Response to Blog - Dots on a Page

This is a response to Emily Burke's blog. In her blog she talks about her experience in playing the flute and how her instructor told her class to stop playing the music as if it were dots on a page. The question she posed how is emotion translated into something audible and how can we tell the difference between some one playing "dots on a page" and them being emotionally involved in the music.

I love to listen to emotionally stimulating music, and I think there is a big difference between when a musician plays (or sings) just because it is their career and when they pour their heart and soul into the music. You can tell the difference jut by the way the music comes out. There is a certain force that comes with emotionally connected music a certain "umph." It something that can be labeled as indescribable. The easiest way to differentiate between the two, I believe, is easier when you are seeing the person performing. Their posture, the look on their face as they deliver it to the audience, and their body language can play a role in how we interpret the music. If we see a musician playing a violin and we see him swaying and closing his eyes and having an intimate moment with the violin we can see that he is emotionally attached to the instrument or the song he is playing at the moment. Seeing this attachment to the instrument, seeing this relationship, we receive the emotional vibes that are given off by our sensory outlets (eyes and ears).
Another thing that can influence emotionally stimulating music rather than "dots on a page" is the meaning behind the music. At one point or another every music artist or composer has written a song for a loved one or a special time in their life. This symbolic meaning behind the music causes the artist to poor out their heart and soul into the music because it is important to them. For example, when Luther Vandross sang the song, "Dance With My Father," he was reminiscing about his childhood and how much he missed his dad. You can tell that he was emotionally connected to this song because of the meaning behind it. His father died and he wrote a song in his memory.
It's not an easy thing to explain how to differentiate between the two. It is something you just know. You either feel the emotional vibes and feel connected to the music that is playing or you just don't feel anything, the music is "emotionally dead" so to speak. That is when artists are just playing the music because it provides income for them. We also have to remember music is something you do not just use your ears for. It is something that you use all your senses for, you use your whole body to sense it and just feel the all around greatness of it. However, when an artist plays just because that feeling of being connected is interrupted by this monotonous sound, this stoic pump in the music that causes us not to be emotionally connected. On the topic of emotions, my question is Can the way music make people feel be called universal? In other words does music cause everyone to feel a particular emotion?

View of the World and Music

OK so today's class brought me back to Nature of Human Nature when there were those days I couldn't verbally contribute to the conversation, but all I could do is jot down notes. Today we talked about Constructivism, reality, and the view of the world. There were many points made, some of which were hard to follow. I did however start to think about some aspects of the conversation in which I thought about many different things.

First thing that came to my mind, is that when we talk about the world around us, we should know that we all view the world differently. We may see the same things, physically for what they are ( a tree is a tree) but how we interpret it and how we feel when we see it isn't shared by anyone else (how do we feel about the tree as it is), the neurons in our brains fire different ways causing us to construct our own feelings, our own possibilities, our own "world" so to speak. In simpler terms, we all have our own idea of the world, what reality is to us is how we were taught to view reality and how those beliefs we hold influence the way we look at the world.

There is no one way to describe reality, count the amount of people there is in the world and that's how many different views on reality we have. However, what we hold as real is really an illusion. If we knew what reality is like, we all wouldn't have our different spin on it. We also wouldn't be trying to escape it all the time through different mechanisms. So if we construct how we view the world, one could say we construct the way we view music. When composers meet what we construct as "music to our ears" we like it. When they don't we hate it. That's what I think. When music enters our brain it is introduced into our reality, our world. It ties into our values and our views and help us get in touch with our reality, making us more ignorant , and more disconnected from the real reality than we already were.

This is a lot to take in, but if you skipped all of that, just answer this, Do you think music is used as a way to escape the world around us and give us a chance to think about how we would like the world (our lives) to turn out? In other words, does it help us to build a fantasy world in our head as a way to escape from the real world?