Certain vague ideas led to the formation of this blog. Now that they are starting to become more concrete in my mind I would like to give some insight into my personal motivations.
Growing up I always felt to a certain extent that I was lazy in the eyes of the world. This never bothered me, as I considered "working" in the eyes of the world as doing something you didn't really want to do, that served no perceivable purpose. Not that I was against things that served no purpose! I was all in favor of them, provided they were things I wanted to do. What motivated my early guitar playing was simply the fact that I enjoyed being able to do things that I was previously unable to do, and the joy of the physical creation of music. Likewise I read a lot because I just liked learning new things and thinking. Finally, I spent a lot of time with friends, often outside, doing something active, because this was the just the best thing you could possibly do. I don't feel like I was a special kid or anything, in terms of my innate nature, but I was incredibly lucky. I had parents who never pushed me to "work", and I had great friends. I also had time, almost unlimited time after the drudgery of school. Furthermore, I realized at a young age that my wonderful life depended on this time, and I organized my life so as to maximize free time and minimize responsibility. Hence the "lazy" thing.
As I grew up this awareness of the value of free time has shaped many of my choices. I went to music school partly to escape the ineffectiveness of mass education. I thought public school was a waste of time, and college would be much the same. I could learn much faster on my own whatever intellectual things I wanted to learn. Music was a craft, though, and you needed a teacher, and I didn't consider it "work" to practice guitar all day, so music school was acceptable. Unfortunately, though, when my music started to serve a purpose other than my own enjoyment, it quickly became work. Practicing to win a competition, pass a jury, get into grad school, or to have a professional career, was just not the same. It was "work", and incredibly time consuming work. It crowded out my time for reading, and my own creative projects. Luckily when I got to musical school I decided that if I ever had to choice between practicing and friends, I would choose friends, because that is the best thing in life. I made great friends and love was not all toil.
When I graduated college and moved back home I lost that as well. I got a job that took a lot of my time, and my friends either lived far away, or were working and busy to. I was still trying to practice at the level I did in college, and I just didn't have time for friends if I wanted to keep up both my official job, and my practicing. Life was really drudgery. What good is life without self expression(what my guitar playing had once been), a rich inner life(what my self-education had once helped develop) and most importantly deep human connections(what my friends had once provided)? For me these are the best things in life, and all they require is time. Not the free time that we think about when we think of weekends and days off work, but real leisure time. Time to read a book the way I described in the last post. Time to write a piece of music. Time to talk to a friend for hours and hours about nothing in particular.
At the time, I understood that a certain amount of work needs to get done on the earth if people are to live, and I could accept contributing to the market society in order to earn my lively hood. What I didn't understand was why so many people work so much. When I thought about the advances in technology and agricultere that our society has undergone, it seemed to me that people should have to do much less "work" than they currently do. This led to an study of economics and economic history. I feel like I have understood my problem, the problem of society, and that I am near a solution. I will elaborate more in future posts.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
The Slow Movement
One of the great joys in my life is reading. Slow reading. Reading purely for my own leisure. Reading not to finish the book as fast as I can, just to return to my daily life, or another of the infinite books worth reading, but reading deliberately slow, to savor the content of the book, to contemplate this content, and to let it illuminate my daily life, and merge into my being, so that the experience of the book becomes a part of me, not a momentary diversion. Reading not as consumption, whether it is the consumption of entertainment, or of ideas, or of great art, but reading as a creative act, where my experiences illuminate the text, and the text illuminating my experiences, and they grow together and merge into one. In short, the kind of reading where the book becomes my friend.
Reading of this kind entails certain time consuming practices. It is frequently necessary, for example, to close the book and sit in inactivity, not to contemplate with philosophical vigor, but simply to let the mind wander and explore the place to which the book has brought it, emotionally and intellectually. It is also often necessary to stop reading in order to copy passages out of the book, to save for some later, unknown purpose, or merely to mark down out of infatuation.
In my reading, and by reading I mean the process of creating new experiences out of the merging of my own mind with that of the authors, a particular type of event often precedes one of these decelerating acts. I read a passage where the author has stated some mixture of my nebulous ideas, half-understood truths, and semi-conscious longings in perfect expression. They seem to state what I have understood already but could not express, and the author becomes a confidant in my most intimate thoughts, and a partner in their development.
For some reason though, when I have fully developed an idea, and then find some author or person who has stated it just as well as me before I did, I feel disappointed. I want some kind of credit for an original thought! This is the feeling I had when I discovered/invented conspicuous unconsumption. Recently, when I discovered The Slow Movement, of which slow reading is just on expression, I had some type of mixture of the two above mentioned emotions.
Reading of this kind entails certain time consuming practices. It is frequently necessary, for example, to close the book and sit in inactivity, not to contemplate with philosophical vigor, but simply to let the mind wander and explore the place to which the book has brought it, emotionally and intellectually. It is also often necessary to stop reading in order to copy passages out of the book, to save for some later, unknown purpose, or merely to mark down out of infatuation.
In my reading, and by reading I mean the process of creating new experiences out of the merging of my own mind with that of the authors, a particular type of event often precedes one of these decelerating acts. I read a passage where the author has stated some mixture of my nebulous ideas, half-understood truths, and semi-conscious longings in perfect expression. They seem to state what I have understood already but could not express, and the author becomes a confidant in my most intimate thoughts, and a partner in their development.
For some reason though, when I have fully developed an idea, and then find some author or person who has stated it just as well as me before I did, I feel disappointed. I want some kind of credit for an original thought! This is the feeling I had when I discovered/invented conspicuous unconsumption. Recently, when I discovered The Slow Movement, of which slow reading is just on expression, I had some type of mixture of the two above mentioned emotions.
Friday, January 1, 2010
Slow Movements
Many people who aren't really into classical music seem to like slow movements of symphonies the most. This was true for me when I first started listening to classical music. I still love slow movements, especially in Beethoven, but I wouldn't say they are my favorite. Anyway, I have a theory about why this is the case. It has to do with post-modern thinking, something I've talked about on this blog before, in connection with Borges. One of the things Borges really explored, in stories like Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, was how the perception of a literary work changes over time, as human society changes. This idea is the key to my theory of the present popularity of slow movements in the non-enthusiast listener.
A perfect symphony has a beautiful balance. It is like a perfectly executed Hollywood film. It has the fight scenes, the drama, the romance, and the comic relief, all in the right proportion, so that when you leave the concert hall you are real satisfied. Not only does it have all these elements, but they rely on each other to be effective. Likewise, in great symphony, it is very hard to pick a favorite part, because each part is great in its own way, and fits in perfectly within the overall structure of the piece. The problem occurs because of how each of the movements achieves their effects. The slow movements rely on and creating a sense of incredible calm, and a meditative peacefullness. I conjecture that this works about as well on modern audiences as it did on audiences a hundred fifty years ago. Our culture, in that time span, hasn't become desensitized to a need for meditative calmness. If anything, that need has grown with the modernization of society (The greek musician/philosopher George Hadjinikos suggests this as the cause for the growth of populatiry in the classical guitar in the 20'th century).
Faster movements, though, particularly finales, rely on creating a feeling of intense excitement. Their methods of doing this, though, worked better on audiences in the past than it does on present audiences. A lot of music has been written in the past hundred and fifty years, and has entered the popular consciousness, that is louder, more dissonant, more raucous, and pursues rhythm as means of building excitement in a much higher degree. This makes sense. Our world has become a much louder, more raucous place. We've become desensitized to this noise to such a degree that those loud classical finales just don't do the job they were meant to anymore. Thus the whole balance of the symphony gets thrown out of whack. People just want the slow pretty stuff. The music is degraded.
Fortunately, I've found that if I only listen to classical music my ear kind off reverses its historical tendencies, and I find I respond to the music in a more natural way. Also, Futurists(the Italian kind) hate slow movements. Yeah, they are silly.
A perfect symphony has a beautiful balance. It is like a perfectly executed Hollywood film. It has the fight scenes, the drama, the romance, and the comic relief, all in the right proportion, so that when you leave the concert hall you are real satisfied. Not only does it have all these elements, but they rely on each other to be effective. Likewise, in great symphony, it is very hard to pick a favorite part, because each part is great in its own way, and fits in perfectly within the overall structure of the piece. The problem occurs because of how each of the movements achieves their effects. The slow movements rely on and creating a sense of incredible calm, and a meditative peacefullness. I conjecture that this works about as well on modern audiences as it did on audiences a hundred fifty years ago. Our culture, in that time span, hasn't become desensitized to a need for meditative calmness. If anything, that need has grown with the modernization of society (The greek musician/philosopher George Hadjinikos suggests this as the cause for the growth of populatiry in the classical guitar in the 20'th century).
Faster movements, though, particularly finales, rely on creating a feeling of intense excitement. Their methods of doing this, though, worked better on audiences in the past than it does on present audiences. A lot of music has been written in the past hundred and fifty years, and has entered the popular consciousness, that is louder, more dissonant, more raucous, and pursues rhythm as means of building excitement in a much higher degree. This makes sense. Our world has become a much louder, more raucous place. We've become desensitized to this noise to such a degree that those loud classical finales just don't do the job they were meant to anymore. Thus the whole balance of the symphony gets thrown out of whack. People just want the slow pretty stuff. The music is degraded.
Fortunately, I've found that if I only listen to classical music my ear kind off reverses its historical tendencies, and I find I respond to the music in a more natural way. Also, Futurists(the Italian kind) hate slow movements. Yeah, they are silly.
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