Clearing

The art of thinking begins with emotional restraint.

This is by no means a suppression of feeling, but rather a conscious, deliberate rejection of emotional subjectivity.  Awareness is altered, impressions gain clarity, subtlety of perception is enhanced.

Accordingly, the creative arts that reflect such perspectives are distinct from those motivated by the expression of emotion and personality.

Listen, Hear, See, Go.

Under the burden of subjectivity, the senses cannot be reliable.

What happens to be unseen, unheard, or unapproached by thought and feeling yet remains. Action, stillness, contemplation, perceptivity and creativity become, at times, conscious choices.

And art follows.

Avenue Canyon, Carpet Whisper, Windy Pines

Music enters awareness as various sets of sound patterns, usually songs with which children become familiar. These differ in tone, form, and perceived content from aural imagery produced environmentally, whether found in nature or in settings like streets, buildings and other common areas.

Then comes recognition and understanding; the instruments, beats, chants, popular songs, classical works and diverse artists; hymns, voices, ballads, soloists, stars and superstars, soundtracks and radios and collections of any and all things with melody, harmony, structure and rhythm-- and all are seemingly inexhaustible.

Yet the first world heard before the learned perception of the musical forms and genres is the real world as well; it is change, imagination its catalyst, and its sounds are essential elements that suggest possibilities beyond those given to represent music.

Course of Aural Imagery

Suppose all sounds in continuum.

Regard listening and hearing, to the extent possible, as uninterrupted experience.

Reception, Perception, Apprehension, Knowledge

In the lost realms of reason, it was believed that reality could be approached in objective and transcendent terms.

The senses open, attention is engaged, impressions take place, and then those impressions are assessed by the mind as true, false, or indifferent, depending upon information at hand.

Certainly this implies the need for awareness that the search for critical knowledge is a process that never ends, and that the unknown may be, at times, within one's grasp.

To Eye and Ear, the Real

Much of what is seen and heard happens across time and distance in forms of electronically generated imagery.

Engaging attention with sensations, most particularly those of sight and sound, forming impressions and recognizing a sense of presence, one may apprehend the reality of experience.

But not all impressions, and foremost among them those delivered through technological media, are free of ambiguity.

As one may choose discernment of beauty, so also may one be open to truth. For the artist and the composer, this perceptivity is of peculiar moment, in the determination of the value of replacing the past or discovering the future.  

Mass Mind and Media

The senses are extended by technology, intensified, exaggerated, and in the course of these effects, weakened.

The natural state of the senses, that is to say, awareness unadulterated by anticipation of events grounded in experience of communications technology, may at times appear strange and uncanny.

Direct experience, in such cases, takes on aspects of the mystical.

For such reasons, among many, I choose to take music toward the unfiltered experience of sound events structured to the larger world, and outside the generic forms.