Historical Truth
Holbrook Robinson
The debates on a.f.s are extremely cyclical, I suppose because
the generations of debaters change so much more rapidly than real
generations. Hardly anyone quarrelling merrily away today was doing so
last year at this time; although there ARE a few stalwarts. I think
that everyone gets to express his core beliefs, then drops out and
lurks. So it's time for me to start repeating myself, stuff from
last year...
Here goes: the thing that keeps striking me in reading over the rather
spirited and sometimes angry exchanges that occur here is that no one
debates the really INTERESTING questions, the ones without the solutions
to which no real intellectual progress can be made. For example, many in
the debates appear to believe that music expresses thoughts and
emotions, yet no one pauses to discuss how that could be so, and under
what conditions. So it is pretty useless to wonder whether DSCH was
expressing political opinions in his music because A.) no one seems to be
sure what those opinions were and B.) no one can explain how they could
possibly be expressed in music, unless that music had text. And of
course text is notoriously ambiguous...
Is there a difference between thoughts and attitudes? How do you go
about expressing 'attitudes" in music? And what about emotion? Does
anyone out there really think that music expresses the full gamut of
human emotions? Anger? Jealousy? Regret? Envy? Could a piece of music
really be characterized in this way? And if it does manage to hint at
one of these emotions, does it in turn make you FEEL that emotion? Does
sad music make you sad? Does 'angry' music make you angry? Just what
would that mean? And so on and so on. My point is this: unless you
have some reasoned anwers to these questions, any debates about the
MEANING of music are futile, because you are arguing about issues that
never get ellucidated.
Just why does DSCH provoke all of this? Why not Prokofiev, or
Stravinski? Is their music so different? How?
And why is political opinion so important? Just why does it really
matter what DSCH's politics were? Politics is a tawdry, small business
compared to music. Music tied to specific, mundane concerns is music
made smaller and less significant, IMHO.
And then there is all that question of DSCH's obvious irony. Things
just are never just quite what they seem to be. This makes
interpretation devilishy difficult. Irony thrives on indirection, on
ambiguity, on subtle reading of context. Not for the faint of heart,
and certainly not for the naive. Sort of the problem of fundamentalism
in religion. Just how is the sacred text to be read? Problem is, the
sacred text never tells you. There are no "users' guides." So where do
you go? It strikes me that this search is at the core of some of the
intemperance shown on a.f.s. The intemperance of fights over belief
systems that are almost religious in nature.
Well, I did say I was repeating myself...
Holbrook Robinson
Opus47
I guess politics are important not because of what WE think of
Shostakovich and his music. BUT how others still have the cold war in
there blood and who think of Shostakovich as "that Soviet composer."
The one hundred million dollar question is what did Shostakovich think so
we can tell others? You can have the point of view that Shostakovich was
a Soviet composer who was just doing his job for his country. This is
boring, uninteresting, and bland. It adds so much more drama and intrigue
if he was secretly fighting the Soviet system with his music.
This captures the imagination and even if it isn't the truth it's what
many of us want to believe.
Hitler lost the air war with Britian by redirecting his bombers to
civilian rather than military targets.
Fred
Eric Schissel
Well, Mr. Robinson, I was wondering if you'd ever be back. As the source
of the post comparing certain attitudes towards Shostakovich's music to
Holocaust revisionism (which, I grant, you then retracted), your absence
has been missed, in a fashion.
-Eric Schissel, inveterate dejanews reader
Eric Schissel
Apologies for my foul mood. Tried to cancel that post, failed. Still have
to learn trn, I guess-- having used it since 1989 or so just doesn't
help...
-Eric Schissel
In article <5e8roc$r...@light.lightlink.com>,
Caius Marcius
In <5e8ke4$p...@chaos.dac.neu.edu> hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook
Robinson) writes:
>
>And why is political opinion so important? Just why does it really
>matter what DSCH's politics were? Politics is a tawdry, small
business
>compared to music. Music tied to specific, mundane concerns is music
>made smaller and less significant, IMHO.
I want to make clear my position that although ever artist inevitably
takes some sort of political stance, that stance is likely to be the
most perishable aspect of his work. That is, while his contemporaries
will understand and respond to the political message, subsequent
generations will not even understand it.
I've earlier cited the examples of Dante & Shakespeare - Good example I
just learned about day - the creation account in Genesis. Light in the
Hebrew Scripture is created before the moon, sun and stars to blast the
astrology-crazed Babylonians who worshipped the heavenly spheres. This
meaning was not some obscure code - any contemporary citizen of Israel
or Babylon would have understood it. However, this quite obvious
meaning was soon forgotten once the Babylonians disappeared.
If a work has merit, it will survive. The Commie v. dissident argument
regarding DSCH, though relevant to us, will be meaningless 100 years
hence, even if the question is definitively decided.
- CMC
Simon Hawkin
Hi,
On 17 Feb 1997 04:58:20 GMT,
opu...@aol.com (Opus47) wrote:
*> I guess politics are important not because of what WE think of
*> Shostakovich and his music. BUT how others still have the cold war in
*> there blood and who think of Shostakovich as "that Soviet composer."
Cold war is irrelevant. There was no cold war inside the USSR,
even though politics (internal) was of utmost importance, in more
than one sense. I remember having tried to talk about that, and
having failed to interest many readers.
*> It adds so much more drama and intrigue
*> if he was secretly fighting the Soviet system with his music.
*> This captures the imagination and even if it isn't the truth it's what
*> many of us want to believe.
Whatever. AFS tells more about the Western mid-brow intellectuals
than it does about Shostakovich. It's about as educational as
reading the Atlantic Monthly.
Simon
redrick
hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook Robinson) wrote:
>Here goes: the thing that keeps striking me in reading over the rather
>spirited and sometimes angry exchanges that occur here is that no one
>debates the really INTERESTING questions, the ones without the solutions
>to which no real intellectual progress can be made. For example, many in
>the debates appear to believe that music expresses thoughts and
>emotions, yet no one pauses to discuss how that could be so, and under
>what conditions.
>Well, I did say I was repeating myself...
>
Hi Holbrook, long time.
Only you certainly are. I recall having a long, pleasant and
interesting discussion with somebody named Robinson on just these
ideas. And it started with the Robinson guy complaining that
nobody ever talked about...
Anyhow, if you would really like to take up where we left off,
here where it ended up, still waiting for a response from you:
---------------------------
From red...@az.com Fri Apr 26 03:14:53 1996
hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook Robinson) wrote:
>redrick (red...@az.com) wrote:
>:hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook Robinson) wrote:
>
>: >Here are some points to be answered by anyone entering the debate about
>: >DSCH:
>: >
>: I agree with you, but your four very astute questions would, as
>: you know, require book-length answers. Still, I will make brief,
>: possibly even flippant answers, in hopes it may be of some help
>: to the problem of "unstated clashing beliefs" that you mention
>: below.
>
>: >1. Is music expressive?
>
>: Yes.
>
>: >Of what?
>
>: Anything or everything in the universe.
>
>Can't accept THIS! Because I don't know what it means.... Of course the
>question is vague, but starts to point the discussion in a particular
>direction.
I really do mean "anything". Not just emotion. Mahler once told
Bruno Walter, on a trip through the Alps, not to bother to look
at them, saying, "I have already composed them." Strauss claimed
to be able to compose the difference between a fork and a spoon.
This may seem to conflict with what I've said above, but what I
mean is that music can also express no thing, or things from some
universe of music that have no counterparts elsewhere.
> I think the expression "such and such is very expressive" is
>very opaque if one can not state exactly what is being expressed.
I also find that expression annoying. I think it is usually used
by critics who can't think of anything else to write. But I
think the commonness of such comments helps make my point- that
much of what music expresses is not translatable.
>For
>example, I would suggest that an "expressive" face could be analysed in
>terms of the emotions, or attitudes, or whatever, that were being "expressed."
>I don't think one could meaningfully say, for example, that "X's face is
>very expressive, but I don't know of what..." I suppose I am saying that for
>something to be expressive, it must be expressive OF something. And
>then I want to know what the something IS.
>
Again, if the composer could express it in any clearer way than
to play his piece for you he would.
And believe me, it is not that composers are idiot-savants with
limited verbal skills. Even a dyslexic stammerer with the fluid
musical genius of a Mozart would still find it easier to get out
any prose message than to "compose" it in music. Just to
hand-copy down on paper any substantial piece of music (even for
a professional copyist) is a long, tedious chore.
>
>: >For example, does it express
>: >emotion? How?
>: >
>: Like a painting. Or a baby crying. Or a painting of a baby
>: crying.
>
>Two out of three are visual examples, from which we can deduce the
>emotions that perhaps a person who looked that way would be feeling.
>back to the expressive face bit. I'm not sure, btw, what kind of
>emotion a painting can express.
I used the painting simile advisedly. For those who don't happen
to have tried it, there is a gap in understanding the technical
conventions used in composing music. But we all can imagine
painting- taking a brush or other implement and making a
representation of something or an abstract design.
Now imagine trying to express some philosophic (or political or
emotional) idea *other than through your choice of subject*.
Of course you can paint any emotion by painting a person or
persons who is undergoing that emotion. Or portray in a scene an
event that would cause that emotion. But suppose you are
painting a picture of a tree and your lover has just left you.
How do you express that in your picture of a tree?
But have no fear, after you are dead critics will come along and
read a bit about your life (probably reconstructed from the
letters that bitch of a former lover didn't tell you she/he kept)
and write that they are quite able to "see" the turmoil in your
tree. And be quite embarrassed later when it turns out the dates
got mixed with *another* tree picture and the one they'd seen
turmoil in was actually the one painted right after you won the
lottery!
>One of my concerns here is that if
>music IS expressive of emotion, it can only express a very small gamut
>of them. Sadness, melancholy, yes. Joy, happiness. Probably.
>Jealousy? Forget it.... Anger? Very difficult.
I dunno. Anger? Fortissimo, minor or chromatic downward runs,
with heavy tremolo in low strings and punctuating dissonant
chords from brass, or sforzando double-stops from a violin if
it's chamber music.
Jealousy? Not fair! Isn't that just situational anger?
But where did my example of anger come from? Is there some
"natural", universal connection between a piece of music like
that and the emotion of anger, or is it just a convention we've
all come to understand after hearing that sort of thing in two
centuries of opera and one of film scores?
There are some obvious connections to the physical world. Very
early in the history of music bird calls were imitated. Of
course, one might argue here that it's just a human musician
saluting an avian one and that opens up a whole new can of worms
that I think we'll just leave to the bird...
But the level of consonance and dissonance within a piece does
create and release tension that results from the laws of physics,
not convention. Rhythm and their tempi mirror natural rhythms
(footsteps, heartbeat, waves on a shore). And as the human voice
requires increased energy to rise in pitch, instruments doing so
may convey increased intensity.
And then of course there are conventions. Four part homophonic
harmony with a plagal cadence at the end is religious. A march
is...martial. A series of diminished 7ths mean its Happy Hour at
the piano bar. :>
(snip section where we agreed on cognitive content)
>
>: >For example, does it [can it ] express ideas?
>
>: The composer may intend it to, and/or the listener may take it to
>: express ideas.
>
Let me amplify this previous answer that I gave just a bit. In
many cases these will be untranslatable ideas- musical ideas that
have no prose equivalent. After the piece is played the composer
and the listener could get together and talk for hours and still
not have a clue whether the "message" the composer felt himself
sending is what the listener received.
: >Of what sort?
>
>: As above, anything at all conceivable.
>
>: >How do we
>: >determine what these ideas are?
>: >
>: Except in the case of musical quotations with obvious referents,
>: we can only guess, analyze, discuss, argue, make a case. Even
>: the composers word, if there is one, cannot always be depended
>: on! -and need not even be agreed with: The listener may decide
>: to determine for himself what the music means to him. He has
>: every right to do so. One might take the position that the
>: composer had his shot when he penned the score.
>
>But this surely is very odd: music is about, or expresses ideas, but we
>can't tell what they are? We have to GUESS? Music is a "language" that
>we don't understand, or, can't understand?
It depends on what you mean by language and let's pretty please
not get into Chomsky. But I can tell you what it isn't. It
isn't a code. There is no Rosetta stone for decoding it into
prose.
>That's not much of a
>language...The key to communication is inter-subjectivity: everybody
>deriving more or less the same "message." And music can't do this.
The key to *clear* communication is inter-subjectivity. Maybe
that is not music's goal.
Maybe music is communicating at (and I know this phrase makes
philosophers squirm but hear me out) a "different level".
Love, anger, the Alps, spoons & forks, can all be, say,
*beautiful*, or, *true*. The beauty and/or truth level gets
communicated but the details level does not. The listener may
supply his own or not have one. The composer may not have had
one and the listener invents one.
>
Let me be quick to say that generally I dislike the way the word
"levels" is used in regard to art. Usually in is a presumed
"authority" telling you that a work of art you enjoy as a
"higher" or "deeper" (odd pair of interchangeable adjectives)
meaning that you would never understand without the help of the
"authority". This is how the "authority" justifies his paycheck.
Not unlike the clergy.
The artist's work may have influences. The listener may apply
it. Influence and application may or may not agree. But I would
argue that no secondary meaning is necessarily "higher" or
"deeper" than what is on the surface.
Do you know this Buddhist story? (No religion intended!) The
Buddha comes out to his disciples who are expecting a lecture.
Instead, he just walks over to a white flower and looks at it and
smiles. Aha, think the disciples, he's going to tell us what the
flower means. But the Buddha just keeps looking at the beautiful
flower and smiling. After a while, one or two of the disciples
begin to understand.
At this point I won't be hypocritical enough to tell you what the
story *means*. But one possible application would be that, while
the flower might inspire prose, it cannot be translated into
prose. Another application would be that the highest, deepest
level of the flower is right on the surface. That's what it
means. Metaphors we might make like "beauty", "innocence",
"purity", or whatever are just words. The flower is a real
thing. There. You can see it, smell it, touch it (gently
please!).
This idea can be applied to poetry, painting, or music, but
perhaps poetry would be the easiest:
You can write a poem about a white flower and that poem might
have all sorts of metaphors about innocence or loss of same and
how that applies to you last love affair or the '60s or DEATH.
But if it doesn't work on the surface, if the surface level
depiction of the flower doesn't hold together and make sense,
then all those other metaphors and meanings will fall apart.
>: >3. Is music somehow an expression of the character of its creator?
>
>: IMHO, if the music in question is true art, it is the truest
>: possible expression of the character of its creator.
>
>It's the "truest possible expression" of the MUSICAL character of the
>composer. NOTHING else.
True, but the somewhat romantic assertion I was making is that,
where art is concerned, anything but the MUSICAL character (the
social, domestic, or political character) is insignificant.
>: >What would evidence for this assertion look like?
>: >
>: IMHO, there is no possible evidence for this assertion. :> (If
>: Louis Armstrong couldn't define jazz...)
>
>Although it's not fashionable to say so, I think music provokes a very
>basic affective reaction in us...makes us FEEL very strongly. But what
>we feel is not precisely everyday emotion, it is what I would call
>an"esthetic" emotion. But this would need considerable explaining...
>
And may not be possible but I'm game to keep kicking it around if
you are.
>
>Rick, thanks for the opportunity to get down to what I claim to be the
>TRUE issues of debate involving music, composers, the relations between
>the two, and listeners, and politics, and all the rest. I do think,
>really, that SOME order is possible in this chaos. At the very least if
>everyone stated their answers to "the four questions" (!), then the real
>reasons for disagreements would be more clearly revealed. And I think that
>the activity of trying to find answers is pleasureable and interesting,
>since we discover thoughts that we were not aware of having...
>
(As Holbrook's original questions may have gotten hard to pull
out of our subsequent posts, I will paste them in again here by
themselves: )
Here are some points to be answered by anyone entering the debate
about DSCH:
1. Is music expressive? Of what? For example, does it express
emotion? How?
2. Can music have cognitive content? What does this content look
like? For example, does it [can it ] express ideas? Of what
sort? How do we determine what these ideas are?
3. Is music somehow an expression of the character of its
creator? What would evidence for this assertion look like?
4. If music is not expressive, why does it affect us so deeply?
---------------
Regards, -Rick
http://www.az.com/~redrick/Shostakovich.html
--
red...@az.com, in a.f.s.,
"...with teacup-storm philosophers, exploded
revisionist historians, stubbornly Steady State
cosmologists, or pallid poets..."
-Martin Amis, "The Information"
Holbrook Robinson
I'm glad SOMEONE remembers what I said. Those electrons don't lie, I
can see. I think my reason of last April for not replying was that
probably no one was interested; but that's a bad reason, because A)
Can't be sure and B)The questions ARE intersting. IMO.
redrick (red...@az.com) wrote:
: hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook Robinson) wrote:
: >Here goes: the thing that keeps striking me in reading over the rather
: >spirited and sometimes angry exchanges that occur here is that no one
: >debates the really INTERESTING questions, the ones without the solutions
: >to which no real intellectual progress can be made. For example, many in
: >the debates appear to believe that music expresses thoughts and
: >emotions, yet no one pauses to discuss how that could be so, and under
: >what conditions.
: >Well, I did say I was repeating myself...
: >
: Hi Holbrook, long time.
: Only you certainly are. I recall having a long, pleasant and
: interesting discussion with somebody named Robinson on just these
: ideas. And it started with the Robinson guy complaining that
: nobody ever talked about...
: Anyhow, if you would really like to take up where we left off,
: here where it ended up, still waiting for a response from you:
: ---------------------------
: From red...@az.com Fri Apr 26 03:14:53 1996
: hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook Robinson) wrote:
: >redrick (red...@az.com) wrote:
: >:hrob...@lynx.dac.neu.edu (Holbrook Robinson) wrote:
: >
Where else except here in cyberspace can the attributions get so
intriguingly intertwined? So here goes yet another level of commentary..
: >: >Here are some points to be answered by anyone entering the debate about
: >: >DSCH:
: >: >
: >: I agree with you, but your four very astute questions would, as
: >: you know, require book-length answers. Still, I will make brief,
: >: possibly even flippant answers, in hopes it may be of some help
: >: to the problem of "unstated clashing beliefs" that you mention
: >: below.
: >
: >: >1. Is music expressive?
: >
: >: Yes.
: >
: >: >Of what?
: >
: >: Anything or everything in the universe.
: >
: >Can't accept THIS! Because I don't know what it means.... Of course the
: >question is vague, but starts to point the discussion in a particular
: >direction.
: I really do mean "anything". Not just emotion. Mahler once told
: Bruno Walter, on a trip through the Alps, not to bother to look
: at them, saying, "I have already composed them." Strauss claimed
: to be able to compose the difference between a fork and a spoon.
: This may seem to conflict with what I've said above, but what I
: mean is that music can also express no thing, or things from some
: universe of music that have no counterparts elsewhere.
Back to the question: just WHAT is getting expressed? Something? I
would argue that, whatever it is, it is NOT an idea. Could it be a
visual image? Well, only if you had some inkling of what that image may
be. Could it be an emotion? Here's a possible distinction: between
music that CREATES an emotion in the listener. And music that expresses
the emotion, without the listener "feeling" it. The normal example is a
picture of a beagle: the face is "sad" but the dog and the viewer are not.
Thus the composer need not be sad, nor the listener. And this: does
"sad" music REALLY make you sad? Or is it a fake sadness, that will go
away quicly, like the horror in a horror movies fades.
: > I think the expression "such and such is very expressive" is
: >very opaque if one can not state exactly what is being expressed.
: I also find that expression annoying. I think it is usually used
: by critics who can't think of anything else to write. But I
: think the commonness of such comments helps make my point- that
: much of what music expresses is not translatable.
Weel, I'm a bit skeptical of this latter point. Just what would this
"untranslatable" thing BE? Could we not say ANYTHING about it? For
example, in the realm of gustatory taste, we can say about a new taste:
it reminds me of such and such a taste. But in music, this would be to
say: this reminds me of such and such a piece. Not of such and such
"untranslatable" thing.
: >For
: >example, I would suggest that an "expressive" face could be analysed in
: >terms of the emotions, or attitudes, or whatever, that were being "expressed."
: >I don't think one could meaningfully say, for example, that "X's face is
: >very expressive, but I don't know of what..." I suppose I am saying that for
: >something to be expressive, it must be expressive OF something. And
: >then I want to know what the something IS.
: >
: Again, if the composer could express it in any clearer way than
: to play his piece for you he would.
So is music expressive without expressing anything?
: And believe me, it is not that composers are idiot-savants with
: limited verbal skills. Even a dyslexic stammerer with the fluid
: musical genius of a Mozart would still find it easier to get out
: any prose message than to "compose" it in music. Just to
: hand-copy down on paper any substantial piece of music (even for
: a professional copyist) is a long, tedious chore.
But to write "War and Peace" is a chore, too, for the same reasons.
Actually, many composers probably do have limited verbal skills. But
for those with the facility, to compose music probably is easy, in a
sense. I mean, did Mozart work any harder than the hacks of his day?
It would be HARD for me to compose great music. But it wasn't hard for
those who can do it.
: >: >For example, does it express
In other words, the tree is NOT very good at expressing these emotions.
: >One of my concerns here is that if
: >music IS expressive of emotion, it can only express a very small gamut
: >of them. Sadness, melancholy, yes. Joy, happiness. Probably.
: >Jealousy? Forget it.... Anger? Very difficult.
: I dunno. Anger? Fortissimo, minor or chromatic downward runs,
: with heavy tremolo in low strings and punctuating dissonant
: chords from brass, or sforzando double-stops from a violin if
: it's chamber music.
: Jealousy? Not fair! Isn't that just situational anger?
This is where we need a theory of emotion. Too much of the writing on
this subject fails to sketch out a satisfactory view of what emotion is.
So I'm not quite sure what "situational" anger is. Most anger is
situational, imo, because it is caused by something, and often directed
at something.
: But where did my example of anger come from? Is there some
: "natural", universal connection between a piece of music like
: that and the emotion of anger, or is it just a convention we've
: all come to understand after hearing that sort of thing in two
: centuries of opera and one of film scores?
I don't think we learn that music is "sad" or "happy" from convention.
If it were convention, it would seem to be ARBITRARY, as Saussure claims
phonetic symbols are in regard to meaning. I would argue some sort of
intrincis theory. But am not too sure what it would look like...
: There are some obvious connections to the physical world. Very
: early in the history of music bird calls were imitated. Of
: course, one might argue here that it's just a human musician
: saluting an avian one and that opens up a whole new can of worms
: that I think we'll just leave to the bird...
But that doesn't explain why a mourning dove sounds mournful, or one of
the Chickadee's songs is cheerful.
: But the level of consonance and dissonance within a piece does
: create and release tension that results from the laws of physics,
: not convention. Rhythm and their tempi mirror natural rhythms
: (footsteps, heartbeat, waves on a shore). And as the human voice
: requires increased energy to rise in pitch, instruments doing so
: may convey increased intensity.
Volume, I agree, is a good metaphor for intensity, but intensity is not
itself an emotion, only a quality of an emotion.Tempo is intersting,
because sadness DOES seem slow, and most sad music is slow. Intersting
question: do you know of any major key, rapid tempo music that is sad?
: And then of course there are conventions. Four part homophonic
: harmony with a plagal cadence at the end is religious. A march
: is...martial. A series of diminished 7ths mean its Happy Hour at
: the piano bar. :>
Well, not all plagal cadences sound religious. there are some great
ones in Sibelius and Brahms. same reservations about CONVENTIONS.
: (snip section where we agreed on cognitive content)
: >
: >: >For example, does it [can it ] express ideas?
: >
: >: The composer may intend it to, and/or the listener may take it to
: >: express ideas.
: >
: Let me amplify this previous answer that I gave just a bit. In
: many cases these will be untranslatable ideas- musical ideas that
: have no prose equivalent. After the piece is played the composer
: and the listener could get together and talk for hours and still
: not have a clue whether the "message" the composer felt himself
: sending is what the listener received.
Maybe because the music CAN'T relay such a message? Just because a
composer THINKS he is relaying a message doesn't mean that he is. And
composers have such radically different views on this. Why do we insist
that there IS a message? At times, the quest for "meaning" seems
positively vulgar, especially in situations where there doesn't have to
be any. What has semiotics really shone? Imo, it shows that many
things DON'T have meaning. And by "meaning," I mean a pointing action,
a referral to something outside of the thing pointing. Although this is
a notorious question. But still, here goes my old question: in order
to discuss the "meaning" of anything, we need some previously
articulated theory of meaning.
: : >Of what sort?
: >
: >: As above, anything at all conceivable.
: >
: >: >How do we
: >: >determine what these ideas are?
: >: >
: >: Except in the case of musical quotations with obvious referents,
: >: we can only guess, analyze, discuss, argue, make a case. Even
: >: the composers word, if there is one, cannot always be depended
: >: on! -and need not even be agreed with: The listener may decide
: >: to determine for himself what the music means to him. He has
: >: every right to do so. One might take the position that the
: >: composer had his shot when he penned the score.
: >
: >But this surely is very odd: music is about, or expresses ideas, but we
: >can't tell what they are? We have to GUESS? Music is a "language" that
: >we don't understand, or, can't understand?
: It depends on what you mean by language and let's pretty please
: not get into Chomsky. But I can tell you what it isn't. It
: isn't a code. There is no Rosetta stone for decoding it into
: prose.
But the whole problem with Chomsky is that there is scant attention paid
to semantics in his work.. No good idea of where language gets its
meaning. I agree on the code thing up to a point: for example, DSCH
COULD have told associates that his duple metered music had a different
significance than his triple time efforts, but this would have not
MUSICAL interest, in and of itself. This form of code would be
arbitrary, and therefore not very good as a communication device for
those who weren't given the code sheet. And that is the whole question.
: >That's not much of a
: >language...The key to communication is inter-subjectivity: everybody
: >deriving more or less the same "message." And music can't do this.
: The key to *clear* communication is inter-subjectivity. Maybe
: that is not music's goal.
But "unclear" communication is not really communication...
: Maybe music is communicating at (and I know this phrase makes
: philosophers squirm but hear me out) a "different level".
I think they do more than squirm at this.
: Love, anger, the Alps, spoons & forks, can all be, say,
: *beautiful*, or, *true*. The beauty and/or truth level gets
: communicated but the details level does not. The listener may
: supply his own or not have one. The composer may not have had
: one and the listener invents one.
I think propositions are true. Objects can't be. And I don't know what
"true" music looks like, unless it is predicated on some dubious notion
of sincerity. As for beauty, well that's another story...
: Let me be quick to say that generally I dislike the way the word
: "levels" is used in regard to art. Usually in is a presumed
: "authority" telling you that a work of art you enjoy as a
: "higher" or "deeper" (odd pair of interchangeable adjectives)
: meaning that you would never understand without the help of the
: "authority". This is how the "authority" justifies his paycheck.
: Not unlike the clergy.
I agree on "high" and "deep".... but the question of "profound" also is
interesting. why does some music strike us as profound, and other not?
Why is DSCH profound, and not Dvorak?
: The artist's work may have influences. The listener may apply
I agree. It's just that when when gets trapped in the morass of
expressionist theories, we start uttering unfathomable banalities like
thinking that great musicians have great character. moral character.
but the counter-examples are legion, starting with wagner. why not a
fascist creator of great musical worth? seem totally possible to me.
: >Although it's not fashionable to say so, I think music provokes a very
: >basic affective reaction in us...makes us FEEL very strongly. But what
: >we feel is not precisely everyday emotion, it is what I would call
: >an"esthetic" emotion. But this would need considerable explaining...
: >
: And may not be possible but I'm game to keep kicking it around if
: you are.
Well, it still seems to me that the emotions either aroused or expressed
by music are similar to the terror invoked by horror movies: ie a "mock"
terror. real terror is quite unpleasant, and we would not willingly
seek it out. that is my metaphor for the emotions of music . a form of
"mock" emotion, one that has punch, but perhaps a diminished context.
: >Rick, thanks for the opportunity to get down to what I claim to be the
: ---------------
: -Martin Amis, "The Information"
Rick, as I mentioned to you recently, "The Information" is a great book,
imo. but it's greatness is almost musical in its inchoateness.
Well, enough of that.
Holbrook Robinson