This is a reply from one of my good friends and Mentor, Jean Serra, to the music and visualization post. The original post is here: http://principia-musicmanica.blogspot.com/2010/09/music-visualization-and-imagination-i.html
It was sent sometime back in December, thanks to my laziness, it comes out only now :)
This was sent sometime back and has made me think of music differently.
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1rst December 2010
To Ravi,
Let me try and tell you, with my poor own words, how I feel music. I guess that music is a trick that we, humans, invented to access and to enjoy another music, more spiritual, that we have in soul and which is purely silent. But this second music is not written, nor even fixed, and we can just touch it, shortly, and never in a durable manner.
For reaching the goal, we have two or three means. One is to reveal the silence as emerging from the sounds. Indeed, the only way to actually feel silence is to discover it as a palpable background of the sounds. Vivaldi, in your example of the four seasons, uses superbly the technique. Background and foreground are almost symmetrical in durations and locations. The second method consists of echoes, souvenirs, repetitions for remaining you some little melody who previously entered your mind. And the third method is the consequence of that. For managing all effects of nice repetitions, music needs to be constructed. For being “adult”, I mean for being a real art, it has to develop letters, words, and sentences in the flow of the time. It is this whole construction that you progressively enter, often not at the first audition, and that suggests you, urges you to penetrate the second music, that of the soul. A a first glance, this construction may seem abstract, of course, but it is always a story, with a beginning and an end, with suspense, with diversions, where some moments must be boring for provoking others, etc..
And curiously, music generates also exactly the opposite. It may prevent you against the spiritual mode. It may make you addict as if it was a drug, by the amount of decibels (dancings), by the rhythm, by the obsession of some theme that you cannot reject. For doing so, it refuses the construction, and bases its power on the incantation. And we want also this effect, we like it.
Another point. How to be active, rather than passive, in listening music? One could think that an interpreter participates in the musical creation more actively than an auditor, but it is not always true. He can perfectly play on his keyboard and sleep at the same time. Dancing is better, the dancer is passive in that he hears, and active in that he moves his body with the sounds. In terms of your approach, he creates a visualisation, but he does not see it from the outside. Same comment when a few musicians play together.
According to you, is the track “tracid”, visually splendid, an “adult” music, or incantatory? And “any colour you like” (which is visually poorer)? But beyond that, there appears another question. According to you, does the first mode of music, the constructive one, lend itself to images? I have the impression that it is because the specimens you show in the blog are precisely without musical structure that images can fit with them. Am I right? Indeed, some of your specimens are constructed music, as for example Vivaldi’s winter, and “nothing else” with its duo of flutes. But their animations are not external images. They are a mixture of the partition and of the time.frequency diagram. Is it really a time.frequency diagram that an imaginative child wanted to see through music when he was a boy, 15 years ago?
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That was one of the best interpretations of music i have heard( and obviously great words from a great man :) )! He goes on with a few more comments. There are a lot of interesting points in there and would surely be answering a few in the next upcoming post. I really appreciate and thank Jean in taking the time and effort to go through my attempts at this topic.
Best
Ravi
