Racer Session #209 | Bryan Lineberry | February 9, 2014
“Robert Plutchik’s Eight Basic Emotions”
A man named Robert Plutchik promoted this idea that there are eight basic emotions that humans feel: Joy, Trust, Fear, Surprise, Sadness, Disgust, Anger, and Anticipation. They act as the primary colors of emotions, combining with each other to create other emotions, for example trust and joy combine to create love, surprise and disgust combine to create disapproval. But for this session, we’re only going to concern ourselves with the basic ones mentioned previously.
The pursuit of this performance comes from the idea that music is most impactful when the listener can empathize emotionally with the performer. Our performance will be an attempt to try to capture the essence of these emotions musically so that they can each be felt in a real and genuine way regardless of listening preference or musical involvement. Using the Café Racer medium of musical expression and experimentation, I’m hoping we all come away learning more about the foundational blocks of universal musical communication through the performance’s successes and failures.
Performing the eight basic emotions has been an idea festering in my mind grapes for a couple of years and, with the help of the amazing Chris Icasiano on drums, will now finally come to reality. As will be explained prior to the performance, this is a very personal subject that means a great deal to me.
In addition to the curated performance, there will also be some super fun thematic audience and musician participation that will also be explained that evening, though this part shouldn’t last the entire remnants of the Racer Session. Afterwards we’ll open it up. Rock n roll.
-Bryan Lineberry, Alto Saxomophone