Category: List of articles

There hangs around classical music, and especially around its subspecies: contemporary music, an atmosphere of initiation: the listener has to know something about it to experience it to the full. Therefore people with knowledge of classical music, and especially contemporary music, are often considered ‘special’ or / and ‘elitist’, invoking feelings of inferiority with people…

“Making and consuming art lifts our spirits and keeps us sane. Art, like science and religion, helps us make meaning from our lives, and to make meaning is to make us feel better.” That the arts can be benefitting for our health, has been known for ages, in fact: in Antiquity this was already common…

Some strange facts of life have a strong meaning, for example that proportions in nature conform to certain mathematical principles, which in turn can be grasped by the human mind – i.e. in the human mind there is a receptive system of mathematical properties which lay at the heart of natural formation. Our mind is…

Classical music is often considered as an art form which embodies humanistic and ethic ideals, and is supposed to inspire moral awareness in its listeners. This aspirational vision of serious music is one of the results of the Enlightenment as it developed at the end of the 18th century, when in aesthetic theory ‘the artist’…

Some research in neuroscience appears to support the claim that confusion, resulting from listening to postwar avantgarde atonal works, is not due to lack of musical understanding and a conservative taste, but the logical result of works without structural patterns that relate to the mind’s hardwired, pattern-seeking abilities. But of course, acculturation plays a role,…