About Me

Minneapolis, MN, United States
I seek for peace, goodness, god-ness, something like this. Sometimes I’m closer, sometimes I’m further away. Sometimes within me, always outside me. Yet, still I am seeking.

Friday, September 10, 2010

What is wrong with the dissection

Analysis. Dissection. Something happens as a result of this. Looking at music. Why is it that analysis of it often feels so unwholesome? After it has been done, the music seems somehow less. It is now a bunch of rationally intermingling parts, only effecting us insomuch as they sensible follow and break certain rules other analyzers have constructed.

In the creation of my own music this is also an issue. My training in Theory and History has built into me a rational lens that changes my creation after it has become. The creation itself comes without basis upon reasons and thought, but built upon senses of the musical sort. Like cooking, I use my instincts built from past experience in a completely non-mental way to construct the dish that tastes the best to me. This taste, or ear in music, is what determines the notes and their timing. Then, upon breaking the parts down, it all simplifies. Here, it often looks stupid. When looking at the rules I have accidentally followed my ideas look uncreative and it seems I am merely copying. However, when I look at how I broke the rules it somehow seems that I have actually done something.

How does the following and breaking of these rules matter at all? No one has assigned me an analysis project of my music. There is no grading of my work to come. Isn't the true value in the creation merely the fact that it is a creation. The fact that no mental process conceived of the sounds I am loving, but some other part of me has some sort of a voice that communicates on audible levels. Why should I bother to even think about the chord names, or the tonicization, or the ambiguities in my part writing. I am not trying to wow anyone with new musical inventions, I am merely tuning into a radio frequency that sounds like what it sounds like. It is far simpler than what our minds attempt to consume it as. Or am I missing the lesson? What is the value of the rationalization of organized audible communication? How does it matter to music itself?

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