Dear Chuck,
Check this out.
"How Music Benefits The Brain More Than Any Other Activity"
The human spirit craves order and we quest for it in two fundamental ways.
On one hand is "Law and Order."
On the other is creativity which achieves order by simultaneously obeying and transcending Law. (Augustine famously said: "Love and do what you will.")
It "rings true" that harmony is the highest form of order.
And since music creates harmony "on demand" -- whistling, humming, singing -- it is a "panacea in your pocket."
As an aside I note that Miles Davis (and the atonalists?) confirm the centrality of musical harmony by proving that discord does not resonate with a broad band of the human spectrum. The vote is in.
I'm looking forward to seeing the Big Game with you.
Ah! The Secular Sacrament!
Even if you've already heard George Carlin riff on "Baseball and Football," I think you'll enjoy a review. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmXacL0Uny0
Although it is probably apocryphal, the following quip has been ascribed to Dwight Eisenhower: "Football is the perfect American game: lots of violence punctuated by committee meetings."
Speaking of which...
"Bush's Toxic Legacy In Iraq"
Pax tecum
Alan
Follow-Up Dialogue With Chuck:
On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 CH wrote:
Well... if mass preference is an indicator of universal truth, then violence, football, hurtful humor, televsion, sugar and xenophobia must be transendent states! (Actually, football is a transendent state when the Steelers win.)
Consonance is pleasing, restful and non-challenging, which is nice, but art contains complexity, paradox, and challenge as well and it's the creative juxtaposition of those elements that is enthralling and elevating.
So watch the slams on dissonance and atonality, especially when popular preference is your measure. Miley Cyrus is better than Beethoven (deemed by a critic "ripe for the madhouse" when he began his first symphony with -- gasp! -- an "unprepared dissonance." I'll play it for you and I guarantee your response will be "let me know when you get to the dissonance.")!
The other flaw in the popular preference argument is that it is culturally determined and constantly evolving, and wildly variable within any culture at a given time. One example, a jazz chord so widely used that it's become a sacharrine cliche, the major 7th chord, contains an interval so dissonant it would have been forbidden except as a crude joke 200 years ago.
And the classical V7 - I cadence contains a tritone, called "the interval of the devil" in pre-Baroque times. When a young Stravinsky enthusiastically shared a Debussy score with his mentor Rimsky-Korsakov, the latter fumed that it wasn't even music. I happened on a 1900 Encyclopedia Brittanica and perused the article on Beethoven which summarized his career as exemplary except for his last string quartets (now viewed as the unsurpassed high point of the genre) dismissed as incomprehensible, perhaps due to his madness.
As for me, a steady diet of simple major chord pop songs and it's not long before I'm driven insane as surely as if I was physically tortured.
I was going to treat you to a hilarious scene from (living! female!) Korean composer Unsuk Chin's opera Alice in Wonderland today if there's time and interest. Lots of consonance and dissonance... Similarly, her violin concerto juxtaposes a frenetic and complex violin line with a soothing, regular, consonant cello line. Better than either separately.
And finally, the anti-dissonance stance has been used to supress modern music in every generation since Palestrina, so it's kind of the musical equivalent of racism and sexism and trickle-down economics. Weak intellectual argument supporting a regressive emotional position. Very popular, though...
C
Dear Chuck,
Thanks for the great explanation and good argument.
I am not denying a role for discord and atonality.
I am saying that discord is not musically central. (In fact, I left the role of atonality completely open for question.)
Yes, discord can be a fine, productive variation on a "central" theme.
But I would argue that discord arises from central harmony and that it is the fruitful role of discord to be subsidiary to harmonic resolution.
If Shakespeare is right in saying "all's well that ends well," I question the human value of ending in discord.
I do not question the value of ending in harmony.
As human lovemaking reveals, it is "all about" "goodness of fit."
***
Just half an hour ago Danny discovered the following quotation by John Lennon which he called out to me:
I responded with Christian mystic Julian of Norwich's comment: "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well." http://en.wikipedia.
I do not think it is in the nature of discord to have the "last word" (or "to sound the last note") although discord not only can -- but "must" -- contribute to wellness in the end.
No discord, no drama: Utopia is boring.
I think it is difficult (and perhaps impossible) to make discord central to a musical composition -- and then embroider that central discord with increasingly discordant variations through the end -- and still have the composition resonate with more than a vanishingly small number of people.
As my "Imitation Game" essay will "reveal," we live in a statistically-predicated universe and the name of the game is bell curve and standard deviations from the mean. Beyond a certain number of standard deviations we are dealing with outliers that may be important unto themselves but are not statistically significant for The Human Project at large. (N.B. I say this as someone who considers himself an outlier, a "fugitive from the Law of Averages.)
It's "all about" exploring "beyond the pale" and then -- crucially -- "bringing it back home."
For Coop(er), it was all about bringing it home.
***
Lest we forget, Democracy itself is an exercise in popularity: the rule of vox populi.
Sure, I can argue (persuasively) that democracy is doomed to failure and will be replaced by one or another form of oligarchy or autocracy.
But I "believe" that the vox populi, will -- in its own bumbling, vacillating, self-contradictory and even self-destructive way -- emerge as a more human and humane form of governance than any of the others.
By and large I believe in centrality -- in the mindful "centered" sense of the word -- because humans have a homeostatic homing instinct informed by the prime directive of harmony.
Although discord can provide useful counterpoint, it cannot be central because it is not central.
I have long considered homeostasis a completely inexplicable, anti-entropic (and mostly overlooked) miracle which, due the "survival advantage" it confers, keeps drawing the behavior of diseased systems back to the center which is where health and harmony are founded.
Yes, we can venture out from the center, even benefiting from discord, imbalance and disease.
But the center is central.
And without sufficient centrality, the center will not hold and things fall apart.
Pax tecum
Alan
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