@theaviv And please, don't take any of my or anybody else's comments personal here. The music world (particularly when you come near anything orchestral) can be unrelenting, unfair and harsh. But no one here is trying to kill your enthusiasm, which you seem to have plenty of. And that's important.
Just bear in mind, none of us are as far as I can tell judging you or your tastes. We're just sharing our own viewpoints, offering guidance and advice as best we can (keep in mind I offered to go over your composition with you for free, something I would normally charge for).
We have good intentions.
No harsh feelings at all. I think we're having a very good discussion here and I appreciate it. I am learning from this.
That's a bit like saying that a hammer hitting someone's thumb is an abstraction of pain.
Music is more a trigger for emotion than an abstraction of emotion.
Melodies are often arranged in forms that make them easy to remember - nested binary forms that combine the familiar with novel. They also often combine cadences of language - used in speech to mark meaning - that we'll respond to as if they were actually encoded with meaning.
But that doesn't mean that the music has any intrinsic meaning.
David, that's a cold way to think about music.
Of course music is an abstraction. All art (or maybe almost all art) is an abstraction of something.
An analogy in fine arts - suppose artists never went in the direction of things like cubism, surrealism, impressionism etc. because they thought they thought they would be too weird for people who just wanted to look at realistic portrait paintings, and "painted down" to the masses who would view them. Imagine how much great art would have never existed.
Michael compared music to visual art.
A painting is almost always an abstraction - i.e. a representation - of something.
Mona Lisa
The Starry Night
The Kiss
The titles tell you what they represent - what they are an abstraction of.
Even so-called "abstract paintings" probably represent things that only the artists themselves can explain.
If you create something without meaning, is it really art or just a random arrangement of elements made by a sentient being?
Dennis Dutton attempted to answer the question of what constitutes art using anthropology. Before he died, he summarized his findings in a book titled
The Art Instinct. He argued that the phenomenon of art can be found across all human cultures, past and present. He argued that the definition of art is not black and white but more like a scale. He determined there are a dozen criteria points, and the more points you have checked off, the closer it is to art.
What is Art? Denis Dutton's Criteria:
1.
Direct Pleasure: The art object is valued as a source of immediate experiential pleasure in itself, often said to be "for its own sake."
2.
Skill and Virtuosity: The making of the object requires and demonstrates the exercise of specialized skills. The demonstrations of skill is one of the most deeply moving and pleasurable aspects of art.
3.
Style: Works of art are made in recognizable styles, rules that govern form, composition, or expression. Style provides a stable, predictable, "normal" background against which artists may create novelty and expressive surprise.
4.
Novelty and Creativity: Art is valued for its novelty, creativity, originality, and capacity to surprise its audience. This includes both the attention-grabbing function of art and the artist's less jolting capacity to explore the deeper possibilities of a medium or theme.
5.
Criticism: Wherever artistic forms are found, they exist alongside some kind of critical language of judgment and appreciation.
6.
Representation: Art objects, including sculptures, paintings, and fictional narratives, represent or imitate real and imaginary experiences of the world.
7.
Special focus: Works of art and artistic performances tend to be bracketed off from ordinary life, make a separate and dramatic focus of experience.
8.
Expressive individuality: The potential to express individual personality is generally latent in art practices, whether or not it is fully achieved.
9.
Emotional saturation: In varying degrees, the experience of works of art is shot through with emotion.
10.
Intellectual challenge: Works of art tend to be designed to utilize a combined variety of human perceptual and intellectual capacities to a full extent; indeed the best works stretch them beyond ordinary limits.
11.
Art traditions and institutions: Art objects and performances, as much in small-scale oral cultures as in literate civilizations, are created and to a degree given significance by their place in the history and traditions of their art.
12.
Imaginative experience: Art objects essentially provide an imaginative experience for both producers and audiences. Art happens in a make-believe world, in the theater of the imagination.
https://sites.google.com/site/allen...second-quarter--aesthetics---form/what-is-art
He discovered this by immersing himself in the art practices of various cultures, past and present. He looked for universal traits. He argued that the phenomenon of art is innate to human nature, arises naturally in human societies much like language (hence the title of his book, modeled after Steven Pinker's
The Language Instinct).
It would be best to just look at examples...
Here's a sketch I composed:
When I composed it, I imagined a prince setting off on a quest to rescue his princess. He mounts on his horse and then stares off at the vast field facing him before embarking on his mission, galloping bravely along the way.
I conducted a little experiment. I played the sketch to a coworker (nonmusician) without telling him anything about it, not the title, nothing. I asked him to tell me what he was imagining as he was listening to it.
I swear this! He said he was imagining a hero mounting on a horse and then galloping away!
Here's another one:
I asked the same coworker to tell me what he was imagining this time (of course, again, without telling him anything, not the title, nothing).
I swear! He said sunrise.
He couldn't believe it when I handed him over my phone and showed him the title!
When music is a true abstraction of something, it's like magic! Other people can see and feel what you see and feel.
I still believe what I said earlier is true:
Do you know why catchy music is catchy? Because it is true.
A catchy tune is a *true* abstraction of a particular feeling that is both personal and universal at the same time.
Catchy music catches people because they can't resist feeling what the composer is expressing. It's magic that's hardwired into us - our minds' innate ability to right away recognize an arrangement of sound as having meaning, a feeling, and to sync into that feeling.
It's a beautiful thing when it happens.
To me - and to just about everyone else in the world except you "cultural elites" - it's what makes music *good*.
It catches you effortlessly.
Let's look at examples of catchy music.
First of all, the two skeches above. They are catchy (writing catchy music is what I do best - I have a talent for it) and I believe it's in part because they are perfect abstractions of what I was imagining.
But here's some other examples:
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
Com'on, are you gonna argue against that? It's an abstraction of, well, "a little night music" - a little night of lightheartedness, socializing, and fun. Mozart probably wrote it for an aristocratic party.
In the Hall of the Mountain King
Grieg tells you what he was going for in the title. You can't argue the piece is not catchy! He did an awesome job in the abstraction.
Palladio
Jenkins named it after Andrea Palladio, a Renaissance architect. Whether he was imagining perfectly cut diamonds or the wonders of human architecture, the feeling he captured was that of outmost intensity and determination - because that's what it takes to perfectly cut a diamond or build a monument that is meant to last eternity.
. People's brains get stuck on loops all the time, it's meaningless and certainly not worthy of being attributed to art.
