Monday, March 1, 2010

Simon Frith Response

Simon Frith’s argues that how we experience music can be understood as an identity process. He claims that “music is a metaphor for identity”; music somewhat shapes the becoming of our identity. Through music, we grasp onto the process of finding our identity because as a form of interaction, we can find not only a sense of ourselves but a sense of others and the way they present themselves to us through music. Music gives us an outlet for self-experimentation; we can lose ourselves through performing and listening to a variety of genres but we can also find ourselves through playing and hearing what we consider to be a representation of ourselves. Music is not limited, just like our identity, because it allows us to cross infinite boarders to a place we wouldn’t have dared ventured to on our own.
The part of his argument that I found most interesting is when he compares music making and listening with respect to musical pleasure. He asserts: “But if musical identity is, then, always fantastic, idealizing not just oneself but also the social world on inhabits, it is, secondly, always also real, enacted in music activities” (Frith, 123). I believe that music making and listening is how we come into our identity, and musical pleasure is how we experience an identity in which we believe to be ideal. So we can all make and listen to a variety of musical genres to create the identity process, but we can embody musical pleasure through experiencing an unlimited identity.

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