The days and hours are flying by as I work non-stop on music production and song writing. My songs are taking as much time and work as a painting now, many days each, but they sound better than ever as a result. Recorded music is a strange medium for me to focus on, unprofitable in this epoch of humanity and I have no plans of performing these live (though I could). Still, I'm very pleased with the results and am growing. I wrote a new song in the night, a very simple rock song called Be My Jesus, and today finalised the words to a second song which moved me deeply as I wrote it, called Always In The Morning. At some point I'll have to stop writing new songs and focus on producing the existing ones.
I've spent today transcribing the recent compositions (I typically write words by hand late at night, and record vocal melody snippets, then type these up in the day), then working on the production of Passive Aggressive, which is a fast swung song, but has a very gentle part in the middle on strings (the essential contrast). The timing here is very important. The enemy of feeling is the regularity of the metronome and the sequencer, but everything is a balance. Prometheus gives me a lot of control over timing now, even so much as permitting a manual regular 'tap' throughout the song to set the meter, if I need to do this.
In the night I had an insight into the purpose and goals of art. I considered when art was used in pre-history, by humans untainted by behavioural rules. Costume, dance, body painting, wall painting... making masks and sculptures... all of these were made for magical or spiritual ritualistic reasons. These objects were magical things, special items that connected mankind with the gods and the deeper, hidden, universe. I connected this insight with my feelings about good art having a special and powerful feeling, like the music I mentioned in my last post. It made me think that this certain property, ethereal in description but completely tangible when experienced, was a measure of something like magical power. I assigned the variable of mana for this power, the statistic used for magical energy in Dungeons and Dragons.
Artworks that have this property, that are high in mana, whether a painting, a piece of music or poem, are like rivets in the fabric of the universe, special artefacts that attract attention in an almost magical way. In a way, this can identify masterpieces, things we feel are instantly 'good'. We instrinsically know what is good or bad artistically; the good art moves us... due to it's authenticity, or beauty, or something else... it emits a special energy and this is my concept of aesthetic mana.
This idea also made me aware of the importance of dance as an artform, which is often relegated now. Of course, to ancient peoples, even animals like birds, dance is a very important art. The same with costume, vital to ancient peoples, but now a secondary art to visual arts, music, literature.
My concepts are worthy of a book. It will have to wait.
