We’re used to electric guitars and acoustic guitars, to electronically amplified strings vibrating through a riff and coffee house strings plucked without amplification. That’s a wide range of “being used to.” Does it show our musical sophistication? Probably. We are used to resetting our natural rhythms, also, when syncopation and rapid beats alter our pulse rates. Unaccompanied Renaissance guitar music and the lute music of Bach engender in the listener a set of images distinct from the riffs of today. Without lyrics, a slow Renaissance guitar* or Bach lute piece** conveys the antithesis of our hurried world.
Yes, we have elevator music, new age music, and easy listening music. Most are the results of complex orchestras or bands or of sythesizers backed by supporting percussion. A slow Renaissance song played on a guitar is the ultimate fruit-slices-over-the-eyes-mud-masked-and-robed spa music. Millions attempt to get away from the frenzy of the times through such experiences. Supposedly, the spa is a place of rebirth without the doctor’s slap on the butt and the crying first breath of the newborn. Under the influence of slow Renaissance guitar music, a once frenetic adult relinquishes syncopated breathing. The pulse smooths into quiet steadiness.
We look back in imagination to simpler times when we might have heard Renaissance guitar strings plucked without accompanying percussion in a room of massive stones and heavy wooden beams. Bach’s slow lute music presents the same imagery. In truth, however, no general peacefulness has ever existed, and the guitar and lute music’s existence might mean that humans have always wanted to “get away.” Being immersed in frenzy wears one down. Or so the common psychology leads us to believe.
But frenzy is also what drives the world toward technological advances. Escaping frenzy completely also means escaping all those technological advancements that make a noisy, riff-like world. All societies are noisy orchestras or bands. All have syncopated rhythms at times. Those spa moments are individual experiences. They are moments of quiet withdrawal. But to what end for most people? To renew? To undergo a personal Renaissance? To be reborn? And then to do what? To reenter the temporarily abandoned music hall filled with diverse instruments and pounding drums and to once again synchronize pulse to external drumbeats?
Carry your Renaissance guitar music with you. Make it your earworm. While all are frenetic around you, you will sit in a Renaissance room listening to unaccompanied guitar or lute, hearing no repeatable melody, but somehow enjoying a smoothness that counters all the roughness, complexity, and noise that surrounds.
*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepAWlgqt2w
**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGpl1Utbqzw
Yes, we have elevator music, new age music, and easy listening music. Most are the results of complex orchestras or bands or of sythesizers backed by supporting percussion. A slow Renaissance song played on a guitar is the ultimate fruit-slices-over-the-eyes-mud-masked-and-robed spa music. Millions attempt to get away from the frenzy of the times through such experiences. Supposedly, the spa is a place of rebirth without the doctor’s slap on the butt and the crying first breath of the newborn. Under the influence of slow Renaissance guitar music, a once frenetic adult relinquishes syncopated breathing. The pulse smooths into quiet steadiness.
We look back in imagination to simpler times when we might have heard Renaissance guitar strings plucked without accompanying percussion in a room of massive stones and heavy wooden beams. Bach’s slow lute music presents the same imagery. In truth, however, no general peacefulness has ever existed, and the guitar and lute music’s existence might mean that humans have always wanted to “get away.” Being immersed in frenzy wears one down. Or so the common psychology leads us to believe.
But frenzy is also what drives the world toward technological advances. Escaping frenzy completely also means escaping all those technological advancements that make a noisy, riff-like world. All societies are noisy orchestras or bands. All have syncopated rhythms at times. Those spa moments are individual experiences. They are moments of quiet withdrawal. But to what end for most people? To renew? To undergo a personal Renaissance? To be reborn? And then to do what? To reenter the temporarily abandoned music hall filled with diverse instruments and pounding drums and to once again synchronize pulse to external drumbeats?
Carry your Renaissance guitar music with you. Make it your earworm. While all are frenetic around you, you will sit in a Renaissance room listening to unaccompanied guitar or lute, hearing no repeatable melody, but somehow enjoying a smoothness that counters all the roughness, complexity, and noise that surrounds.
*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FepAWlgqt2w
**
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGpl1Utbqzw
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