Iain Cameron's Diary
"Click here to access the Fruitful Album" - Click here to visit Music for the Highveld Project


The Highveld Project

Get your own
 diary at DiaryLand.com! contact me older entries

2002-04-16 - 11:56 p.m.

Various e-mails back in the office. One from Paul Wheeler with material about Leo Strauss - a political philosopher influential with the New Right in the USA. The article Paul sent by Will Hutton made me want to find out more and the net turned up some quite good material. Strauss is a subtle and original thinker whose ideas can be fatally oversimplified in the present circumstances, especially his views on "terror" as a fundamental in holding societies together.

Also a note from Dick Jones - the bass player from the Goldsmiths based acid rock band which Ian Macdonald and I joined in September 1967. Dick mailed me out of the blue having read an article of mine on the Nick Drake files. It seems we both feel pretty good about the band we were both in - Tintagel. Dick knows the part of the world where I live - Guildford, Godalming and Farnham - well although at the moment he lives north of London. He is still playing - what from his description comes across as very interesting music. He mailed to say that domestic circumstances had allowed him to listen to the Plundafonix CD which I sent him and that he liked it. I think I am still worried that this CD is less immediate than its predecessor although I have got more confident about its artistic unity. Tomorrow I am going to see Peter Chatterton about the website for the Highveld products which I hope will soon be linked up to the main diary page here. Peter is supportive of this diary group.

I started to look at some articles on music and emotions - in a collection on the philosophy of music I got in Boston last November. Emotions are varied - sometimes they are a general disposition - say like grumpiness - other times they can be almost like a strong sensation eg embarassment. There are plenty of other varieties as well. I am interested that it is only lately that the concept of emotional intelligence has begun to gain currency - that people might vary in their ability to "manage" their emotions and integrate them effectively into their broader life plans. It's an open question whether a person who is emotionally intelligent in that way will be creatively effective I think.

As far as the link between muisc and whatever it may or may not mean and our emotional life is concerned, the picture still seems to be blurred. Sometimes there are sections of music which seem to be well described in emotional terms - we might even say that the music represents the emotions. When we hear the music then we might sometmes actually feel the emotion, or, more likely we might hear the music as a representation of the emotion - recognise the emotion in the music. But how far should we go in insisting that this is the main or only meaning of the music? There is a further school of thought which thinks that what the emotion and the music share is some set of formal properties - contour or gesture or pace. It seems to me that that is sometimes true - but not always. I am doubtful that this line of thought will lead anywhere very rapidly. This could be completely mistaken of course, but one would be much better off looking at how poems treat emotions in my view.

I am more taken with kind of analysis that Theodore Gracyk does eg in his book on rock called "Rhythm and Noise." Gracyk actually knows a lot about rock eg why Television broke up at the end of the 70s and is able to use these facts within a philosophical framework. The Boston collection has a couple of articles which pics up and develop some of Gracyk's proposals eg that in rock, songs are "ontologically thin". This means that if you look at what is common between a number of recorded versions of the same song by different artists, then the area of commonality may be very thin indeed - what songs are in essence is not substantial. Thinking about the fundamentals of rock in this philosphically informed way strikes me as more valuable.

I read a Chapter in the bookgroup book on the Disciplines but in the event the group discussed something else - a vision statement. Some non-standard disciplines such as "secrecy" are included in the book - also keeping a journal.

I am optimistic that there may be a positive pay-off from this activity, though it is much too early to tell what it could be. We will return to the disciplines in about three weeks time.

There were a couple of meetings in my office today - something I normally try to discourage - but both these seemed to lead somewhere. Especially the one which looked a set of skills which the Department thinks its staff might need to a greater depth and linked these up to possible opportunities to develop the skills. I promised to write an invitation to tender for some workshops to start people thinking about the skills implicit in their new roles following a significant reorganisation.

There is a lot of stress and unhapiness in the Department at the moment. What kind of music would best suit people in these circumstances I wonder?

previous - next