First of all, if you are interested in the neuroscience of music I suggest the video on the left about music and the elderly. This week we'll look at some of the more peculiar people and music from the turn of the 20th century.
First of all a strange Russian man named Scriabin whose harmonies pushed the envelope of what was acceptable at the time. Scriabin believed that humanity was like a pregnant storm cloud which was working towards its ultimate lightning-strike goal and that his music was the catalyst. Later we will get into Charles Ives, a Yale athlete macho-man who was as revolutionary in the insurance industry as he was in music. Ives had a tendency to put two totally unrelated melodies on top of each other and the result was often unique to say the least. Also in store we have a French man named Erik Satie who in the midst of all this wild music found the beauty in the soft and the simple. Satie was a friend of and a huge influence on the wildly famous Claude Debussy.
Alexander Scriabin, the little frail Russian man with a tenuous relationship with god. In one of his notebooks he actually claims to BE god. I might also claim that if Rachmaninoff decided to play my music for a recording. Antisocial as a child, enamored with self-fashioned mysticism as a man, he had a system of associating certain colors with certain tones. He is by no means the first person to draw up such a detailed synesthesia:
"For some time before his death he had planned a multi-media work to be performed in the Himalayan Mountains, that would cause a so-called "Armageddon", "a grandiose religious synthesis of all arts which would herald the birth of a new world"... The Mysterium was, psychologically, a world Scriabin created to sustain its own evolution."
No comments:
Post a Comment