tend to weaken subsequent anticipation and thereby undercut the impact of further deviations. A momentary shift in tempo brings a tinge of emotion, but at the price of undermining the overall sequence of rhythmic anticipations that keep a piece moving along. When too many deviations fall together, the listener loses track of the underlying meter and ceases to anticipate coming beats forcefully. Similarly, using too many non-scale tones (chromatic tones) tends to obscure tonal centers so that harmonic resolutions lose their impact. For composer and performer alike, music-making is always a tug-of-war between the maintenance of underlying musical structure and the indulgence of musical deviations. With too much deviation, music becomes cloying and incoherent. With too little, music becomes cold and mechanical.

The idea that negative emotions arise from unmet anticipations might resolve the longstanding debate over why chords built on major triads sound "happy" while chords built on minor triads sound "sad." Many critics have insisted that such distinctions must be entirely culturally determined, pointing to the very different responses sometimes elicited from non-Western listeners. Still, that an Indonesian might find a minor chord "happy" does not necessarily mean that emotional response to chords is wholly arbitrary. The Indonesian brings a different harmonic paradigm to his listening—one that is not centered on triads—and so he anticipates harmonic relations in a different way. Within that context, a minor chord might entirely meet his expectations and so would sound "happy." Yet minor chords might still be necessarily unhappy within the triad-based Western harmonic system because they violate anticipations established by that system. The overtones produced by minor triads do not overlap as well as those of major chords, and so minor triads are inherently filled with conflict—that is, with violations of the overtone series that is so important to our harmonic system.

More than a few musicologists have wondered why we continue to find music expressive after we have heard a piece a few times and know where its expressive deviations will fall. Shouldn't we begin to expect a composition's deviations automatically, and so cease to be affected by them?

One explanation is that musical systems, including conventions of harmony and form, constantly reinstate standard expectations. We are taught and retaught that one chord naturally leads to another. The underlying logic of the overall harmonic system forces our expectations along certain lines, no matter how many deviations we have previously encountered. So violations of standard expectations continue to be expressive.

Some psychologists have suggested a neurological basis for this phenomenon. On the assumption that our brains are naturally predisposed to certain musical structures, they posit that modules of cerebral cortex devoted to particular kinds of processing can't help but function in terms of the anticipations and resolutions they were designed for. A module that plots out temporal patterns has no choice but to anticipate the next beat as being in time, no matter how many times it has heard that beat arrive late.

- Robert Jourdain


Sunday, March 18, 2012

try again veblen

one of the weird things about conspicuous consumption in the art world is that for all that it’s conspicuous it isn’t public—outside the big public museums everybody tends to be very secretive indeed about what they own and what they don’t


poetic ambiguity

....[title of art]'s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary—which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light—ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades


secular religion

contemporary art has become a kind of alternative religion for atheists


distinction but not too much

despite art’s reputation for distinctiveness and originality, its value is established not by the narcissism of small differences but by the megalomania of sameness.



Saturday, March 10, 2012

music

1. how is it that music elicits emotions from us?
2. how is it that music gives us pleasure?
3. what is happening in our brains when music leads us to the threshold of ecstasy?


Tuesday, March 6, 2012

art

There’s no use arguing over taste. And art doesn’t mean beauty. Art means anything you set aside in a way that -- and ask people to look at it by itself -- is art.


Tuesday, February 28, 2012

How to Behave in an Art Museum



on art viewing:

Your friend comes to visit. You go to whatever exhibit you found on the New York Times website that morning while he was sleeping. At the museum, he talks about the pictures in a voice loud enough to make you uncomfortable. He asks, “What do you think makes this painting so powerful?” Or, “What do you think this artist is trying to say?” The questions are not stupid. It’s just that you can’t think of how to answer them without sounding stupid yourself. Should you say, “I think the vibrant use of orange really enhances the composition”? Or, “She’s critiquing commodity culture, while also reveling in it”? No! Intellectual conversations, as a woman I briefly dated once admonished me, are like public displays of affection—fun to be in, but mortifying to observe, and in a museum you know you’re being observed. But refusing to answer your friend’s questions is no solution either. You’re paralyzed. And you’re not even sure what you’re afraid of. You’re not sure whether your replies will make you look like a philistine or a snob. Which would be worse? Which are you more qualified to be?

You want to seem down-to-earth of course, but if only your desires were that simple. Modesty, after all, is just a means of demonstrating that you’re well positioned within the various cultural hierarchies that preside, just out of sight, like tactful event planners, over all variety of rituals in New York City—hierarchies you can best show you’ve conquered by pretending they don’t exist, by being completely yourself, but gracefully so, sans agape mouth. Museums, with their egalitarian educational goals and their obscurely significant high-culture objects, stage a confrontation between America’s democratic pretenses and the invidious struggle for prestige that these pretenses conceal and enable. At a place like MoMA it becomes painfully apparent that class and status ambiguities in America make for a comfortable blanket, but there’s plenty of room for tossing and turning, for kicking and pinching underneath it.

So what do you say to your friend? You’d think that your education would help you. Shouldn’t the time you spent in college or grad school have taught you how to behave in places like this, how to feel? The problem is generational, I suspect. Very few people leave college these days with the kind of well-developed reverence for high culture that would make it easy to know how to behave in a museum. Most students go to college to learn technological, financial, or managerial skills, and can acquire culture capital outside the traditional ensemble of highbrow pursuits. And those few who do end up majoring in English or art history will likely learn that reverence toward high culture is no longer so fashionable.

middlebrow pretension:

We probably all know an older colleague or friend of our parents who doesn’t suffer from this problem. He talks piously about Beethoven, Rembrandt, Freud. When a ballet performance ends he emits vaguely sexual noises to underscore what a profound experience he’s had and what a dullard you must be if you couldn’t summon the same enthusiasm or happened to be thinking about whether you could put off doing your laundry for another day right as the performance was reaching its crescendo. This is how a previous generation showed itself to be cultured. You look at these people with amusement, especially when they evince unctuous zeal in the face of contemporary art that doesn’t deserve or seek to inspire this kind of attitude. They look at you with perplexity when you report conversations using the phrases, “I was like,” and “he was like,” or declare approvingly that a video installation reminded you of The Matrix.

It’s not that this older art enthusiast is in a culturally secure position—though he may have seemed to be when you were an adolescent, and his erudite conversation at your family dinner table aroused in you those early stirrings of intellectual insecurity and ambition from which you still haven’t recovered today. His painstaking efforts to demonstrate his knowledge are the essence of middlebrow. But so are all the anxieties I’m describing here. If I’m being honest, the feelings I experience when I enter a museum are as middlebrow as the Van Gogh “Starry Night” drink coasters that someone bought for my mom, probably at the MoMA gift shop. I’m looking to improve myself. I feel inadequate. I’m hoping to impress people.

There’s a difference, however, between the previous generation of strivers and ours. For both, trying too hard to show off your expertise is a dead giveaway that you haven’t got as much status as you’d like. But in previous decades there was still a belief that those who took advantage of inexpensive museum fares, public libraries, and so forth were elevating themselves. For my generation, say those born around or after 1968, the sign that you’re at the top of the hierarchy is a readiness to acknowledge that the high ground you’ve come to occupy isn’t actually higher than any other ground.


Tuesday, February 7, 2012

art is marketing

Alice Gregory has a great piece in the latest n+1 magazine about working at Sotheby’s during the run-up in prices following the 2009 crash. Here’s a taster:

After a few months on the job, I was assigned a new duty—writing the essays that are printed beneath and between the reproduced images in the sale catalogue…

I sprinkled about twenty adjectives (“fey,” “gestural,” “restrained”) amid a small repertory of active verbs (“explore,” “trace,” “question” ). I inserted the phrases “negative space,” “balanced composition,” and “challenges the viewer” every so often. X’s lyrical abstraction and visual vocabulary—which is marked by dogged muscularity and a singular preoccupation with the formal qualities of light—ushered in some of the most important art to hit the postwar market in decades… It was embarrassingly easy, and might have been the only truly dishonest part of the Sotheby’s enterprise. In most ways, the auction house is unshackled from intellectual pretense by its pure attention to the marketplace…

Sotheby’s felt detached from the posturing that happens in Chelsea galleries and the gnomic garbage that counts for art-world conversation. Auction house employees don’t invoke half-remembered poststructuralism or make inapt analogies. They don’t have to. The prices speak for themselves.


Friday, January 27, 2012

hyperreal

Our image technologies have proven so successful in their strategies, that they lead us to question reality itself and make the possible look artificial. When viewing the images and footage of the attacks on the World Trade Centers, many responded by saying, "it looked like a movie." The image is more real than real, hyper real, and we often prefer it that way.