What to Listen for in the World

The world is a place that sparks imagination. Images and beauty evoke creativity in which all people see differently.“When we pretend, we learn./Look out the window of a train as you ride/and pretend you are someone else:/ a poet, a novelist, a painter, a politician,/ a composer. The poet sees in metaphors which can be named:/ the sad houses, the  lonely streets, the impatient sky.”  The poet can is one that can see the loneliness and put it into words, using tools like metaphors. He can take his surroundings and put them into feelings and onto paper. While the novelist can use his imagination to create a story about who lives in that house and why the street is so empty today and will a sudden storm cause people to rush from stores to their unsuspecting homes only to find they’ve been betrayed in love?”. The novelist is one that can take the buildings and the streets and put a story line to it. He can make up information and put personalities on people to portray fake lived. But the painter, he can see see “the colors of those sad houses, fixing street and sky forever in a separate reality, part of private vision”. The painter is one who can take an image and distort it into their own view, one no one every sees and can only be made up in the mind.

This poem goes on to talk about the composer and how all of these people just simply looked at this street but a composer can look at the houses and still be aware of his surrounding and be able to feel “the stillness inside the train” and be aware of how time is running out but with a rhythm . He is able to see everything in front of him but be aware of sounds and how they work together.  I feel that this is what the whole article was saying. Musicians have the ability to do more than one thing at a time they can read the music they are playing, play it, hear the sounds they are playing, change it to correct tune or do an impromptu change because of the belief it will sound better. While in their head they will hear what the music should sound like, will sound like and the reaction of the audience.

I believe it is the musician’s job to look at a picture or the world and understand what they are looking at. They then have to put a mood onto that picture and come up with a story. It is then their job to take this information and convert it into music. To make their feelings into notes and then into pitches and sounds which then turn into a melody or a tempo. It is the musicians job to take what they say and demonstrate it to their audience, to try and make them feel the way they felt or come up with something of their own. This translation can make a person feel the exact way as the composer or feel something different.  Everyone can absorb music in a different way and it Is the musicians job to spark and idea or feeling or emotion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsc-kZ0-KGY

the video above is an example of how musicians affect mood. I think it shows that music can make you feel different things and picture different images with no real idea about what the musician was thinking when he wrote it.  Below are my emotional responses to the different types of music, maybe yours is different.

1.       Reminiscent

2.       Sad romance

3.       Greif

4.       Loss

5.       Uplifting