Music that has a hold of me beyond understanding

Any understanding begin and end with ectasy....

For William Blake, the unknown genius because he was too deep for the average reader or listener , any perception is an ectasy precisely for this reason... Perceiving is already an understanding and no understanding exist which is not a perception ... As for Leonardo Da Vinci or Goethe or Archimedes methods, which three methods in different fields are all related with one another by the creative perceptive imagination way ...I could have put Aristotle with them or Faraday seeing of the electrical and magnetical field before his  mathematization by Maxwell ...

The rest out of this perceptive ectasy is a sleeping mechanism habit or industry ( not craftmanship nor art ) ...

Then your observation is very true...

 

I can prove it with a simple example...

This is an article about the stability and time enduring stability of bike throwed on a road and the geometrical figure representation of their trajectories , which by the way reproduce an image related to the prime numbers distribution ...

Then understanding that relation and why this is so is opening a door toward ectasy...

 

https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.88.3781&rep=rep1&type=pdf

https://twitter.com/anirbanbandyo/status/1700663719930544420

 

Small room acoustic experiments were also an ectasy for me...Not only music listening...

As was an ectasy the only book i read really describing what is mammals forms...Here you read it and realize that you had never really seen a dog or a cat in all your life , you had merely only recognize them as a robot do...

https://www.amazon.ca/Understanding-Mammals-Threefoldness-and-Diversity/dp/0932776639

It is IMPOSSIBLE to study grammar without stumbling into an ectasy...Try Gustave Guillaume books...One of the most enduring ectasy of my life...

Someone who listen the art of the fugue of Bach without going into ectasy had not listen to it really yet...It is why i own 15 versions perhaps... 😊

Ectasy is related to real perception not to "tastes" or "habits"...

Etc...

Someone already said it though I can’t remember who: To completely understand something would be to unravel and lessen the beauty of it. Something like that anyway

Thinking is going out of the filters of our mind...

It is the basis of language , imagination....

Ironically, in the West, "to be "out of one’s mind" is regarded as a tragedy.

 

 

In popular music i can listen Bob Dylan and Baez for a day....Or Elena Frolova...

There is poetry in their songs...

When music is simple i need poetry to go to ectasy... ( when there is poetry in a song i can even "understand" Russian otherwise i dont understand even english nor french )

Understanding is not what we think it is...

It is not always "catching" it is often "resonating" ...

It is normal that each one of us differ in our innate taste...Acquired taste as Marian Anderson is for me or for you are more challenging to appreciate...( i never like opera as an innate taste, i prefer sacred music and choral one )

Try this :compare his two versions of the Ave maria of Schubert, the younger one in his prime and the latest one when she was way older , compare the two version to all other versions by most known singers on youtube... And meditate on that comparison... Just a game... 😊 Dont feel the obligation to like her , just compare her with other singer to measure his singing soul...

She really gives us the impression that she pray way more than a mere singing but the singing is perfect anyway...

This is why she is my perfect singer... With few others...She pray when she must pray and not mere only sing a tune ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GksRp42s3S8

The negro spiritual "crucifixion" is so powerful that we can disperse a crowd if we put it on speakers... Try it, we dont lack crowd to disperse and dispense with these days... 😉

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiFEOhZ8Jb4

No -- I will never say that! There is no question that she possessed the capability. I’m afraid we are back to the factor of "taste", yet again, an impediment with which I struggle far more than you ;o)

All of what you say made sense for me...

But listen Anderson singing " deep river"or any other spirituals...

And dont say to me that she will not be able to sing anything if she wanted to...😊

And i love Joan Baez for the same reason you reject it... in any genre i listen the artist specific voice not the genre ... I dont listen many folk singer...But Baez among few others i did because she add something unique...As for Dylan...

But most actual folk singers dont appeal much to me... Some do as Dylan and Baez for example... I prefer 19 and 18 century English folk music ...

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bytFrsL4_4&list=PLXa3P16r0_ytEKZJJzXxmNCV_vuQ4TiHg

English 19 century folk music ;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrXCVJOwil8

 

I like Russian folk music too ...As much as i like Cohen the Canadian poet brother of Dylan :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TYHPEz-9sCM&list=OLAK5uy_l9_lnnIMYoEqt0XXjoHw6E4t1XAtDcsXY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktGgPkmW-A0&list=OLAK5uy_l9_lnnIMYoEqt0XXjoHw6E4t1XAtDcsXY&index=2

But it is always a specific singer i listen to not to a genre or to some culture...

I listen even to some specific Thibetan folk singer 😊

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyutcSi0Rx8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvEXnSpQ220

But i dont listen folk genre in general as a genre...

Each singer is unique...That is what matter for me...

 

 

A matter of taste, surely.

How many Jazz fans enjoy Jazz sung with a classical vibrato?

Sarah Vaughan is perhaps the most "operatic" of Jazz singers but she still doesn’t sound like an opera singer.

I’ve never enjoyed Joan Baez or more recently, Rhiannon Giddens, precisely due to their vibrato. Giddens trained as an opera singer -- not sure where Baez acquired it, but to my ear, at least, it sounds very out of place in the Folk genre.

Perhaps I’m biased towards preserving a certain integrity when it comes to musical genres. No doubt, there are others who are all for breaking down the characteristics that traditionally define genres and fusing them into something new.

I can’t imagine classical guitar played with a Blues-style vibrato, for example but perhaps there are those who would find it appealing.

More to the OP’s point, as music is a language that operates on multiple levels, simultaneously, I don’t find it surprising that we may be strongly affected by a certain piece without necessarily being able to discern why or, that we may not be able to even name the particular/combination of emotions, it evokes.

A composer (presumably) is intimately familiar with how various factors such as time signature, key, intervals, timbre, dissonance/consonance, density, etc. are likely to impact a listener. As to why-- well, that’s a more difficult question.

beethoven 7th

 

More than a great choice indeed...

The allegretto directed by Kleiber is the most stunning piece of orchestral music i ever heard... Not the more beautiful... The most powerful cure to ressusciate the dead... It describe for me, not a mere emotion but a real force behind all emotions, the growing seed in the spring awakened and rythmically directed to light ,displacing rocks slowly and emerging IRRESISTIBLY to the surface... Listen to it with this image in your head... I always "see" music and sound more than a feeling but as an objective force...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDpDwZZA248

Perfect too performed on piano:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjdY5-cRyh4

 

Music is not so much mathemathical,   it is the opposite in fact  ; thanks to Alain Connes, we now know that it is  the mathematics core which  is musical...

 

The most beautiful woman and the most powerful surreal voice of this century for me is Marian Anderson able to sing anything to more than just perfection ...

 

She can sing Bach, Verdi, Shubert or Schumann or any spirituals and would had sing jazz over any other female singer...

Toscanini said of her that there is only one voice like her by century, and Sibelius say to her that she was too great to enter his house and he spoke truth from his musician heart not light words from his lips...

She was victim of racism which is incredible after listening her one minute...

She has the most beautiful voice with AT THE SAME TIME the tender emotion of a children praying and the power of an armed archangel... Unbelievable...

There exist some few voice as beautiful as her contralto,Kathleen Ferrier, Aafje Heynes for example , but none with at the same times this sheer pure power ....

And how many voice can sing lied, opera, Bach or Handel and negro spiritual on a level so high no one else compare ? listen to his "ave Maria"... The best deeper moving prayer put on a cd...

Here in his younger years:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GksRp42s3S8

Here in his last years :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsqPTuottp0

Listen "crucifixion"....I think Billie Holiday "strange fruit" take his minimalistic interpretation and his inspiration directly from her... After all it was known by all that the greatest voice in America ever among white or black is her... No one else compete even today...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-EsGNikJU4

 

One of the best if not the best Brahms song :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ep3h9A1SNk

 

 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hMULR80aQ8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pnNtbZj4zg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuzYE3E0Nfk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E7zjNiz2ZI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GksRp42s3S8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiFEOhZ8Jb4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3pvIBhbkfg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sruWF2Uoo4M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPGEiWAPm1M

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9m49NK-xUUk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sri2pJu7SJQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XOHOW1zYNI&list=OLAK5uy_n-tCWrrE4Gde_YWbQQPyeb04DdCTzqRZc&index=8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=302DVKRSK74

Same heart and same taste! 😁😊

Puccini is a musical genius... I understand your amazement because i  feel it too...