more exhortation, dying down...

This one starts with an exhortation but then it calms down.. In all the exhortation (continual transformation, tonally), there is a lot of disruption in the chromaticism of it all. Gradually, patterns assert themselves (particularly rhythmically) - this is coercive. In becoming more chordal, there is less disruption, and more coercion. The question is, is the final silence transformative..? Is silence always transformative (exhortational)?

moving towards music theory

I'm feeling the need to articulate more fully how I think music works. I see it as a key example of a context for being human which we make through our being human. In this way it is no different from any other form of human activity.

It's effect on us is, I believe, fundamentally vicarious - we gain an insight into other lives through recognition of the outward manifestations of those lives. How the recognition works is through the effect of the music on our personal regulation. For me this boils down to coercion, disruption and exhortation... with the aesthetics being placed on the art of the composer in positioning (system 5) their musical gestures with our biological regulation. Get the aesthetics wrong, and the gestures don't ring true... our taste (system 5 again) intervenes and stops the communicating process.

Busy Saturday

A near-perfect day as we (Astrid, Izzy and me) went to see houses and then went to Levenshulme antiques market, and then onto Mossley. The video is a random screen recording which contains Izzy's 'stick animation' which she spent most of the afternoon doing (she loved it - we used to do this sort of thing with flick-books).

The music is meant to be optimistic - a lot of second-inversion chords - they allow for a lot of disruption because they never really settle anything tonally. This means that the coercive element in the music is more rhythmical than harmonic I think, and the rhythm can be a lot freer, itself sometimes disrupting the surface in the manner of Janacek.

exhortation

This is exhortational music: The impassioned statement; the vision of a better world; the moment of falling in love; the transformation. It's characterised by continual disruption in the changing harmonies, but regular patterns (coercive) in the rhythm, which also become disruptive. With such disruption, anything becomes possible. In other words, every instance of something in one context, is immediately placed in a new context, with new possibilities emerging. It may be a schizmogenic process... where does it end? a rupture, an explosion, after which memory is lost and all is new.

thinking music...

Went to see Don Carlos yesterday at the lowry with Astrid. It was brilliant. Verdi knew about real people and real politics.

I'm thinking about a VSM for music at the moment. What are the regulating mechanisms which determine how we hear music?
Here's my first stab:

1. Mechanism of instinctive reaction to perceptions
2. Mechanism of making sense out of perceptions
3. Mechanism of modelling future perceptions and expectation
4. Mechanism of taste

This is a bit like (but definitely different from) Peirce's firstness, secondness, thirdness, etc...
The bottom line is can it be modelled?

After marriage

This is my first blog post after being married at the weekend. Although it's not been a great day today (lost my touch politically!), and recovering from City University event yesterday, I wanted to do something happy. I am very happy at the moment, so this is meant to be really free, jazzy, contented...

Evolutionary consciousness, Lamarck and unfortunate ideas

The 'inheritance of acquired characteristics' is something which effectively underpins any view of humankind that sees consciousness as 'evolving'. "Look at the wonderful technology we now have, all the social reform, etc, etc" - human consciousness must be evolving! In other words, the acquired achievements of one age are inherited by the next.

This is a debate which raged in biology (it takes me back to Bateson, so comfortable territory!), concerning the development of Giraffes' necks and Elephants' trunks. Because one giraffe had to stretch, its descendants grew longer necks.

It is merely an idea, but a powerful one (which has for some time been discredited by the scientific community). It still exists in various forms - particularly in Dawkin's work.

What are it's political implications? The real problem for me is that it suggests that one idea is more enlightened than another, and that this idea will be inherited by future generations. Whose idea? Why theirs? It's an open invitation to manipulative people to expoit and abuse positions of power.

All-in-all, these political problems are a testament to the causal powers of ideas, which in many cases must be guarded against. The defenders are always human conscience and decency.

The social efficacy of some ideas is clearly better than others. What that means is that some distinctions are more effective than others at any particular point in history. At this point in history, Lamarck serves us poorly. Luhmann might be more interesting...

This improvisation is set to a diagram I did with Jim on the relationship between Shiva, Vishnu and Brahman and the VSM.