Music and the Mind
Paul Robertson: Tension and Resolution - The musical marriage-The cadences of head,heart and hand. Neurology forms the objective evidence of the arts. Scientists are human beings and therefore they are necessarily discovering the human condition. There is a common linkage between all activities and disciplines. The public now has a need to know about scientific discoveries. The public needs a holistic approach. The impoverishment of the spirit in our culture also impoverishes the medic as well as the patient ( 5 minutes for each patient) If artists want to have power then they must engage in the world. Artists have the gift of perceiving altered states. They have the gift to enter themselves into creative communion in order to get an understanding of the world. Artists are holders of power but a lot of the time they don't have the ability to use that power.This is also due to the constraints of financial realities. The dominant language right now in our culture is science. Top scientists are right on the edge of chaos- they are thinking the unthinkable on an hourly basis. However,scientists are now exploring " secondary features": emotions, affect, feelings ( i.e. the domain of the artist). Artists are the mapmakers but they don't hold the key to the map. The ancient Greeks understood the world as formed of frequencies of energies. These energies conformed to laws, music laws, which were vibrations of strings (violins).The Greeks then transformed these laws into mathematical laws.
Do God as creator
Si Star systems
La Latea (milky Way)
Fa (fata) planet, spoken word, Man's fate
Mi (microcosmos) Earth, men's role upon earth
Re (regina de coelis) the moon
Patterns are also formed in our society. DNA sequences can be played. For Plato music, science, astronomy and mathematics were part of a single discipline. Peace is the complete congruity of an individual within their family, their society and their age. It is also a musical form. The journey to peace is long and torturous but it needs to be made. All cultures need to make it. We have to move on. An experiment where light powder was sprinkled onto a membrane and,as a trumpet sounded,the vibrations made the molecular energy be transformed into visual patterns. The auditory system is the first fully formed system before birth. Sound plays a key role in our pattern making. Consciousness (the logical left brain) or Creativity ( the right brain of emotion, spatial non-verbal appreciation of the world) A not specifically trained musician will not get an emotional appreciation from discording music as there are different networks of activities in the brain. Beethoven's Opus 132 is entirely concordant as it uses the musical language of the western church. The right brain enhances our musical experience with right brain meaning. In an emotionally blunted world/workplace/family we might well live in an emotionally deprived state. If you live in a culture where you take away people's ability to speak how can they express themselves? They sing songs. Our whole brain is riddled with networks which allow us to keep our musicality. When we create art, very often we use things from our early childhood. Brahms's Gypsy Orchestra shows this,as he was brought up in a brothel in Hamburg,where every bar had a gypsy orchestra then. An autistic society is a society which is unable to generate an emotional response. Truths are always eternal but the language with which they are conveyed changes. The Power of Hollywood - arousal or violent scenes in films tap into a human need. Dr Raus Spinker uses music therapy in operations and after operations to help healing. Music reduces the amount of pain and level of stress hormones. But astoundingly this procedure is used in only 1 centre in the world (Germany). What does this tell us about our world? We must change the emotional tonality of our culture through the Power of the Arts. We need to integrate and communicate as artists. Music can act as a soundtrack to the soul.If you can read music,you can read the functions of the brain. Beethoven lived a life of great anger, pain and sorrow but he transformed this into music and gave the world something out of his own misery. He didn't live out the negativity but transformed it into positive energy. (Poison into medicine ). Interestingly,there is a profoundly deaf woman who plays in the London Philharmonic Orchestra. If we follow the beautiful mathematical order and the physical order there is a profound gap. This gap is known as the Pythagorean Gap. ( check this on the internet as there are countless papers written about it). If we're close to each other but not quite congruous this leads to aggression. The auditory response of an individual is coloured by their cultural milieu. In an orchestra the player must be able to play slightly out of tune for the totality of the group. Music establishes and enables our deepest personal emotion and coherence. We can evoke memory, we can move forward and explore, explore even dangerous places without risk. We can recover if we have the misfortune to disintegrate either externally or internally. Music remains. The artist's role is to be emotionally literate to help others. The tragedy of our times is that we've created systems that don't include emotional systems. How do we link music and colour? It's a subjective experience. An example of a synaesthetic composer is Mozart. Lots of western composers connect certain colours with certain keys. But it's very subjective and personal. However there is lots of literature about relationships between composers and colours. A sufi musician's music changed and transformed people's lives. People would travel hundreds of miles to listen to him because it transformed their lives. However, one day he decided not to play his instrument and people still flocked to see him.He realised that he didn't need his instrument. He was his instrument by his own energy. We're all born with insipient perfect pitch.
Professor Semir Zeki, neurobiologist, "Art and the Brain " Arts have power because of the uniformity and variability of our brains. Freud ( and he's not the only one) said that all the advances in technology and science have not made people happier because of the fundamental misery of mankind. The visual brain is one third of our entire brain,therefore the visual is very important. Colour , form and motion are all different aspects of our brain. The brain must acquire constant knowledge from a world which is never constant, the world of flux. Art is an extension of the functions of the visual brain. Plato's theory of ideal forms are accessible by thought alone. Colour vision ( Schopenhauer) - if you measure the colour given off by an object in different lights or conditions you get very different results. There are no colours in the world outside, colour belongs to the brain. Each area in the brain has to abstract what is the essential attribute of the object and what is not. The Platonoc ideal and the Kantian thing in itself are products of the brain. They don't exist by themselves. You build up a visual concept about what it should look like.The struggle of art is to translate ideals onto canvas. There's always a clash between the experience of the individual as built up by the brain and the second experience. A great painting has a constancy which applies to many different situations. Matisse says that "seeing is a creative act" and requires a lot of effort. Abstraction is the system of acquiring knowledge. Its sister is idealism and the two come into conflict. Why is ambiguity such a prime quality of art? Michelangelo was a perfectionist. Yet he sometimes left his work unfinished. Perhaps this was because the sublimity of Michelangelo's ideals went beyond the power of his hands. An unfinished piece of art also leaves something for the mind. The sublime form is in the spectator as well as the artist. Variability in the brain leads to a difference in attitudes. This causes huge difficulties for people. Art is an outlet for people's aggression, hypersexuality etc. Don Giovanni is a serial rapist and lecherer. Mozart and Da Ponti put him into an acceptable context because he has overwhelming biological needs but he is indifferent to his fate. The power of art externalises things in ourselves which would lead us to live a life we wouldn't want. Violence and sex on TV is a response to needs in people and they can take part in it via TV rather than directly enacting it. Biological destiny is extremely difficult to change. Art is not necessarily only to be utilized but equally valuable is the mystification of the communication that occurs between the artist and the spectator. Art is for communication , however, to produce great art, you need to have the motor skills which most of us don't possess.
Patrick Guinand, French Theatre Director " The Creative and Subversive Power of Imagery" Arts are powerful. Think of when they were and are put under the control of governments and religions. Art has always been important for the people. Images keep in mind what we are doing on the stage. Kierkegaard preferred to watch the opera in the corridor so that he wasn't distracted by the obstrusive scene trappings of the stage. He was a purist. Don Quixote was a scenic image killer as he chopped the heads off puppets. Jaques Lacan bought a famous painting which he hid behind another painting and you could only see it in a certain way by gradually drawing a green curtain from it and this was known as the" Theatre of the glance".Theatre shows us what is impossible to show. Theatre tries to tame the viewer. The director's job is to be the viewer tamer. When the viewer is looking at a painting, the viewer is depositing his look. Theatre is the art of depositing the mind ( and look). But who looks too much forgets to think! Medusa turned people to stone.To petrify on stage a living painting. The Technique of the hypnotic process. A scenic image must make a viewer dream. Theatre is full of represented dreams. Pirandello tried to put a bridge between dreams..."Io sogno ma forse no" is a play half of which is made up of images of a young lady's dreams. The theatre is showing a sleeping lady, the theatre is made of dreams, the scenic images on the stage petrify the characters and the spectators with a nemetic hypnosis and symbolism. Is this the last step before death? Theatre after the dream is made for the awakening. Theatre as awakening and theatre as narcosis. Maybe a non-narcotic theatre is a view of the mind. Every image brings a dose of narcosis, eyes wide open or eyes wide shut. Iconophilia or Iconophobia? Are we always going to be trapped in the act of looking? The majority of people in our society are constantly absorbing and taking in images. However,in some societies ( Islamic for example) images are forbidden. Now that we're in a post-protestant age, we are in an age of iconophilia ( as opposed to iconophobia) . Jean-Luc Goddard: " C'est juste un image ou un image juste?" We belong to an iconic society but these images could be narcosis and we must be conscious of this and that is what is meant by post-narcotic images/theatre/society.... The director's job is to organise the chaos on the stage, to make a shortened version of reality " racourcir la réalité". But too many images could kill the image. In Elizabethan times men could not watch the theatre because it made them unmanly for manly duties...the image penetrates the eye. Penetration leads to femininity. Does the theatre try to expose truth or dreams? Scenic images come about by the opening of the curtain, putting the lights on and this is the specific moment when the image hits the viewer. It's done gradually. The unshowable is not automatically theatre but theatre is ultimately the unshowable! The gap lies in if we see too much we forget to think. Mind the gap! But if we think too much do we forget to see, hear,feel etc? Should that gap be filled? Could it be filled with creativity? Great art allows you to see signs in a rethought way. The world is sated with images. It is almost in a semi-religious way that people are like pilgrims when they go to the theatre and galleries. The spectator leaves something of himself - depositing his look - when he goes to the theatre. The narcotic theatre is an escape from reality. There is the danger of reproduction in the theatre with actors performing night after night and this can lead to necrosis. Actors could be within the living performance but they are dead people.
Tom Bentley "A Creative Future" Tom Bentley is head of Demos, the independent think-tank How creativity can influence and inform institutions. Tom Bentley wrote a book called "The Creative Age" which examines how educational psychologists understand the mind. Arts and policies feed creativity. Suddenly creativity is in favour in places like business and education and there are lots of books about creativity. How you develop and use creativity is linked to the role of arts and culture in society but it's not the same debate. The underlying drivers of change in society:
· Value change, post-modernisation of people's values
· Peace and prosperity in many western and industrialised societies which lead to people's values changing from unemployment and ill health to a broader spiritual fulfillment. People want more autonomy . This is a product of affluence.
· This gives people a need for creativity and this comes out in the longer standing debates of work life, standarding, parenting and balancing it all.
Knowledge is the primary factor of industrial production. The application of knowledge drives competitiveness to improve products and so forth. Production is learning, it's a form of continuous innovation but it is also a form of destruction as you destroy everything you learnt before. Globalisation is the development of a single communications infrastructure. We have much more instantly accessible information and culture. Where are we going? Historically creativity has always been associated with categories and practices or institutional elites, for example, scientists, creative thinkers, military strategists. But these categories are tightly compartmentalised and are felt to have uniform characteristics. You can't put this institutionalisation around creativity and value,nor is it the sole property of elites. Creativity escapes from boundaries. There are big creative industries, such as games production and advertising which are commercially driven aspects of creativity. Firms could use creativity to add a particular element to an organisation to help it achieve its goals but it shouldn't be that you hire creativity just because you can pay the fee. This would exclude those areas of society which really need creativity, One place where there is no creativity is the government because of its institutional structure. Creativity can be defined as the use of knowledge and skills in new ways to achieve a valued goal. It is not sector specific nor should it be presented in the language of any particular group. But how do you define your valued goals? Moral, civic, cultural, social value.... Creative learners:
· can identify new problems and try to solve them
· transfer knowledge they've gained in on context to another · believe that learning is an ongoing and incremental process of repeated effort ( and failure)
· have the capacity to focus their attention in the pursuit of a particular goal
Creativity can also be defined as the interaction of people in the environment in which they find themselves. You need to have trust (but not too much) for it to be possible to experiment but you need a certain level of security. You need freedom of action and to have a balance between skills and the level of challenge. How do you find the right kind of stimulation or risk? There is an overlap between understanding how these organisations learn and cultural institutions. We need to take culture out of the traditional places. Network based relationships are formed between a wide variety of players. Arts and business have become closely associated as business started off raising money for the arts and now it's become a major traffic. In deprived communities the arts are used to replace the language of formal consultation, that is,the fusion of artistic practices with some other form of goal. The public health system is aiming to bring about wealth, dignity, respect and moral equality. Artistic experiences can help to deliver the psychological process to help individuals in society. The new generation of independent cultural entrepreneurs define themselves as working in a new way, away from the conventional institutions, by developing creativity in practice without the need for a think tank diagnosis about what they're doing. In education you need subversion so as to destroy in order to renew which is a creative process but this goes against our accumulative learning ethos. To change education is a progressive form of subversion. Tacit knowledge comes into contrast with explicit knowledge. The student needs depth, engagement with deep meanings drawn from what is studied, a depth of understanding and learning in different contexts such as theatres, churches, alternative spaces and business. Learners themselves are involved in shaping the educational experience. We should be designing programmes of learning which are coherent for learners rather than for institutions. As for evaluation, how do we try to understand the outcomes of values of education? We should define it in terms of excellence and moral and spiritual terms. Now education is delivered through a technocratic context.
Artists have separated themselves from the ties and structures of society as part of the necessary chaos of the artistic experience. Artists refuse to accept the boundaries with which we start with. This Conflict is at the heart of a good society. However, in this world artists are increasingly pushed to find ways of legitimating themselves in their society through their search for funding( which is like a kind of horse-trading) where the money comes from the public purse. It would be better if artists could participate in culture in a new way across society. It is vital to establish good networks. The role of the artist should involve expanding their capacity so that they can be part of society rather than critical observers. However, this is just a part of what the artist has to offer as his or her role is multifaceted. Artists should also help people access their creativity and to do this they need to be flexible and fluid and not have to work within paradigms or structures. Business is in great need of creativity because of the difficulty in balancing work, life and family. If business can't help their employees to achieve this,the latter will simply leave and go elsewhere. Institutionalisation or not of the artist??
Art The hellish triangle of Who is the value-maker? It's nearly impossible to join all 3 points of the triangle
Moral Economy Artists' use in society is also quite a controversial debate. Should they have a use? It's necessary to unbalance the injustices in society.
Politics affect the way we live (not art); institutions of governments sort out laws, social issues etc. But the political sphere needs to change too and art forms can help to inspire particular forms of engagement.
The power of arts explodes in all directions and sometimes the shrapnel hits people. A core artistic community is needed to enable a wider experience of audience participation and a network enables various degrees of involvement. We need to create a new pattern of learning relationships. If everyone acted as "artists" then we wouldn't have any systems to work against. Does the Power of the Arts lie in politics becoming looser and the de-ministry of culture? Change leads to interaction of conflict. We need to find a way of shaping a structure and clarity or else we'll get total chaos. But we also need to blur the boundaries. Politicians need to be helped to know that they need innovative approaches and that they can't just continue to use the existing levers of power.
Mary Ward Director and Founder of the Chicken Shed Theatre Company "The Power of Inclusive Theatre" It is possible to reach children through drama and theatre. You don't necessarily have to have a rigid set vision of what you want to achieve ( a rough idea is fine). It brings out children's sense of self-worth. There are no barriers to joining the CSTC, no fees originally (fees have been put in place now because of the enormous demand for places), no class, no specific ability. It was set up for anybody who wanted to do it. The ethos in place is that everyone's performance is as important as your own. Our society is not an inclusive society- children are labelled from birth. However, you learn something everyday by having the widest range possible of people to work with, and ALL AGES too. You need to strive for excellence at all times and excellence is communicating with the audience. The more ingredients you have, that is, different people of all abilities and background, then the greater the product. You have to prove that everything is possible. Even children who have been excluded from special schools because of their behaviour and are considered uneducatable don't diminish the performance of all the other kids. You dance with your heart and spirit and your body is just another part of you. In theatre you explore the psychology of someone else. In our society there are barriers put up for children to fail at. The children who participate in the Chicken Shed Theatre Company don't possess the attributes traditionally associated with success. The CSTC gives everybody the opportunity to fly and not be defensive. The CSTC is completely self-funding and has no government subsidies. It was granted a building from National Lottery Funding. This means that people who want to join have to pay.
Roystoon Maldoom, Choreographer "Dance United" Royston has developed dance in any way he thought would be of benefit and feels that it's very important not to categorise or put people into certain groups such as"being disruptive"or a group of"single mothers".We're all street citizens and need to use our voice for those who don't have a voice. He has worked in places like South Africa (when Mandela was elected), Bosnia, Ethiopia (where the government was rounding up street children),Lithuania (on the national day of mourning). If you do a "one-off" event and hope that somewhere along the line it will continue, it will continue as long as there's the energy to make it happen. Royston organised "The Street Symphony Development Project" which wholly involved street children in Ethiopia and was set to the music of Carmina Burana. He prepared the cast in 18 days! These children couldn't even envisage a future before and had to think about surviving from one day to the next. Now after this dance project the children are full of plans and have named the Project and everything associated with it "Adunya" (Fate) Another incredible show was "A Dance Project in Holloway Prison". Dance is truly powerful. Women prisoners committed themselves to two weeks to this project to perform to other inmates and staff. Dance and the arts in general are vital parts of human nature and bring out people's humanity, no matter what. We need to have that expression of feeling and solidarity as we come together as a group.
Pat Kane, " Moving towards a Play Ethic" Pat Kane is half artist and half advocate. The way you express yourself as a world citizen has to be as eclectic and boundary-crossing as possible. People live under routine and they have to find a way of accepting that routine. The culture of work is a complete culture in itself and is incredibly stressful. Creativity exists in humans as we are concept creators, sign manipulators and tool users. This enables and expresses our creativity. But what is the best social and economic arrangement to express this human need? We need to see ourselves as semiotic creatures, that is, we create signs and change the world. The play ethic is a progression from the work ethic. Capitalism with all its technological advancement has given humans a full list of expression throughout life. Life now in the first world is a period of post-scarcity, a pleasuredome. Most of our free time comes from organised play which is our leisure time. Can everybody be an artist? Can there be artism? (like there is socialism, environmentalism etc..). The way artists deal with their poesis, technology and so on is a necessary condition for living under new capitalism ( or new artism). The past 20-30 years have seen a post-material mentality. People have a right to play and be creative. The play ethic needs to tie in with a political militancy so that we can reduce the working week and really argue for it. It needs a specific tactical struggle to create space for people to be creative and artistic. The education system is a crime on human potential. The proportion of the GDP spent on education is appalling. We must think about the reproduction of creativity. Artists ( although not necessarily all) must take the passion forward and campaign for things like a) citizen's income and b) a radically changed education system. A citizen's income is the harmonisation of all existing benefits like job seeker's allowance, tax relief, child benefit etc and a radical assessment would be made of an individual's income. Everybody has the right to be a player as well as a worker and the general social conditions to allow this must exist. Human needs and human exceeds - we are here to be excessive. LET Schemes (local exchange and transfer skills) enable people to exchange skills in the local community. Utopianism is highly prevalent in a lot of popular art, think of "Billy Elliot" and "The Full Monty". An enlightened view towards the arts would be for all companies, no matter how big or small, to be legally required to pay a 1% tax which goes into the arts. It would be a great idea to start a pressure group to do this in our country. The internet,"communism" is the digitalisation of artistic activism. Responsibility is the ability to respond or responding with ability. We need to implement a new rhetoric to justify the power of the arts to ourselves and the outside world. Art is universal as people from all different cultures and backgrounds can communicate because we are looking at the roots of where life is anchored. The ancient Greeks were obliged to go to the theatre every week and see two tragedies and one comedy for catharsis and purge themselves of negative feelings. The arts kept Greek society civilised. This is the transformative power of the arts as it gives emotional release. Creativity is appreciating the journey and where you are on it and where you are going. CREATIVITY-ARTISTRY-HUMANITY are inextricably linked. Left brain( logic,rationality) and Right brain (emotion, feeling) are crossing boundaries and this is shown by the collaboration of arts and business. As business is getting into the right brain , art is getting into the left brain. Art is one of the main sources of delivering spirituality in the post-religious age. As a society we've been disenfranchised with our spiritual language and we need to re-install it. To reclaim the vocabulary is empowering. Art is a powerful form of exchange which is not necessarily connected to money.
LONG LIVE THE POWER OF THE ARTS!
summarized by Pamela Pirie
