(11-04-2013, 04:44 PM)jdvanwijk Wrote: It's risky to deduct the person of the writer/composer/painter from isolated works ('This piece is in A minor, Beethoven must have been mighty sad when he wrote this.') but I agree with jdeirmend that the full body of work of an artist does permit this to an extent. Almost every writer has a few recurring themes in his full body of work that he obsesses over, and as a reader, this can tell me something about him.what tells us something about the artist is extraneous material. i write poems about shit, snot and farting in public a lot but i don't walk round shitting my pants.
often what we know of famous poets, writers, singers, painters etc is what we get outside their works, show me some happy music and i'll show you a suicide. why must Beethoven have been sad while writing that piece in A minor? were you there? he was a masterful composer, can't a great composer compose sad pieces while they're happy? and did we also get that he was blind as well from any of his music? you'd have thought something so profound would have shone a light in our eyes. but no. We're smart because we have big brains that work well. we pick up peripheral information all the time. we see the merchant of Venice on tv, we read in the news how Ann Hathaway lived in a certain place. we hear a quote from Gandhi in a comedy. how do you know what you know about Beethoven apart from the obvious? we're inundated with external information and we retain some of it but, and this is a big but, knowing when the grape was crushed shouldn't make the wine the sweeter. if it does then you're not really interested in the wine but the more so the knowledge of when it was created
when i say blind i mean blind to sound (deaf )