We are to delineate Art in terms of the real and imagined senses that it engages and the tools of its art-form that it employs.
So let's take a look at Music in its pure form. I understand music to be the organization and application of sound.
Music's tools consist of volume, rhythm, language (word-play and word-idea), melody (tune, pitch, progressions), acoustics (tone, timbre) and dynamics (variations of arrangement). Music engages hearing (the real sense). In the processing phase, the imagined senses (all the other 4 senses are engaged which are largely informed through association with prior schema. The senses engaged are also inclusive of space-time awareness) and the production of meaning is achieved.
On the second level, Music can also exist as an image and sound-scape (of a musician producing music). This is where problems set in.
When producing music as a means of bridging towards the truth, the ideal situation is that the musician self-empties and becomes a medium and/or facilitator through the production of music and his/her bodily and emotive actions.
But what often happens is that the audience may interpret and add on dimensions which in turn causes further layering and distancing. They may get distracted from the capture of the essence and instead be mesmerized by the performance. This then leads to music in its less purer form: as Entertainment.
When we examine the idea of Music as Entertainment, we can see that there are many non-art elements involved in what we deem as contemporary music appreciation. These include the attractiveness of the musician, the dynamics of the bodily and emotive actions involved in the image-scape and the pageantry of the performance as an event.
Music then suffers from a confusion of Form VS Function whereby Form gets overemphasized over Function. It then renders music not as a phenomenon to be processed but instead to be consumed.
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