From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Thu Jul 14 2005 - 23:13:42 BST
Hi Arlo,
> I've read over the music/motivation piece. My personal take is that the
> author ascribes too much causality. There must, in my opinion, exist some
> internalized pattern recognition on behalf of the listener, to make the
> connection to personally meaningful emotive experience. Without this, for
> example, it supposes that taking an aboriginal tribesman and playing
> Beethoven's 9th will have the same effect as when heard by someone
> enculturated in western belief. Music, to me, is dialectical not
> unidirectional. And, even within broad cultural descriptors, individuals
> have quite different experiential paths, or internalized
> cultural-experiential meanings. Johnny Cash can move some people to tears,
> while others simply hear boring droning. One of the most common "criticism"
> we hear against particular music is "this says nothing to me", meaning "i
> have no internalized experiential patterns that make this music
> meaningful".
>
> This relates directly, in my opinion, to what Pirsig meant when answering
> the charge of "why different people can disagree on what Quality is". To
> think otherwise is to begin back on the road towards what Ham and yourself
> seemed to be arguing months ago in the "punk-nihilism" thread. Namely, that
> Quality in Music is absolute and apart from the cultural-experiential lives
> of people, who may respond differently to different forms of music based on
> how they, as individuals, have internalized their experience, and what
> particular forms of music are meaningful in evoking these experiences.
>
> But, short answer, I do agree that music can be a powerful
> emotional-evoking force. But what form this music must take for different
> people, with differently internalized experience, exists in dialectical
> relation to the individual, not as an external absolutist force that
> effects (or SHOULD effect) all people equally.
Our respective reactions to the article in question demonstrates the well
documented phenomena that ten witnesses to an event will tell ten
different stories of what happened. You saw in the article a questionable
statement about the emotional effect of music since whatever emotional
reaction music might engender would depend largely on each individual's
life experiences, like Quality itself. I saw in the article the statement
that music enhances the emotional impact of film and related that
immediately to Pirsig's comments about the hypnotic effect of movies:
"The irony is that there are times when the culture actually fosters
trance and hypnosis to further its purposes. The theaters a form of
hypnosis. So are movies and TV. When you enter a movie theater you know
that all you're going to see is 24 shadows per second flashed on a screen
to give an illusion of moving people and objects. Yet despite this
knowledge you laugh when the 24 shadows per second tell jokes and cry when
the shadows show actors faking death. You know they are an illusion yet
you enter the illusion and become a part of it and while the illusion is
taking place you are not aware that it is an illusion. This is hypnosis.
It is trance. It's also a form of temporary insanity. But it's also a
powerful force for cultural reinforcement and for this reason the culture
promotes movies and censors them for its own benefit." (Lila, 29)
Having been reminded of that quote I thought to myself that one way to get
the MOQ idea across would be to make a movie about it with the appropriate
musical score to punch it up emotionally, i.e., tapping into this
"powerful force" to improve our culture. As for the relative merits of
Mozart vs. the Beatles, we've been through that debate so no need to go
through it again. I'd like to point out, however, that John Williams as
provided musical scores for some very popular modern movies --.scores
which can hardly be considered in the genre of rock n' roll. :-)
Platt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Jul 15 2005 - 02:04:30 BST