Taking a break
Well, I've spent this entire morning and afternoon (up until now) analyzing poetry...somebody put me out of my misery :P No, I'm just being harsh. Some of these lines are beautiful:
"The growing idleness of summer grass
With its frail kites of furious butterflies..."
Derek Walcott - Lesson for this Sunday
"And the secure from thinking may climb safe to liners
Hearing small rumours of paddlers drowned near stars."
Derek Walcott - The Harbour
"The sun goes slowly blind.
It is this mountain, shrouding
the valley of the shadow,
widening like amnesia
evening dims the mind."
Derek Walcott - Love in the Valley
Anyway, I was just thinking about whether a piece of art - and by art I mean anything for expression, including music, writing, painting - is necessarily diminished by analyzing it? We can all feel the beauty of a melody, or imagine the pictures painted by words of rich imagery, or look at a painting and be moved by life captured on canvas. If we can simultaneously appreciate the logic behind the structure of that melody, or the reason why those words are able to paint such vivid mental pictures, or the structure of the painting...surely that would compound rather than negate our appreciation for the piece of art.
Someone was saying to me yesterday that dissecting art to understand the theory behind it was tantamount to renouncing our emotion for it, and I remember disagreeing. Just because you understand the technicalities behind harmonies, chord structures, musical sentences, tone and colour, doesn't necessarily mean that Rachmaninoff's Prelude in D would mean any less to you than to someone else who appreciates it because "it's a beautiful piece", or even because "it's the most amazing piece of music, and when you're playing the crescendo in the middle of it, you feel as though you're flying, and suddenly nothing matters except the sound of the music all around you, and you can do nothing else except drown in it". And if you are able to appreciate both, well, so much the better. In much the same way, understanding that clouds are made of water vapour and evening is caused by cyclic revolutions of the earth around the sun, does not prevent me from being moved by a beautiful sunset....
Well, anyway. Back to studying.