What does your art express?
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by Scot Ranney on 02/24/2009, 14:30
if you are really interested, i would suggest the book the singing neanderthals, which was written by a cultural anthropologist. i also read this is your brain on music, bur i thought it was a very superficial treatment of the neurocognition of musical enjoyment.
to reduce it to science is to miss the point entirely.
i think we always express something in our music but i also think that´s not the more important thing...the question is what my audience is receiving with my music.
am i helping them??
for me it is a craft, an acquired skill.
as to what i "express" with my "art", is nothing more than "i hope you folks enjoy yourselves tonight".
i'm just an entertainer, a poor wandering minstrel, a juggler of sounds and an acrobat of technique.
i don't perform for myself. i only perform for others to attempt to make this world a better place and to help people forget the cares of a cruel hard world.
i came to the very clear conclusion that while playing in public i am an entertainer and to think otherwise is folly. what am i expressing? the disire to please the audience, the desire to get paid at the end of the gig, the desire to have someone buy me a drink and most importantly the desire to get laid.
break it down and this is what every piano player truly expresses in their "art".
"trying" double hm
art is a means of communication.
communication is either of thought or of feeling.
words (ordinary speech) convey our thoughts.
... communication of feeling is necessary to art.
this communication is successful only if the audience feels the emotion.
communication must be by "external signs" to be art. this means indirectly, by signs "external" to the original experience.
to "express" the emotion "directly" and "at the very time" one has the emotion is mere venting or displaying of symptoms, not yet art.
any feeling so communicated (the artist "infects another") by external signs is art.
without art, humans would be ignorant of others’ feelings, and we would be savages.
... the purpose of art is the socially vital role of creating community.
summary: art communicates feeling that unites us with one another.
tolstoy: "to evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling -- this is the activity of art.
art is a human activity consisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them."
in successful art, we feel our union with others.
art transmits joy and spiritual union.
transmission of anything else makes counterfeit art.
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