Courtesy of a reader, this is amygdala rising, even among the artsy crowd:
A concert-going crowd last weekend in Cologne, Germany, jeered to a halt a performance by Iranian “virtuoso” Mahan Esfahani of an infamous piece of degenerate “minimalist” music by American “composer” Steve Reich.
The crowd’s behavior, condemned by the Cologne Philharmonic management as “stunning,” is unprecedented, and German media have tried to link the reaction to the New Year’s Eve mass sex attacks by nonwhite invaders in that city…
Philharmonie Köln management said it was “stunned at the unforeseen reaction to Sunday’s concert. We expect artists to be treated with respect,” and insisted that Cologne’s prime concert venue would remain a “forum for cultural diversity…”
He was first challenged by catcalls such as “speak German”…
… he broke off after about eight minutes because audience reactions had become “unbearable” and he had noticed that audience factions were yelling at each other, with a few people even crying.
Art is inherently amygdala-driven. Among visual art, as with worldviews, if your amygdala is developed, it appears art that closely adheres to reality focuses the amygdala on it, and relaxes it with it’s close approximation of the real world. If your amygdala is poorly developed, art which diverges from reality radically will attract the amygdala with the divergence, and distract it from the real world. If I didn’t know better I would think K-strategists want to be absorbed in reality, while r-strategists seek art that distracts from reality with its shocking or confusing divergences from reality.
At the K end of the scale is the realistic style of the Renaissance masters, while as you head more toward r-selection, you find Jackson Pollack and Picasso.
Here in music, K-strategists are looking for complex, rule governed compositions, which absorb their amygdala with the beauty of the music. Meanwhile r-strategists seek strange, irritating compositions which are so strange they cannot be ignored.
It is a measure of amygdala ability, combined with the purpose it is filling for the person. A highly functional, easily focused amygdala in a person who is inherently happy, will seek complex beauty, which is designed to focus the amygdala on pleasurable stimuli. A weak amygdala, poorly able to focus, in an innate depressive, will produce an individual seeking shocking amygdala distractions from their natural depressive state.
It says something about a person’s fundamental nature when they need to hear the sound of nails on a chalkboard to prevent any accidental passive contemplation of the world around them.
Finally, note the most amusing aspect of the article – the mingling of r and K during the approach of the apocalypse. In-grouping over language, chaos, anarchy, jeering, screaming, fleeing, and crying – and that is simply a bunch of artsy types at a music recital, while resources are still ever present.
Wait until the economy finally collapses, governments go bankrupt, the savages come out to play, and things turn really harsh. Then the real fireworks will begin.
ITZ coming, and if it is half as amusing as this concert recital, I’m almost looking forward to it.
[…] By Anonymous Conservative […]
Having married into a family of Germans, I’m telling you — do not fuck with the classical music. Bach and Beethoven are as much a totem of their culture as cowboy hats are here in Texas.
It’s interesting to me when some art gets attention and has very strong K-themes. A recent video game in this vein is Dragon Age: Origins (2009), which has a strong emphasis on duty, group-combat, and sacrifice. In the beginning of the game the recruits go through a ritual to join an elite military group, and only you survive. And in the climax you give your own life to defeat the demonic threat. It stands out from the generic shooters and rpgs in my view.
Tsk. Steve Reich is capable of better. His “Music for 18 Musicians” works nicely as a soundtrack (even to something as uneventful as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AAU_btBN7s ) But playing the same notes over and over has got to be the music equivalent of Chinese Water Torture.
What is K-selected art? Its the unparalleled maybe even otherworldly beauty that the real world may not possess, done as it were in realistic detail.
Its the glory of the unseen transcendental world being refracted as perfectly as possible into this lower plane of reality.
I disagree that art is amygdala driven, while it soothes, agitates, and distracts the amygdala, the process itself is not driven by the amygdala. When I play or improvise it activates most if not all of my brain and the portions it activates are in proportion to the emotional and physical states I try to emulate musically. My experience is born out in science, studies and scans of the brain show that music activates the portions of your brain related to the emotions and states the music invokes. Musicians are pyschologists, rather, music is psychology applied to sound.
The act of music making is similtanously mentally exhausting and exhilerating, and why not? It’s a form of exercise. A good practice session, rehearsal, jam, concert… can both burn and build neural connections. Playing certain forms/styles of music can be bad for you. Aquinas and Aristotle were right, playing and listening to the wrong types of music will damage you.
Reich is one of the most unimaginative composers to bear the title. He ought to have been called Leer or better, Arm. Taking pop motifs and spreading the development out over length/space/time does not a classical piece make. Coming up with something that is intellectually stimulating, such as the phasing from Piano Phase, or the ever extending and shearing of the dominant eleventh chord of Four Organs, is very nice, but one has to remember that this is an art interested in the listener. I quite like both works as exercises, as things to think about and learn from. Perhaps one day I may add phasing to one of my own works, if done properly the listener will enjoy it and not think anything of it. The goal being they’ll notice it about as much as they’ll notice a V chord resolving to a I chord.
Ideas behind the music can be fascinating, but a composer cannot allow them to dictate his music as the music always takes primacy over the philosophy. Wagner discovered this the hard way and his music was made infinitely better for it. Recall his opera Tristan und Isolde and compare this to his earlier operas Das Rheingold and Walküre. In Das Rheingold and Walküre the philosophy guides the work at the expense of the music (which only becomes apparent to Wagner with Walküre), while in Tristan and Isolde it is obvious that Wagner has learned that the music reigns supreme, the other aesthetic choices serve the music as it is the music that provides the drama.
I read both your books and a lot of your blog, but I have questions: Why are most artists r-types? (Bach is a notable exception) And, being r-types, why do so many make art glorifying K ideals? Does repurposing the brain towards art make it incapable of living as a K inspite of that persons original dispossition?
My gut reaction on the questions (AC can speak for himself) is that art that exists solely as art can only be created in a time of excess because it is a luxury good. Art is often directed at K ideals because the struggle that K provides is much more dramatic than “I ate some grass, and then I ate some grass, and then I ran away, and then I ate some grass.”
I think that when the brain is K selected, the artistic drive is expressed in different crafts. Take the Vikings — their art was expressed primarily in the Poetic Edda (which was likely composed on long, boring longboat drives) and through some of the finest Form Follows Function black smithing in history. The Spartans, rather than indulge in the sculpting and freises that defined Athens, devoted their artistic energy to sharpening their Laconic skills to a razor edge.
I think the artistic drive is there in K, but it expresses in things that are not SOLELY art delivery devices (or serve a dual religious function and consume only energy, like the Edda.)