Status Updates From Music and the Mind

During the interval of a concert, various members of the audience chat to him ( Proust):

But what were their words, which like every human and external word left me so indifferent, compared with the heavenly phrase of music with which I had just been communing?

Worringer claimed that modern aesthetics was based upon the be-haviour of the contemplating subject. If the subject is to enjoy a work of art, he must absorb himself into it, make himself one with it. But this empathic identification with the work is only one way of approaching it.

There are tracings recording the increase in Herbert von Karajan’s pulse-rate while conducting Beethoven’s Overture, Leonora No. 3. Interestingly, his pulse-rate showed the greatest increase during those passages which most moved him emotionally, and not during those in which he was making the greatest physical effort.

Rousseau, argued that musical sounds accompanied or preceded speech as we know it.

‘It is not hunger or thirst, but love, hatred, pity and anger which drew from men their first vocal utterances.’ Primitive men sing to one another in order to express their feelings before they come to speak to one another in order to express their thoughts.

Stravinsky points out that natural sounds, like the murmur of the breeze in the trees, the rippling of a brook or the song of a bird, suggest music to us but are not themselves music: ‘I conclude that tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act.’