Saturday, November 22, 2008
Surrealist Music
Yesterday, google's homepage showed a surrealist painting of Rene Magritte. This made me wonder why the surrealist movement was geared mainly towards visual arts (Eg. painting , movies).
More specifically I was wondering if there existed corresponding surrealist works on music.
A wiki search led me to this page on surrealist music. However, from that wiki entry it seemed that surrealist movement for music was hardly popoular; In fact, IMO, the article may very well have concluded "To summarize, the idea of surrealist music did not catch on".
So, why didn't the surrealist movement apply for music?
I think this is simply because music, from its conception has always been divorced from reality.
A painting or a film can be realistic, since it depicts something the eye sees in the real world. By the same logic, realistic music should be something consisting of sounds mimicing the natural sounds that a human hears in his/her everyday life.
Clearly, that is not what we refer as music. Music, from the very begining has been something which is imagined with little connection to realistic sounds -- In other words, it is already surreal, I claim.
More specifically I was wondering if there existed corresponding surrealist works on music.
A wiki search led me to this page on surrealist music. However, from that wiki entry it seemed that surrealist movement for music was hardly popoular; In fact, IMO, the article may very well have concluded "To summarize, the idea of surrealist music did not catch on".
So, why didn't the surrealist movement apply for music?
I think this is simply because music, from its conception has always been divorced from reality.
A painting or a film can be realistic, since it depicts something the eye sees in the real world. By the same logic, realistic music should be something consisting of sounds mimicing the natural sounds that a human hears in his/her everyday life.
Clearly, that is not what we refer as music. Music, from the very begining has been something which is imagined with little connection to realistic sounds -- In other words, it is already surreal, I claim.
