I admire Miles Davis, i admire Stravinsky; but i loved Chet Baker and Scriabin...You?

I could go on, but I’ll restrain myself.

Never restraint yourself here.... 😊

I suggest between this fine line between "effort" and "allowing" to read and study a little bit around the music which interest you without having yet all your heart in it....

Article of music critics, philosophers, or simply bios.... Reading and studying a bit help a lot....

I remember younger when the reading of the text on the vinyl cardbox presentation of the intention and epoch of the composer and his situation in it help me a lot....Same thing about Indian and persian music elementary introduction... I read biographies of Scriabin and Sun Ra that help me to appreciate their journey for example....Reading about unusual instrument help a lot....

Do you know where come from the vichitra veena or the sarangi ?


The other helping method to cross and navigate this fine line between effort and allowance is listening at small dose, and reading at the same time around the intention of the composer or the musician... It is listening without imposing anything in the attention....Like background listening.... Alternating this with some deep attentive short listenings sessions looking for the ideas and concepts we are discovered in our reading studies...


This was my way.... Perhaps good for me and not for all.... I dont know....

One thing is for sure, enlarging my musical scope was always enlarging my own soul at the same time....

Thanks for your suggestions, mahgister. I'm curious how intellectual understanding can impact the spontaneous reaction to music/sound that occurs on a non-intellectual level. 

If an interval "feels" unpleasant to us, it's not clear to me how understanding the composer's intention can affect the interval's  "energetic charge" -- it's effect upon our metabolism. 

I apologize if I'm missing something. 

I’m curious how intellectual understanding can impact the spontaneous reaction to music/sound that occurs on a non-intellectual level.

Acclimating our soul to another soul through biography or essays is not only an intellectual work or even mainly an intellectual one... It is mostly a contextualization of another soul..A way to link our journey on earth to another one journey... If you stay only on an intellectual level in reading you will miss the task...

If an interval "feels" unpleasant to us, it’s not clear to me how understanding the composer’s intention can affect the interval’s "energetic charge" -- it’s effect upon our metabolism.

Understanding the composer intentions participate of this contextualization of his soul...And to the contextualization of your own listening interpretating soul at our own time....



I will give you an example because it is easier to give an example...

When i listen Schoenberg atonalism music i feel a strange out of this world emotion that is very powerful but that is not "metabolizable" by my spirit/soul/body organization ... The chords and colors feel are icy cold and invit me in some ethereal artificial world... It is interesting but not gripping in a transformative way for me...

No reading will modify that experience...

When i listened to the late works of Scriabin, on the fine line between tonality and atonality, the dynamic movement which withdraws me from this world and returns me there immediately after in a continual back and forth, dynamise all my creative spirit, in an uncontrolled enthusiastic surge toward the infinite, through my own being...

Reading about Scriabin, his intention, his superhuman wishes for humanity through his music illuminated his work.. Schoenberg was only a genius with his creation of atonality, Scriabin appeared before me like a Christ-like figure who used atonality WITHOUT making it a dogma and used it to transform humanity not to entertain it.....

But the main reason of my love for him was also the discovery of a rare pianist able to play him at the required level....Sofronitsky...

Then Schoenberg i may like him and admiring him... He did not touch me at all ...Like Stravinsky they are brain and genius only...I admire them and i know exactly why...

But Scriabin transform my life at each listening like Bach.... I love hin and i feel exactly why... For other reasons but related one in the history of occidental music, Bach and scriabin partake a concious masterful use of the colors tonal scale for the redemption of humanity at the limit of the tonal world but never completely out of it like Schoenberg...Schoenberg method is only new entertainment not alchemical transfrmation... The brain play the more important part in Schoenberg .... Thhe brain and the will play the more important part in Wagner.... With Beethoven, Scriabin or Bach the heart and the will play the more important part the brain come in third ....


But the first time i listened to Scriabin i only perceived a complex and uninteresting curtain of harmonies without melody...My ears/brain cannot proceed the information that was too powerful to be understood by the ears/brain/heart/will in the form of their complex initiated completely new interactive movements ...


I read much, i was also initiated by some musician in my younger years about him, that initiation kept my curiosity alive; i begun to understood slowly the promethean task behind Scriabin creation, which is not unlike Beethoven or Wagner ( that is  more artificial in Wagner more natural in Beethoven ) and my complete listening of music was changed for ever....

I begin to perceive complete new dimensions in sounds colors.... Thanks to a patient curiosity and a slow investigation.... And i loved him spontaneously at the right mature moment of true discovery and enlightenment when the moment was right in the person of his greatest interpreter on piano...

Not loving something at some time only means that we are not ready sometimes....

Without Scriabin my musical life would have been way poorer...Because listening to a new colors perceived dimensions has no price...

I place Scriabin now next to the greatest composers of all times... Not under....

Re the “fine line between effort and allowing”:

Music, like all art, evolves over time; all creative artists build on what came before to one degree or another.  Additionally, art is a reflection of the time of its creation.  These are but two of the reasons that one of the best ways to traverse this fine line between effort and allowing is to approach this process from a historical (chronological) viewpoint.  From a musicological standpoint there is tremendous and inescapable logic to the stylistic evolution of Jazz and “Classical” and there exist many parallels between the two.  For example, the listener that has at least some familiarity with the music of Charlie Parker will find the music of John Coltrane to be much more palatable on first listen than the listener whose exposure to Jazz ended with Lester Young (Swing era).  

In all serious music, the move from very comfortable harmonic and rhythmic ideas to the more liberal use of dissonance and obtuse rhythms is a direct reflection of societal changes that evoke similar changes.  Understanding this will put things in better context.  This may not necessarily cause one to actually love the music, but can do much to move one in that direction.  

Great post...

Ernest Ansermet, the great director and maestro, who was a mathematician of first formation and wrote a  masterful 1200 pages book about the musical experience says that the history of music reflect the history of the soul and the history of each soul mirror itself in the history of music...

Like you said we cannot love all there is to love on the same footing because we are all different in our approach to music, but studying a bit history and styles help a lot for a deeper experience....