Musical Space, Cooperation, and The Art of Play

Non-competitive or cooperative relational space is difficult to conceptualize in our individualist and consumerist North American culture, yet I find myself drawn to understand what it might mean and look like. I think some of this fascination with mutual relational spaces comes from my background as a musician. Ensemble playing (orchestral, choral, chamber music) is like a second language that reorients how I experience and understand the world around me. It is a strange and wondrous hermeneutic that provokes curiosity.

Every once in awhile I stumble across an example that captures my imagination, causing me to wonder once more what a lived out and cooperative love really looks like in the world at large. I sometimes feel naive, because we are taught from a young age to win or that our value in the world is tied to winning. Just think about how many coming of age movies are about competitions, whether in love, sports, or music (e.g., The Karate Kid, Bend it Like Beckham, The Bad News Bears, The Chorus, Pretty in Pink). But I believe that the Christian life demand a more mutual and non-competitive way of living and loving. I also believe that one of the secrets to loving in this manner is the art of play.

Below you will find a video of a public art instillation in Montreal: 21 Swings. What is most fun about this instillation are the new melodies and sounds that come about when friends and strangers work together. Cooperation and play are rewarded when people figure out how to swing in tandem or at different moments. It is not often that we practice these cooperative relational space, yet that is exactly what Paul calls us to in 1 Cor 12. Our diversity creates a very dynamic unity. Again I ask, where do (should) we practice this strange and wondrous biblical call in our lives?

Want to swing?

21 Balançoires (21 Swings) from Daily Tous Les Jours on Vimeo.

APA vs. Chicago

As papers begin to loom, it is good to have some accessible tools to help with citations, etc. I just ran across a great tool that shows easily and quickly how to cite in both Chicago and APA. Each of the style guides is just a click away! The link below will take you to how to cite a book in Chicago style...

bibme.org

Thinking about the God Body Maps: Ann Hamilton's Art

Just in case anyone is interested, here is another video of the Ann Hamilton exhibition. It fills me with longing and with glee...

Complex Concepts Through Music

OK, I heard about this video on the news this week and had to check it out. This is a grad students at McGill University, Tim Blais. He rewrote the lyrics to Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody to explain string theory: renaming the song Bohemian Gravity... I enjoy it when folks have fun with music and the complexity of the universe.

Plato & Aristotle

"The School of Athens," by Raphael
Image found on Wikipedia

In class I made reference to a famous painting of Plato and Aristotle. They are the central figures in the famous fresco seen here on the left. Raphael has placed them and their philosophies at the center of the Athenian school of philosophy in Ancient Greece.

It is often thought that the hand gestures of these two great men represent the central tenets of their teaching. For Plato, the world can be understood through the eternal Forms. Aristotle, in contrast, held to a more empiricist view of exploration. In other words, Plato reasoned from a more cosmological and theoretical (a priori) foundation, and Aristotle reasoned from experience and observation (a posteriori).

Of course this is overly simplistic, but it is a great philosophical example of how important one's starting points are to one's ways of thinking. Plato's philosophy, over the years, has often lead to ways of thinking that are suspicious or even degrading of the material world (a strong dualism between what is material and what is more metaphysically non-material). Aristotle's philosophy, lead to more materialist views of the world, valuing the surety of material investigation and reasoning (what would later be thought of as the scientific method). Both philosophers, however, did hold to a more cosmological universe with eternal and sure laws than is often assumed in our day and age. Their assumption was that there were laws already present to be discovered and adhered to.

I'll end my thoughts there, because we have now moved past the importance of starting points toward the application of one's methodology. Of course, that is where the fun really begins...