Klarinet Archive - Posting 000983.txt from 2003/02

From: b1rite@-----. Rite)
Subj: [kl] Music vs. motion
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 15:57:05 -0500

This is my final comment about "Music and the Mind" by Anthony Storr
..... I promise!

A few months ago --- and this is not intended as an 'ad hominem' ---
someone posted that the Nutcracker doesn't fill them with a sense of
motion. I know that the other person was 100% sincere, but this is
impossible for me to imagine. In the end, the pair of us had to fall
back on the standard accommodation that "Different people respond to
music in different ways." Certainly this example proves it.

Also a few months ago, I quoted a paragraph from "Music and the Mind"
which ended with: "[....] the fact that musical movement is more
apparent than real will be discussed later."

...well, "later" has arrived.

The final chapter discusses, in detail, the cross-talk that occurs
between various portions of our nervous system as we play & listen to
music. Despite the fact that PET scans show that language and music
cause different areas of the brain to become active, it is still true
that neither language nor music can happen without this cross-talk.

I'm not going to type a bunch of quotations. So everyone can breathe a
sigh of relief. But I have to say that (imo) every person who wants to
understand music completely, rather than just to play it (and who hasn't
read the book already), should read this one. It's a $15 book in
paperback ($14, actually). It's written in conversational English
without recourse to tiresome jargon, and it's much more than just 'a
worthwhile read'.

... okay, so I lied just a little bit:

"But music promotes order within ourselves in a way which mathematics
cannot because of music's physical effects."

Cheers,
Bill

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