SHAMWOW

I heard a really cool story on Radio Lab earlier. Have you ever heard music that makes you emotional? How about music which triggered negative emotion? Has music ever made you want to physically harm another person? (lol)



That ugly motherfucker is Igor Stravinsky. Igor Stravinsky was one of the most brilliant musicians of the 20th century.

In 1913, Stravinsky premiered a piece called "The Rite of Spring". This was not about dandelions or honeybees, or what you would normally think of when you think of spring. This was about a pagan ritual in which a young girl would dance herself to exhaustion, and is then violently murdered to appease the god of spring.

It starts out innocently enough with a charming bassoon, playing a classic Lithuanian folk tune. Then about a minute in, it gets a little more odd. After about three minutes, it is fucking chaos. Stravinsky just fucking pounds on this really disturbing chord, and he doesn't stop pounding until basically the end. That chord structures the entire thing, and it's probably one of the most difficult sounds you will ever hear. You really do have to hear it to get the full effect.



Now, this may not seem all that "disturbing" or "difficult" to us in 2009, with almost a century of newer stuff that we've been exposed to. But this was 1913. The most extreme music people were familiar with was the soothing romanticism of the 19th century. Nothing remotely like this had ever been heard before. Audience members who liked what they were hearing (who were very few) began arguing with the detractors. About halfway through the ballet, the entire audience rioted in a violent game of fisticuffs.


Neurologists are now finding some very interesting effects music has on the human brain. Musical notes are typically broken up into two categories - consonants and dissonants. Basically, consonants are the notes that just sound "right" to us, and dissonants are ones that don't. When the brain hears a dissonant, some weird shit goes down. When an unfamiliar sound reaches your auditory cortex, certain neurons in there attempt to dissect it, take it apart, and understand it. They basically try to find patterns in it. Most of the time, these neurons are successful, and you're left with the feeling of "Oh hey, I get it now."

But sometimes the music is just too fucked up, and the neurons fail. When that happens, your neurons squirt out a chemical called dopamine. Dopamine is responsible for making you feel. When you take part in things like drugs and sex, you get a tiny dopamine reaction, making you feel euphoric. However, when you get too much dopamine, it basically triggers mild schizophrenia. You literally go insane.

This is probably what happened during the Rite of Spring premier. Neurons revolted, and people lost their shit. It's also probably why grandma hates that got dang rockie-roll music.

The second night? The audience was warned ahead of time. They knew what to expect. Their brains could react to it a little better, and they could more easily recognize the patterns. Everyone loved it. Stravinsky was literally carried out on peoples' shoulders. A year later, police would have to escort him from the concert hall to keep him safe from adoring fans. Twenty-seven years later, Disney would approach him for the rights to use his music in Fantasia.

Our brains hate things that are new. Stravinsky realized that the purpose of the artist is break our brains out of their inherently conservative cycle. He wanted his audience to really listen to music, and the way he did it was not to bring them pleasure, but discomfort, and maybe a little bit of pain. But even with that discomfort, our neurons can adjust. Rapidly. Upon hearing something new, the brain literally rewires and tunes itself to make it more enjoyable. Then the new becomes the conventional.

I don't take this blog on serious notes that often, so bare with me. I'm in four art classes this semester. Every one of them is three hours long. I was really worried at first that I would get too stressed out, and my creative juices would run dry fairly quickly. And I admit, I am getting a little stressed, but it's okay, because I still feel that my creativity is going strong. It's fun as hell.

I love this story about Stravinsky, and I decided to share it because it pretty much summarizes all art. To be creative, just do something new. But you also have to be careful, because when someone does something new only for the sake of being abstract, or getting a shock out of people, you end up with complete meaningless shit. That is the lazy way out, it's attention-whoring, and it is not art. Use some structure. Just think about things that are fairly conventional, and put your own cool twist on them. That's pretty much all there is to it. Don't try to be the next Picasso, or you'll end up with shit since you are not Picasso. But you should still have a little confidence in yourself, and your ability as a human being to create. I think to be even remotely creative, you sort of have to develop your own personal method of how things should be done, and how things should change. That is the key. I'm really not trying to sound pretentious here, I've just never really thought about these things before. It's pretty cool stuff to think about.