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Drum Circle Spirit: Facilitating Human Potential through Rhythm (Performance in World Music Series)
Drum Circle Spirit Facilitating Human Potential through Rhythm - Performance in World Music Series Author:Arthur Hull What does music mean? Common sense ideas (and even many kinds of theory) do surprisingly little to answer this question. For example, a familiar statement such as "music reflects society" treats both terms as if they were separate, timeless things instead of ongoing and related processes. Moreover, the intensely personal dimension of music is l... more »ost in the shuffle of abstraction. If music is a genuinely immediate experience, and as such essentially disconnected from everything else in our lives, then it is beyond or outside what words can explain. If, however, music is a part of the story of our lives--if it is historical--then its stories lie within the realm of our capacities to learn about ourselves. Such stories cannot replace or compete with music, but can help us to understand it. Consider the statement "music expresses emotion." While it may seem to be self-evident, a cursory glance at the worlds of music shows that this is a strange, even incomprehensible idea to most people in the world. At the same time, this perspective has a documented history. We can say how we got to believe that "music expresses emotion," by examining the cultural worlds which have preceded and engendered our own. Each historical world of musical experience is at once unique and exemplary, a direct manifestation of human possibility. This work addresses these issues by showing their connections to the traditions of musical time and social discussion. Logical and semantic problems are analyzed through the Kantian philosophy of time. Following a general correlation of this conception to the discourse of social theory, the argument expounds the core details of musical time: rhythm, pulse, beat, and finally song structure. These concepts show how musical experience spatializes time, creating a kind of logical specificity congruent with other dimensions of our social experience, and thereby open to comprehensible discourse.« less