Klarinet Archive - Posting 000927.txt from 2000/09

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: [kl] Smiling and feelings
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 19:48:48 -0400

Bill Wright wrote:

> When someone says, "I express my feelings in my music", well....
> this statement appears not to be entirely true for musicians who use
> an embouchure to play (when judged by PET scans and neural anatomy).

Thinking about this a bit more, it's of course true that playing music
is more like acting than it is like smiling, which is perhaps what you
were wanting to say. (What your book is saying is that smiling is
'hardwired' in some sense.)

The 'feelings' that are expressed when you play music aren't just those
that you are experiencing at the time (although sometimes you may happen
to be experiencing them). They're the feelings that you take the music
to be after communicating.

So, you're concerned that it 'sounds right', rather than that you're
doing authentic things, whatever that might mean. You do whatever it
takes to get it to sound right.

Of course, what 'right' means in 'sounding right' may be very surprising
to you at certain moments, which is why the whole enterprise is alive.

But I don't think that's a particularly mysterious thing. If you don't
have an arm, for example, merely a prosthesis, it's possible to imagine
you making a genuine gentle gesture of affection with that prosthesis to
someone else -- stroking *their* arm, for example -- even though the
muscle movements to generate the gesture might be quite different ones
from those used for essentially the same gesture by someone who did have
their own arm.

And making that gesture might come upon you quite unexpectedly.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

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