Sory for the big delay, but I was really busy. I will try to answer in between lines:
Mathieu Bouchard escribió:
On Tue, 8 Sep 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:
So they say that good piano players play with the whole body (same for guitar or any physical instrument, I guess).
Is it because it makes the music any better, or because what musicians are after is not just the music but also the dance that a musician makes with the instrument?
In a physical instrument the position of the body when playing modifies the dynamics of movements, so variations in the dynamics of movement produce also diferent dynamics of sound. If you press a key with a strong movement it will almost shurelly be different if you do it sitting on a chair, with your head and back aiming behind your gravitational center, that if you do it whith your body aiming foreward or if you do it standing on your feet. Your finger´s pressing movement will be affected, and also the strength with which you keep pressing after that. Being able to administrate this variations gives the musician a wider sound palette (Sorry, I am not shure if this is the word). This expands the expressive possibilities of the performer as he then is able to subjetively transfer the meanings he gives to his body movements to the sound dynamics. In the following text please note that it says "from the performer side" and "what music should express", not what it DOES express, neither from an objective view. I mean, I am trying not to take the subject to the interpretation from an observer-in-the-public point of view, and, I must say it again, this is not what everybody should do, but those that feel that they need to.
"...different performances of the same piece can communicate different expressive inten- tions. Most music performances involve expressive inten- tions from the performer’s side, regarding what the mu- sic should “express” to the listeners. Consequently, in- terpretation involves assigning some kind of meaning to the music. " (http://smc.afim-asso.org/smc05/papers/LucaMion/mapping.pdf)
Art is suposed to be a free environment, meaning that it should be guided or conditioned only by the artist.
According to whom?
This subject is treated in aesthetic since the enlightement and romanticism, and maybe even before. You can read about this subject´s history (treated secondarily) in Simón Marchán Fiz´s "La estética en la cultura moderna", from chapter III till the end. Other related subject might be "Ludic Aesthetics". I don´t remember a more specific book. Marchan Fiz is related to the Frankfurt school. I don´t know how the freedom subject is treated by Analytic Aesthetics, but as a more-science-philosophy-related aesthetic perhaps it just does not treat it. Also in Post structuralist´s philosophy Freedom becomes an important subject that implies relationships with art, and of course in Existentialism, before that, so you might find usefull reading Heidegger or Sartre, or triyng to understand Foucault´s, Deleuze´s and Guattari´s art-related works. Furthermore, any statement about being required from the artist to give his own truth implies the concept of being the artist free. Anyway, as any definition of art is possible while it must be contextualized, I agree that we could talk of other kinds of art where freedom is not important or does not exist at all.
If you answer yes to the third, the probabilities are that your mind is twisted after years of taking drugs, and maybe it was already twisted before you studied art or started taking drugs. Sorry, I was joking...
Drugs usually come relatively late in the picture. They don't tend to make art more twisted, just more defective. They also don't have much to do with being twisted.
I was just joking and being metaphoric and rethoric. Besides that, There have existed circunstances when drugs have been part of the creative environment and I wouldn´t agree that the results were defective. And I would say that "defective" is another relativable concept.
Of course in these three questions I was only having fun while being retoric, because relativity dismantles concepts as "making a difference", "quality", "being emotionally involved" and even "academic" or "popular" (history shows lots of examples that would complicate the difference between the last two).
Dismantling and complicating are not the same thing. Being conscious of the relativity doesn't make those concepts less important and it doesn't break them. It just breaks down a lot of talk that uses those concepts: that which is vague, makes undue assumptions, etc.
At the end, anything could be poetic, as it mostly depends on who we are at that right moment. It ends as a matter of self-perception.
Right.
And as perception is not transferable, neither is poetic or aesthetic experience.
Well, despite our frustrations with it, plain talking goes a long way transferring a lot of perception, experience, and other ideas. Calling perception non-transferable comes from either taking conversation as so much for granted that it doesn't count in the picture, or being very pessimistic about how well it can be effectively transferred.
I understand what you mean, but the fact is that perception is not fully transferable. If it was, there would be no difference between any sound/image and a description of it.
That gives us a lot of possibilities, none better than other, only differents.
It's only all the same if you just don't care about the possibilities (or if you are trying to be diplomatic). In practice, people get involved in aesthetics because they are passionate about them, and they judge a lot. There is no absoluteness, no central authority, but there's still a lot of judgements and impressions of what is better and what is worse, and that's a necessity.
Maybe yes, but what I am trying to say is that I believe that those discussions about better-worse are also relativables, and then they shouldn´t end in duality (unless it is stated that this duality is related to the speaker), because when they do it probably means that a part of the true will be left out, and maybe that´s not an implicit necessity of the art world.
It is also supposed that someone not educated would be more able to find poetic in anything, because for him anything would be different from anything he knows.
People don't enter university as blank slates.
I agree.
That is why we commonly despise the creations of early students, forgetting that in history teachers stole several times the concepts of students that "weren´t clever enough to realize the jewel they had in hands".
Students are at a disadvantage here. They are not knowledgeable in the research-wise artistic discourse of profs, that is what profs are bathing in constantly, and so they don't know what is valuable to the profs. What is valuable to the profs doesn't make much sense to an outsider. It's probably more whim-oriented than most any other discipline (?).
it was an interesting read.
Thankyou for reading.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
On Wed, 7 Oct 2009, Fernando Gadea wrote:
Mathieu Bouchard escribió:
Is it because it makes the music any better, or because what musicians are after is not just the music but also the dance that a musician makes with the instrument?
In a physical instrument the position of the body when playing modifies the dynamics of movements, so variations in the dynamics of movement produce also diferent dynamics of sound. If you press a key with a strong movement it will almost shurelly be different if you do it sitting on a chair, with your head and back aiming behind your gravitational center, that if you do it whith your body aiming foreward or if you do it standing on your feet.
Yeah... well, I guess it's possible to imitate the natural playing style of any body position using any other body position, but then it would be a bit like ventriloquy. For example (in Spanish), the vowel A is open, vowels E+O are medium, and vowels I+U are closed, but what matters is the amount of opening in the mouth as a whole, not just the tongue or the jaw. You could do it with just the tongue and not the jaw, but it's more difficult and the only point is to give a different impression with the sound than what it looks like you'd be doing if you were talking normally.
gives the musician a wider sound palette (Sorry, I am not shure if this is the word).
sounds like a good word for that.
Art is suposed to be a free environment, meaning that it should be guided or conditioned only by the artist.
According to whom?
Anyway, as any definition of art is possible while it must be contextualized, I agree that we could talk of other kinds of art where freedom is not important or does not exist at all.
Yeah, the word "art" just like the word "being" and the word "freedom", are used in many related and not-so-related ways by different people as tools to express their ideas and ideals. I admit right away that I don't know nothing about those philosophers' conception of art, but it sounds quite peculiar that they would claim such a thing... they surely use a non-recursive (non-transitive) definition of "guided" and "conditioned", skipping over all the thinking about what guides or conditions the artist, which is nice if that's what they want to skip thinking about. Anyway, that's the thought that made me ask the question in the first place.
If you answer yes to the third, the probabilities are that your mind is twisted after years of taking drugs, and maybe it was already twisted before you studied art or started taking drugs. Sorry, I was joking...
I was just joking and being metaphoric and rethoric.
I know I know, but jokes are as meaningful as anything else, else we wouldn't bother saying them in the first place.
Drugs usually come relatively late in the picture. They don't tend to make art more twisted, just more defective. They also don't have much to do with being twisted.
Besides that, There have existed circunstances when drugs have been part of the creative environment and I wouldn´t agree that the results were defective.
Yeah. For example, if a musician has a headache and is supposed to be recording right now, the musician takes aspirin. that's part of the creative process.
But also, if the musician has adopted a «lifestyle» such that various substances of dubious usefulness have hijacked his/her dopamine subsystem, then a stable amount of those substances have to be taken in to support the creative process, else it becomes a process of frantically running around the city to find the appropriate shady people that support the musician's brain damage.
I know what you mean, I just want to point to other realities that are probably taking most of the room that drugs are taking in this vocation.
And I would say that "defective" is another relativable concept.
Yeah, for example, drug users who argue that everything is alright end up changing their minds about it and start claiming that drugs made them lose years of productivity, lots of opportunities, ... they think it's relative, because it sounded like a good idea, then it sounded like it ok, then it sounded like it would be better without, then it sounded like it was a tremendous waste after all. it's all relative. and then there are those who you can only imagine wishing to claim the same, because they passed away.
And as perception is not transferable, neither is poetic or aesthetic experience.
Well, despite our frustrations with it, plain talking goes a long way transferring a lot of perception, experience, and other ideas. [...]
I understand what you mean, but the fact is that perception is not fully transferable. If it was, there would be no difference between any sound/image and a description of it.
You didn't say "fully" and in that case it doesn't mean the same at all.
That gives us a lot of possibilities, none better than other, only differents.
[...] There is no absoluteness, no central authority, but there's still a lot of judgements and impressions of what is better and what is worse, and that's a necessity.
Maybe yes, but what I am trying to say is that I believe that those discussions about better-worse are also relativables, and then they shouldn´t end in duality (unless it is stated that this duality is related to the speaker), because when they do it probably means that a part of the true will be left out, and maybe that´s not an implicit necessity of the art world.
in the end, people still choose to spend their time with certain art and not certain other art, and this is implicitly a judgement of value. those judgements are both relativables and an implicit necessity of the art world. everybody chooses an opinion or is chosen by an opinion or feels compelled to have an opinion which is often not someone else's opinion, but all those different opinions work together towards giving (or not giving) actual value to specific artworks: reputation, money, and the time of the day.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
--- On Sat, 10/17/09, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
in the end, people still choose to spend their time with certain art and not certain other art, and this is implicitly a judgement of value. those judgements are both relativables and an implicit necessity of the art world. everybody chooses an opinion or is chosen by an opinion or feels compelled to have an opinion which is often not someone else's opinion, but all those different opinions work together towards giving (or not giving) actual value to specific artworks: reputation, money, and the time of the day.
There are plenty of reasons one might spend their time with certain art and not certain other art, without making an implicit judgment about artistic value at all (area of expertise, access, medical condition, risk aversion to spending one's time examining new works, etc.). So why do you say this is an "implicit necessity of the art world?" I don't get it.
-Jonathan
On Sat, 17 Oct 2009, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
--- On Sat, 10/17/09, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
in the end, people still choose to spend their time with certain art and not certain other art, and this is implicitly a judgement of value. those judgements are both relativables and an implicit necessity of the art world. [...]
There are plenty of reasons one might spend their time with certain art and not certain other art, without making an implicit judgment about artistic value at all
Yeah, my comment was not the whole story, but you know, when you're starting back from scratch after «nothing is better than anything else», how long and how detailed would you write immediately when you don't know whether you will get a reply?
(area of expertise, access, medical condition, risk aversion to spending one's time examining new works, etc.). So why do you say this is an "implicit necessity of the art world?" I don't get it.
Because I'm trying to say that even if everybody claimed that anything is as good as anything else, then there are still signs we can extract from observing people's behaviour, to figure out what is important to them, regardless of the words; and I'd say that this may also be a key concept to figure out what's going on when absolutism reigns, because in either case, the words "bad" and "good" and "beautiful" and "ugly" (etc) can't be used anymore for one's own opinions, as absolutism steals those words and total relativism trashes them, which both means that those words aren't yours, aren't mine, and they aren't anybody else's.
Those things you are listing, are useful to consider for building new definitions of bad/good/beautiful/ugly/etc. There are several kinds of definitions that we might want to use, though. I might say that if an artwork is hidden from public view, then it makes it less valuable, and someone else may say that it makes it more valuable, and someone else may say it doesn't matter, and all three will successfully argue for three different kinds of value, and all of those ideas are different aspects of value in general.
It's really hard to talk about these topics and be clear in that few words, though.
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801
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Fernando Gadea -
Jonathan Wilkes -
Mathieu Bouchard