What are you listening to?

Ouuu, sorry. In this sense Manu Dibango’s words are naturally absolutely crazy! I’m coming from the Alps (Europe) and people here are not listening to music always yodelling. These are bad clichés. They always have a potential of disrespect, especially from Europe to Africa. But that’s naturally absolutely not the way I meant it and certainly Dibango did mean his words in this way too.

I see a message to “Western” listeners in Dibango’s words: You don’t have to sit down and get rigid when you want to be cultured and intelligent. Intelligence IS motion. There is no rigid division between thinking and intuition etc.. Dancing (“hearing by feet”) to rhythmically very complex music in West Africa is a very intelligent activity – I think. I can better feel a solo of Coleman, Finlayson, Coltrane etc. when I regard it as motions in a musical language. Sometimes I let my hands dance to it because this way the motions get very vividly – so I hear with my hands.

I don’t really know Dibango. I only saw him on TV. But my impression is: He is serious (and humorous). And I like his charm.

Let me add one more philosophical idea: I see 3 things nested:

Primarily we are acting in MIND. We love and kill one another due to reasons which others cannot see. Mind is a very ethereal world of pictures, stories, illusions. But Mind is a manifestation of LIFE. We find the principles of Life in Mind: the tendency to expand, the coming and going, staying the same while changing, separation and opening etc.. It is the world of special self-preserving (biological) processes. These processes follow the principles of matter (inanimate substances). So Life is a manifestation of the UNIVERS where it came into being. Mind came into being in Life.

When I’m in the town where I grew up (in the Alps) I like to see the high mountains all around. A mountain is very heavy matter, pure stability, steadiness, constancy, calmness. Due to these reasons we like material things. Because Life is a frightening stream of changing. A stream of processes. When they stop we die. In this stream of Life there is an even more elusive thing: Mind. It consists of unreal clouds, colored smoke, illusions … though they are very mighty inside us and between us. (These thoughts bring “Obscurity”, CD “The Ascension To Light” to my mind.)
That’s the world in which we are primarily acting …

… I guess we are really poor souls
Crying or Very sad

Now I found this:
“ … The inapplicability of these linguistics-derived models to other musics is quite glaring in the cases of West African and African-American musics such as jazz, rumba, funk, and hip-hop. In these cases, certain salient musical features, notably the concept of groove, seem to have no analogue in rational language. Although groove is a highly subjective quality, music that grooves can sustain interest or attention for long stretches of time to an acculturated listener, even if "nothing is happening" on the musical surface. A prime example is James Brown s music [CD-2], which frequently has precious little melodic or harmonic material and is highly repetitive, but would never be described as static. The fact that groove carries enough weight to override other musical factors in certain kinds of musical experience suggests that the traditional linguistics-based viewpoint does not suffice in describing the entirety of music cognition.
A major reason for this mismatch between tonal-music grammars and most music of the world is not (as is commonly thought) differing levels of musical sophistication or complexity, but rather a major cultural disparity in approaches to rhythmic organization and musical form. I claim that an essential component of this disparity is the status of the body and physical movement in the act of making music. The role of the body in various musics of the world becomes clearer when one observes the function that music and dance assume in these cultures, the common cultural/linguistic metaphors associated with musical activity. All of these observations have led us to study the role of the body in cognition in general.”
Vijay Iyer
http://cnmat.cnmat.berkeley.edu/People/Vijay/03.%20Embodiment.html#anchor222431
http://cnmat.cnmat.berkeley.edu/People/Vijay/%20THESIS.html
This is exactly the direction in which my thoughts are going. Unfortunately my English is bad. So it is a hard work for me to read this voluminous text. But I’ll try it.

study

Joined : 11 Sep 2006 Posts : 137