Just for the record: you have not aggravated me. And there is an
ancillary point that goes along with this "force feeding" idea. That
is that people do not have an infinite capacity for digesting music.
The listener's mind does, indeed, shut down when it is full. I
prefer to choose my musical nutrition.
One of the most egregious examples of this kind of thing is the
practice of playing recorded music before performances of live music
in some venues.
Chuck
On Feb 21, 2007, at 6:25 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Andrew: I will spell it out for you:
I understand Pavlov's experiment.
They bells combined with the feeding caused their minds to expect food
when they hear a bell, hence the behavior of salivation. My analogy
is not
perfect, but the if the constant overexposure to music causes us to
subconciously filter it out or block it, isn't that blocking
behavior akin
to the salivation?
And... I never said anything about the STYLE of music. You and someone
else who responded intimated that this was related to a particular
style
of music. RUBBISH; It has to do with ALL MUSIC getting force fed in
every
conceivable environment.
You also missed the point with you remarks about your familiarity with
Haydn's music. YOU SOUGHT OUT THE MUSIC. It was not force fed to you
everywhere you went. And I beg to differ that muzak is not more
prevalent
now that it was 50 years ago. And it is naive to claim that there
is not a
concerted effort to manipulate the music industry marketplace by Muzak
(the corporation) and everyone else who licenses recorded music (from
publishers, recording companies, radio stations and their
playlists, et
al), which ultimately leads to somewhat less than your democratic
view of
supply and demand driven by the consumer. When I go to the market,
I go to
buy groceries, not listen to music. When I want to listen to music, I
select what I want to hear.
I'm going to drop this issue and let everyone indulge their own
conclusions. It apparantly is a divisive issue rather than and
unifying
one, which surprises me.
And I don't want to aggravate my colleagues as I seem to have done
by not
staying true to the intent of this site, which is Finale.
On Feb 20, 2007, at 1:00 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Just a quick recall of the bells and Pavlov's dogs should
illustrate what happens with repeated stimulus; If they salivate
whenever
they hear a bell now, when someone who has systematically and
subconsciously shut down their antennae to music, what do you think
happens when they get in a concert hall (if they even go)?
Pavlov's dogs salivated because they had been taught to associate the
sound of a bell w. the provision of food. Where's the analogy?
Do you honestly
believe that they still have the same facility to hear/perceive
music
as
well as they could before the saturation syndrome? I'm not talking
about
the "educated" and disciplined listeners who are dedicated to their
appreciation of music (like the readers of the Copland book); I'm
talking
about the millions of every day folk who are becoming numbed to the
experience through no fault of their own. And who will not seek
it out
as
a consequence of the overexposure. If I'm wrong, I don't see
anything
to
support your claim that it's garbage: everything I see leads me
to the
conclusions I've made.
The tendency to view popular music with alarm is very old.
Decriers of
ragtime, early jazz, and rock-n-roll in their day all took the exact
same position that you are taking: that popular music deadens the
soul
and makes it impervious to more sophisticated fare. Theodor Adorno
built an entire career on this notion, presenting it at book
length in
his most opaque German (translated into equally opaque English).
Charles Ives and T.S. Eliot both decried "phonographs and
gasoline" as
spiritually deadening--which a century of subsequent history has
proven
they are not.
All these critics have it upside down: popular music is composed and
distributed because it is what people want to hear. It is just not
true
to assert that the music comes first and is imposed manipulatively
upon
an unthinking populace. What is going on here is basic
supply-and-demand, nothing else.
All that has changed--the *only* thing--is that people can get
*whatever* music they want more easily, quickly, and in greater
variety
than ever before. Popular music is by definition the music of the
great
mass of people, and therefore the greatest mass of available music
will
be popular music. Nothing is being forced on anyone, and no-one is
forced to hear music they don't seek out. (Musak and its ilk have
been
around for 50 years and are no more pervasive now than when first
introduced).
As a child of my generation, I am aurally familiar with all 107 Haydn
symphonies, which nobody of any previous generation (except Haydn
himself!) could say. Am I therefore to be deemed less able to
appreciate them--or other music--than the less Haydn-saturated
folk of
yore? Or does classical music saturation not count, somehow?
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_______________________________________________
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Chuck Israels
230 North Garden Terrace
Bellingham, WA 98225-5836
phone (360) 671-3402
fax (360) 676-6055
www.chuckisraels.com
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