Hello Music4Life people, my name is Paul, I'm 23 yo and I am a visual arts student living in Mexico, I was referred to this platform by a friend and after a couple of days scrolling through the posts I was surprised by the talent and passion that some of you share and I did not wanna miss the chance to participate.
First of all I'd like to let you know what are my posts going to be about, as I mentioned, I am studying visual arts and I believe that visual art just like music have a lot of things going around them than just 'the joy', I think that in the same way that we look at art master pieces we can analyze musical compositions, taking into account not only the artist and the instruments that they play but the social, political, historical, etc. context around the artist/band, I mean, we can certainly even take a look at the artist/band's individual life, and by doing this, I will try to point out specific points that I see valuable, whether it is because music and art share something or that they are totally oposite in that sense.
I decided to start posting because of a small debate I had with my friend, in which we were discussing the purpose of a specific song (both of us thought it did not provide pleasure to the public), this song was some kind of a trap/white noise song that in both of our opinions it lacked the main purpose of music which is to bring pleasure to the listener's ears (of course some people might debate this), even if it's only the person who creates it.
Even when we do not know personally the creator of the song we do know his girlfriend which is a friend of ours, and that made us wonder what would we do in that situation... if my couple decided to make music but I do not find it pleasent, what should I do? Should I tell him/her my honest opinion? Should I white lie to his/her face? Is there a way to tell her that I do not find pleassure in his/her creations?
No, no and NO. If you are worried about your couple and how his/her approach to creating music might affect his/her emotional wellbeing the first thing that you need to ask is: What is your purpose? What are you trying to achieve by creating those songs?
Music, just like art, will most of the times generate the most pleasure to the person who creates it, it might be some kind of a therapy to them , it might be their happy place to run away from the world's impatience, it can be anything to them, very rarely it will be their try to start a music career and if it is, the only thing you can do as a person he/she loves and trust is love and trust them back, because not many people would have achieved great things if there was not someone supporting and caring for them.
That is the main question of this post: what is the purpose of making music?
As I said at the beggining, music and art have a lot in common but sometimes they are totally oposite. And I would not be able to think of a better way to start this blog than with this question because in my opinion, it truly shows how similar and adverse they are.
Both art and music are channels for introspection, you can learn a lot from a person by looking at their sketches, drawings and paintings, also by listening to their songs, jams or live shows but not only that but the art they like, the music they listen to, what makes them thrive to create more. So in this sense, music and art are alike.
Now, whenever you draw or paint, you do not actually need anyone else to like it, not even yourself and I believe that it is the same way when it comes to music. Like I've said before music and art can both be influenced by outside factors, let's take politics as an example: you can create a painting that reflects the way your current government's downsides or even atrocities just like you can create a song that expresses it. But here is where the difference comes in, if there is a painting, even if it does not contain basic composition, color theory or previous research elements it can still be enyojable, someone might use it as its lock up screen, background or even profile picture but in the opposite way if a song does not contain a melody or a rythm it is very unlikely that someone actually enjoys it.
Even with this major difference and the way we unconsciously analyze music and art I firmly believe that both art and music do NOT need a specific purpose. Maybe some of you knew that I was going to say that at some point but it's actually pretty obvious, they do not need a purpose and it is beautiful that way because by promoting exploration, experimentatation and practice we all will always get 'better' results.
If you have read this far I want to thank you, this is my first post but I still wanted to give you a little sneak peak of what I am going to be posting in the following days/weeks. In my next posts I will use specific songs and art pieces that complement the topic of discussion.
I really enjoyed writing this and I hope you did aswell, have a nice weekend!
