RE: [F_minor]http://archives.radio-canada.ca/arts_culture/musique/dossiers/309/

["Robert Merkin" <bobmerk@earthlink.net>]

Hiya Fred,

Hey, stop asking simple, easy, softball questions.

Okay, first of all, I challenge your use of "normal" in this context. Are
we all hanging on this List because of our interest in a "normal" guy and
his "normal" relationship to music? Define "normal," then maybe we can make
a little progress. Or tell us why "normal" is a particularly significant
perspective on such matters.

All I could think to respond to this topic was an old post (thanks trusty
Archives!), from the diaries American art critic Bernard Berenson kept
while he was hiding from Mussolini's cops during World War II.  Oddly
enough, that post was triggered by a whirlwind of Beethoven posts just as
we've just had.

Maybe others might use Berenson's thoughts as a starting point to inform
your question.

Berenson (1865 - 1959) was perhaps the best-known and most influential art
historian, scholar and critic of his time, specializing in the Italian
Renaissance. In 1900 he settled in his beloved Italy, outside Florence.

Bob 
Massachusetts USA

=======

from "Rumor and Reflection" by Bernard Berenson
Simon and Schuster, 1952

25 December 1943

I referred yesterday to the way abstraction can dehumanize one. I recall
that in the last war I was wondering whether that was not the reason why
Germans for the great part, as individuals so kindhearted and so ready to
feel with others, can turn into mechanized executioners, as impersonal as a
guillotine, the moment the Fatherland, the state, the army orders them to
go against abstractions labeled French, English, Russian, etc., etc.

I have been tempted at times to ask whether this unusual readiness of
Germans to submit to abstractions in every field, not of action alone but
of thought as well, was not in part at least due to their indulging too
much in symphonic, relatively timeless, music. Such music easily puts one
into moods whence the concrete disappears almost entirely, where the mind
is filled with exhalations that cannot be condensed into verbally statable
concepts. It cannot remain unsatisfied; yet the vaguest abstractions
suffice.

Wagner must have felt something of this danger, for he furnishes a verbal
basis for the symphonic and undramatic intervals of his operas that keep
the listeners tied town to the words of the libretto. Pious Wagnerians
attend to it as closely as to the score. There is nothing of the sort to
keep one from opiatic vagueness in the symphonies of a Beethoven, a Brahms,
a Bruckner, and their foreign followers César Franck and Sibelius.



> [Original Message]
> From: Houpt, Fred <fred.houpt@rbc.com>
> To: Etha Williams <diftorhehsmusma@gmail.com>
> Cc: <f_minor@email.rutgers.edu>
> Date: 6/25/2008 1:38:38 PM
> Subject: RE:
[F_minor]http://archives.radio-canada.ca/arts_culture/musique/dossiers/309/
>
> It leads me to ask another question: what is the normal response
> supposed to be to music?  There is something intrinsically energetic
> about music.  Waves from the instrument move energetically through air,
> our ears hear and our minds appreciate.  On top of that, our nervous
> system picks up subliminal waves of energy which affects us through more
> unconscious areas of our brain.  And, if you are sitting too close to
> the speakers (or an orchestra) you can actually pick up sound waves
> bouncing off your body, which affect us in ways unknown to me.  
>  
> I simply cannot imagine that our experience with music was ever meant to
> be passive.  Think of all shamanic and other religious traditions of
> evocation using verbal incantations, constant repetition of a word,
> phrase or drum beats.  Think of how transformative these measures were
> supposed to be.  We humans are built to rock and roll.  Perhaps then it
> is a more normal response to sway, move, dance and otherwise be
> physically moved by music, rhythm or just organized sounds.  
>  
> I recall the opening bars of Dave Brubeck's "Take Five". If you can sit
> still and not tap your fingers to the beat, then I think a part of you
> is cut off and asleep.  It is just natural to feel yourself brought into
> a type of unity with the musical moment through a type of empathy.  At
> least that is the way I explain it to myself.  
>  
> I think now of the opening moments of Ravel's "Bolero".  Again, we start
> to hum that tune along with the orchestra and before long you feel the
> urge to start dancing around with the beat.  
>  
> Last for now: how can we sit still during the fourth movement of
> Beethoven's Symphony #7, especially as done by Carlos Kleiber?  You just
> have to start waving your arms around and go with the torrential flow of
> energy.  It is all normal.
>  
> IMHO
>  
> Cheers,
>  
> Fred
>  
> [snip]


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