introspective retrospective

Note: DANIEL—NICE TITLE “INTROSPECTIVE RETROSPECTIVE”, AND SINCE YOU SAID PLAGIARISM WAS COOL, IM GOING TO STEAL IT

While I’m on the subject… if all plagiarism is cool… then I’m going to shamelessly steal from all of you…

So I guess I might just reflect on the FYS coarse like Daniel.
So I came into the class kinda feeling robbed, but after the first few classes I realized it was all for the best. One reason was the John Cage intrigued me, techno became involved in our class, and all in the class are pretty funny

How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie-roll pop?

I'll admit, I hadn't really noticed it until this week, but we are truly a stimulus-addicted society. Thinking about it now, it just seems weird to play music while you're grocery shopping (maybe it's just me). You're stuck in an elevator for, what, two seconds, and they play you music. You're put on hold and they play you music over the telephone. It seems that they try to catch you in a situation you can't escape and pump out noise at you. we "plug ourselves in".

It is true that saying “like” all the time may make you sound like a “valley girl” or immature, but have you ever stopped to think about why and how that word has infiltrated our language and conversation. The word “like” is a filler – it’s used to fill those uncomfortable pauses of silence that inevitably happen in everyday conversing. We as a society have become so dependent on having a constant noise

While I recognize that music, for the most part, is about evoking emotion, I don't think we should limit music to only emotions. For these reasons, I think all forms of art, including music, are not defined by whether they evoke emotions or not. Art makes us wonder, makes us think how or why something is the way it is. Cage's music, though occasionally composed with purposelessness, is still music. As long as it generates some sort of reaction, a form of thought, from its listeners, it can be considered art in my opinion.

However, I do agree that, without having had the chance to develop personal preferences, this exposure to different types of music is rather irrelevant. If you don't have preferences to begin with, putting the i pod on shuffle doesn't mean anything.
"I believe the matter of music to be central to that of the meanings of man, of man's access to or abstention from metaphysical experience. Our capacities to compose and to respond to musical form and sense directly implicate the mystery of the human condition. To ask 'what is music?' may well be one way of asking 'what is man?'"

And so, I hate to burst your bubble, but it's not the end of the world. Noise has always been there and always will be. Silence isn't always golden (Sometimes it might be green or blue or red), though it often is. My point is, even though using sound as a weapon scares me, and even though I may not like all the "noise" created by new technology, I think we have bigger problems to deal with.

That isn't to say that you should totally give up your independent thought or opinion, but just merely accept that not every sound you hear you will like, and that the sounds/music that you like is not, nor will it ever be, totally the same as someone else's. So please.....relax.

"My deepest desire regarding contemporary music is to hear it all. Not successively, but all at once, at the same time. Everything together! But perhaps that's a perverse wish... Who knows if we'll do it even when we have the necessary technology? That technology doesn't exist yet? Well, long live the technology to come!

And it kinda seems like I wrote an awful lot, but this didn't really take me that long--like five minutes. I wouldn't like you all to think that I don't have anything better to do than write this, even though I don't.

--B.J.J.J. (Blog Jockey JJ)