Music Club: Ouverture (Term XXII Activity #01)

[flyingharmony.livejournal.com]

Activity: Ouverture
Points: Long debate: Participation 10pts, Additional comment: 2pts, 30pts limit.
Deadline: Submit your answers by Monday, April 30th @ 22:59 UTC (timezone converter).
Details: New club leader, new luck, don't they say? Let's start with discussing a fundamental question: Music. We all love music, at least we who joined the music club. But what does music mean? Can we define music like we can define physical laws? What does music mean to us, how does it influence our lives, our thinking, etc? There's lots of material for discussions. As always, you'll get ten points for your initial comment (which should be at least 100-150 words long) and two more for each additional comment (I'm not giving you any limits for this, but please, show that you've put some thought and effort in it, just saying "I agree/don't agree" isn't enough) with a limit of 30 points as a total.

Note: I've turned notifications off for this, so if there are any questions etc, feel free to contact me via PM!

Note #2: As always, please don't forget to sign each comment with your name&house and to check if you're on the roster - there will be no grace periods!

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent. Victor Hugo recommends you to join the Club.

Comments

[lotrangel17.livejournal.com]

Music is vital and very influential to peoples lives. A song or a lyric can bring back a memory whether it be a strong memory or one we want to forget. When we are babies we are sung lullabies by our parents, when we are children we dance around the room and act crazy, when we are married our first dance and our dance with our father/mother is a memory that lasts a lifetime, the song that is played at our funeral whether we be a person from New Orleans with jazz or an cop and the haunting song of the bagpipes.

Music is a very strong part of my life as well. I always have music playing whether it be on my laptop on last fm or on the tv on the music channels. I play cds on the way to and from school for my kids so we can sing songs together. The hymns that we sing in Mass can bring tears to my eyes they are so moving and inspirational. No one is immune to the Amazing Grace and the memories it invokes from hearing it played at a funeral. I hope that I can pass on to my children my love of music the way I have my love of books.

Steph//Puff//216 words

[anbyrobanby.livejournal.com]

It's interesting a discussion, what defines music. You would be tempted to say it's melodic, but you can have some amazing percussion that is very much nothing to do with pitch sequences. You could say an instrument is key, but some of the best music is purely vocal- singing a cappella for instance. Heck, birdsong is often musical.... yet it doesn't quite fit in a nice neat box. It's very tricky to quantify music, but I think it's better represented by what it does to the recipient. After all, what one person may call Music, another might call Turn Down That Bleeding Noise. It's totally subjective, but I think music should resonate with something within you. Some people might go as so far sa to say it touches your soul (though I find that a bit precocious). Regardless, it's a sound you'd want to listen to again and again, and you'd often find out something new about it (or, possibly, yourself) each time you pay it heed. You can't say the same thing about a car alarm.

Rob//Gryffindor

[anbyrobanby.livejournal.com]

It's quite interesting how you tie in memory to music- because often people do say the two things are fairly closely intertwined. I know I find certain songs remind me of certain people, memories, and events.... yet it's rarely overwhelming.
I like the way you mention how music connects with one's culture, too. I think this is one thing that underlies our human experience: similar, yet different.

Rob//Gryffindor

[mmailliw.livejournal.com]

Back when I was in undergrad - hard to believe it was actually a full decade ago - I had the 'pleasure' of taking a course on music in fin-de-siecle Vienna. Essentially, although we were lured in at the beginning with pretty nineteenth century waltzes, we very quickly moved past that to the beginning of the twentieth century studying a composer whose works pushed the definition of music: Arnold Schoenberg. Sure, his earlier stuff - like Verklarte Nacht - actually sounded good, but then we learned about the early 20th century notion of "liberation of the UGLY" in music and art which apparently meant, as far as I could tell, that art was supposed to look as bad as possible and music was supposed to sound like noise just to be "new"... marked in Schoenberg's case by breaking completely from tonality and creating pieces which, to me at least, sound like someone with no sense of music and a blindfold on walked over to the piano and started pressing notes at random without paying attention to such things as how the notes sounded in combination with each other. (To see what I mean, take a listen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrjg3jzP2uI for a representative example).
Everything after that seemed even worse... his magnum opus seemed to be a 21-part opera called "Pierrot lunaire", each act of which consisted of someone singing in a "Sprechstimme" (half singing, half speaking) where the pitches of the notes were almost completely random along with two or three instruments playing out of tune, with no pair of instruments being in sync with each other or with the Sprechstimme. And don't get me started on his 'twelve-tone' system which he invented next...

I guess what I'm trying to say is that a lot of the modern classical music, starting from that Schoenberg noise, does not really strike me as MUSIC because it is not created to sound good and, at times, almost sounds as if it was designed to be as unpleasant-sounding as humanly possible!

William//Slytherin

[meredith44]

I don't ever remember a time when I wasn't around music. In fact, my first word was "row" as in "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." (I'd say that I was sorry for my parents that my first words weren't "Mama" and "Dada", but it was their fault for singing to me. :D ) I always played around on whatever instruments I could find, whether it was my toy drums and xylophones or my grandmother's piano, and I started formal lessons (on the violin) at age 5. Music is such a part of me, that I pretty much constantly have one song or another running through my head at all times. It tends to help me focus, which is a good thing for someone with ADD!

As a preschool teacher, I've also seen the power of music working through children. Often kids who lack language skills (because they are speech delayed, autistic, whatever) will respond to music and be able to follow along with the hand motions or sing the lyrics, even if they don't talk much otherwise. Also, music is such a communal experience. It could be the kids joining hands and spontaneously performing "Ring Around the Rosie". It could be drawing the kids in with a song that involves their names. (They particularly love "A Ram Sam Sam" at the moment in my class.) It could be all the kids stopping what they are doing to dance when a particular favorite song starts playing on the radio. Or it could be at formal circle time, when kids who generally won't listen to a book for more than a couple of minutes at a time will perform along to a myriad of songs together, often laughing the whole time.

I just can't imagine my life without music!

Meredith // Hufflepuff

[shellzconlon.livejournal.com]

Oh geez, so much to talk about. Music is everywhere, I think we can all agree on this much. From a very young age, children are sung to (and apparently they can hear music in the womb, hm). It helps us learn, like the ABC's and in my case, the quadratic formula. It can get a party started or calm down a room. Lyrics can inspire you to pick yourself up from a bad breakup or make you want to rage dance and get all of those negative emotions out. A song can be interpreted a hundred different ways. Music can help you escape your reality, even for just a short while. It's like reading a book for your ears. When you read a book your mind takes you elsewhere and you don't care what's going on around you. Same with music. When you put on those headphones, you're just...gone. Music is the one thing we can all agree on (maybe not the types of music, but you catch my drift).

Michelle/Gryffindor

[beautifulbluee.livejournal.com]

Music is a huge part of my life. I don't think you can define music in broad terms because it depends so much on the individual. Music can mean totally different things for different people and that's one of the things that is so great about it.

For me, music can help out with my current moods. I have songs I like to listen to for working out that really pump me up, songs I love to dance to, songs to listen to when I'm sad, songs that cheer me up, and songs that represent certain moments or certain people in my life.

I don't need a specific reason to listen to music either. Most of the time I just throw my iphone on shuffle and let musical fate do the rest. And don't even get me started on concerts, festivals and live music haha.

Lindsay / Hufflepuff

[slumber.livejournal.com]

I think there are ways to measure music, maybe, in that there are beats and cadences and pitches, but I don't know that music is something that can be defined completely. What is music to some can be noise to others, or even poetry, sometimes. I think it sometimes means different things to different people, and that it should. Like writing, and paintings, and really, any other form of art, music is something that the creator has a right to define as they wish and the audience has the same right to interpret and make their own.

Personally, I'm interested in what music makes me feel at any given time. Sometimes the lyrics have a lot to do with it, but sometimes I just find the mood I'm in has a lot to do with what I like listening to.

Evy/Claw/140

[slumber.livejournal.com]

This, all of it. That's exactly how I am with music! :D Sometimes I feel kind of, I don't know, like I'm not ~picky enough or something with what I listen to, or that I'm maybe not educated enough because I can't talk about the history/importance of a genre, but music is a broad enough topic that it shouldn't matter how I enjoy it, should it?

Evy/Claw

[slumber.livejournal.com]

Haha, I was gonna disagree when you said it was the one thing we can all agree on, especially because it seems to me that a lot of my friends are really pretty opinionated when it comes to what music they'll listen to and what they won't, but I have yet to meet anyone who doesn't enjoy music, so you're definitely right on that count. There's a song for every emotion out there, and more waiting to be written.

Evy/Claw

[slumber.livejournal.com]

That's amazing! I have a friend who works (or I think it's "wants to work") in music therapy. I do think of music as another form of communication and can be quite fantastic once utilized properly.

Evy/Claw

[slumber.livejournal.com]

I do think that's a pretty interesting viewpoint--and as I was writing up my initial comment here, I wondered if anyone had ever tried to push beyond the boundaries of music as an art form to challenge the common conceptions or ideas of what it was. I'm inclined to think that yes, it still falls under music, and can still be defined as music, but it just becomes something that is evaluated by taste/preference. (Perhaps not positively.) I mean, after all, going by this notion, plenty of artists have become quite known figures because they broke the mold of what was deemed acceptable or normal, right? So if they can do it, who's to say Schoenberg was just ahead of his time? (Still ahead, too, as I agree with your assessment--that video you linked to is kind of disjointed and jarring.)

Evy/Claw

[slumber.livejournal.com]

I think this is because music is an art form, for me at least, and as such it becomes defined less by what it is than by what its audience/creator thinks it is, if that makes sense?

(Admittedly, I am of the opinion that I can put a can of soup in the middle of the road and call it an art installation. I may do that cheekily but there will be people who can derive from the piece some interpretation that moves them, one way or another. But just because I didn't mean anything by creating the piece does not mean it loses any sort of artistic significance, though, does it?)

Evy/Claw

[slumber.livejournal.com]

This is fairly true-- I tend to associate music with a lot of different memories. I think one of the biggest examples for me is listening to church songs. I went to a Catholic school where we regularly held mass and a big part of those were the songs that we sung. For the major milestones in our lives (first communion, confirmation, graduations, etc) we would spend hours of our days singing songs over and over again. I am not the most religious person in the world (nor am I its best singer) but I loved singing those songs. I was always with my friends and we always had fun and sometimes when we went on long road trips we amused ourselves by singing various church songs and working on the blending for them. There's just something completely calming and soothing with singing them again, all these years later.

Evy/Claw

[slumber.livejournal.com]

One of the things I really enjoyed about the Hunger Games series was actually the way it used music. I think it handled it with authenticity, how there were songs that their parents sang and whose words and melodies came to them long after they last heard them. It was used also as a reflection of their culture. I think there's a reason the scenes with songs touched a chord in most readers. (I have no idea if you've read it or not so I'm trying to be as vague as possible, lol.)

Evy/Claw