(no subject)
You ever think about music?
Because if you do, it's insane. Just think: human ears have (hang on while I look it up) a frequency range comprising 19,980 individual frequencies. And there's infinite shades of variety within that number, based on volume, sounds in conjunction, medium or conductivity, instrument, whatever. Basically, an endless progression of possible noises, and cherrypicked from it, ten thousand years of sound arranged. Think about it. Someone, at some point in the past, must have sat down and invented a guitar. Just invented it! A device to make a sound no one had ever heard before, no one had ever imagined before, a sound with no analogue in the natural world. If carving statues is like freeing forms buried in marble by chipping away at the prison, what's music on a guitar when there's never been a guitar before? It'd be like being born inside a block of marble, and freeing yourself using tools you'd never seen before. Why?
You tell me. Tell me what song was playing in the background the first time you had sex. Tell me what song you want played at your funeral. Tell me...why bother. It doesn't matter, the point is you know.
I collect sounds. More to the point I collect chords. I have no idea if there's any commonality to the chords I've collected, but notes on their own don't really interest me. It's chords...especially if they resolve themselves out of black noise. All those ugly, disparate elements, and you shake them together for one second and it's something that's about as good a synecdoche for being human as any second long endeavor we've ever embarked upon as a species. (so is music's polar opposite, cemetaries, now that I think of it. But I've already waffled on about them)
Some of my favorites:
Minute 7:19 in Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings
Arma-geddon FLAME! From 'Holiday' by Green Day
...the minor fall the major lift, the baffled king composing...
The final "Super Automatic" from 'Let It Rain' by OKGO
There are others. Religion found many of the best ones; that's probably behind my theory that, while not all the best songs contain the word 'hallelujah,' any song that contains it is probably good. (Think of a Venn diagram.)
There's probably a very simple, first-year-music-student commonality in the chords I collect. A similar tonal profile or something. I barely hear them after a few listens. Rather I'm looking for chords that but a certain pressure on the esophagus. You know it. The squeeze that tells you, in no particular order, 'You're not alone in the world. There are others like you. They share your wisdom. You are so special. You are loved. The world is as wonderful a place as you've always suspected.'
You can see why I don't talk about this much. It's stupid, and probably completely incomprehensible to anyone who's never had to play a song ten times through just to be able to get to sleep.
I often think about the different fields of art. Why you work in one but not the other. Aside from lack of talent, that is. I have a theory for a few of them; novels, I think, capture life as we like to organize it in our memory. This happened, it caused that and the other thing, and this is what it all means. Films capture life as we observe it happening to other people; we go through most of our lives, after all, suspecting that everyone else is prettier and more interesting than we are, and that's how movie people are. And comics...comics are the best representation of the way a story alchemizes itself in our heads as it's being told. They're not meant to be about real people; not unless your friend's ex girlfriend really was an angel, or your dad really did catch a fish that big. They're about the teller's representation of themselves, and how that representation manifests in your subconscious as you hear. Talk about your best night out in college and see if you can do it without a POW! or a KRAK!
I don't know if I have a theory for music. It's easily the least clothed of the art fields; maybe that's why teenagers make so much of it. Maybe that's my theory; music is for a point in your life, not a statement. It's for a few moments of veil-ripped reality we all experience and then try to relive.
I like to make music. It's been a long time since I let anyone hear me do so, but when I do...I love it, actually. I love to sing. I sing all the time; alone in an apartment it's either that or start knitting. I haven't let anyone hear me sing in a while...it's an odd, vulnerable kind of activity, even though I suspect EVERYONE does it and not just in the shower. What I'd really like to be able to do is write music; but I've never been able to. I think the idea scares me. Most art does; I read a good book, see a brilliant film, or replay my chord collection and I don't want to besmirch them with my mildewy fumblings toward art. Music especially though. It's frightening.
So tonight, I'm thinking about it. And writing about it.
Maybe next time I'll sing some.
-
By the way, anyone got any good chords for me?
Because if you do, it's insane. Just think: human ears have (hang on while I look it up) a frequency range comprising 19,980 individual frequencies. And there's infinite shades of variety within that number, based on volume, sounds in conjunction, medium or conductivity, instrument, whatever. Basically, an endless progression of possible noises, and cherrypicked from it, ten thousand years of sound arranged. Think about it. Someone, at some point in the past, must have sat down and invented a guitar. Just invented it! A device to make a sound no one had ever heard before, no one had ever imagined before, a sound with no analogue in the natural world. If carving statues is like freeing forms buried in marble by chipping away at the prison, what's music on a guitar when there's never been a guitar before? It'd be like being born inside a block of marble, and freeing yourself using tools you'd never seen before. Why?
You tell me. Tell me what song was playing in the background the first time you had sex. Tell me what song you want played at your funeral. Tell me...why bother. It doesn't matter, the point is you know.
I collect sounds. More to the point I collect chords. I have no idea if there's any commonality to the chords I've collected, but notes on their own don't really interest me. It's chords...especially if they resolve themselves out of black noise. All those ugly, disparate elements, and you shake them together for one second and it's something that's about as good a synecdoche for being human as any second long endeavor we've ever embarked upon as a species. (so is music's polar opposite, cemetaries, now that I think of it. But I've already waffled on about them)
Some of my favorites:
Minute 7:19 in Samuel Barber's Adagio For Strings
Arma-geddon FLAME! From 'Holiday' by Green Day
...the minor fall the major lift, the baffled king composing...
The final "Super Automatic" from 'Let It Rain' by OKGO
There are others. Religion found many of the best ones; that's probably behind my theory that, while not all the best songs contain the word 'hallelujah,' any song that contains it is probably good. (Think of a Venn diagram.)
There's probably a very simple, first-year-music-student commonality in the chords I collect. A similar tonal profile or something. I barely hear them after a few listens. Rather I'm looking for chords that but a certain pressure on the esophagus. You know it. The squeeze that tells you, in no particular order, 'You're not alone in the world. There are others like you. They share your wisdom. You are so special. You are loved. The world is as wonderful a place as you've always suspected.'
You can see why I don't talk about this much. It's stupid, and probably completely incomprehensible to anyone who's never had to play a song ten times through just to be able to get to sleep.
I often think about the different fields of art. Why you work in one but not the other. Aside from lack of talent, that is. I have a theory for a few of them; novels, I think, capture life as we like to organize it in our memory. This happened, it caused that and the other thing, and this is what it all means. Films capture life as we observe it happening to other people; we go through most of our lives, after all, suspecting that everyone else is prettier and more interesting than we are, and that's how movie people are. And comics...comics are the best representation of the way a story alchemizes itself in our heads as it's being told. They're not meant to be about real people; not unless your friend's ex girlfriend really was an angel, or your dad really did catch a fish that big. They're about the teller's representation of themselves, and how that representation manifests in your subconscious as you hear. Talk about your best night out in college and see if you can do it without a POW! or a KRAK!
I don't know if I have a theory for music. It's easily the least clothed of the art fields; maybe that's why teenagers make so much of it. Maybe that's my theory; music is for a point in your life, not a statement. It's for a few moments of veil-ripped reality we all experience and then try to relive.
I like to make music. It's been a long time since I let anyone hear me do so, but when I do...I love it, actually. I love to sing. I sing all the time; alone in an apartment it's either that or start knitting. I haven't let anyone hear me sing in a while...it's an odd, vulnerable kind of activity, even though I suspect EVERYONE does it and not just in the shower. What I'd really like to be able to do is write music; but I've never been able to. I think the idea scares me. Most art does; I read a good book, see a brilliant film, or replay my chord collection and I don't want to besmirch them with my mildewy fumblings toward art. Music especially though. It's frightening.
So tonight, I'm thinking about it. And writing about it.
Maybe next time I'll sing some.
-
By the way, anyone got any good chords for me?