John Borstlap

composer | author

Menu
  • Home
  • Blog
  • About
    • Biography
    • Werkbeschreibung Deutsch
  • List of Works
  • Audio
  • Classicism
  • List of articles
  • Press
  • Contact
Menu

Category: List of articles

Contemporary music risks

Posted on August 15, 2017December 24, 2017 by John

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…

Read more

Prescribing art

Posted on July 20, 2017July 20, 2017 by John

“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…

Read more

Aesthetic perception and nature

Posted on June 29, 2017March 16, 2018 by John

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…

Read more

Classical music and humanism

Posted on February 5, 2017November 23, 2018 by John

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’…

Read more

Neuroscience and aural confusion

Posted on January 30, 2017February 5, 2017 by John

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,…

Read more
  • Previous
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • 6
  • …
  • 11
  • Next

List of articles

  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • July 2016
  • April 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • May 2015
  • March 2015
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • July 2014
  • May 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013

Recent Posts

  • Two short essays on Euro News Website
  • The modernity of revival
  • For further reading
  • Deep Listening
  • Revival?

Links

  • Donemus Publishing BV
John Borstlap © 2022