The transcendence of music
 

I know I'm new here and this is my first thread to create, so don't be too hard on me. I've been experiencing this lately and I'm going to try to express it in this post. Here goes.

Lately I've been consumed by music on a different level of feeling, almost sensing or perceiving it in a different manner. It's not something that has never happened to me but it's been a regular occurrence lately in my life. Allow me to attempt to explain, as I'm trying to improve my ability to translate thought into writing.

I've gone through periods where I was really consumed by the technical facets or elements of a musical piece. In this type of mindset I would dissect a song, structurally breaking it down, listening for technique and prowess - time signature, dynamics, harmony, chord usage and structure, modulation, use of modes and scales etc. There is no doubt all these technical components are crucial to music and they should be analyzed and appreciated.

However, as of late, I've found myself hearing music on a different level. Rather than analyzing and dissecting a song I will just listen to it, soak it in and hear it as it is in its complete form. Simply just feeling it more and thinking about it less. I have found great pleasure in this and music has been affecting me in a different way than usual. It's become more profound, more powerful, more moving. I've found much more enjoyment in simplicity and in the raw emotion and creative force of music. To hear it as it is, to bask in the sound and the emotion. I have found music to be truly transcendent, having the ability to take me out of time and space into a place that I can't quite explain. That is the true beauty of music, to me.

Interested to hear what you guys think.

Take it from one whio's done something similar what you've done. Your attempts at judging music has transcended into a more experienced form where you just have to listen to it to understand it and enjoy it. The same thing happened to me a couple years ago. I started out about 4 years ago as a simple aspiring critic. People often got annoyed by how I would analyze things. Well, it eventually evolved into a "second nature" and I never really had to do much thinking to critically rate it. Instead of picking it apart and taking my time, My brain would pick it apart immediately upon listening to the music and put every single little detail in short-term memory for me. Overall, I reached the point where I didn't have to disect something to understand it, and I almost immediately understand a greaty album now.

I think you're going through something similar. Basically, you have dissected so many frogs that you're entirely familiar with how a frog works, no matter how different each frog may be. And by frogs, I mean music. Basically, you never started out as a guy who just listened to it. You wanted to understand why it was good, right? Well, you've likely gotten to the point where you don't need to spend so much time thinking about it, and the ability to "get" the album has become a second nature experience instead of a thought process. I'd say that's a good thing. Your mentally able to immediately dissect and put back together music as you listen to it.

Thanks for the response. I can definitely relate to what you're saying and that's an interesting insight. You pretty much hit the nail on the head, I've always been one to attempt to understand why music is good rather than simply listening to it. I pretty much take that approach to life, always wanting to understand things and know how and why they work. What you say makes a lot of sense.

Thank you very much.

It's a lot cooler this way. When you understand music enough after dissecting it for so long, you know what to look for.

I understand and acknowledge the importance of all the structural elements of music but I hold the opinion that the pure creative force is equally as important. I can be moved as much if not more by a very simple piece of music as I can by a very complex piece of music.

Same here. What I'm saying is there is something to look for in every album, even if it's something different in every one. But the thing is, the thing we're lookimng for is whether the elements we examine live up to pure quality or not. That's the one thing they have in common.

I basically do a combo of the two--I automatically experience music on both the trees (the technical, music-theoretical, analysis of details) and forest (the holistic, transcendent) levels at the same time, without having to think much about either. It's second-nature to me. Of course, I've had over 45 years of practice at it--I started taking music lessons as a little kid, and I've been just as focused on composition and arranging, which helps with the forest level, for about 40 years, too.

Wow, that's a lot of experience.

Lemme know when you reach the volcano level. There's a cool miniboss there.

I prefer the underwater level. More freedom of movement.

Just sucks you can't jump on your enemies heads to kill them.

And the controls SUCK on those levels.

Anyway, I guess whatever people "look for" in music after reaching this stage varies between people. But like I said, it all depends on if we view whatever we find in the album to be high quality or not.

I know a lot people won't agree with the sentiment behind this but music takes a very spiritual form for me. Like I said, at times, it takes me out of time and space and completely lifts me to a better place. The power of it is awe inspiring.

Agreement is irrelevant since it's your experience. No one can tell you what you feel/perceive.

I'll direct you to my Popol Vuh review later. Time and space were the beginning.

Thanks for pointing that out. I do forget sometimes.

I think most people actually experience music from a powerfully emotional place before anything else. Only people of a particularly nerdy strain (not meant to cause offense, just a lazy attempt to try and slap a label on what I mean to get at) actually have to learn NOT to analyze and just listen instead.

Musical experience is actually based on putting both together. That way, people can learn to see quality in any kind of music instead of being stereotyped and biased to a few genres for a longer period of time for the rest of their life. Most people aren't naturally open to most kinds of music.

I actually think that overanalyzing music is more likely to put you in a box than the alternative, mostly because you'll be analyzing things based off of one mode of music (such as Western music) and end up grading things on criteria that it's not even considering.

I'd say that's fostered by upbringing. I think that anybody has the potential to enjoy any type of music if they're exposed to it in the right climate.

It might be personality. Curiosity vs complacency.

That's true, but we can jump right back into the nurture vs nature on that one too. For that one I'm pretty certain it's both though. F. ex. being curious about why your parents are making weird noises in their bedroom and seeing them in the act might make you a little less curious about things in the future.

Overanalyzing can't really be combined with just listening. But it does lead up to it in a way. After a while, the listewner becomes so experienced at analyzation that he's learned to judge the overall quality by instantaneously picking it apart and putting it back together. That's because the listener knows what to look for, so there's no need to spend too much time analyzing it. It becomes instantaneous second nature, and thus "overanalyzing" it becomes a false label because it just takes simply listening to it to decipher it at that point. It becomes a second nature/mental reflex.

"Knowing what to look for" is one of the reasons why I think it will more likely put you in a closed set of genres like I mentioned earlier. I also think it's possible to understand whether or not you enjoy a song without having to dive into it on an analytical level.

I write music myself (self taught, probably not very good) and I insist on reading only very little musical theory when I need it most. I like to explore by ear and not let any genre conventions control what direction I go in. This produces interesting results, since I'm really just making it up as I go along.*

Never been one to sit and analyze music closely. To me, it's all about emotions and atmosphere. The challenge is to deactivate the intellectual part of my brain when I compose, as it often gets in the way and goes "hey, you can't do that! THat's too weird!".*

When listening to music, wouldn't one just listen to what the instruments are playing and let the music show the way? I don't understand why I would want to sit and analyse its structure, scales, etc.?

*(basically saying that intuition will carry you very, very far as long as you're not trying to be Mozart)

Yeah, you're right. Much too big a tangent, really.

If anything, it opens the user to new genres. Opening yourself top a style of music that you just don't like will likely keep you away from the genre for a long time. Trying to find out what makes the genre good by analyzing it is what opens a person to exploring the genre. And that's the whole reason I'm into shoegaze, hip hop, a lot of electronic genres, and more. In fact, that mental process is practically the basis for my Loveless story.

Uh, that means you're not opening up to it then.

That same thing can happen through increased exposure. Also these examples don't sound like you knew what you were looking for but rather that you had to find it. I'm not saying that analyzing music doesn't help certain people (I don't know the preferred nomenclature these days), but it runs the risk of closing people off of music because it can lead to an establishment of firm rules that music is not allowed to break.

Explain how feeling music on an emotional level sans analysis can be restrictive when a person intentionally explores new kinds of music.

That's what I was saying. If you just jump into a genre without knowing about it because you don't know how it works, you'll be less likely to get attracted to it later. Whereas if you attempt to understand it by not comparing t to other genres until yopu're experienced enough, you'll first learn to like it based on the quality and then you'll find other things to like about it as you go along.


I've never met a single person that became less attracted to a genre because they specifically searched for the quality in a new experience. If I didn't do that, for example, I never would have liked My Bloody Valentine, some Radiohead albums, Frank Zappa, ambient in general, and experimental rock. If it runs the risk of closing off genres, it runs the possibility of opening people up to them even more because they're using the unique things that separates their usual interest level from the new musical experience as the basis for what makes the unique sound good in the first place rather than just listening to it and deciding on whether you like the sound or not. Sure, increased exposure helps, but this process can sometimes get a user into a genre on just a couple to a few albums rather than spending so much time trying to like it whether or not he plays the music himself or just hears it at random a lot.

You're missing my larger point that judging things by the wrong criteria when analyzing can lead to people misinterpreting what makes something good because it doesn't match up with the arbitrary fixed idea of what's good or isn't. Also, I've already mentioned that it can be helpful for someone who needs to categorize everything, so you continuing to spout off your experience isn't really that relevant.

"I've never met a single person that became less attracted to a genre because they specifically searched for the quality in a new experience."

Meaning what, exactly? Just trying to follow the train of thought.

You missed what I said. Opening up to a new genre means forgetting about what makes your previous experience good like hard rock or folk, and trying something new like hip hop by trying to find what makes hip hop good instead of comparing it to the same criteria you'd use for rock, which would be unfair to the genre and to the user.

Therefore "knowing what to look for" is not necessarily a good thing when listening to new music. I get the feeling that you are still missing my larger point because you're agreeing with it but presenting it like a counterargument.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume you missed my point again by assuming I said one knows what to look for when trying new music. You know what to look for when you've heard enough of that music to do so, which gives you rthe experience needed to immediately decipher the music later. I first played Loveless with the rockist mind, and I didn't like it. Months later, I tried it again by opening myself to a new style of music, and I wasn't entirely sure what to think since shoegaze was still entirely new to me. So right after Loveless, I played MBV. I liked it because I was more used to what shoegaze was and had not gone into it with the rockist mind that I had. So I played Loveless again immediately after, and I put it in my top 100 and it's still there from, this day on with a perfect 100.

Basically, my experience went as follows:
1. try the new genre by trying to get an idea of its sound without judging it like I would judge an album from my usual experience (rock, pop, folk, etc.)
2. Once I've gotten an idea of the sound, try another album in the genre and compare the two and find out what's similar. It's likely the first album one tries won't be that highly rated, but you might like the second one more. Heck, on the second shoegaze album I heard, MBV, I realized what shoegaze was about. It only took two albums, and they were by the same band. Since then, I've been able to call myself a fan of MBV, Slowdive, Beaulieu Porch, grungegaze, and Ringo Deathstarr. The same thing happened with black metal recently. I tried something new and did not attempt to judge it by anything else. The first album was At the Heart of Winter. I gave it 8. It took two more black metal albums before I could finally give one a five star rating and understand its sound.

It may take some longer, some quicker, and sometimes it entirely depends on the genre. But overall, having a different mindset can really help. I grew from a rockist mind to one open to determining why genres are so unique, and that helped to develop my love of the concept of genre tagging (although I admit there are WAY too many tags).

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After he's heard enough. Forgive me if I did not make that clear, but I thought it was pretty obvious. Although, you've misinterpreted my arguments many times in the past.

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Jesus christ. Can you two just kiss and get it over with already!

This is what a music discussion looks like. Get your cameras out, this is a rare one.

It still appeared that you missed a couple details, so I was just clarifying them.

Now that we have that out of the way, I'm not gonna kiss him. How about a manly handshake that will break each other's hands?

This website would be more fun if it was less rare.