The choice of the World Music Don Chicho

World Ballads

Network medien 2009
Compilation by Christian Scholze

ON LINE SHOP MEMBRAN ON LINE SHOP
PREVIEW LISTENING: Network Medien Frankfurt
GYPSY GROOVZ ORCHESTRA: : By the creek of the hot water

Ballads are a peaceful oasis in today’s noisy world.

We are plagued by the sound of all kinds of engines. On television we hear excited dialogues conducted in a limited vocabulary, advertise-ments in a loud, sometimes obvious, sometimes subtle command tone; on the radio the same poorly-balanced old hits or else a constant background noise whose absence we only begin to really notice on a peaceful island or in the desert.

Ballads are an invitation to dream, smooch, doze, fantasize, reflect, to drift through landscapes, to indulge ideas and sometimes to enjoy a small festival of idleness.

Ballads can deeply move us, can stir that sensual goose-pimple feeling. Music and emotion: a delicate topic. None of the explanations as to why music moves us, more or less, is really appo-site.

Much research has meantime been done on the subject – be that neuro-physiological studies linking musical-syntactical processes with emotional appraisals in the orbitofrontal cortex, or analyses from a biochemical, psychobiological, behaviourist viewpoint. The findings are not very satisfying. Little wonder! It’s impossible to reduce this complex phenomenon to individual quantifiable variables. Let us keep this wonderful secret!

In an essay on “Music and Emotion” (in Bruhn, Kopiez, Lehmann Musikpsychologie, Reinbek 2008) in which he evaluates the dif-ferent research approaches and findings, Gunter Kreutz comes to the following astonishing con-clusion:

“It is to be assumed that music has its greatest impact when it succeeds in getting people to gather in peaceful communities and behave considerately towards one another.”