The Music Itself | Grassroots Workshop

If music can express truth, or God, or something deeply human - how does it do that? What are the phenomenal aspects of music - what is it made of, and how do we perceive those parts?

These questions are essential for talking about music, and yet, so rarely do these questions get direct face time. It often seems as if musical discourse is something either mediated through social taste and personal preferences, OR, reserved for stodgy institutions of higher learning where “theory” and the “classical tradition” dominate the discussion. Can’t we talk about music in more interesting ways than that? Can we discuss the music itself without appealing to pure relativism, or old and narrow conventions?

Join us for an exploration and discussion of the phenomenon of music, and of all the interesting ways we think about and experience it.

Recording

The Music Itself [Grassroots Workshop].mp4 The Music Itself - Text Chat.txt

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Links and Resources

Quotables

What does music mean to you?

@Grant Swift: “tapping into some kind of fundamental life force”
@Danu Poyner: “a universal language that gets everyone to drop their armour”
@Nicholas Caparso: “my life. My most fluent language.”
@Tracy Smith: “It’s transcendent. It’s string theory. It’s the universe. I came to god through math and what a sense of humour.”
@Vincent Ayotte: “It’s unexpected. And it’s about the internal vibrations of what music does to your inner organs.”
@Peter Gilderdale: “I trained as an opera singer. I don’t have a good ear but it’s a physical thing. Singing is about what you can do with your body.”
@Brittany Cole Houston: “A somatic body-moving experience. It’s about how it makes me feel and attuning the body to what we’re hearing.”
@David Thomas: “Music can always help me tap into deep heavy feelings or scratch whatever itch I’m feeling”
@Colin Mosgrove: “A viscerally felt thing. I use dance to process emotions. Music starts in the gut and goes out from there. It’s relational - it has me asking ‘what would the music be like’ for whatever situation.”
@Nathan Oglesby: “Music is inspiration that transcends function and comes from the divine or beyond - it’s for its own sake. Etymologically, it’s the work of the muses.”