Appeasement Music
A lullaby is a song to put babies to sleep. Much of the so-called esoteric or alternative or meditative music sounds like lullabies. Why would you put people to sleep that are supposed to wake up?Music wouldn’t exist without tension. There is always tension in and around us, gravity alone would suffice to provide for it. Life without tension doesn’t exist. There is no magnetic flow without tension. There is no change without tension. And there is no musical flow without it.
This doesn’t mean human beings have to be necessarily uptight although this seems to be the accepted price to pay for the participation in the rat race. Neither do I want to express a need for violence towards oneself or others. Just that tension is something we have to deal with all the time.
More important is the way we acknowledge or ignore the various ways tension shows itself for example inside the body or in nature at large: is there a natural flow of releasing built up tension or do we keep and accumulate it?
People who want to prove their point of listening to music by citing Pythagoras (of whom pretty much nothing is known which is not speculative) are standing on shaky ground. What do his mathematical laws and observations about planets mean in the time of quantum mechanics and the hubble telescope? Even the notion that he was interested at all in mathematics is speculative. Maybe exactly this open field for speculation constitutes his popularity.
The word ‘harmony’ in music has undergone so many changes and (ab-)uses that there is no room here to give it much attention. As an example of changes in musical reception may serve what was considered ‘consonant’ in medieval times in comparison to today’s use.
The definition changed over time. To medieval musicians and theorists the interval of a sixth or third was not consonant. Obviously those theorists did not solely rely on Pythagorean mathematical ratios but on their ears. That means on a subjective way of judging relationships of sounds. According to that system already Bach would have been hopelessly lost in dissonances, not to mention the constant increase in harmonic tensions further on in the classical and romantic periods of the 18th to 20th century.
Anyway, there has always been consonance and dissonance to actually create some kind of harmony as accepted by the recipients at the time. Some individuals always began to challenge these traditions. For them the expressive power seemed to have faded over time. So they were looking for ways to make themselves heard in different ways than accomodating to current fashion or tradition, both of which inhibit the creative impulse of the individual artist.
An organic field of relational sounds plus a human soul organizing it in a personal manner is what makes music. So if you have nothing to say/express . . . then the ever repeated sound of a japanese shakuhachi doesn’t serve as inspirational music. It is a mere symbol of something utterly absent. Such sounds serve as appeasement music and are completely boring to anybody fully alive because neither a human’s subjective feelings/views nor interesting relationships between sounds are vibrating.
Healing sounds don’t exclude the process of tension and release either since no healing would occur without a more or less strong feeling of disturbance in a existing basically healthy energetic flow. The healing actually happens by increasing the efficiency of the flow, not by denying one side of the magnet.
What about extremely dissonant music without resolve whatsoever? An ongoing sound provocation doesn’t mean either that you have anything to say.
Aesthetic preferences may form out of the need for whatever is happening in someone’s life. But IF you feel alive I’d guess there is a resonance for a great diversity of vibrant music (or the exploration thereof).
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