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Aww, crap – I lost the rest of the post… sorry. I don’t have time to retype it right now – I’ll finish it later (sorry!)
Ok, people, my opinion is God so listen up (just kidding).
The way that I see it is if you can not convey a point, meaning, or emotion to another person in your art, than it is not art. Art is not created for yourself, and if it is than that is pretty lame. Now I am talking about art in general, including film, music, painting sculpture, ect. What is the point of having 3min and 22sec of silence? Because, in MY mind, silence is beautiful, and is something that there is just not enough of. Silence is peaceful, calming and relaxing. So that piece would convey something to me, but it’s not what Cage probably intended. As for the Rap bit, it is still music, but it is not roiginal music. Rap is ripped off from anything and everything anyone can find (with a few exceptions), and the biggest reason is the whole new form of “musician”: DJs. They don’t acually do much but play back records and scratch and stop them rythmically. So if you break it down, Rap is music, but it is music that has been done before (often MANY, MANY times). Speaking can be music if it is done rythmically, hence the “chants: and such.
I really believe that the whole point of music and any art, is to make you feel something, no matter what it is. The reason why I love music so much is because it inspires emotion to me, but if I hear a guy banging a stick on the beat in 4/4, that would just be boring and would not inspire emotion, so I wouldn’t consider it music. Whereas I can listen to the main titles from Sommersby and almost be brought to tears because is sounds sad but peaceful. That is the beauty of music that I find, is when it makes me feel.
Now someone is probably going to bring up the whole “If you hear a march than you march point”, so here is my answer to that. If you hear a march (lets take the Main Titles from Mars Attacks! for this one) then why would you want to march? Just because it is a march? Right when the theme comes into that piece, it makes me personally want to move rythmically, kinda like dancing, but it is such an enpowering piece of music that if I saw someone flailing around while listening to it (that is what dancing looks like to me) then I would laugh at them. It just sounds perfect for marching into battle or whatnot.
Now for the deaf thingie. I acually know a guy who got one of those implants that lets him hear now, and he can’t get enough music. I acually gave him a CD with some of Beethoven’s works on it and explained that later in his life Beethoven went deaf and he was really moved by the fact that he was able to hear this music that the composer could not. So not everyone hearing music for the first time will be so numb to it.
Anyhow that is all for now.
Knight (Who can’t type anymore because his fingertips are bleeding)
But isn’t boredom a feeling?
Nat
“I mean, we have words for colors and all–like red, for example. But, how can we know that one person sees the color red the exact same way someone else does? You can’t, really…”
By the way, this argument is bad. The premise is true, sort of–not that we can’t know whether different people perceive the world in the same form, but that they in fact don’t (take, for instance, color-blind people, or varying forms of perception among different species, etc.). But the conclusion (that we can’t know what reality is *really* like, that all we can know is our own subjective perception of it, etc.) doesn’t follow. Because what we are talking about here is merely the *form* of perception, which does not change the *object* of perception. That’s a crucial distinction. But this is not a philosophy board, so it probably isn’t the place to get any deeper into it than that.
Yes Nat, boredom is a feeling, but I doubt a composer wants to inspire that feeling with his music lol.
I just believe that music is subjective to those that listen to it. Different things affect different people, and at the very least, every piece every written had at least one person who really liked it: The composer. On a side note, everything I am talking about has NOTHING to do with the science of music. I think that anyone who only likes music that is “perfect” in the sense of methods used, orchestration, form, ect is nuts. But that is just me.
Knight (Who isn’t really into Mozart even though he was REALLY good at the whole “science” part of it)
Oh, and on a second side note, you can have a person learn everything there is about they way music is written, perfect every technique of writting, and shoot themselves because they can’t even come up with a theme. It’s not all about what you learn, but how you create.
“Yes Nat, boredom is a feeling, but I doubt a composer wants to inspire that feeling with his music lol.”
There are times in TV and Movies when the composers have to show boredom (usually it is a shot that steadily fades from hour to hour as a person is sitting on a couch watching TV, eating, sleeping, ect.). The whole purpose of that cue is to convey to the audience that what is going on on-screen is boring, and incidentally that can be entertaining as well. So here is another point of discussion – can something be both entertaining and boring to 1 person at the same time. I say yes (see above example).
Nat,
Who thinks that Mozart wrote some kick-ass themes [not an 18th century colloquialism but something that Mozart would appreciate (insert crazy cackle here)] for a person who knew the “science” of music ).
And to comment on Evid Dead’s and AndrewStt’s earlier posts about how we see and perceive colors; I think it is interesting that we DO hear things differently – at least as it refers to our own singing and speaking voice. The whole “that’s what I sound like” conversation as been played out long enough to prove that. So our perception, which is the only perception (because you can’t “put-on” anyone else’s) of how we sound is false. I know it really has to do with how acoustics work inside our head, but I still find that rather thought provoking. Can we trust our eyes (or any sense) if we can’t trust our ears.
Nat
Wow… I’m getting frightened, now!
Woah… I’m getting frightened, now!
…what am I seeing here?
…is this computer really beige? What is beige?
Nat, you’ve made me paranoid, damn you!
I won’t sleep a wink, now! GRR!>¦:o)
The JHere’s what I’m really wondering: If we can’t trust our ears, can we trust our noses?????
That occured to me, also… the same with our tongues.
And what about our toes?
AndrewStt–actually, my point of people perceiving colors (and the world in general) differently, isn’t a bad argument. It’s not a good argument, but it isn’t bad, either. I know more than a little about philosophy, thanks so much. (That’s not me getting snippy or mad, mind you, so much as me just typing how I talk).
But, my point was: people like different music, therefore it’s difficult to distinguish what is and isn’t music–in a general definition, in which everyone can agree upon. Which, is what the thread was about–the whole “is music music” bit–therefore, it was relevant.
And, in order to decipher what is music, you need to work at a kind of understanding; figure out what music means and all. And, in which I was saying, you really can’t define what music is, in the grand scheme of things, because everyone perceives the world differently–including how they hear.
I mean, yeah, you can get a general, generic definition from the dictionary and such–but bottom line is, everyone could argue forever over what kind of music sucks, what kind of music is good, what kind of music is noise, what kind of music is music, and so on and so on and so on. The color bit was only an example.
Aside from that, I think I’ve nothing more to say on the topic, really. I mean, it just keeps going around and around and around. I think I may throw up soon….But it’s been fun to talk about stuff somewhat related to the boy, in a snazzy, argumentive-yet-informative-and-productive-type way.
Yeah Nat, I totally see your point. Of course, by boring I meant uninteresting, unfeeling, rather shoot myself in the head than hear it again, ect. For those type of cues you can acually have many emotions in there, like depression or whatnot which brings it up to another level. For some reason (I really don’t know why) alot of the “B-Movie” composers that I have heard lack the ability to convey certain points with thier music, such as emotion. It’s almost like I can hear where they were trying to go with the music, but to me it never got there. Yet I have heard such people as Elfman make the most boring cue seem really interesting with a ton of depth. Now, those “B-Movie” composers I was talking about don’t write bad music (not like you would cringe when you heard it), it’s just that it feels like they are lacking something. Now I am going to propose a new topic in a few minutes, and I hope you check it out.
Knight (My topics always rule hehehe)
Hi, I didn’t exactly read this whole thread, because I really didn’t want to. But I guess, my personal definition of music is the relationship between silence and sound uniformly created with a purpose, whther it be the manipulation of rythym or sound. The thing is, is that whether something sounds good or not, it can still be considered music. As a musician, one of my hats is percussion. A frequent warm-up is eight on a hand, and for each measure, it is just eight hits on the right hand, then eight hits on the left. So basically, it is just straight eigth notes on and on and on. I would not go out and buy an album so I could listen to “eight on a hand” for hours on end, but it is still to me music.
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