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In Al Gore's book "The Assault on Reason" he starts by asking, "Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" In our historic 2008 election, Barack Obama said, ".. children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." The truth is, a white youth with a book also stands accused, or at least they did when I was in school. I was called "four-eyes" because I had glasses, and "professor" because I was smart. How many people have you heard say, "I was never any good at math" to the smallest demand on their numeracy, and everyone smiles and laughs! My personal favorite is having someone hand me the check at a restaurant, saying, "You were a math major" .. as if math were years of study of how to figure 20%. (It's not.) I am saying we don't think, and our society says it's okay to not think, by now encourages us not to think. What we do is feel.
Feeling is cool, feeling is gangsta, feeling is great. Movies make you feel, music makes you feel, advertisements, and definitely politicians make you feel. Liberal politicos simply "raise awareness" of issues, as if being aware of soul-killing tragedy #837 is as good as doing something about it. Conservatives like Rush Limbaugh or the mercifully banished Sarah Palin do the same (though they don't call it that), inciting their followers to rants and bigotry through feeling. I am claiming, then, that reason is good and under attack, while feeling is used for ill but widely admired.
However, it's easy to tell the opposite. How many good ideas died quietly because something should be studied more carefully? Many talk of "death by committee", but there is also "analysis paralysis" at the individual level. (I know something about that.) Feeling bursts through barriers. It focuses our attention, makes us respond "without
thinking" as they say. Feeling is a call to action. You don't think alive, you feel alive.
So where does music lie in this spectrum? The media and common wisdom describe it easily as feeling. Great artists are always quoted in emotional terms, and often judged that way as well. However, anyone who has actually studied music or performed it should recognize the power of thought. Technique is often gained through rigorous repetition, but also through painstaking, compulsive analysis of physicality. Even deeper, the reason that music evokes feeling is often a combination of intuitive understanding of what universally makes people respond, and a knowledge or mastery of the underlying vocabulary of a particular musical discipline. Jazz sounds like jazz, punk sounds like punk, because the performers have picked up the right accent for that music.
And what of the ultimate challenge, to create your own vocabulary, or at least your own dialect, of a musical language, one that makes logical sense and inspires great feeling? Well, wouldn't that be something.
