Utterances

The Emotional Medium

This little quibble sparked some thoughts on the essential role of music as a medium.

helenkashap advocates for musicians to get out of practice rooms, and, as cliché as it may sound, go live a little:

In a musical society that is so obsessed with competition, perfection, and unfaltering work ethic, it is difficult to convince anybody, including myself, that the experience of life – the authentic and genuine interaction with humanity, culture, and nature – all of those things which don’t involve the instrument or a metronome – are essential to our work as musicians. These often undervalued components of life are paramount in the creation of beautiful music and are absolutely integral to both the depth and dimension of one’s creative work. How can one begin to capture the essence of rhapsodic wind without ever having consciously felt it? Or conjure the dark mysticism of a full moon in the early hours of the morning without ever having truly seen it? The attempt to create a realistic musical world out of a synthetic or imagined experience can only render a somewhat less genuine and sincere musical conception.

Indeed, the obsession with technical perfection or faithful interpretation is likely yet another thing that can be credited to the proliferation of recording machines or the classicalization of Western music. As we turn our ears towards our own and each other’s performance with the help of recordings, we focus more and more on the craft, and less on creating emotional impact (albeit technically imperfect at times), which of course necessitates having these emotions in the first place.

I used to believe that as a form, music is distinctively abstract in contrast to visual arts which are fundamentally representational, in that it does not stem from the mimicry of natural sounds, but speaks in artifacts like melody or rhythm (insert your favourite psychoacoustic phenomenon here). However I have since realized that music is descriptive at an even more visceral level than the visual medium (no denying that together they do wonders). It is not some natural sonic object, but the emotional ripple (or storm) that can be engendered in the listener’s heart, that music is most apt in recreating/describing. The craft that is polished ceaselessly in practice rooms or counterpoint exercises is only a mean to this end.

In this regard, authentic experiences are essential but not sufficient, as empathy is also needed to impart in others the same sensations that we feel, be it passion, nostalgia or plain creepiness. No doubt that the best musicians understood this intuitively, if not knowingly (my suspicion is that other performance artists understand this much better than average musicians), but sadly the systemically rigid academia does not, instead it prefers the more tangible and enumerable.

That is not to say highly abstract pieces, or pieces that are designed to exploit particular concepts or mechanisms have no value if they are not effective in imparting emotional experiences. However in the grand scale of things, these seems to be akin to exercises that polishes the craft, their contributions are more technological than artistic. The real value, I believe, is still predicated by the basic ability to affect emotions in hearts other than your own.