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Nirvana - Come As You Are

This observation is especially apt when discussing music, perhaps the most experiential art form. Like music itself, which operates on a primal level best described as “pre-rational,” musical judgment seems more visceral than cognitive, more automatic than reasoned. An old opera joke addresses the problem of relying on the expert’s opinion: Wagner’s music is better than it sounds, while Puccini’s music sounds better than it is.

The humor lies in the absurdity of judging music, the audible art, apart from how it sounds. It is the difference between experiential appraisal (“I know what I like when I hear it”) and analytical discernment (“I discern its value when I measure it”). These divergent modes of apprehension help explain the often-wide chasm between popular musical tastes and the rarified tastes of music critics, theorists, historians, and other professionals.

Rather, we are aroused by our own involvement, and mistake that excitement for emotions expressed in the music. We may ascribe sadness to a musical passage. However, our response, sometimes with tears, is not one of sadness, but of pleasure in the appreciation of aesthetic features.

The capacity of music to express emotion, as opposed to our experience of emotion in music, is a major subject in contemporary musical aesthetics. Whereas pre-modern thinkers viewed music as a branch of mathematics, following the Platonic- Pythagorean tradition, late medieval and Renaissance thinkers introduced a humanist understanding of music as the “sonorous art,” which gave mathematics a secondary place of “calculating means to audible ends.”
Source: Musical Aesthetics: An Introduction to Concepts, Theories, and Functions by Jonathan L. Friedmann


Nirvana - Come As You Are
  • Songwriter Kurt Cobain
  • Producer Butch Vig
  • Released March 3, 1992

"Kurt Cobain agreed to release "Come as You Are" as the second single because of its commercial potential. Cobain described the lyrics of "Come as You Are" as contradictory, and said the song was about "people and what they're expected to act like"."

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