Sunday 18 January 2009

Emotional Landscapes? #2

The second reason why I name the blog Emotional Landscapes consists in my notion of what music is. Musik, like all other forms of art, seem to me to be a picture of the world that depicts aspects of the world which cannot be captured by other means. An artistic picture differs from a scientific treatise or a newspaper article in that objective properties of the depicted and subjective evaluations merge in such a way that they are impossible to disentangle.

This view looks plausible in an obvious manner for representational painting or prose - but for music? What in the world should music depict? To me, it seems as if it is located at the abstract end of a scale reaching from "concrete" to "abstract". Even with explicitly representative music as, e. g., Richard Strauss's Till Eulenspiegel, it does not derogate regalement to be ignorant of the programme. Music effectively depicts the whole world.

If, therefore, the object is always the same, the focus lies entirely on perspective. Perspective in turn comprises the emotional attitudes towards the world, the listener's as well as the composer's / musician's / producer's. Music is about one's emotional grasp of a situation in life or a whole conception of life, where the possible experience is so much in the foreground that the "external" situation in or conception of life disappears behind the "internal" experience. Those landscapes painted with musical means are internal landscapes, emotional landscapes.
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