Oracular Music

As I sit here, there's a mahogany coloured post over yonder, out the window, that goes in and out of view depending on how the rain hits the pane. If a droplet or rivulet is shaped one common way, the light from around the post gets bent in front of it. If there's not much water or it's a different shape, I can see the post just fine.

It's a funny thing that of all the art forms, music is probably the most commercial. People sell paintings of course, and literature is usually sold once it's written, but even the raggiest romance novel doesn't seem to compare to the emptiness of a really commercial music track; and moreover, it seems that all music is expected to be performed, packaged up, and sold. I don't like that point of view... I don't see how much different Dickinson's poems are from a diary, for example, so I'm not sure why this industriousness must necessarily apply to music as though it's some instrinsic universal feature of music, the medium, itself. It's not. I get to choose what happens to the music that I produce, just as I get to choose what happens to my paintings and words. Some stuff is personal, some is crap, some is publishable, and some is a rarified mixture of all three.

The subpoint, as the rain really comes down, is that music is as much a record of context as any other art form. Music, good music, reflects the mind or minds of those who create it, and crystalise somehow a feeling which may then be reinterpreted, refelt, the same way by others. Rarely. It's true with, say, the big city feel of Rhapsody in Blue. But more often than not the feeling is different in other people. That's what worries me qua artist, though not too much because at least the personal record aspect is always present. I'm not really a good enough artist to give some piece that transformative quality which is contextless, or somehow intrinsic and inalienable. It seems that my "115th Semantic Dream" essay is perhaps my only published piece which approaches that, but I don't produce much art anyway.

It's surprising that bustling minds can get so entrenched into the science art dichotomy and still be bustling, but they clearly can. Charles Darwin said that once he got more scientific, his joy for Shakespeare waned considerably. I've certainly been veering like a Mexican driver (some analogy that somebody used on Dick Cheney long ago, that stuck) towards the scientific side of the road, and I've been trying to calculate or devise an oracular system to nurture and promulgate more artistic endeavours. But just oracularising tends to eke out one's bustle; it doesn't direct the kind of bustle: it's the medium there which counts more for that. Once you start painting pie charts in oils, you know you're in trouble.

Still, it's all just convention really. There's no reason why people shouldn't paint pie charts, if they're going to produce pie charts anyway. So as long as it's not a sole painting activity, perhaps it's actually beneficial. And music is a very mathematical thing: I suppose it would be possible to encode many a rigid formula in music; and that might even help to expose why certain music makes us feel a certain way anyway. There hasn't been a great deal of investigation into that, probably not least because the chromatic scale is such an odd starting point.

I should note for convenience that the term "oracle" is borrowed from a friend's use to pertain to notebooks. With that in mind, I guess that the summary of all this is to make your oracles achromatic. Microtonalise those oracles!