catapult magazine

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discussion

a conversation about music and history

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dan
Jul 10 2005
10:56 pm

grant and i have been having an e-discussion about music and history, and various related topics that we thought might be interesting to some cino readers, so we decided to post the conversation here. Of course everyone is welcome to join in.

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grant
Sep 27 2005
11:57 am

I think we would find many artists who attest to this. The fact that vowels and consonants come before words I can attest to as well, as a lyricist, but then I am most influenced by Bono. But the sense that the song is pushing itself onto you from somewhere else is something I’ve heard many artists talk about. Sure, Tori Amos calls them little fairies or girls etc., but I think she would agree that sometimes she just tries to make a song do something and it just won’t do it. It almost feels like the song “wants” to be what it is. Is anyone watching the Dylan documentary on PBS? Scorcese is raising these exact questions, I believe. In the sixties, music actually became a part of the written history of America and American politics. So this is a relevant thing to look into!

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grant
Sep 27 2005
01:19 pm

I don’t mean to speak in analogies when I say music is historical. I do mean that music is really history making itself (the activity of time-making), or at least I’m trying to figure out why music seems to have this role.

Music has had this role for a long time, and many of my questions probably grow out of this ancient way of thinking about music. Music is thought of from Pythagoras to contemporary composers today as an expression of the order of the universe. Music expressed the harmony of the universe that could be seen in the ordered movement of the planets. It was the expression of the world-soul. I don’t really think of music mathematically myself, but I think this is the origin for thinking of it as an expression of the world’s own movement. I also don’t buy into cosmology too much, but I do follow the line of thinking that there are spirits that move people in certain times and places, like planets.

Contemporary thought may try to say that we only call them spirits after-the-fact or that people are only reacting to the practical every-day problems that face them because of the world of contexts they’re randomly placed in, but how do you explain the prophetic sense that people like Bob Dylan had in the sixties? Dylan and co. knew before-the-fact that the music they were making was going to be part of a major movement, but people like Dylan couldn’t explain where that feeling came from. In fact, he describes a song-writing process of putting words together that he didn’t really know the meaning of. They just felt right. And scores of people with a collective consciousness swore that he was telling their story with those words. The spirit of the times was just there. And the feeling Dylan had about his place in it turned out to be true! I don’t believe Dylan just had more strength than other artists to fulfill his dreams or that everyone has those feelings, but they just turned out to be true in Dylan’s case and that’s why we know his name. Though that is part of it, the land just seemed prepared for it. The planets were put into the right place at the right time. And history writers had to submit to the story that just seemed to be writing itself. “The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind” might’ve been the song the apostles were singing at Pentecost. Set our historians on that trail and come back to me! Why don’t we know what song they were singing? etc. etc. I’m losing my midnight train of thought to Georgia. All apologies. I don’t know much, but I know I love you. And that may be all I need is love doo doo doo-doo-doo.

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anton
Oct 06 2005
07:03 pm

Certainly the reign of scientific thinking has weakened our discernment with respect to music. Scientific thinking demands that one set aside any feeling and stick with the “cold hard” facts. It demands that one be a “neutral”, dispassionate observer without any biases, and it tells itself that such neutrality is really possible.

So, perhaps, as scientific thinking falls, music will rise. People now doubt scientific thinking, because it lied to them about supposed “neutrality.” But music, it never lied to them. It never pretended to be objective but in fact championed the passions. Thus, as people die to the idea of neutral thinking, they find themselves more and more alive to the power and passion of music.

Our friend John Calvin warned us about the power of music. He wrote of music: “…we find by experience that it has a sacred and almost incredible power to move hearts in one way or another. Therefore we ought to be even more diligent in regulating it [during worship] in such a way that it shall be useful to us and in no way pernicious.”

Music may have value for understanding Heidegger’s call for an open way of thinking. More musings to follow, must go for now.

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grant
Oct 09 2005
07:21 pm

I think Calvin wasn’t ready for what’s to come here in our generation. He was still stuck in the humanism and rationalism of his time and the Modern age that grew out of it (though I think Calvin did pave the way with his biblical understanding of heart-knowledge and the workings of the spirit). We’re seeing a radical shift away from the dominance of language and reason and the beginnings of a whole ‘nother way of communicating. The academy is behind on this one and are just starting to catch up, though it may be too late for it to survive since it has its own nature going against it. I think the musicians of the 20th century were on to it, just like music was ahead of the game on the shift in aesthetics to abstraction. Why? Because music is about prophecy. Historians have had their day. But the past belongs to those who are making the future and this is where the artists have been and continue to be. Heidegger’s realization that art is the best response to a technologistic society is right on. What an exciting time to be an artist!

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dan
Oct 11 2005
01:29 pm

Ah, so this is why you wanted to have the conversation: so you could diss historians and toot your own horn. Is that really necessary?

One thing I’ve noticed in the world (especially in academia) is that everyone thinks that what they are doing is the most important thing and that everybody else’s thing is kinda useless in comparison. And I don’t think this approach is very helpful to anyone.

I know this is lame, but we all need each other don’t we?

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dan
Oct 14 2005
02:29 pm

Grant, the following is a quick summary of how I understand your position in this thread:

Historians don’t make history. People make history. Historians describe what the people already decided was true. Good musicians make history by anticipating the future.

Is this a fair summary? Your recent posts made me realize that we don’t agree as much as I initially thought.

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anton
Oct 18 2005
06:03 pm

Piggybacking on Dan, I would add:

Times are changing. Music is possibly a ’nother way of communicating history, in line with the shift away from the dominance of language and reason (scientific thinking).

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grant
Oct 19 2005
02:53 pm

Dan, I was trying to provoke a little, perhaps. I don’t like synthesis very much, and I felt a bit too synthetic. There certainly may be some truth to the idea that I’m trying to toot my own thing, but my intent is not to discard scientific analysis altogether. I feel that the arts have been put aside in some way as less important in society (especially in the Christian community) but there is a genuine shift happening. The fact that the university is taking “Simpsons” episodes into the classroom says alot about how much the academy thinks of its particular method. The Academy seems to think people can’t truly “understand” the television show unless it’s brought into an academic setting. The Simpsons writers make fun of our society’s educational philosophy, and now the academy studies “The Simpsons”! The academy always seems to be the one learning from experience, yet it refuses to let people have valid experiences without its own stamp of approval.

I don’t think the university is fully aware of its own limitations. I believe the field of history is growing and changing along with this shift to artistic method or experiential learning— there is a recognition of the subjectivity of its own method now and there is more of a merging of the artistic method with science, and maybe there always has been, but this only reveals the ridiculousness of the separation we have between the two still today. This is why I’m having this conversation with you. Do you sense this shift too. Is this what is happening, or not?

I work in an academic setting and it bothers me that learning seems trapped in this scientific (theoretical) approach. We all live in the pre-theoretical experiences and perceptions of day-to-day living and there must be a way to transfer personal experiences from one person to another rather than having to go through this scientific way of validating everything with proof etc. This is what excites me about art. Transferring personal experience is precisely what it does! Why can’t the academy include more of this type of learning? How can history be true by presenting facts and statistics when the reality is that people do not follow such facts when they make their day-to-day decisions. How accurate a picture is history, then, if it is so confined to the scientific method?

Dan, maybe we can see if we really disagree about any of this. Do you agree about the difference between scientific and artistic method that I’m basing alot of my arguments on? Why must history be so “scientific”? Is that a valid question to ask a historian? Is “non-scientific” history bad history? Or is this question completely false because history already does involve artistic method?

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grant
Oct 19 2005
02:56 pm

I’m REALLY sorry about how all-over-the-place this discussion is. I can’t seem to find a way to hone in on what I’m looking for. That’s kind of why I’m in this thing in the first place. If I had a doctoral dissertation all wrapped up on this issue, it would perhaps be more clear and precise, but all I have is a bunch of feelings about this or that. If you feel like I’m just using you to try to clarify my own thoughts, we can stop this whole thing and move on to something else. It would have been worth the effort.

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grant
Oct 20 2005
10:34 am

I’ll take another stab. So I watch this film, Amandla, about how music was probably the strongest weapon in the fight against Apartheid in South Africa and it sounds an awful lot like African-American blues music. So I think perhaps it’s the mixture of African and European emmigrant culture, just like in America, that causes this and I marvel at the South African strugglers and the way they hold onto the hope and the belief that Apartheid is not right and that it will be overcome some day. Where do they get this idea? This is not a natural way to think. Not all peoples in a similar situation act that way. Take Iraq, for example. Or Afghanistan. Or maybe better examples than these. Cuba? So why is there such a similar approach in the Apartheid struggle as in the resistance to segregation in America?

A historian might have his own way of putting these together, using sociological findings etc. But I discover that African American choirs from places like Fisk University travelled on cruise ships at the beginning of the 20th Century and hung out in many of the black neighborhoods in South Africa and my analysis, based on experience, is that the radical spirit of hope (which I think came from the church but Alex Haley thinks came from the pride of the Africans…but most likely is some combination of the two) was transferred to the South African people through the music—not the lyrics, not in the narrative!—but couched in the music itself. That feeling is what kept the South African struggle alive.

Now, is it within the realm of the historian to examine and actually display the seed of the anti-Apartheid struggle in music? If history tries to reveal causes, shouldn’t it now become musical in its analysis, since music appears to be a big cause? Or do we leave that up to ethnomusicologists. See, it’s all inter-related. Music does not just have political and sociological implications. It is political. It is what makes up a people. Won’t history be limited if its method is not capable of exploring the actual feeling life of a people or period that it is studying?