This quote, from Wm. Congreve, conceals a series of truths have been on my mind for the past few days.  Last Thursday, I traveled to Sackville New Brunswick with the Ottawa Bach Choir to attend Podium 2008 at Mount Alison University,  All in all, a varied and quite interesting trip.

Podium is an interesting “conference” - quite different from any other I have attended (and that’s quite a few over the years).  It is a meeting of choral conductors, choirs and musicians from across Canada.  Unlike the prototypical academic conference, one doesn’t have dry papers being read out by bored presenters to sleepy colleagues.  Podium has workshops and Master Classes where the audience is not only invited but required to participate.

The workshop that sticks in my mind the most was run by the Finnish group Rajaton.  If you haven’t heard of them before then you really should check them out (upcoming concerts here).  To use the technically correct musical term, they kick ass (check out these YouTube videos here and here - they really should be seen live).  So, why did this session stick in my mind?  I think the main reason was because they didn’t talk about the technical issues of music but, rather, about how it should, can and does convey emotions.

This projection of emotions wasn’t new to me, but the way in which they talked about it while simultaneously getting the audience to experience it, was.  I had seen them in concert the night before and, despite the fact that half the songs, maybe more, were in Finish which I don’t speak or understand, I could still get the emotional content of their songs.

This issue of emotional projection through music is a complex one.  In general, everyone seems to be able to make music, at least at a basic level (yes, even if you are tone deaf!).  At the same time, music is able to affect most people as well (see Daniel J. Levitin’s This is your brain on music for the neurology).  There also seems to be a correlation between the complexity of an emotional message and the complexity of the music, a correlation I have certainly run into with performing Bach!

Now this idea of using music to project / manipulate an audiences’ emotions is not a “new” discovery by any means.  It is a basic in advertising, theatre, ritual, marketing, movies, etc. ad nauseum.  But how about using music to understand our cultural and racial (actually species as in Homo Sapiens Sapiens) heritage?  Can we use historical music, or contemporary for that matter, to understand the emotional states and processes of a culture or sub-culture?  This is something I am exploring right now and I think it may be possible to use popular music as an analog of official culture and, when available, of “real” culture.  While the project is just starting, I will be coming back to it in future blog entries.