Thinking inside the Bachs - 03/21/06 12:39 PM
Happy birthday to J.S. (w/ hats off to his forebears and his offspring). And thank you to Mendelssohn, who revived him from obscurity.
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abridged by themilum without proper permission
When we speak to each other we process a very complex set of equations that are quite quickly and accurately resolved into meaning, intent, accent and perhaps even direction. Language is quite firm in most of these four divisions.
Music doesn't make hardly any of those as clear as speech, yet in spite of this can be transcribed about as easily.
Scribing the semantics of music is futlie even if meaning is often prescribed, but the meanings of 'musical' sounds are a personal overlayment. Intent, like language, draws from context, but unlike language, music is again strictly a personal endeavor.
The rules for music are much less stringent and at the same time, within this universality, we can only hear a fraction of the possibilities that it offers and therefore it creates more anticipation of understanding of it than we do at a wonder of its newness. This may speak toward my suggestion of 'direction'... perhaps a musical application of Chomsky's Syntactical Hierarchy will yeild a "Universal Music Theory"...
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I think that Chomsky is a jerk and a joke.
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Whoa, dude, pretty harsh words. Learn some linguistics and get back to me on why Chomsky is what you say he is. In fact, since music is a language, hum me a few bars of your thesis. Far be it from me to defend Chomsy's linguistic theories, as I studied with one of his alienated grad students, but to listen to you talk about language is like listening to Bart Simpson scratch out Beethoven's 9th Symphony on a chalkboard. Go back to bird watching and leave language to linguists.
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I think we are on the same page here, Insel. it is why I went so far to say "music is math" yet "math is not music". Being more successful at making math out of music is a function not an aesthetic (IMHO). A theory should not be the driving force in composition any more than technique should be the driving force in a performance... yet, often it is what some give highest regard.
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Oh, Milo, baby. Did you fall down and bruise your ego? Maybe you can get one of your geese to kiss it.
I simply said that, on linguistics, Professor Chomsky knows more than Mr Milo. I know this because I have read what the both of them have to say on the subject. I may disagree with Chomsky on his theory of language, but you've never really said anything substantive about language, so there.
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Bach shot farther, higher and longer than anyone else so shall we declare this convo moot, already?
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( I think I'll start "this" again somewhere free of all this subtle antonomasia)
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To posit a clean distinction between theory and "the creative act" once theory has entered the discourse and given rise to the possibility of the notion of creativity is itself at once a creative performance and a hapless theory.
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The notion of "creative acts" arises in a conceptual/practical frame that is already completely saturated with theory. Therefore, to posit a non-porous divide between the theoretical and the "creative" is to sight a phantom. Such a divide does not and cannot exist, except as seduction.