Jazz and Christian Thought
Accomplished jazz pianist Pamela York visits the program to discuss jazz music and its relation to Christianity. Pamela’s two albums, The Way of Time and Blue York are currently available at Amazon and in the iTunes music store.
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This was a very cool episode. Lots to think about in regards to education, aesthetics and “ontological impossibilities,” haha.
I’m an ontological impossibilities and potatoes guy, but you gotta eat your veggies too. That whole idea is a question having to do with performance art, especially classical music. If I compose of a piece of music, where/which is the actual art work: the composition on the paper? the ideal performance I have in my mind? Any or every one of the infinitely varied realizations in performance? This would make many factors actually integral parts of each “token” or performance, such as the individual performers, plus environmental aspects (the hall, the weather, the audience, and so on). Crumb composed that piece 4’34 which was meant to emphasize the role of immediate environmental factors in the performance of the art work itself. It was an ontological statement. Or a Platonic ideal performance which no one ever achieves? Glenn Gould quit performing in public at one point in order to concentrate on recording. He believed that recording technology made live performance obsolete. So he was emphasizing a kind of Platonic ideal approach – but he was famous for changing scores, like even Mozart scores! So clearly it was HIS ideal he was searching for.
Its a great question, which is probably best left unresolved. With visual art, the mystery is anchored in the subject-object context of interpretation I think, since obviously the object doesn’t change.
Enjoy the episode.
Nate – with regard to the subjective benefit to the musician of his performance, I was reminded of a helpful quote with regard to my own art of choice. It’s not exactly analogous, but similar:
”Most of the arts, as painting, sculpture, and music, have emotional appeal to the general public. This is because these arts can be experienced by some one or more of our senses. Such is not true of the art of mathematics; this art can be appreciated only by mathematicians, and to become a mathematician requires a long period of intensive training. The community of mathematicians is similar to an imaginary community of musical composers whose only satisfaction is obtained by the interchange among themselves of the musical scores they compose.” Cornelius Lanczosm, in H. Eves Mathematical Circles Squared, Boston: Prindle, Weber and Schmidt, 1972.
[...] Reformed Media Review has a great interview called Jazz and Christian Thought with Pamela York, a Jazz musician and the wife of a pastor of an OPC congregation in Texas. [...]