Art and Life

First of all, before I forget, thanks for the link to the article about Talman. I didn't have an account there, mine was at the Republic Savings and Loan, a block or two north on Kedzie, but I remember Talman as being a landmark in the neighborhood.

Also, before I forget, we are going to my daughter's place in Petoskey for dinner tomorrow and will be getting home late, so I won't be going on line. Be back on Friday.

So it sounds like art is in the eye of the beholder. I understand that there are different schools of art, like realism, surrealism, and impressionism. I suppose that I would be a fan of realism. If you showed me several pictures of a horse, my favorite would be the one that I think looks most like a real horse. Now if they all looked like real horses, then I would pick the one that I thought captured the classic spirit of horseness. What I mean is, the one that inspires you say, "Now that's a horse!" Does that make any sense?

It's the same with music, only it's an  auditory rather than a visual experience. The words to a song could stand alone without a tune, but then it would be a poem rather than a song. Whenever I had to write a poem in school, I would just think of song with which I was familiar and write different words for it. The teachers always bought it. Many of the songs I have composed were just my own words tacked on to a familiar folk melody. That's acceptable in the folk genre as long as you tell your audience where the tune came from and don't try to claim it as your own. Many traditional folk songs were spun off of earlier songs like that. The original song is called the "root song", although sometimes nobody knows which version was the earliest one.

The tune of a song should match the mood of the words and, yes, the instrumentalist should try to play with the same attitude that the lead singer is expressing. Of course, some tunes don't have words, in which case it's the tune's job to evoke whatever image or feeling that the author is trying to express. With traditional fiddle tunes, it's not unusual to find several different tunes with the same title. I'm not sure how this happens, but I suppose that, as the song is handed from one player to another, they each put their own spin on it until the tune evolves into something quite different than it originally was. There is an olds fiddlers' joke about that: "All fiddle tunes are devolved from three  generic fiddle tunes, and all three of them are called 'Sally Ann'".

I never cared that much about Dylan's politics, and it's possible that Dylan didn't either. What made Dylan's defection to the rock camp so disappointing was that the neo folk revival of the 60s was seen by many as a cultural alternative to the rock and roll lifestyle of the 50s. The rock culture was viewed as artificial, shallow, and urban, while the folk culture was believed to harken back to the days when life was more rural, natural, and honest. Maybe the good old days were never really all that good, but we liked to believe that they were, or at least that they should have been. The youth of America seemed to be divided into two camps, the "greasers" and the "long hairs". It wasn't just about music, or hair styles, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Then Vietnam reared it's ugly head and all bets were off, but that's a whole nother story.