Pandora wrote:You must be one of those people who listens to Handel for relaxation.
But seriously, maybe we should first address the whole purpose of making music. According to this
doc, the original purpose of music was to share common emotional states and to bond. Since we are social animals, it can also be seen as an extension of grooming activity, and it is essentially emotional. I think you might be one of the people who think that anything outside classical music is not really music, but then I'd have to ask, what is music for, evolutionary speaking? And if the music does not emotionally move you, has it fulfilled its function? I don't know about you, but for me, if wanted to actively work my brain on picking up on complex auditory patterns/sounds (critical/logical processing), I might just choose to listen to Morse code messages or learn different bird calls, or foreign language, instead.
Or you can simply listen to jazz music:
https://youtu.be/z-z6n0gm918Which is my point.
The creative element generates ideas, options, possibilities, etc. The critical element, on the other hand, is that which applies filter to generated ideas. It is what separates the good from the bad.
The excess of creative element produces unnecessarily complex, noisy, random patterns which can then only be enjoyed mechanically, as a game of prediction, with little to no emotion involved, what you refer to as "critical/logical processing".
That's the problem of jazz music. Also the problem of baroque, which you mentioned, and virtuoso music in general.
The purpose of music, I would say, guess more or less in agreement with the documentary that you linked (but that I cannot see), is to represent emotions.
Though this is not always the case. In some instances, the purpose is merely to demonstrate the skill of a musician or the power of some technology. In such a case, a piece of music is nothing but a collage of all sorts of difficult-to-play or never-heard-before musical movements, sort of tech demo, producing an emotion no one can relate to because noone ever experienced it naturally.
A piece of music is supposed to reflect some naturally occurring emotion. As such, its content, the movements it is made out of, must have near absolute correspondence to the content of the represented, naturally occurring, emotion.
We say such a piece has soul . . . for no other reason than because it corresponds, with high level of precision, to some emotional dynamic we can relate to because it is something we have experienced naturally in our past.
The purpose of music is to imitate emotions.
The purpose of dancing is to imitate music.
Emotions -> music -> dancing
When this chain is broken, as it is today, strange things happen.
We now have dancers who do not even dance to music let alone to some naturally occurring emotion. You can change the music they are dancing to, even turn it off, and it won't make any difference, because their dancing is highly independent, merely meant to show all the difficult moves they can perform.
And the choice of moves they perform is grounded in nothing but difficulty . . . what is difficult is automatically good, what is easy is automatically boring. So you can see plenty of ugly, awkward, moves performed merely because they require skill, in the same way you can hear all sorts of awkward sounds, e.g. farts, in jazz music.
Many consider silence, and slowing down, to be undesirable: performers, because such movements do not display much skill; audience, because people are restless, emotionally degenerate, incapable of pausing.
Division of labor is responsible for this, I would say. The benefits it has are not without the costs.
Composers, fewer in numbers, are responsible for tapping into their memory, selecting aspects of their past they consider to be of high value, and then choosing the best sequence of tonal movements that mimics them. Performers, greater in number, are responsible for carrying out the task set by the composer.
Performers are physical . . . they make physical movements they are told to make.
Composers are mental . . . they select, filter, attune, connect, etc.
The problem occurs when composers die out -- being fewer in number, they are the first to die out -- and all we are left with are performers who then attempt to be composers but without much success.
We live in the age of lower castes -- artisans, performers, etc -- trying to play the role of the now long dead higher castes.
What happens to children when they lose their parents?
With all that out of the way, I will say that, as someone who's forced to endure VH1 music every morning, I’d rather listen to jazz than to
motherfucking starboy.
Modern pop music is terrible . . .
I got a philosophy degree, I'm not upset that I can't find work as a philosopher. It was my decision, and I knew that it wasn't a money making degree, so I get money elsewhere.
-- Mr. Reasonable
I wonder if they have moments of tranquility and quiet meditation.. or may be only when they are asleep. 
My oldest (half) sister is like that.. gets it from her dad.
... Don't tell me, I wanna be in suspense for a bit. 
