Music

In your opinion, Is music invented or discovered?

Music is discovered then invented, modified, and supermanisized.

Great question, let me get back to you...

Niki ( IO ) wrote: In your opinion, Is music invented or discovered?

A very interesting question! thought I'm too tired to give any indepth answers at the moment. Funnily enough I was reading through a book the other day, which contained and email exchange between ' Radu Malfatti' and 'Taku Sugimoto' (both composers who utilise substantial periods of silence in their music). Malfatti touched breifly on this matter throughout the course of this discussion. My own views are somewhat similar this (musically wise), thought I might disgree slightly depending on the context the dicussion is focusing on.

small quotation:

"Evolution goes on, whether we like it or not, and the creative human being is the one who can detect the changes before others do. I don't think any one "invents" things, not Edison, not Bell, not Charile Parker, not Schoenberg, not Cage, etc., but I believe that some - only very few - people are more alert and awake than others and hear, feel or sense the changes eariler that the rest. Which does not mean they are the best..." Radu Malfatti 2002

This quote might be aimed more directly at evolutionary step taken in musical idea (taking into account the elite mindset), but I think it is still applicable to the creation of music, generally speaking.


Edited by Black Velvet - April 09 2007 at 02:00

I think that people discover rhythm patterns and melodies so singing comes "naturally", but they invent music. Music is when people take conscious control over the structures they discover and try to elaborate further; and they do it by imposing premeditated ideas and concepts to the process and the results. Going back in history to the earliest theories of music that we know about (I think the oldest one is the one of Pythagoras and his school), they had very well defined reason for their choices for what they called perfect ratios . They used these ratios in music and physics, maths, architecture, medicine etc. because of their metaphysical beliefs in the relevance of these numbers. My "classical civilization & culture" teacher told me he had the opportunity to listen to attempts of recreating Greek antique music from some discovered "transcripts", and they sounded really weird, like nothing he had heard before.


Edited by andu - April 09 2007 at 04:47

Both.  Discovered in the sense that it comes about from a natural phenomenon we discovered.  Invented in the sense that the methods of harnessing this natural phenomenon we invented.