Let's talk music, no genre boundaries

It is a dead end to listen music  only by nostalgia and it is a dead end to listen music with no nostalgia at all ...

Why ?

Music understanding and feeling are developed in  different stages in each of our life...

It is then normal to be nostalgic and listen again "Moondog" i discovered at 20 for example as i do times to times...I listen to him differently now...

It is normal to discover new musical languages too ...

But the more we internalized a new experience, the more it will have a growing  meaning in later stage in our life and then we will listen to it differently with nostalgia and sometimes surprise about what we missed or what we overvalued......

« I am nostalgic only about the woman i did not love anymore.»-- Groucho Marx

@mahgister 

Slowly working my way through Orgin. It's a very interesting view of the world and philosophy. I think it might help in my endeavors.

I am glad if it could be a useful book for you...

Anyway i will read your book if i am alive here ...

it is  by far the best one hour about "creativity" course  with an example related to the geometry of the heart by an artist who picked his intuition in Rudolf Steiner description of the heart :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQMpEAsNHmY&t=266s&pp=ygUMY2hlc3RhaGVkcm9u

It is the same thing in natural science if we study Goethe...

It is the same in mathematics which need our act of interpretation at the end... As illustrated by  Godel famous alternative : " (1) the human mind is not a Turing machine or
(2) there are certain unsolvable mathematical problems"

For Godel meaning is an embodied symbolic form and we are more than machine...

more :

«Furthermore, Godel consideres that there must be a nonmechanical plan to
machines, as he reportes "Such a state of affairs would show that there is something
nonmechanical in the sense that the overall plan for the historical development of
machines is not mechanical. If the general plan is mechanical, then the whole race can
be summarised in one machine." (Godel in conversation with Wang).»

https://scispace.com/pdf/godel-on-the-mathematician-s-mind-and-turing-machine-4n7mymlm38.pdf

@mahgister 

Meaning is an embodied felt  symbolic form

In art, this has certainly been my experience. I cannot comment on how this applies in math, science or other left-brain-dominant fields. 

Information is not meaning...

Meaning is inaccessible using only  information or bits...

Meaning is an embodied felt  symbolic form not a set of bits....

IT is BITs from the tip of Babel PIT.

But heart beats beat bits.

Data makes us beta.

I think as audio-b-dog...

As for AI creating art. AI cannot feel love or the fear of death. AI cannot know what it is to have a broken heart.

if there is overlap between Gebser and you i want to read your book...

I will wait...

@mahgister 

I read the intro, preface, and the first chapter of "The Ever-Present Origin." I'm not sure if I will read the rest now or later. I'm in the middle of "The Plumed Serpent" by D.H. Lawrence and I want to finish it. Although, Lawrence's constant repitition and old style of writing (I've been trained to use one modifier, whereas Lawrence can string together a long list of adjectives) might drive me away from the book.

I think "The Ever-Present Origin" might overlap with me on the research I've done for my book. Our Ven diagrams might have a lot of overlap. I'll have to look further.

@mahgister, I, too, was an alter boy and choir boy. My love of polyphony and liturgical music began with music in the church. I’ve been to Italy 3X and saw some stupendous churches and cathedrals there, as well as in the U.S. I have zero religiosity: all I want from religion are the buildings and the music. As for J.S. Bach, I could live on a diet of nothing but and die happy. I listen to his music ~12 hrs/day, every day.

I listen Bach almost everyday since my youth...

I never see Europe... The one day i was supposed to quit and travel i use the 1000 bucks to pay for my books order 50 years ago... A big order... I never quitted... But i dont regret the books order... Nothing beat a deep book which will change you life for the better  as a travel can do in some case (Not all case my friend came back very  ill ) 

There is no age appropriate music...

There is only exposure,education, ears training...

When a child i  was going to Catholic masses and Vespers and ceremonies, I even worked as a boy altar...

My mother and father  were singing  "Ave Maria Stella" as i was a baby, and i remind it clearly and i was 2 years old or 3 max, then  i listened to choral music at the Radio  before noon( very old french and english folk song or popular chorus songs).

Then when all my friend listened Cream and Beatles and Hendrix, i was listening ,Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Josquin Des Prez, Jakob Obrecht, Purcell Anthems, and Bach  etc...

Training ears biases when a baby will determine your music journey...

 It was so strong conditioning, i discovered Jazz  only at 35 years old...I decided it was not an inferior music style no more because i discovered music is done by musicians not written for singing by great past Masters...

Already in my twenties, i listen Indian sitar... It becomes after my  35 years a passion for Indian and Persian music especially .,..

Today i listen to many world musical cultures...

But the Choral music stay my all time favorite...

I like Armenian and Persian songs ...

Popular music has no real appeal to me save few poets exceptions (Dylan Cohen  Baez, Ferré, partly because i was a "hippie" against war in the 70  etc )

Alas! if i can wrote a book about Bruckner symphonies describing them in metaphors i had no talent for music at all ...I was discarded from the Choral of boys because of my unability to sing correctly...

I "see" music with my eyes and do not hear it a way a musician hear it...

In my next life i want to play piano as Ervin Nyiregyházi playing Liszt... Or as Sofronitsky playing my god Scriabin...

if not i did not come back here ...

I didn’t really answer your question about the correlation between genius and chronological time.

A genius in art is someone who stay in our collective memory as a representative of his era.

The history of art is parallel and perpendicular to the story of science whose two are part of the history of consciousness which we can read  in the history of language itself...

See Owen Barfield : history in english words...

Monteverdi is a genius because he manifested his era  on another level inventing opera ...

I dont like many opera...

I like madrigals a lot especially Gesualdo and the 8th book of Monteverdi...

 Art is not about "taste" which are only an expression of our own personal biased history... Art is about some truth of an era and his link to universal truth...

 I recommend Jean Gebser masterpiece book about consciousness history " the ever present origin" ...

If you dont fall out of your chair i will pay the book price...

Is Monteverdi 8th book of madrigals, all Gesualdo and  Josquin Des Prez   are boring or correspond to your definition ?

For me there is no relation between genius and chronological time ?

I have certain criteria that I love in music. If music does not have most or all of those criteria, I find it uninteresting, emotionally and/or intellectually. And it’s not like I made a conscious decision to only like music that meet those criteria, it was an evolution over the years.

Those criteria being (no particular order): very high level of musicianship, deep and broad levels of emotional and/or intellectual content conveyed, fairly high levels of complexity and sophistication, (usually) long form song structure that goes through changes in: mood, intensity, tempo, dynamics, time changes, etc., over its length.

I believe that art (including music) and "religion" were one thing to  the primitives. They had no distinction between the two.

I think you are right on this. 

Women sing for the child even before birth...

It is women that create humor to control the male hubris, the women were center to the social net, and they  co-create speech which is music with the hunting male group imitating animals and communicating between them...

 S. Pinker once said that music was secondary...

https://iai.tv/articles/pinker-vs-nietzsche-is-music-the-basis-of-language-auid-3247

Nietszche said the opposite...

 He was right and this explain why i never read Pinker...

Music and linguistics are linked if we think about language origin and more so if we observe the hidden iceberg part : the motivation of sounds...The sound signs are not absolutely arbitrary,Saussure for methodological reason establishes  the arbitrary of sounds system as starting point. Others linguists takes this further and posed it as a dogma...They are wrong..

But it is another story...

I am interested by linguistics too and especially by the differences between oral first cultures and the invention of written signs and after it by the huge abyss of the Greek alphabet created and its impact on Greek thought ...Not just music and acoustics...

Very important observation about breathing and non written music... breath is a gesture as is speech or playing an instrument... Some gesture can be written some others not, the flow in time and his cycles created a time dimension proper to music and not to metronome measured by the clock time...

I own 20 albums of didgeridoo, not one is like an other...

This music may be very powerful...

Didgeridoo players can breathe continuously into the instrument while ’talking’ to create an incredible variety of sounds.  Clapsticks (hundreds of them) and didgeridoo featured in the opening work of the refurbished Sydney Opera House, in "Of the Earth" by Willian Barton. I cannot conceive how music for the didgeridoo can be written down!

You dont get what i spoke about it seems...

When you speak are you conscious of the complex mechanisms behind syntax and semantic ? Not at all, we learned it without even knowing what we do...

It is the same for the musical time, which is born from our complex response to society and to Nature from the body members (rythm) and from the throat/mouth (timbre and tonality)...

Then this  "musical sophistication" occurred from the beginning...But it is now that we get this sophistication consciously understood...

Ancient language are not less complex than english... it is the opposite...

 And Einstein concept of time or Newton concept of time has nothing to do with "musical time" not measured by the watch, and if so is being denatured and lost...It must be felt not counted...

@mahgister,

All of this musical sophistication couldn’t have occurred at once. Certain things must have happened first, then others, then others. Early Homos sapiens probably didn’t have a concept of time beyond the sun setting and rising.

In the beginning there was not speech on one side music on the other. Social interaction must had been motivated by rythms to unite the tribe in a work.

Speech dont exist without body members gestures rythms and without throat/mouth motivated  tonal sound (continuous vowel and discontinuous consonants) and specific body timbre.

In the beginning speech and music are one, and when they separate in the days activities they reunite in the calm of night.

Speech makes music through not only singing but speaking. And music spoke as in the Nigeria the Yoruba they call their drum "talking Drums". Yoruba is the name of a tribe of his language and of his drums.

Also music not only exist in time but exist as time itself, at least a time of his own.

Musical time is a specific musical concept...Musical time cannot be reduced to measurable physical time. It is a qualitative rythmic time linked to the body gestures felt as a rythm.

here from the web a few concepts  about musical time you certainly know:

«Beat: The basic unit of time in music, providing a regular pulse. 

Tempo: The speed of the music, often measured in beats per minute (BPM)

Meter: The grouping of beats into recurring patterns, indicated by time signatures.

Measure (or Bar): A segment of time corresponding to a specific number of beats, separated by bar lines

Time Signature: A notation that indicates the meter, specifying the number of beats per measure and the type of note that receives one beat. 

Rhythm: The arrangement of sounds and silences in time, encompassing note durations, rests, and patterns»

Now these concepts come from written classical music.When i speak about musical time ( Ansermet wrote a huge book about it) i spoke mainly from the phenomenology of felt conscious qualitative  time(a duration said Bergson debating with Einstein) 

In our evolution it was the body improvising gestures that created his own time as a meaningful content to be repeated or commented by others body gestures as a musical and spoken answer in the tribe or in the social group.

I often wonder what the earliest music must have sounded like. I assume it had a strong beat and the melody from a flute or whatever was less important than it is today. Music is the only art that exists in time, as @mahgister has talked about, and I have a feeling that the beats in time are fundamental to any human music.