Monday, December 18, 2006

Stress, Music, and Thoughts

If our lives were easy would our music sound the same? Could a world without stress hear a requiem and be affected the same way that you and I are affected?

One of the reasons I feel in love with music is because it allowed me to express my inner-most emotions without fear of being criticized. When I played a solo, I would relate each part of the music to a part of my life, making the music my own. More often than not, the best part of my performances were those that I could relate to times of extreme stress in my life, and the more real I could make each memory at the time of performance, the more effective the passage was. At the same time, the "sad" parts didn't feel right without the "happy" parts. You can't have one without the other, so the more pronounced you can make one, the more pronounced the other will become.

Is this basic idea at the center of all music? A good composer can sit down write a piece of music without the spark of the inspired, but how much more effective is the music when the composer becomes intimately familiar with and develops a deep emotional connection to the music? As musicians and teachers, we often try to tell the students what the composer wanted and was thinking, but in reality, we can't know for sure. A composers thoughts on their music should merely be a guide, the first step on the journey of discovering the piece of music

Music is a very personal experience and no piece of music will affect everyone the same. We have to look beyond what the composer was thinking and feeling and discover what the music means to us as individuals.

Some people claim that older music is losing it's spark, that it has passed it's prime and we need new music for today. But I say that all we need to do is to pour ourselves into the "old music" and it becomes new. So when you listen to music, either classical or contemporary, do so with an open mind. There is musical value in everything from chant to rap. Anyone can complain about how music has changed, but it takes a true musician to find something worthwhile every time they turn on music.

3 comments:

Christopher J. Simerman Jr. said...

I realize that this post is a little random. I started with the idea that stress and music go hand in had, and before I knew it I had gotten on a tanget. The thing is I wanted to talk about all these things. So look for more indepth entries about Stress and music, as well as "New" vs. "Old" msuic

Music Study Room said...

Hi Chris,
I enjoyed your post even it went on a bit of tangent, although I don't think you went too far off, just expanded the focus a bit. I haven't heard this comparison for quite a while and I think it is important. Emotions, like music (IMHO), are timeless. People have loved, suffered, experienced joy and sorrow, just to name a few emotions, throughout time. The only difference is the language that the musicians used to express the emotions. Different periods of music history had different standards of tension and relaxation but were expressing the same emotions and each in his own time, found the right language for his audience. The nice thing about it is that there is still the tension and relaxation and the consonance and dissonance is relative. Maybe the tritone of somewhat early music is not as dissonant as some of the more modern extended harmonies, when it goes to a 3rd or 6th the purity of the resolution is still very moving. Throw in the right suspensions and other tension related techniques and it can still make you cry. Throw in the Untempered 3rd and 6th and you have such a purity of consonance that any tension is relatively as intense as anything that we can write today.

And to go on a slightly different tangent; I lived in Morocco for several weeks before it struck me that the classical music of the Arabic culture does not have harmony as an element. The modes however and the modulation of the modes especially with the nuances of the 1/4 tones create such a rich emotional feeling that you do not miss the harmony.

So, not only does music stand up to the test of time, if you allow yourself to let yourself go and to let the music get inside you, culture is not a barrier either. The way I see it, if one can't feel the emotion in music of any time or from any culture, one should examine their own shortcomings and try to find out what is preventing them from connecting with the music.

Sorry to take up so many bytes, but your post sparked some memories that I enjoyed revisiting.

Anonymous said...

I have actually never heard of this comparison so found your post very interesting.