Real

Technical and Analytical Readings

Arguably, music is the most spiritual art form, because it is unbounded by the physical world in the same way as the visual and bodily-kinesthetic arts are. Like other arts, music reaches deep into subconscious, often serving as opening into joy or an outlet for suffering.

Music processing in the brain is being mapped. The frontal and temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex are highly involved in music listening. Frontal-temporal-cerebellar beta neural circuits appear to be related to auditory-motor rhythm learning. Several cortical regions appear to be selective for music. The orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala appear to respond to the flow of tension and resolution in music. On the dominant side of the brain, an area of the frontal cortex called “Broca's area supports enhanced visuospatial cognition in orchestral musicians”. Consonance, dissonance and harmony generate activity in the brainstem but not exclusively. The neural basis for music perception is under study.

Oliver Sacks famously underwent fMRI imaging while listening to Bach’s Mass in B Minor, then to Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis: the results confirmed his strong subjective preference for Bach. EEG technology can also be used to track emotional responses during music listening. “Formal musical training seems to have a domain-general, but modality-specific beneficial effect on selective attention.” A three-channel model has been developed, which has yielded insights into why “music directly affects the cognitive system and leads to improved brain efficiency through well-defined mechanisms”. Some research suggests that “nonmusical associations with music training are limited to measures of intellectual ability and their correlates”.

Musical intelligence is associated with other forms of intelligence, and abilities. “Producing and perceiving music engage a wide range of sensorimotor, cognitive, and emotional processes.” “Cognitive Control in Auditory Working Memory Is Enhanced in Musicians”. “. . . musicians (have been) found to attain significantly higher spatial test scores than nonmusicians. . .” “Musical abilities are known to be associated with factors like intelligence, training, and sex”. “ . . . cognitive processes such as musical input analysis, decision making, and output monitoring are independent of general intellectual status.” Perhaps this partly explains why music education of young people is so popular.

Technical journals:

• Journal of Art Histiography
• Journal of the National Art Education Association
• Arts Journal
• Journal of Art & Design Education
• Sculpture Journal
• Leiden Journal of Pottery Studies
• Journal of Musicology
• The Journal of Musicology
• International Journal of Musicology
• Journal of Musicological Research
• Journal of Music Theory
• Journal of Culinary Science & Technology

True Narratives

General histories:

• Penelope J.E. Davies, et. al., Janson's History of Art: The Western Tradition (Prentice Hall, 2006).
• Editors of Phaidon, 30,000 Years of Art: The Story of Human Creativity Across Time and Space (Phaidon Press, 2007).
• Fred S. Kleiner and Christin J. Mamiya, Gardner's ArtThrough the Ages : The Western Perspective (Wadsworth Publishing, 2004).
• Marilyn Stokstad and Michael Cothren, Art History (Prentice Hall, 2010).
• Harold North Fowler, A History of Sculpture (MacMillan, 1916).
• Angelika Taschen, Sculpture: From Antiquity to Present Day (Taschen, 2010).
• Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History (Thames & Hudson, 1985).
• Andrew Causey, Sculpture Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1998).
• Penelope Curtis, Sculpture 1900-1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, The New Grove of Music and Musicians (Oxford University Press, 2004).
• Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford University Press, 2005).
• Ben Ratliff, Every Song Ever: Twenty Ways to Listen in an Age of Musical Plenty (Farrar, 2016): twenty essays that distill popular music.
• Jonathan Lethem and Kevin Dettmar, eds., Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop From Elvis to Jay Z (The Library of America, 2017). See a review here.
• Nicholas Fox Weber, The Bauhaus Group: Six Masters of Modernism (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009): “As conceived by Walter Gropius, then a lieutenant in the World War I German Army, (Bauhaus) was meant to reconcile beauty, simplicity, utility and mass production — a radical departure from the prevailing decorative elaborations.”
• Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena (Random House, 2019): “After three years spent writing about his crucial return visit to Libya, he takes himself to Siena to do nothing but look at pictures painted between the 13th and 15th centuries.”

Personal histories:

• Andrew Motion, Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets (Faber & Faber, 2008).
• Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (NYRB Classics, 2006).
• Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment (Yale University Press, 1981).
• Giorgio Vasari, The Livesof the Artists (Oxford University Press, 2008).
• William Wallace, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and His Times (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
• Ellen G. Landau, JacksonPollock (Abrams, 2010).
• Justin Spring, The Gourmands’ Way: Six Americans in Paris and the Birth of a New Gastronomy (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017): “One critic’s often harsh take on a generation of influential food writers.”
• Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney, The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017): “He was capable of narrative embellishment when the facts were not sufficiently dramatic.”

Art and the person:

• Eric Kandel, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present (Random House, 2012).

On the power of art and beauty:

• Jack Lowery, It Was Vulgar & It Was Beautiful: How AIDS Activists Used Art to Fight a Pandemic (Bold Type, 2022), “tells the story of the art collectives whose work became the iconography of a movement.”

On art and culture, through film:

• Noah Isenberg, We’ll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton & Company, 2017). “’I stick my neck out for nobody,’” said Bogart’s iconic character; then he did.
• Glenn Frankcl, High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (Doubleday, 2017). “ . . . a profile in collective cowardice”, based on the Red Scare of the 1950s.

The beauty of art, illustrated:

• Abelardo Morell, Flowers for Lisa: A Delirium of Photographic Invention (Abrams, 2018): this book of photographs and commentary arose out of a gift the author gave to his wife.

Documentary and Educational Films

• Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, about making the film Apocalypse Now