This is a little belated, but I was thinking back on our afternoon with the Alexander String Quartet and the discussion we had in class about our experience. I kept coming back to the strange parrallels between music and writing. Rhythm is always the first commonality that comes to mind, but as I listened and watched the musicians play, I couldn’t help thinking that the most IMPORTANT parrallel between music and writing is the power of both to appeal to our emotions by “defamiliarizing” experiences.
I thought it was amazing how in one of the pieces the Quartet played, the composer somehow captured the tone and the feel of bagpipe drones, without flatout replicating their sound. It immediately made me think of what Professor Smith said about great writing “defamiliarizing” certain feelings and ideas to make them more fresh, and much more powerful. Writing translates experience into words, and because language is our most common form of communication, we tend to think that this translation occurs quite naturally. But truly great writing pushes the limits of this translation, and finds ways to make us reevaluate our perceptions and hopefully feel these experiences in a new way. Music does the same thing, but only a few people have the ability to perform this task.
on May 6th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
This is exactly what I was going to say in class! I think its incredible how the rhythm of music can be changed at any given time to any given tempo. While writing we can do the same thing with our word selections. We can join a simple sentence and follow it up with a complex sentence to change rhythms. This also ties in with what we were discussing on Tuesday about maintaining a constant thought. If we interrupt an idea from one sentence to the other we disrupt the rhythm of of our work.