Sunday, February 21, 2016
Are there reasons to be skeptical of your knowledge claims? Or: an exploration of musical emotion through the icon of your elementary school general music class.
Of course... Unless you think you are absolutely positive that you really know everything you know. Even the things that everybody knows, maybe none of it is true because everything we learned is a human construct... like numbers and math and emotions. There's a bunch of vague words that sound like they are only coincidentally insightful (because if you're vague enough, you can sound like you know anything). For example, from a musical standpoint (because it's the only thing I think I can form a decent example out of in the middle of the night), its "known" that major chords/arpeggios/scales/pieces are happy, and minor chords/arpeggios/scales/pieces are sad. Maybe light and dark would be better phrasing than happy and sad - although "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor" is a "dark" piece because it is in a minor key, many people are made happy by listening to minor, darker songs. For most people, the chords in a piece like "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor", reflect images of... that one Disney Halloween movie, while the chords and melodies in a piece like "Carnival of the Animals" seem cheerful, light, and carefree. Is the knowledge of the mood of a piece really something we can know, or have the connotations of major-happy, minor-sad, been implanted into us since we were children watching Fantasia 2000 three times every year in elementary general music class? Often times, when we listen to music, that music has words, so through that many of us begin to associate a different tone of words with different musical modes, but when we remove words from music (See Fantasia examples above! Elementary school music has prepared you for this moment!), those emotions still remain. We have been told and (I dare say, most of us) believe, that the majorness/minorness of a song is representative of its happiness/sadness, but do we believe that this knowledge is something that is fundamentally implanted in the human brain, or is this knowledge we have been trained to believe and have acquired through the knowledge of a language? Are sad songs actually... sad?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
It is not necessarily true that words and the melody of a song match its mood. For example, the melody and tempo of OutKast's "Hey Ya!" make it feel like a very dance-y and happy song, but when looking closely at the lyrics, one learns that the song is actually about a painful relationship, contradicting the overall "mood" created by the music itself. One must separate their beliefs created by physical reactions versus emotional or mental reactions. In other words, one must differentiate between their initial beliefs and their beliefs after looking analyzing what they know, thus bringing in the necessity of skepticism. However, if one is to look at songs that switch between major and minor chords, such as "Broken Cash Machine" by Modern Baseball, their meaning becomes infinity more confusing. In these cases, its more dependable to rely on the lyrics of the song than its actual melody. However, is this knowledge still justifiable without any physical means to prove it? Now bring in your earlier statement about how emotion is a human construct. Following simply one's emotional reaction to the lyrics becomes not only unreliable, but useless as it only applies to humans (and only certain groups of them at that). Thus the question does not become whether or not a "sad song" is actually sad, but whether or not the sadness of the song is significant in a universal context.
ReplyDeleteThis is an important question for the arts. The question "is this song sad" could be restated as "did the musician compose a sad song", or "did the listener hear a sad song", or "did the song evoke feelings of sadness in its listeners"? Could all of these could be different yet equally valid ways of knowing a song.
ReplyDelete