What Is Visionary Music? (2.0)

Michael!
Very Interesting Ideas here. While agree wholeheartedly with your perspective on sounds, and restoration of the wonder that is attentively listening to music, I am confused with your definition of visionary art. "The result of taking the process into conscious consideration, of bringing that experience and its lessons home as directly as possible" seems to be more a definition of good art, because if the artist is not engaged fully in the process of creation, that which is created is not worthy of the audience's attention. To often, especially in music, the focus of the audience is located solely around the finished work, (recorded versus live music, for example). This stance detracts from the process of creation, which is I feel the only point in which aspects of the visionary may be accessed by the creator. Thanks to postmodernism, the artist is indeed no longer the sole authority on their own work, and like you say, the audience’s read of the piece is of paramount importance.
However, I’m not sure that the artist ever gets to claim visionary status of his or her own accord. I feel that it is possible to be inspired to visionary states by a work, but that to label oneself a visionary artist, seems to me just a marketing device to reach a demographic concerned with the subject matter. Many of music’s true forward thinking composers and performers were only considered as such long after their work was created (Hildegard von Bingen). Like you say with regards to Mendelssohn and Bach, this designation often takes time to earn, mostly due to the time necessary for the artists ideas to be accepted by the populous. So on that point we are in agreement, I just feel that the term is perhaps utilized to freely.
Your description of the universe as a musical work of sorts is great! I recommend reading R. Murray Schafer's "SoundScape; Our Sonic Environment and The Tuning of The World". His main thesis is that the very environments in which we live out daily life are meta-musical compositions, and the book contains a very interesting history of the world SoundScape, and some interesting observations regarding the impact of industry on the sonic palate of the world.
The problem with this distinction of visionary art in our current society is that the arts are frequently viewed as little more than entertainment, or a commodity ready for consumption by a target demographic. Taste in popular music is judged by society to be some reflection of style, in the same manner as one’s wardrobe, vocabulary and such. The traditional uses of music in shamanic ceremonies (Ayahuasca, Peyote), or religious rites (Tibetan trance dancing), allow the music to serve some purpose in the fulfillment of a community function, and so is not viewed by the participants in the same framework or from the same perspective as our contemporary art is. I don’t mean to come off in a negative manner with regard to your efforts, simply to point out some pitfalls in this designation. As an artist, I personally try to be a forward thinking as possible, and to create within the paradigm in which I exist, work that will inspire others to appreciate the world we are in for what it is, and to be aware that indeed we live in an amazing, terrifying, complex and wonderful world.
I admire you commitment to addressing the future of the art, and your open minded stance. In your pursuit of hearing the world with new ears, I urge you to seek out a pamphlet by R. Murray Schafer (again! I must like him…) entitled: “Ear Cleaning” which is a course guide for teaching students how to listen to New and Experimental music, and to break free from their preconceived notions of what music should be. I look forward to hearing what you find, and to future discussions!
Best of luck!
Rod

Hi,

It is awesome to see you here! :)

namaste,

Richard

I'm coming at this topic late, and don't really understand the whole thread blog discussion thingamabob, but hey, here we are. Maybe someone will see this. Michael, I dug your opening piece about visionary music. You allude to the difficulty of putting "vision" with a medium that primarily involves the ears, but then there is a level of synaesthesia involved with art in any case, and putting these perceptual phenomena into speech is a process of metaphor anyway, so can music be visionary? Yes.

Adorno reminds us that art began as ritual. In that context, it has a didactic (teaching) function. The shaman/artist is a teacher. With the rise of civilization, there is a division of labor for the most part between the priest and the artist, but they collaborate, and the artist and art still fulfill the role of teacher.

To take a simple example, beginning in the tenth century in France and Germany, stained glass windows were intended to teach Bible lessons to an illiterate population. And the ancient sense of teaching taking place in a context of altered reality or visionary experience must have still come across in that medieval context, since that experience of intensely colored light design in an otherwise darkened space must have been unavailable in any other context, providing a truly psychedelic experience (psychedelic: hallucinatory, perception-distorting, from psyche [spirit, soul, mind] and deloun [make visible]). Tim Leary used to speak of this, the medieval cathedral as the LSD of the 13th century sort of thing.

Adorno says that with the rise of humanism in the Renaissance, the didactic function of art, in the sense of art teaching moral lessons, begins to recede in favor of what eventually became known as "art for art's sake." The idea becomes that art has no utility, it is concerned only with beauty. So, for example, about 1849, we have Theophile Gautier writing that if usefulness is a criterion for beauty, then the most beautiful object in the house is the toilet.

But the removal of art from the role of teacher in the humanist era parallels the inversion by which humanism becomes inhuman, giving us the bloodiest century in human history, Holocaust and Hiroshima. Adorno says that following this, art will again take on its didactic function. And he says that genuine art does teach us something. It teaches us that there is an alternative to fascism, or an alternative to the fixed idea, the final word, and the prescribed reality. It shows us that there are alternative realities. This is what I mean about art's psychedelic function.

I believe that the psychedelic aspect or function of art persists from ancient times, that this is its main attraction. It "distorts" perception, provides a kind of hallucination, and, to go to the etymology again, makes the soul visible.

The association with music is, unavoidably given my age (and my recent reading), the psychedelic rock of the late 1960s, which came out of pop musicians with an interest in avant-garde music (Luciano Berio, John Cage, Albert Ayler, etc.) discovering plant medicines such as marijuana, the stronger botanical hallucinogens, and LSD.

So it seems to me at the moment that the term "visionary music" might be usefully recast as the psychedelic function of music. Is all music psychedelic? Well, some specimines are more, shall we say, alkaloid rich than others, more able to approximate and affect the chemistry of perception. In this sense, an argument between the fans of Bach and Beatlesmaniacs might be akin to a debate between peyote devotees and the disciples of the toad.

Eurythmics are an interesting study!!! I am reminded becaus Steven brought up synesthesia.
/\ Eurythmics is a system of teaching and thinking about music that integrates dancing and music. Pretty much teaching people how music works by demonstrating it with their own bodies. I don't know much about it but this fabulous woman Meridith Monk studied it as a child and now is incredibly prolific.