Nowadays we live in frenetic society, surrounded with a vast amount of different stimuli. In response to this situation, and supported by a fully accesible culture market, we turned ourselves into eager consumers, creating new combinations and revaluations of products.
This paradigm has specially influenced the cultural environment, and with that, the music market. Now, everything must have an economic value, and because of this, “attracting attention has become an essential economical activity, and on many markets even the prime one, because it conditions the possibility to realise economic value” (Laermans, 2011, 121).
This need to be perceived by others in order to be valuable might lead us to follow collective trends and as a result, losing our individuality as artists. However, we often face the question, “what do you have different from your competitors?” This question is a clear response to the fact that the attention of the audience could be particularly increased through offering something unique and connected to our identity and experiences.
There have been artists that tried to fight against this possible alienation, specially after 1960, with the change to postmodernism. John Cage is one of the most outstanding artist of the XXth century thanks to his approach to Zen and the inclusion of this philosophy in music, inspiring a lot of the musicians that came after him.
Taking these philosophies as a starting point, I created a new work method centered on the idea of self reflection and opening to the every aspect of daily life, helped by the act of journaling. As a mentioned before, we live surrounded by a lot of stimuli, ideas, judgments, etc, a situation that sometimes can be overwhelming. It’s difficult to organize all of our knowledge and inspirations, since we feel trapped inside these whirlwind of different ideas. For that reason, I tried to find moments to stop and reflect about myself, my feelings, my inspirations, writing all of this in my own diary.
He was one of the first to put the focus on the things around the art, the life itself, and at the end, he decided not to intervene, and just to propose some scenarios to the audience in order to change their perspectives.
On the other hand, composers such as Llorenç Barber, creator of the City Concerts, decided to approach sound in its core but at the same time, to be involved, that is to say, adopting a proactive attitude towards it (Barber & de Francisco, 2003, 55), being one possible way to fight against the passive role that mass media is creating in the current society (Laermans, 2011, 128)
The structure of the journal is determined after examining other actual methods, and also, after my own experience.
With all of this, I tried to connect all the elements included in the journal and with that, made it useful for any other artistic purpose. In my case, this work method has been proved during the research in the creation of an interdisciplinary piece, for which I had to deal with elements of different nature.
Bibliography
- Barber, and de Francisco. El Placer De La Escucha. Madrid: Árdora Ediciones, 2003.
- Laermans, Rudi. “The Attention Regime: On Mass Media and the Information Society.” In In Medias Res: Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological Poetics of Being, edited by Willem Schinkel and Liesbeth Noordegraaf-Eelens, 115–32. Amsterdam University Press, 2011. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mstx.9.
- Jameson, Frederic. “Posmodernismo y sociedad de consumo”. In La posmodernidad, edited by Hal Foster, 165-186. Barcelona:Kairós, 2002
