The three basic elements for a musical experience are: a musician, an audience and the relationship between them.
We can consider the history of music as the evolution of a “sound language” due to cultural (social and economical) changes. This evolution has always been carried out by the musicians (composers and performers), deeply worried about keeping the communication channel open to the audience.
Since the beginning of the 1900, art became something new: Modern Art and Contemporary Art broke the obsolete rules in favour of an innovative fresh perspective. New society, new culture and new economical power need a new language for a new level of communication. Of course, music was part of this epochal change! But music has a peculiarity; it goes straight to the feelings of the audience. That’s the power of music…but this peculiarity hides a problem: the audience (or the most part of it) will always be superslow and lazy to accept any changes in music language (in fact we love modern architecture, design furnishing, avant-garde paintings or abstract scultures but very few people like to listen to Schoenberg, Stockhausen or Ligeti’s works).
Music communication stops when the musician gives up running after the audience! Then the “Market law” takes place: I sell what you want to buy. And the noble purity of art is instantly ruled by interest and money.
Today we stand in front of a new epochal change. I believe that we are free enough to exponentially increase our quality of life. Of course, most of us don’t know how to use this freedom (it is not easy to escape from prejudices and old cultural mentalities) but anything can change, if we believe that it is only a matter of responsibility. Yes, my freedom is my responsibility!
I can open my mind. I can decide to eat healthy. I can open my heart… And then there is the “Action Time”: I WANT to open my mind, I WANT to eat healthy, I WANT to open my heart….
If I allow falsehood in art, I enable any falsity in my life. Falseness is a cultural pattern, an automatic response mechanism driven by consumerism and publicity. I persuade you that what I sell is what you need.
Music can be the starting point: I WANT to open and change my way of listening to music. This will make me free from cultural patterns and automatic mechanisms. Patterns and mechanisms are cages in music as in life.
To change our “listening mode” means, first of all, to know what the subliminal messages of a musical language are. Every composer knows what the audience likes the most: emotions. It is very easy to use music to feed the emotional hunger of an audience. A sweet melody or a strong rhythm will target my composition chasing the audience taste and finally selling my music as any other goods.
I need to choose between a fake entertaining music, easy listening that goes straight to my limbic system and drives my emotions, or an engaging puzzling composition that makes me feel totally weird but allows me to skip my basic listening automatism.
This is moving my “listening mode” to a new level, allowing the sound to invade my soul and to connect the two cerebral emispheres. This means harmonizing my thinking with my feelings to discover the beauty of a new acoustic experience. Ultimately this means that my balanced state of mind is free and able to embrace the whole universe.
This is the mindfullness experience coming out from patterns waiver: it is a true sound meditation.
It is the audience responsibility to change the “listening mode” in order to win the battle against the market law and conquer the opportunity of today’s freedom; on the other hand, composers will do their part by respecting the audience effort, grounding their style and language in an accurate and precise structure; otherwise communication will fall again in the same obsolete false rules of deceit (it is too easy to get a synthesizer and put together sounds or effects just following a personal taste to show something new). I like to ground my music in math sequences, fractals or Fibonacci’s strings that inspire a new sound relation system: a new acoustic world to be explored together with the audience.
Numbers and mathematics represent the human view of the universe that, converted into music, will harmonize individuals and societies in a new culture of fullfilled freedom.
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