Re: Music a story or something else - WAS looper vs storyteller. if there even is

[Nevyn Nowhere <nevynnowhere@gmail.com>]

Anders, when improvising, do you never say "this is the setting, the tone, I am speaking of this emotion, or from this story that happened to me, or that I read of" in your mind, and try to translate that musically?  I suppose that would be, to me, a more abstract way of still semi concretely storytelling with forethought.

-nn
happyhumans.org

On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 11:13 AM, Anders Bergdahl <anders_e_bergdahl@hotmail.com> wrote:

I basically agree, but the very basic difference is that music speaks to emotions directly bypassing our language. II think we might do music a disservice by saying that we create stories we need to understand that music can be wordless. I'm not sure but I think that Evans, Jarret et al does not think stories. I only REALLY know how i improvise and i seldom try say something, i might start out with a mood or sound that want to explore and then i start playing and try to react to what i hear and it quite often end up being rather different than i thought it would. I recently saw Mike Landau and he really painted with guitar, much closer to visual than narrative art. I cant really ever say that instrumental music ever made me think of a narrative or story, pictures developing and changing, like a film. Maybe the music, film, pictures could be seen as a sort of "story" and I'm tempted to say that some music is a journey from one place to another, one picture after another and yeas i can give the jorney a name and perhaps invent a narrative or story around it.
I like to think of instrumental music as abstract art, it is what it is, it's not a picture OF something. A bit like Kandinsky's compositions  the are not a picture OF something they are just the puicture