{"id":839,"date":"2011-12-27T22:21:01","date_gmt":"2011-12-27T22:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/?p=839"},"modified":"2011-12-27T22:21:01","modified_gmt":"2011-12-27T22:21:01","slug":"from-httpblog-millsbaker-net","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/?p=839","title":{"rendered":"from http:\/\/blog.millsbaker.net\/"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n\t\t\t\t\tTweet<\/a>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div><\/div>
DECEMBER 10TH, 2011<\/a><\/div>\n
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How to Listen to Jazz<\/h3>\n
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Music\u2019s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almostnothing<\/em>\u00a0of a song\u2019s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music\u2019s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into their sense of identity\u00a0\u2014they argue about these pseudo-tastes, fight about them, draw moral conclusions from them, particularly about others\u2014\u00a0yet the same cannot be imagined for most other arts. Who can envision a redneck spitting into the dirt at the mention of a sculptor he considers emblematic of society\u2019s ethical decay? Who can conjure inner-city youths following the internecine disputes between schools of painters?<\/p>\n

This virtue -that we\u00a0all<\/em>\u00a0react to music, and intensely enough that our reactions become part of our\u00a0selves<\/em>\u00a0and indeed seem to us indicative not of arbitrary mood or opinion but of the quality of the music we react to-is a curse because it means many listen to music happily, as atmospheric noise or soundtrack or acoustic scenery, without being able to understand anything about itsmeaning<\/em>\u00a0or\u00a0art.<\/em><\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t a problem in itself;\u00a0there\u2019s nothing wrong with using\u00a0subjective enjoyment<\/em>\u00a0as your sole aesthetic criterion<\/a>. But part of life is finding new things to love and new ways to love things more deeply, and understanding the creative arts\u00a0\u2014their scope, history, contemporary contexts, intentionality\u2014\u00a0opens them up for ever-deeper appreciation. But the most obvious way to learn an art is to become a practitioner of that art, a time-consuming and difficult task, and one impossible to pursue across all fields.<\/p>\n

Fields that make such demands have a high barrier to audience entry. They compete against quasi-art designed for immediate enjoyment.\u00a0Again<\/a>: the magic of jazz was that, for decades, it was profoundly innovative, artistically revolutionary,\u00a0and fun to listen and dance to.<\/em><\/p>\n

Analogical Understanding<\/strong><\/p>\n

But we don\u2019t dance that way now, and jazz grows sadly less-accessible to listeners every year; I know many people who have the same reactions to horns that others do to operatic voices:\u00a0they simply hate the sound of them.<\/em>\u00a0Your art has lost its connection to ordinary people when elements of it are\u00a0perceptually<\/em>\u00a0discomfiting to them.<\/p>\n

I know many others who like jazz for what we might call \u201cassociative\u201d reasons: they like\u00a0Woody Allen movies, various expressions of \u201cretro\u201d culture, New Orleans, and so on. Certain jazz makes for excellent background music, and while we might lament that music so dense with intention, deliberation, improvisational heroism has become soundtracked, the same has happened to classical; and the same has happened to nearly all the arts (people eat popcorn in movies about genocide; people drink thirty-two ounces of Coke while blood pools on screen), and even to news and politics.\u00a0Reproductive technology democratically trivializes everything<\/a>. Love it or leave it.<\/p>\n

You can enjoy jazz without grasping much about it for an entire lifetime, andshould<\/em>\u00a0if that suffices; but if you want to enjoy jazz more and aren\u2019t a musician, or aren\u2019t familiar enough with music to follow, attentively and thoughtfully, instrumental music, to see what\u2019s interesting about a piano solo (beyond its emotional impact), to know what to pay attention to while bassists duet, you need an analogical approach.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s one I\u2019ve used for years, even though I\u2019m a musician and have studied music:<\/p>\n

\u2026when I talk to people who find\u00a0jazz<\/a>\u00a0musically intimidating, or unintelligible in its refusal to\u00a0be as repetitive as popular music, I sometimes tell them to try to hear in the solos little musical structures, any one of which could\u00a0be a song in itself,\u00a0but each of which is\u00a0built, explored, and discarded with\u00a0breakneck speed. Popular music relies on the ecstasy of trance: repetition of what resonates. Jazz relies more on restless exploration.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not exactly like\u00a0Levitt Homes<\/a>\u00a0and sand castles,\u00a0but that\u2019s one way to think of it. The point is that one needn\u2019t know anything about music at all to hear in the short\u00a0bursts of notes –up and down, side to side, angry or soft, symmetrical or jagged<\/a>– little sound sculptures,\u00a0built, perfected, then discarded.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That is: try and relate meaning you don\u2019t understand to a form of meaning you do understand, one which will support some of the same logical, structural interrelationships present in what\u2019s otherwise unintelligible to you. (This is, incidentally, the isomorphism you pursue in all forms of understanding; comprehension is analogical, all newly encountered phenomena relating to previously encountered phenomena, and developing this capacity for metaphorical relation is how you get better at understanding the world, in addition to getting better at understanding and loving and being made happy by creative arts).<\/p>\n

Attention and Devotion<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two effective and fun demonstrations of this idea are different visualizations of John Coltrane\u2019s seminal \u201cGiant Steps.\u201d It\u2019s an excellent example, because it is not obviously emotional in intent or effect, so while much jazz –this song<\/a>, for example, or\u00a0this one<\/a>– can be apprehended with the heart, \u201cGiant Steps\u201d demands cerebral attention, and not just for its frenzy; this song will be boring or grating if you can\u2019t figure out how to map its meaning to a topography you understand. That might be a flaw worth critiquing, or cause enough to ignore jazz, but again: loving art makes you happier, so why foreclose the possibility simply because it requires a little effort?<\/p>\n

Check out\u00a0Michal Levy\u2019s outstanding animation from \u201cGiant Steps,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0or for a more prosaic take,\u00a0see Dan Cohen\u2019s video, which tracks the sheet music for it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Note that once you\u2019ve watched those videos, you can apply that same sort of visualization methodology to other instrumental music –jazz<\/a>,\u00a0classical<\/a>,whatever<\/a>. Indeed, while the\u00a0various visualizers<\/a>\u00a0which ship with music apps are generally considered the province of dorm-room stoners, they\u2019re useful for attempting to appreciate instrumental music, because they do what\u2019s needed most:\u00a0they allow you to devote your attention to music while relating music to something you understand already,<\/em>\u00a0then have your own creative reactions in collaboration with the work of the artist(s).<\/p>\n

When I really want to love music, I tend to close my eyes and\u00a0listen to Keith Jarrett<\/a>; the technical passages form landscapes, the affective passages move my heart, and their sum is enough to convince me of music\u2019s total artistic superiority whether or not I consider anything like the song\u2019s context, theoretical details, historical significance. For a listener, this is like an apotheosis: the fulfillment of one of art\u2019s promises.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s possible to bring the required attention to bear on a song without visualization, it\u2019s hard, and getting harder every year; and\u00a0art rewards attention above all<\/em>. Music half-attended to is really music ignored, ill-understood, the slightest kind of pleasure. There is much more to love in the best music, and it\u2019s easily accessed with just a bit of creative, analogical effort.Try it out<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(Thanks to\u00a0David Cole<\/a>\u00a0for the conversational catalyst).<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

DECEMBER 10TH, 2011 How to Listen to Jazz Music\u2019s great virtue is its great curse: a listener needs to understand almostnothing\u00a0of a song\u2019s art, meaning, intent, or contexts to react powerfully to it. The universality of music\u2019s effectiveness is peculiar: people of every conceivable sort have musical preferences they integrate into their sense of identity\u00a0\u2014they Continue Reading<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=839"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":840,"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/839\/revisions\/840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=839"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=839"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mauspace.com\/space\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=839"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}