Theoretical Reflection Week 5

 RHYTHM'S OF LIFE

Partridge aims to explore the ways in which listening to music affects the individual in everyday life. Although acknowledging that it is important to study how people relate to music, Partridge is more concerned with music and the "construction of self." (Partridge 2012)

Music can cause a person to reminisce about times gone by or be affiliated with something familiar, it can be in an individual and/or collective sense. A universal language that not only seduces the aural and emotional, it can also create a physical feeling.

Partridge discusses this with the example of dub music,  linking it to the construct of a person. The bass having a relationship with the heart pumping blood and the melodic rhythms to the rhythms of life. This assault on emotions can be created from a sound frequency too low to be heard, the sound therefore affecting the emotional and physical being rather than the aural being. Creating a new special awareness the listener can exist in.

Interestingly, this low frequency sound is also created in pipe organs, often played in a place of worship. Given the already spiritual atmosphere, this new emotional space and feeling of connectedness of music to life could easily be attributed to or even mistaken for the presence of God. The tones of the organ stimulating the same unseen euphoria experienced through dub music.

Partridge also mentions the relationship of drugs and music, amphetamines often associated with fast beats heard in jazz and cannabis use with dub. If these drugs are used to enhance the feeling created by music, and similar tones are used in dub music as well as pipe organs, it could be said that the combination of either drugs and dub music or church music and the listeners spiritual place of worship, could be endeavouring to achieve the same purpose. That of some form of spiritual enlightenment.

The role of music and "the construction of personal and social identities". (Partridge 2012) is a phenomena that impacts every music listener. Further study of the relationship between music and the 'construction of self' may reveal music to be "a language of the emotions through which we directly experience the fundamental urges that move mankind." (Cooke 1959)

References:
Partridge, Christopher.  "Popular Music, Affective Space and Meaning."  In Religion, Media and Culture:  A Reader, edited by Jolyon Mitchell, Gordon Lynch and Anna Strhan, 182 - 193.  London and New York:  Routledge, 2012
  
Cooke, Deryck.  "The Language of Music.", 262.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1959 

Image References:
http://pixabay.com/en/music-note-recreation-cartoon-clef-25663/