Geez... I KNEW I was going to get in trouble if I made lofty statements based on nothing. Offering no evidence to support my pontifications, I have to conclude that my post from yesterday was pure crap!
But I don't think it was. I just didn't have time to fully support it, nor do I really tonight, but what I had in mind was something along the lines of what sdemott said. Certain types of music tend to have greater and more lasting effects upon our brains, and possibly upon our souls as well, if there is such a thing as "soul" that we can measure. (I'm speaking more of the "soul" we refer to in music, not religion) But then again, we have to ask ourselves, on whom were these studies conducted? Did they have more effect on people who have studied Bach? Would the same music have similar effects on monkeys or dogs or cats? Personally, I believe that classical music DOES have a profound effect on people. I've seen it in myself and in my children. I used to tell my kids that studying music seriously will bring them rewards they would never expect, such as better enabling them in math, sciences, arts, literature, and just general living. My daughter always reports the very same thing to me after practicing music a lot. She is amazed by it -- as I am -- for it doesn't seem logical. But there it is: after stretching your mind with Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, and Debussy, suddenly our other abilities seem to have grown as well.
If you take the idea of dissonance to the art world, what does it represent? Let's take Jackson Pollock, since everyone knows his work. It's sort of the "anti-crap." While it appears totally dissonant at first -- no immediately recognizable patterns, no subtle color shades, etc. -- one soon finds one's mind trying to make sense of it. You begin creating patterns where none were intended, as we do with clouds or landscapes far below from a jet plane. Thus, his art forces a confrontation with our senses, and that's probably its chief value. But we don't tend to form a favorite association with any of his works. It's all "Pollock." Very few people know his work well enough to identify different pieces by name. With Monet, however, we all recognize the water lillies or haystacks or cathedral at Rouen, etc., even though they also are quite dissonant, because they retain some natural forms which are recognizable.
Music has natural forms. The simplest is a statement-answer duality which we see in the simplest of phrases in pop songs. The most complex would probably be the polyrhythmic drumming of Africa or India, where phases repeat after hundreds of beats. Or the contrapuntal music of JS Bach where the lines follow rules that evolved over centuries, and were perfected by the master himself. But even that music has a certain artificiality to it. It's not something we easily relate to, and it's not necessarily "beautiful" to our senses. On the other hand, many of his works based on dance forms (his Partitas and Suites, for example) are quite beautiful to a novice upon first hearing, because they DO follow natural forms that seem to come from deep within our psyches rather than arbitrary rules.
I think this is evidence that there actually ARE some natural forms that emanate from deep within us, and when we use them in our music, people resonate to the music in ways that they don't even understand.
When we force arbitrary associations and rules on our art, we may indeed create something that is beautiful to one who has mastered the rules, but the average listener or viewer will not be as inclined to appreciate it. The beauty of music by Beethoven, Mozart, and others is that it attracts our interest and is immediately perceived as beautiful even before we figure out its deeper complexity. Debussy seems to have found an arbitrary world of sound relationships even more mysterious, bordering on dissonance, but always within the bounds of sense.
How different composers approach this cognitive dissonance of Jackson Pollock without losing all connection with the listener's natural inclinations toward aesthetic interest is the story of trying to discern the difference between that brilliance and rubbish. When we find ourselves spending more time trying to explain it than it took to absorb the music itself, one has to wonder whether it's worth it.
I still cling (helplessly and hopefully, perhaps) to the notion that beyond a certain point it DOES become objective, and crap is just crap, no matter how you explain it.
Shooshie
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