Make it musical

By Anonymous -
Street musicians in Chicago performing on buckets

Throughout the reading, the same though continue to remain in my mind that Anne Rasmussen posed in the beginning of her writings: What is music? 

Although the answer seems clear, there are people who find find ambient "background" noise as music. Is the difference in music or not that intention and effort put in? Even the presence of an instrument doesn't exactly equate to people considering it music. Think, for example, about a novice playing the saxophone (or many wind instruments, actually), people around them may say that it's not music and may even call it "racket". Older people talking about music of a younger generation may call it noise ("turn off that noise!"). This eliminates the idea that just an instrument is needed to indeed make something musical.

For that matter; What is an instrument? 

 Colloquially, instruments pop into our heads that are made with the intention to produce music. But anything can be an instrument. The image above shows that. Also I found an article that discusses a symphony created by street noises. You can watch clips and read more about it here. Of course, cross culturally what we hear as noise could be another's music. Are all street noises the same? If not, what does it mean that they're different? Does music mean the same thing to everyone?


Comments

  1. Jonathan Brumberg-KrausMarch 21, 2018 at 8:11 AM

    Great observations and questions! Does music have universal forms or functions?

    ReplyDelete

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