Music moves us, those sounds of hammers striking strings, voices singing words or scatting, mallets pounding taut skins. We are attuned to shapes of time and space sculpted by musicians, the moment-to-moment shimmerings of sound that make our hips, knees, and arms want to undulate. Music is everywhere, is personal, is communal, is magic. Maybe …
Two Pennies Left: Why The “How” of a Thing Matters
FYI, up front, this post is not about flowers. It is about content and form in art-making, conversation, and relationship. It's about the connection of human essence and identity to the fundamental, structural realities aesthetic forms demand. It's about the challenge of creating art wherein form and content create a unity of power …
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Three Tall Women Demonstrate Why Art Matters
At 7:15 p.m. on this Wednesday evening I was in a bit of a huff. Mad, actually, because I couldn't find a parking place. I hate to pay for parking. And usually there's a spot lurking somewhere west of Seattle Center. But not tonight. I finally gave up, parked and payed, and headed across the …
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A Christian Aesthetic
My intellect is getting a pretty robust workout these days, pressing some heavy reading about aesthetics, moral creativity (does that make anyone nervous? I'm loving it...), and the notion that surfaces may actually have substance. Just think, lots of people are designing things that are aimed straight at my amygdala, my pre-cognitive, emotional self, …
A Call for Syllabus Ideas
The title of the university class is this: The Arts and Culture: A Christian Aesthetic. It’s in January, is one week long, 8-5 for five days straight, beginning Monday, and there’s a two-three hour final on Friday afternoon. I’ve been teaching this class for ten years, a couple of years on my own, and the …
JEFF BERRYMAN 