Justin tonight sort of implied that he didn't like electronic music because there's just that something about people getting in a group and playing together.
I thought about this on the way home tonight. A thought occurred to me: maybe I think of music as a carrier of sound as opposed to a carrier of emotion. So I decided to list music that I can remember evoking some kind of feeling in me:
- Traumerei (Schumann), which gives me this sense of longing.
- Sad violin movie music (it's all the same) when someone dies, which makes me cry, or want to cry.
- Happy hardcore (also all the same), which gives me stress and actually helps me focus on something else.
- I did also get stressed out listening to a really really long cadence of chords in some jam in some Phish song that just wouldn't end.
That's all that I can think of. I mean, I don't even associate Dueling Banjos with that scene in Deliverance. Though, if I remember correctly, most people are wrong to associate the track "Dueling Banjos" with that scene. It was some other ditty playing.
I feel moved, when people get together and play and they really blend. I enjoy when there's a particularly clever or catchy harmonization. I admire technical prowress. I get engrossed when different instruments (vocal or not) all move in their own way, but calmly enough that I can barely follow them all. I want to move when I hear certain baseline or percussion rhythms. But those aren't emotional reactions as much as they're reactions to the sound that is the whole of the music, and there's nothing that prevents electronically generated music from satisfying all of those things other than the mental realization that there aren't any humans driving the instruments.
