music / emotional complexity

All music is sad?

So it's not so much all music is sad (quite CLEARLY not the case), but appreciative music listeners engage with the sadness in music?

I believe it's possible to engage with music in many ways. For the joy and beauty, cereberally, for it's sadness, for the energy and dancability, for the storytelling. But also invariably for the pleasure. For if you have "a deeper than usual appreciation of music," is that not a love of music? In love there is pleasure. In seriousness and contemplation there can be pleasure, and it does not necessarily lead to a sadness.

confucius said:

and she went on to claim that every person who values music beyond the surface of its social or entertaining qualities is set apart from the others, those for whom music is nothing more than a casual distraction, by some kind of complex emotional character.

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I'd go the other way and say that people who aren't touched by art in some way, be it emotionally, conceptually, or in terms of the imagination, are missing something. In the same way that some people claim they aren't creative.

Different strokes tho eh.

"and she went on to claim that every person who values music beyond the surface of its social or entertaining qualities is set apart from the others, those for whom music is nothing more than a casual distraction, by some kind of complex emotional character. "

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the original post, but I find this to be a highly dubious proposition.

Lots of people who are into music massively show all the signs of having unusually simplistic emotional characters (in fact it's kind of a cliche that people who are obsessive nerds about certain types of cultural artefacts are the exact opposite of "complex") but in fact I tend to think there's no substantive link either way. Certainly one's appreciation of music could be or involve an expression or component of one's "complex emotional character", but it doesn't have to be, and there are so many other character traits that one could argue demonstrate or reveal "complexity". My boyfriend of 5 years has only a very moderate interest in music (in terms of how much he thinks and talks about it, and how much he listens to), but I would never assume this meant that he was somehow more simplistic than I am, or even more typical (after all, it's very typical to have a cultural distraction).

I'm also uncomfortable with the notion that the world splits cleanly into music obsessives and people for whom music is "nothing more than a mere casual distraction". My little sister tends to get into music through it's inclusion in films (she's much more "into" film than music), so you might say that her enjoyment of music is secondary to and consequent upon her enjoyment of films. <i>But</i> a good deal of the music she gets into by this means is obviously emotional stuff that she then relates heavily to her private life (relationships etc.) So while she tends not to value highly <i>music</i> as a cultural past-time, discrete pieces of music become very important to her, and if anything I would say that her relationship to music is more <i>exclusively</i> emotional than mine, as I tend to enjoy stuff both emotionally and in other ways (e.g. nice sonix).

What I think we can say is that people who highly value music as a cultural past-time are more likely to relate to music in a manner that more readily reveals the complexity of their character, for the simple reason that their music fandom makes up a larger component of their character than it does for others.

Interesting topic.

Deleuze & Guattari have a lot to say about these issues in A Thousand Plateaus, generally in disagreement with this - for them music is always joyous and positive, as a symphonic kind of expression of the dynamic processes and becomings of the world. They also say that the territorial markings, colourations and postures of animals are the origins of art (from territorial pissing to the stagemaker bird which turns over coloured leaves to form a 'stage' on which it proceeds to sing), not a more human (oedipal) expression of tragedy/lack/loss.

I'd broadly go along with this, with the caveat that it's quite cosmic and vague - it applies nicely and differently to all sorts of music from late Romantic/early modern symphonies (Mahler, Debussy), to later 20thC (Boulez, Stockhausen), to Eno's ambient, to side 2 of Joy Division's Closer etc, but maybe not so obviously to more specific pop etc microgenres. And bearing in mind that by "music" D&G mean a (formally and politically) revolutionary art that launches off from a more socially-functional folk music and "sweeps it a way in a becoming" - typical D&G revolutionary flow-speak, but a quite powerful concept.

You could also see music as expressing a tragic ineffable sadness paradoxically because of its inherent joyousness - i.e. it expresses the tragedy that the freedom and joy of existence and biological life is denied to us because of social repression, capitalism etc., but also available to us as because of thought we, unlike animals, have an intuition of life "in itself", the sublime...

hip hop is the modern day version of the blues to me

"You may call it a past I call it haulin my ass
Through that patch of grass over them railroad tracks
Oh them railroad tracks, them old railroad tracks
Them good old notorious well known tracks" - 'Yellow Brick Road' Eminem

Tim F said:

in fact it's kind of a cliche that people who are obsessive nerds about certain types of cultural artefacts are the exact opposite of "complex"

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sorry to nitpick but this is a dubious proposition in itself. why would collectors (or nerds as you put it) be less complex than other (presumably more "normal") people?

just focussing on social interaction neglects taking into account peoples mental lives, their personalities and many other factors.

i'm confused as to what is sad ; music obsessives or music itself ( it could be argued that all music is about longing)?

I think the idea behind that cliche is that people who wire so much of their lives <i>through</i> music are partially reducing the plane of experience to that level - as if listening to music is a language and you speak it at the expense of learning others, so while others may be able to think in four or five you're stuck with one or two.

BUT if you read my initial post again you'll see that I rejected this premise as well - I don't think there's any necessary link b/w music appreciation and the complexity/simplicity of a person.

Music has given me many emotions, of which sadness is the very least of.
My dad was a professional musician for most of my childhood, and introduced me to many different types of music. I do think that music has its origins in emotions though. Grieving, war, celebration, victorious....all music has a relation to one or more of basic (primitive if you will) emotions, imo. And that is the beauty of it, it is a gift from humanity to humanity (i'll stop now before this ramble gets to long)

That bitter-sweet vibe in music is one of my favourite things. Theres so many different ways it can be expressed... The blues is so miserable it becomes funny and life-affirming. A sound can be so beautiful its terribly sad. Art can create a moment or feeling that is so powerful, yet we can never have that exact experience twice. Grist to the karmic wheel. A bit emo innit.

On the surface simplicity
But the darkest pit in me
It's pagan poetry
Pagan poetry

Morsecoding signals (signals)
They pulsate (wake me up) and wake me up
(pulsate) from my hibernating

bleep said:

Art can create a moment or feeling that is so powerful, yet we can never have that exact experience twice.

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That hits the nail on the head.
I can listen to a song for 2 hours, each time getting better with such an epitomy.
Or watch a scratched reggea dvd with a good friend (pfffffffffff Spectrum, with Sizzla/Beenie/Spragga Benz/Buju and a whole load of others just banging out their best known bars. You can see people in the background running round in circles, just to do something).......ramble, ramble, ramble -- im getting out of this thread

music >< emotion

Hmm
Jezmi I hear you
about music and emotions ...

I think there are a few different questions to address here

Confucius in his/her original post makes the distinction between those who are deeply into music and those who are into it casually or socially; now I'm in my 40s and i can remember when music, specifically pop/ rock or whatever, wasn't everywhere as it is now in most western cultures; it was mysterious, special, a thing to be sought out. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when you wouldn't know what the person who made a record - even a hit record - looked like; soul records, in particular, in the 70s could have been made on the moon for all we - outside the metropolis - knew of their creators. The point I'm trying to make is that there was a time when the social space occupied by music was very different and consequently the distinction between the devotee and the casual listener was constituted by different structuring agents. When i was at school, there were maybe 6 of us in a class of 30 who were 'into' music; for everyone else, music could have disappeared from the planet and they wouldn't have noticed. Records were rare and expensive things; they appeared erratically and long after they were released; but they were treasured and analysed to bits.

For all that, though we felt superior like all teenage males with an obsession, we didn't feel especially sensitive or anything; we were differently cultured and socialised by that culture, not isolated. With the advent of punk, the dialectic between the music obsessive and the outside world was radicalised; you were forced by your appearance - small but potent signifiers; safety pins, earrings - to defend yourself constantly; the music in turn had to be worth laying your life,or at least your social existence on the line for.

Now, with music everywhere, 'taste' is something everyone thinks they have; the patterns of obsession once limited to teenage boys are the norm; but the parameters of the private obsession/ public indifference dialectic have changed. Whereas once you fought pitched battles to protect a space you and the music you liked inhabited as a placeholder for a future utopia, now you inhabit a niche and you are marketed to.

On the substantive question; music is - or can be - complex; the question is whether it demands an answering emotional - and intellectual - complexity in the listener or whether it creates it, institutes a sort of 'temporary' personality which it can inhabit, in which it can be heard.

D7_bohs said:

On the substantive question; music is - or can be - complex; the question is whether it demands an answering emotional - and intellectual - complexity in the listener or whether it creates it, institutes a sort of 'temporary' personality which it can inhabit, in which it can be heard.

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Both! We appreciate the beauty of a piece of music where the beauty resonates something already within us - and in doing so we enter that temporal mental/emotional space/state where we become the music.

D7_bohs said:

it was mysterious, special, a thing to be sought out. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when you wouldn't know what the person who made a record - even a hit record - looked like; soul records, in particular, in the 70s could have been made on the moon for all we - outside the metropolis - knew of their creators.

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Interesting point. This made me think of the timeline of music. See it's only been about a hundred years since music has been recorded and approx the same time it was able to be transmitted. The uniqueness of experiencing a piece of music was absolute then, you could garauntee that no one would ever hear the same piece again.
But as huge as the music industry has grown on recordings and transmissions, music is still something that is created in and for such a intimate setting.