# Where's the boundary that defines what's music and what's not music? With poll!



## aleazk

We all agree that a Beethoven sonata is music. And we all agree that pure silence (without the sound of the public, or any sound, we are in outer space, just silence) is not music. Thus, the fact that those extremes exist means that there must be some boundary in the middle at some point. Of course, where exactly that boundary is has a lot of convention and artists like to break those conventions, and therefore to push the boundary.

My intention is to clean up a bit here the discussion from _that_ other thread...

Vote the piece in which you think this boundary falls in! I tried to order the pieces from silence and unconventional to many sounds and conventional. Granted, even my order will be debatable. The pieces (or non-pieces, you choose ) are:

1) Pure, outer space silence
2) Cage's 4'33'' 
3) Sdraulig's Collector
4) Lachenmann's Guero
5) Ligeti's Symphonic poem for 100 metronomes
6) Lachenmann's Mouvement
7) Cage's ASLSP
8) Cage's Seven2
9) Stockhausen's Gesang der jünglinge
10) Stockhausen's Oktophonie
11) Dhomont's Je te salue, vieil océan! 
12) Ferneyhough's String Quartets
13) Ligeti's Atmosphères
14)Boulez's 2nd Piano Sonata
15) Beethoven's Piano Sonatas


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## Enthusiast

I have no problem with any of those being termed music. And, for most of those that I know (even pieces that don't interest me), I would have a problem with terming them non-music. To me the intent of the named "composers" is the key and I have no personal need to gainsay them.


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## Guest

Sorry, but I simply draw the line at Gabrieli. As soon as composers start even _thinking_ about writing anything that may resemble goddamn homophony, music loses the quintessential element of the melodic line (solo or interwoven with others) and ceases to be music altogether.






Screw this ****


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## aleazk

shirime said:


> Sorry, but I simply draw the line at Gabrieli. As soon as composers start even _thinking_ about writing anything that may resemble goddamn homophony, music loses the quintessential element of the melodic line (solo or interwoven with others) and ceases to be music altogether.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Screw this ****


Ligeti's micropolyphonic pieces have a number of independent parts that needs three digits to be written. My music is more music than your music


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## Eva Yojimbo

The problem with these discussions--and I see similar ones in other mediums: what is poetry? what is film? what is art? etc.--is the mistaken initial premise that there's such a thing as "music" to begin with. Get rid of the label and actually think about the objects we call music. Ask yourself if there is some rational reason to group these things together and give them a label that picks out some feature as distinguishing them from other things. This is not always an easy exercise to do! The problem is that that most things in reality exist on a spectrum and where we draw boundaries and invent words to distinguish this thing/these things from other things is often somewhat, sometimes almost entirely, arbitrary.

The only common thread I see running through all music is "organized sound (usually for aesthetic purposes)." Referring to your list, this would make 1) and 2) not music, and 3) (and most of the rest) music. People are, of course, free to dispute the definition, but the thing to keep in mind that what you're really debating is where to draw the boundary in reality. Redrawing boundaries/changing definitions doesn't actually change reality and the degree to which things are similar/dissimilar to other things. It's mostly an exercise in the optimal ways in which to think about things, language being one of the ways in which we construct and organize thought. A good read on the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary (though I'd highly recommend reading the entire sequence on language).


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## aleazk

Eva Yojimbo said:


> The problem with these discussions--and I see similar ones in other mediums: what is poetry? what is film? what is art? etc.--is the mistaken initial premise that there's such a thing as "music" to begin with. Get rid of the label and actually think about the objects we call music. Ask yourself if there is some rational reason to group these things together and give them a label that picks out some feature as distinguishing them from other things. This is not always an easy exercise to do! The problem is that that most things in reality exist on a spectrum and where we draw boundaries and invent words to distinguish this thing/these things from other things is often somewhat, sometimes almost entirely, arbitrary.
> 
> The only common thread I see running through all music is "organized sound (usually for aesthetic purposes)." Referring to your list, this would make 1) and 2) not music, and 3) (and most of the rest) music. People are, of course, free to dispute the definition, but the thing to keep in mind that what you're really debating is where to draw the boundary in reality. Redrawing boundaries/changing definitions doesn't actually change reality and the degree to which things are similar/dissimilar to other things. It's mostly an exercise in the optimal ways in which to think about things, language being one of the ways in which we construct and organize thought. A good read on the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary (though I'd highly recommend reading the entire sequence on language).


Great post and exactly the resons why I never cared too much about this question. But since there was some interest on this, well, let's play the game. After all, what's life, and art, if not playing lots of games which we know are arbitrary and without any fundamental meaning in this crazy reality


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## JAS

If we are looking for a common definition, I think we will certainly end up disappointed. The label is still useful as long as we understand that people have different and often highly personal meanings, and if a conflict arises, there is a pretty good chance that the difference is the basis. I mostly think that it is interesting to see what definitions people who have actually given the matter thought have worked out for themselves. My own definition necessarily includes an element of the sound being pleasing, but even there one gets into disagreements about the requirement or what "pleasing" means. I think people get far too concerned about the disagreement and fail to recognize that the discussion is what makes it of any interest at all.


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## Phil loves classical

I would argue pure silence is still music, and anything that we can hear our thoughts with. White noise, etc. As long as we are alive we hear music.


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## Fredx2098

Phil loves classical said:


> I would argue pure silence is still music, and anything that we can hear our thoughts with. White noise, etc. As long as we are alive we hear music.


I think a crucial part of what makes something music, and art in general, is that it is conceptualized and created by a human/humans. A human can't create silence (someone's very existence causes a bit of sound, perhaps that could be called music). I don't think silence can be "created" in general, like darkness. It's the absence of something. I think art needs to be an invention of some kind.


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## Thomyum2

I concur with the aforementioned illustrations for why it is difficult to assign a definition to music or art. A few thoughts to add to the mix here though:

I recently heard a lecture on aesthetics that brought up an interesting idea that I think is useful here, which is that the concept of 'family resemblance', as developed by Wittgenstein (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance) can apply to understanding the arts. The observation is that, as with members of a family, different works of art or music may be "connected by a series of overlapping similarities, where no one feature is common to all of the things". I think it's a good way to think about music - as a large extended family with a lot of strange relatives - and it's hard to define the boundaries of who exactly is or is not a member.

Those who know me will also know that I often use language as an analogy to music, and I think that is instructive to. So asking the boundaries of music is kind of like asking what are the boundaries of language, or say, what is the 'boundary' of English? It's a bit of a nonsensical question really since language is always changing and evolving and new words come as others fall out of use, and some words are very specialized and only used by certain people, just as music is in a constant process of evolution and is used differently in different cultures and circles.

Lastly, I'll go off the deep end here and refer to modern theoretical physics, which in the writings of Stephen Hawking and others, has demonstrated that the physical universe can be finite but without boundaries. So, for example, it's meaningless to talk about the universe 'before' the Big Bang, because the dimension of time itself comes into existence with the Big Bang, so there's no possibility of there being anything before that event since the idea of 'before' is concept that only exists within the dimension of time. Conceptually, I think there is a similarity with music in that there are extremes and limits, but no boundaries. I think 4'33" and pure serialism and pure silence (and possible some of the other choices in the poll, as I'm not familiar with a lot of those) may be examples of those extremes - the very limits of what music can be, but not 'boundaries' because there is nothing beyond them by which the idea of a boundary makes any sense.


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## Jacck

I absolutely agree that it is pointless to argue about words, because language is imprecise and many things in life are not that easy to categorize into simple boxes. But the border for me lies between Ligeti's Symphonic poem for 100 metronomes
and Lachenmann's Mouvement. If it has no rythm and no melody, I would not call it music, but sound.


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## Eva Yojimbo

Jacck said:


> I absolutely agree that it is pointless to argue about words, because language is imprecise and many things in life are not that easy to categorize into simple boxes. But the border for me lies between *Ligeti's Symphonic poem for 100 metronomes*
> and Lachenmann's Mouvement. If it has *no rythm* and no melody, I would not call it music, but sound.


Are the metronomes broken?


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## Jacck

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Are the metronomes broken?


I must admit that I did not listen to the whole piece. It bored me. It sounded like rain - the raindrops randomly hitting the roof and producing random sounds, with no discernible rythm and melody. Were the metronomes synchronized to produce some kind of rythm or were they just random?


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## isorhythm

At the risk of being a buzzkill, I don't think there's anything deep about what music "is" - it's a word, which can mean whatever we want it to mean, depending on what's most useful to us.

For me the most useful definition is: anything held out to be music is music. So I drew the line at 4'33". You could try to draw the line somewhere else but I've never seen it done in a way that holds up to any scrutiny, and I'm not sure where it gets you anyway.


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## eugeneonagain

Eva Yojimbo said:


> The problem is that that most things in reality exist on a spectrum and where we draw boundaries and invent words to distinguish this thing/these things from other things is often somewhat, sometimes almost entirely, arbitrary.


Well not entirely arbitrary. Even before Aristotle went on his quest to classify things people assuredly could roughly tell the difference between a carrot (if they had a name for it) a rain-shower and a good idea. Some classification occurs naturally of itself. The rest is just ordering the obvious and discovering similarities enough to form groups.

There are some things that will never be grouped together, custard and grass for example (though I happen to think it is delicious). When I ask for a bowl of it the reason you might be perplexed is not because of a failure to be open-minded about the spectrum of all existing things, but because organisation of things and recognition of classes and orders - scientific or down to social norms) actually matters.

If everything is merely a spectrum where do you point to the boundaries of anything? At what point does something ever stop being music and how did it ever become music if no-one knows where to start or stop their identification of it?


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## hpowders

The only thing I refuse to acknowledge as music is "Rap". I would reclassify it as "Tedium".


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## Jacck

hpowders said:


> The only thing I refuse to acknowledge as music is "Rap". I would reclassify it as "Tedium".


smoke something and you will see how amazing rap, reggae etc can be  You can hear the bong (water pipe) at the beginning of this song


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## JAS

Yes, I trust that no one, individually, is using such words arbitrarily. That person may have his or her own particular interpretation (words do have denotative and connotative meanings), but the basic act of communication at any meaningful level presumes something more concrete than a purely arbitrary use of words. (Although re-reading some old posts . . . .)


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## aleazk

eugeneonagain said:


> Well not entirely arbitrary. Even before Aristotle went on his quest to classify things people assuredly could roughly tell the difference between a carrot (if they had a name for it) a rain-shower and a good idea. Some classification occurs naturally of itself. The rest is just ordering the obvious and discovering similarities enough to form groups.
> 
> There are some things that will never be grouped together, custard and grass for example (though I happen to think it is delicious). When I ask for a bowl of it the reason you might be perplexed is not because of a failure to be open-minded about the spectrum of all existing things, but because organisation of things and recognition of classes and orders - scientific or down to social norms) actually matters.
> 
> If everything is merely a spectrum where do you point to the boundaries of anything? At what point does something ever stop being music and how did it ever become music if no-one knows where to start or stop their identification of it?


I make a distinction between physical ontology and things like this music boundary stuff. Objects from the physical world can be distinguished and catalogued in a purely objective way in terms of what they do to other objects (one can use the best scientific theories to date in order to have a clear notion of what these interactions are). That's why this type of ontology is usually called 'the furniture of the world or reality'. But to do something similar in music, we would need to consider the effect it has on us, something which is, of course, subjective. Thus, an objective ontology for art is not possible and the boundary will always have a good dose of pure convention. On the other hand, if we throw all categorties through the window, it becomes difficult to maintain an intelligible discussion. Thus, some boundary has to be spelled out at some moment, if only to make more clear what we want to say to another person that may be having trouble to get what we are trying to say.


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## hpowders

Jacck said:


> smoke something and you will see how amazing rap, reggae etc can be  You can hear the bong (water pipe) at the beginning of this song


LOL!!! Maybe, that's what it takes!!!


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## aleazk

Jacck said:


> I must admit that I did not listen to the whole piece. It bored me. It sounded like rain - the raindrops randomly hitting the roof and producing random sounds, with no discernible rythm and melody. Were the metronomes synchronized to produce some kind of rythm or were they just random?


It becomes a bit more interesting at the end, when few metronomes remain 'alive', since one can hear more clearly some interesting polyrhythmic interactions here and there.


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## Woodduck

At its most basic, music - like art of any sort - must be perceptibly ordered. We need to feel that the sounds chosen have been brought into some comprehensible relation to one another, some perceptible pattern according to some organizational principle embodying some purpose. Art is not accidental, it isn't a "happening," random noises are not artistic sounds, and anything that sounds accidental or random fails to attain the status of music even if it's put together by a "composer."


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## Phil loves classical

Fredx2098 said:


> I think a crucial part of what makes something music, and art in general, is that it is conceptualized and created by a human/humans. A human can't create silence (someone's very existence causes a bit of sound, perhaps that could be called music). I don't think silence can be "created" in general, like darkness. It's the absence of something. I think art needs to be an invention of some kind.


Here is an example of a creation of silence. Score is shown at 18 seconds in. This is different than Cage, in that it is an actual composition with only silence.


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## philoctetes

I love the sounds of bare nature, uncontaminated by civilization. Driving through Nevada may sound boring but spend a night on a high desert mountain and you'll want to go back again and again. Well, that's me anyway. Just make sure your vehicle is full of gas and water.

As silence becomes more difficult to find on a very noisy planet, perhaps this is a reason that more people need more silence in their music nowadays. I'm thinking especially of developments in jazz which I find very fruitful... over the last 20 years musicians are adopting more strategies that utilize ideas of complexity and subtler dynamics. I like it.


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## Eva Yojimbo

Jacck said:


> I must admit that I did not listen to the whole piece. It bored me. It sounded like rain - the raindrops randomly hitting the roof and producing random sounds, with no discernible rythm and melody. Were the metronomes synchronized to produce some kind of rythm or were they just random?


'Twas just a joke on my part. I just a found the notion of criticizing a metronome piece for having no rhythm funny. I assumed the metronomes were set for a particular tempo.


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## Eva Yojimbo

eugeneonagain said:


> Well not entirely arbitrary. Even before Aristotle went on his quest to classify things people assuredly could roughly tell the difference between a carrot (if they had a name for it) a rain-shower and a good idea. Some classification occurs naturally of itself. The rest is just ordering the obvious and discovering similarities enough to form groups.
> 
> There are some things that will never be grouped together, custard and grass for example (though I happen to think it is delicious). When I ask for a bowl of it the reason you might be perplexed is not because of a failure to be open-minded about the spectrum of all existing things, but because organisation of things and recognition of classes and orders - scientific or down to social norms) actually matters.
> 
> If everything is merely a spectrum where do you point to the boundaries of anything? At what point does something ever stop being music and how did it ever become music if no-one knows where to start or stop their identification of it?


I don't disagree with you and if you read the article I linked to it suggests much the same thing. By "most things in reality exist on a spectrum" I did not mean all things in relation to all other things (grass/custard), but rather the things we often do group together exist on a spectrum to some other thing we exclude from the grouping so there's often no rational reason to draw the boundary here rather than there. Colors are a perfect example, but so is organized sound/silence. This idea is perhaps best illustrated by Sorites Paradox.


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## Jacck

Eva Yojimbo said:


> 'Twas just a joke on my part. I just a found the notion of criticizing a metronome piece for having no rhythm funny. I assumed the metronomes were set for a particular tempo.


if you'd set the metronomes with different phases and different frequencies, then you could produce some interesting sound effects such as beats. 




but I did not hear that in the Ligeti piece. I gues they all had the same frequency, but were started with different phases.


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## Guest

_Guero _is, _Collector _isn't. The boundary falls between.

Many thanks for the post - I've enjoyed listening to, and being hypnotised, soothed and irritated by, for me, new music.

(Some of it more interesting than the Mahler's 5th I'm half way through watching on BBC iPlayer from the Proms!)


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## millionrainbows

Eva Yojimbo said:


> The problem with these discussions--and I see similar ones in other mediums: what is poetry? what is film? what is art? etc.--is the mistaken initial premise that there's such a thing as "music" to begin with. Get rid of the label and actually think about the objects we call music. Ask yourself if there is some rational reason to group these things together and give them a label that picks out some feature as distinguishing them from other things. This is not always an easy exercise to do! The problem is that that most things in reality exist on a spectrum and where we draw boundaries and invent words to distinguish this thing/these things from other things is often somewhat, sometimes almost entirely, arbitrary.
> 
> The only common thread I see running through all music is "organized sound (usually for aesthetic purposes)." Referring to your list, this would make 1) and 2) not music, and 3) (and most of the rest) music. People are, of course, free to dispute the definition, but the thing to keep in mind that what you're really debating is where to draw the boundary in reality. Redrawing boundaries/changing definitions doesn't actually change reality and the degree to which things are similar/dissimilar to other things. It's mostly an exercise in the optimal ways in which to think about things, language being one of the ways in which we construct and organize thought. A good read on the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary (though I'd highly recommend reading the entire sequence on language).


Wow, this is excellent! This would be very effective as a supporting argument for 4'33". It's an aspect of 4'33" that I can't recall being discussed before.


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## eugeneonagain

philoctetes said:


> I love the sounds of bare nature, uncontaminated by civilization. Driving through Nevada may sound boring but spend a night on a high desert mountain and you'll want to go back again and again. Well, that's me anyway. Just make sure your vehicle is full of gas and water.
> 
> As silence becomes more difficult to find on a very noisy planet, perhaps this is a reason that more people need more silence in their music nowadays. I'm thinking especially of developments in jazz which I find very fruitful... over the last 20 years musicians are adopting more strategies that utilize ideas of complexity and subtler dynamics. I like it.


Yes, there's a lot to be said for silence - or for just listening. I am a farm boy originally (I think we've been here before) and the 'silences' of that 'nature' actually tend to be quite rhythmic, ordered and repetitive. Many bird calls are repetitive and even a babbling brook takes on a sort of order - even if that is just me imposing it. You lie in a field and the small plane flying high above takes on a undulating, rhythmic quality. Crickets chirp to a pattern. A farm machine clatters in the distance and develops a tick and a tock.

Many of those sounds are deliberate and they come together for me, the listener. I don't think I want to call them music. There are other things than music to which I can listen. If I sit and record those sounds (though I don't think I would) and played them back for people I'd hope everyone wasn't trying to interpret it as some kind of 'symphony of nature'. It's corny and predictable. As for silence or near silence, that's an experience to be had for itself, not as a guest element in something which is being presented to me in a context which usually contains sound. I don't go to sit in the countryside to hear music and I don't go to the concert hall to hear nothing.


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## millionrainbows

eugeneonagain said:


> There are some things that will never be grouped together, custard and grass for example (though I happen to think it is delicious).


After my grass the other day, I suddenly had a craving for custard. I suppose there are exceptions to every rule...man...


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## Guest

Eva Yojimbo said:


> People are, of course, free to dispute the definition, but the thing to keep in mind that what you're really debating is where to draw the boundary in reality. Redrawing boundaries/changing definitions doesn't actually change reality and the degree to which things are similar/dissimilar to other things. It's mostly an exercise in the optimal ways in which to think about things, language being one of the ways in which we construct and organize thought. A good read on the issue: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/d5NyJ2Lf6N22AD9PB/where-to-draw-the-boundary (though I'd highly recommend reading the entire sequence on language).


Well...ye..es..and no. You seem to want to say that this is simultaneously a useful and useless exercise. That arguing boundaries doesn't change reality, but since reality is at least in part what we think about things and how we discuss them and frame them in our language, actually, we _are _changing reality...

...aren't we?


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## Merl

I've said it 1000 times on here and stick with it. You either like what you heard, tolerate it or dislike it. There's no 'boundaries'. 50 years of listening to music has also told me that reasonable people are open to changing their mind.


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## millionrainbows

Eva Yojimbo said:


> I don't disagree with you and if you read the article I linked to it suggests much the same thing. By "most things in reality exist on a spectrum" I did not mean all things in relation to all other things (grass/custard), but rather the things we often do group together exist on a spectrum to some other thing we exclude from the grouping so there's often no rational reason to draw the boundary here rather than there. Colors are a perfect example, but so is organized sound/silence. This idea is perhaps best illustrated by Sorites Paradox.


After reading about Sorites Paradox, and your statement "...there's often no rational reason to draw the boundary here rather than there...", "what is music?" can be said to be a matter of degree, and this is largely subjective.

Boulez' Structures, based on a self-generating process, and which he considered a failure, could be said to be on the lower end of the spectrum" than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Cage's 4'33" would lie even lower on the spectrum.

But since this is aesthetics, and depends greatly on subjective responses, then there can be no rational dividing line, no absolute measure, of what is or is not music.



Woodduck said:


> At its most basic, music - like art of any sort - must be perceptibly ordered. We need to feel that the sounds chosen have been brought into some comprehensible relation to one another, some perceptible pattern according to some organizational principle embodying some purpose. Art is not accidental, it isn't a "happening," random noises are not artistic sounds, and anything that sounds accidental or random fails to attain the status of music even if it's put together by a "composer."


Woodduck's criteria are admittedly subjective, since they are based on what is perceptible, and what is comprehensible. What sounds "random and accidental" is an admittedly subjective experience, as he states above.


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## eugeneonagain

millionrainbows said:


> After my grass the other day, I suddenly had a craving for custard. I suppose there are exceptions to every rule...man...


It has to be real custard, not out of a packet. It makes a difference. The grass is unimportant and may even be astroturf.


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## philoctetes

Desert silences can have no sound at all for long periods of time. The only place I've found this is in southern Nevada on a road known as the Extraterrestial Highway, where there is absolutely nothing but radar stations for 170 miles and no traffic. At night the air is full of predators and victims, and the sun rises on pure silence. 

Then there is the fabulous experience of listening to bugs. Only once, on the Tuolumne River, they droned all night so loud I never slept. So I have my limits.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> After reading about Sorites Paradox, and your statement "...there's often no rational reason to draw the boundary here rather than there...", "what is music?" can be said to be a matter of degree, and this is largely subjective.
> 
> Boulez' Structures, based on a self-generating process, and which he considered a failure, could be said to be on the lower end of the spectrum" than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Cage's 4'33" would lie even lower on the spectrum.
> 
> But* since this is aesthetics, and depends greatly on subjective responses, then there can be no rational dividing line, no absolute measure, of what is or is not music.*
> 
> *Woodduck's criteria are admittedly subjective, since they are based on what is perceptible, and what is comprehensible. *What sounds "random and accidental" is an admittedly subjective experience, as he states above.


We should be careful not to confuse "subjective" with "arbitrary" or "optional." There may be some instances of uncertainty about whether something claiming to be music actually is music, but if it's impossible for a normally developed human brain to discern an ordering principle in a succession of man-made sounds, it's safe to say that we are not listening to a specimen of the art of music.

The thoroughness, complexity, meaningfulness or perceptibleness of the organization may differ, but the basic principle that music consists of _purposefully ordered sound_ is still valid. The "rational dividing line," the "absolute measure," exists, even if not everyone will be able to discern its application in every case. And I don't think it's ungenerous to suggest that "borderline" cases will be of little artistic value, regardless of whatever other sorts of value people might attach to them.

I must point out that _all_ art is "based on what is perceptible, and what is comprehensible." What is the alternative? I'm afraid we know the answer. But I don't live in a universe in which anything can be anything if I "subjectively" believe it is.


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## aleazk

I think that no having boundaries is boring and makes a disservice to art. Many of the great artists are seen as great because they challenged, pushed and redefined the boundaries of their time, their art is a magnificent game of following the rules to subtly break them. We, as spectators, know the stylistic rules and boundaries of our time, and thanks to this we can follow and realize the delightful game proposed by the innovative composer. Without rules, we wouldn't have progressive figures like Beethoven, Debussy or Stravinsky.

And, also, some composers, like Bach, Mozart and Brahms, have shown us that even within the rules and boundaries, the game can be endlessly complex and ever changing.

So, rules and boundaries are actually crucial for art.


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> We should be careful not to confuse "subjective" with "arbitrary" or "optional." There may be some instances of uncertainty about whether something claiming to be music actually is music, but if it's impossible for a *normally developed human brain to discern an ordering principle* in a succession of man-made sounds, it's safe to say that we are not listening to a specimen of the art of music.


This assumes a norm of experience. That is an attempt at objectifying experience, but it fails, since there can be plenty of exceptions to what the vague description of "a normally developed human brain" might be. Since the brain is "wired" by cognitive factors, there can ne all sorts of exceptions to what you attempt to deem as "normal." That's why there is so much diversity among the musics of the world.



> The thoroughness, complexity, meaningfulness or perceptibleness of the organization may differ, but the basic principle that music consists of _purposefully ordered sound_ is still valid. The "rational dividing line," the "absolute measure," exists...


No, it does not exist, except in your experience. That dividing line lies on a spectrum of subjectivity, and is not an objective, rigid measure.

[/QUOTE]...even if not everyone will be able to discern its application in every case.[/QUOTE]

You are confusing the subjective with objective criteria. You are saying the definition of music "exists outside of human experience" as some sort of objective "thing." This seems like a rational attempt to objectify that which cannot be objectified.



> And I don't think it's ungenerous to suggest that "borderline" cases will be of little artistic value, regardless of whatever other sorts of value people might attach to them.


That depends on what your subjective criteria are for "artistic value."



> I must point out that _all_ art is "based on what is perceptible, and what is comprehensible." What is the alternative? I'm afraid we know the answer.


This seems like an inevitable conclusion.



> But I don't live in a universe in which anything can be anything if I "subjectively" believe it is.


But art and aesthetics are by nature subjective, malleable and open to interpretation. The idea of art as totally subjective is apparently unacceptable to you, since it places art in the realm of human experience; and that is a metaphysical realm, not unlike religion and philosophy. Art is not science.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> I think that no having boundaries is boring and makes a disservice to art.


I don't; I'm glad that conceptual art with "no content" exists. I enjoy it. I like Yoko Ono's conceptual art.



> Many of the great artists are seen as great because they challenged, pushed and redefined the boundaries of their time, their art is a magnificent game of following the rules to subtly break them. We, as spectators, know the stylistic rules and boundaries of our time, and thanks to this we can follow and realize the delightful game proposed by the innovative composer. Without rules, we wouldn't have progressive figures like Beethoven, Debussy or Stravinsky.


Aren't you being a little overly-dramatic? I like Led Zeppelin as much as the next guy, but I'm glad that conceptual art exists. You act as if its existence threatens to supercede all other art. I don't think it will do that, since it doesn't have any real "teeth" to do it with.



> So, rules and boundaries are actually crucial for art.


Okay. Just be sure that you don't squelch other art out of existence.


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## philoctetes

This reminds me of Cantor, cutting up the number line (spectrum) into little pieces, only to find that points cannot be obtained by subdivision. 

I think the evolution of music speaks for itself. To make any absolute claims from a present day perspective is kinda asking to be wrong sometime in the future.


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## millionrainbows

So, if music does exist "objectively," you should be able to prove it rationally.


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## philoctetes

"But I don't live in a universe in which anything can be anything if I "subjectively" believe it is."

Unless your belief leads you to create what you subjectively believe in. Isn't that one diff between art and science? Art is more free of empiricism than science.

"So, if music does exist "objectively," you should be able to prove it rationally."

Hard to argue with that one, but someone will.


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## Woodduck

aleazk said:


> I think that no having boundaries is boring and makes a disservice to art. Many of the great artists are seen as great because they challenged, pushed and redefined the boundaries of their time, their art is a magnificent game of following the rules to subtly break them. We, as spectators, know the stylistic rules and boundaries of our time, and thanks to this we can follow and realize the delightful game proposed by the innovative composer. Without rules, we wouldn't have progressive figures like Beethoven, Debussy or Stravinsky.
> 
> And, also, some composers, like Bach, Mozart and Brahms, have shown us that even within the rules and boundaries, the game can be endlessly complex and ever changing.
> 
> *So, rules and boundaries are actually crucial for art.*


This is a powerful insight. An art's boundaries - its "rules," assumptions, principles - are the "given" against which an artist's choices are made, and the frame of reference within which those choices have meaning. Art is neither created nor received in an aesthetic vacuum, and its ability to convey meaning depends to a great extent on the artist and his audience "speaking a common language" which the creative artist speaks in a way that defies expectations and so expands the language.

I do think, though, that the boundaries defining art _as such_ are of a slightly different order than the boundaries of style. Styles are apt not to be clear entities but rather generalizations and moments in the progression of history, and the names by which we bound them - "French Baroque," "Russian Nationalist," "Neoclassical," "Wagnerian" - are chosen mainly to keep our perceptions and thoughts differentiated and orderly so as to know what we're talking about. These categories may or may not possess even a single defining trait, and we're free to redefine them or discard them altogether if doing so makes the phenomena more comprehensible in the light of new knowledge and understanding. The concepts of "art" and "music," because they refer to basic human activities rather than loose aggregations of phenomena or arbitrary points on a continuum, are not so flexible or disposable, although they are expandable and have been expanded.


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## eugeneonagain

millionrainbows said:


> But art and aesthetics are by nature subjective, malleable and open to interpretation. The idea of art as totally subjective is apparently unacceptable to you, since it places art in the realm of human experience; and that is a metaphysical realm, not unlike religion and philosophy. Art is not science.


Now now... I do believe that you previously said music was mathematics (am I correct?). There's nothing subjective about that.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> This assumes a norm of experience. *That is an attempt at objectifying experience,* but it fails, since *there can be plenty of exceptions to what the vague description of "a normally developed human brain" might be.* Since the brain is "wired" by cognitive factors, there can be all sorts of exceptions to what you attempt to deem as "normal." *That's why there is so much diversity among the musics of the world.
> *
> *You are confusing the subjective with objective criteria. You are saying the definition of music "exists outside of human experience" as some sort of objective "thing."* This seems like a rational attempt to objectify that which cannot be objectified.
> 
> But *art and aesthetics are by nature subjective, malleable and open to interpretation.* The idea of *art as totally subjective* is apparently unacceptable to you, since it places *art in the realm of human experience; and that is a metaphysical realm,* not unlike religion and philosophy. *Art is not science.*


I've made no attempt to "objectify experience." I said only that a normally developed human brain can discern order or pattern in art. This is a skill that can be refined with practice, but a high degree of it is essential to mental functioning. There's nothing "vague" about it. Pattern recognition (the essence of perception) is the most basic mental function after sensation. It's what we do with sense data. Diversity in music is diversity of pattern. We can recognize pattern in all sorts of music, even if the music is alien to our culture or temperament.

I'm _not_ "confusing the subjective with objective criteria." I am in fact differentiating the objective features of music - that it consists of sounds, and that the sounds are organized according on some principle according to some purpose - from the subjective interpretations which might be placed on those sounds by individual listeners.

I am _not_ saying that "the definition of music exists outside of human experience as some sort of objective thing." Definitions exist only in the mind, they are epistemological tools - but they are not based on whim. There are objectively good reasons why some definitions are better - more appropriate and useful - than others, why they tell us more about reality, make for a truer understanding of things, keep better order in the fields of experience and knowledge. Epistemology is not a drunken free-for-all.

It's ambiguous and misleading to say that "art and aesthetics are by nature subjective, malleable and open to interpretation." What elements or aspects of art and aesthetics are you referring to? All elements? "The idea of art as totally subjective" is indeed unacceptable to me, because that is a formulation vague enough to be useless in understanding anything. Equally useless to the understanding is placing art in a so-called "metaphysical realm." All these locutions are nothing more than attempts to keep the door open to the epistemological saloon where drunken free-for-alls can happen.

Art is a distinctive human activity. It exists - it has existed since prehistory - to fulfill some apparently very basic human needs. It has taken certain forms, and these forms can be studied and, presumably, tied to the purposes art serves in human life. These are objective factors which deserve our attention. No, understanding them is not a "science." Science is not the only vehicle of knowledge.


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## philoctetes

In the same sense, proportion in visual art is mathematics. 

It could be argued that EVERYTHING is mathematics, but perhaps I digress. 

Animal behaviorists will note that non-humans perform incredibly precise acts of calculation, without ever learning the advanced math required to make a robot do the same.

If you play sports, you're doing the same thing. I consider the kind of math in most music to be like backgammon, mostly counting, kinda boring. It's the physics of music that is more interesting to me, and I like music that explores timbre and dissonance for that reason.

A decision to like something happens through a series of logical calculations, does it not? Does that make it objective? I don't think so. No two neural nets with the same architecture will make the same decisions if they have been trained with different data. Humans are similar.

Nature is deterministic to a limit. Consciousness exercises its own degrees of freedom, based on collected knowledge. and each consciousness will have different solutions with different consequences.


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## millionrainbows

I don't think anyone is advocating a total aesthetic vacuum; only that art and music be the tools that serve us, in whatever ways we find meaningful and useful.

Oh, and eugene, sometimes music can have a mathematical aspect. It seems like every idea I speak about is interpreted in black and white terms, all or nothing. I don't see things like that. 
I don't have much use for definitions and labels, either. Have a nice day!


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## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> I've made no attempt to "objectify experience." I said only that a normally developed human brain can discern order or pattern in art. This is a skill that can be refined with practice, but a high degree of it is essential to mental functioning. There's nothing "vague" about it. Pattern recognition (the essence of perception) is the most basic mental function after sensation. It's what we do with sense data. Diversity in music is diversity of pattern. We can recognize pattern in all sorts of music, even if the music is alien to our culture or temperament.
> 
> I'm _not_ "confusing the subjective with objective criteria." I am in fact differentiating the objective features of music - that it consists of sounds, and that the sounds are organized according on some principle according to some purpose - from the subjective interpretations which might be placed on those sounds by individual listeners.


Ok, but just don't let these definitions get in anybody's way. They might trip over them and hurt themselves.



> I am _not_ saying that "the definition of music exists outside of human experience as some sort of objective thing." Definitions exist only in the mind, they are epistemological tools - but they are not based on whim. There are objectively good reasons why some definitions are better - more appropriate and useful - than others, why they tell us more about reality, make for a truer understanding of things, keep better order in the fields of experience and knowledge. Epistemology is not a drunken free-for-all.


Then it sounds like you want to control the subjective realm, and give it limits which you prescribe, and which you deem to be universally accepted. That's fine, but the joy of life is in "playing" with ideas, and using them as tools, not in subjecting them to a curriculum. There are plenty of social institutions and ways of doing things already in place to do things like that. I'm advocating freedom of thought, and creativity. That seems to be a disappearing trend in our ever-increasingly rational, structured society.



> It's ambiguous and misleading to say that "art and aesthetics are by nature subjective, malleable and open to interpretation." What elements or aspects of art and aesthetics are you referring to? All elements? "The idea of art as totally subjective" is indeed unacceptable to me, because that is a formulation vague enough to be useless in understanding anything.


Well, I suppose if you are a teacher of a subject, those limitations would be acceptable. But this rarely leads to real creativity or innovation.



> Equally useless to the understanding is placing art in a so-called "metaphysical realm." All these locutions are nothing more than attempts to keep the door open to the epistemological saloon where drunken free-for-alls can happen.


Then if you have some theory about art that is not metaphysical, then prove it rationally. I don't think it's going to work.



> Art is a distinctive human activity. It exists - it has existed since prehistory - to fulfill some apparently very basic human needs. It has taken certain forms, and these forms can be studied and, presumably, tied to the purposes art serves in human life. These are objective factors which deserve our attention. No, understanding them is not a "science." Science is not the only vehicle of knowledge.


Then you are in difficult territory, if you wish to control and define art.

It sounds like you are opening the door to an enforced rigidity, in which "certain" things are allowed, and others are off the table.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> I don't; I'm glad that conceptual art with "no content" exists. I enjoy it. I like Yoko Ono's conceptual art.
> 
> Aren't you being a little overly-dramatic? I like Led Zeppelin as much as the next guy, but I'm glad that conceptual art exists. You act as if its existence threatens to supercede all other art. I don't think it will do that, since it doesn't have any real "teeth" to do it with.
> 
> Okay. Just be sure that you don't squelch other art out of existence.


My views are layered, million. You would need to read all of my posts here and in other threads to have an idea of what I think about this topic. I give and concede but I also make remarks and distinctions, that's all. I'm interested in a full discussion, from all angles. And I also have my particular taste. So, reality is a complex thing, who would have thought?.... I don't care about you or the art you like, if it makes you happy, go for it. I think you are the one putting too much drama into this. A zen trick: delocalize your ego from your body, forget about the boundary between your body and the rest of world. In this way, the ego disappears and cannot feel attacked. If you do this, all the stress you mention about these discussions will disappear. I thought you knew about all this, you disappoint me.


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> In the same sense, proportion in visual art is mathematics.
> 
> It could be argued that EVERYTHING is mathematics, but perhaps I digress.
> 
> Animal behaviorists will note that non-humans perform incredibly precise acts of calculation, without ever learning the advanced math required to make a robot do the same.
> 
> If you play sports, you're doing the same thing. I consider the kind of math in most music to be like backgammon, mostly counting, kinda boring. It's the physics of music that is more interesting to me, and I like music that explores timbre and dissonance for that reason.


100% agree. It's curious how we all, the people in the sciences, have this view and yet the ones that have little clue about it keep mentioning mathematics and music as if there were some cosmic connection between them. Pythagoras lived 2500 years ago, we are in 2018 now, lots of developments in music, physics, mathematics and philosophy have occurred since then... better to open the history books to update our views... now go, page 1, from 2500 BC to 2018.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> It seems like every idea I speak about is interpreted in black and white terms, all or nothing. I don't see things like that.


Well, maybe you should re-think the way you write or express yourself then. Just sayin'...

Have a nice day, too. See, we can all get along well if we use the _rules_ () of basic manners


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## philoctetes

aleazk said:


> 100% agree. It's curious how we all, the people in the sciences, have this view and yet the ones that have little clue about it keep mentioning mathematics and music as if there were some cosmic connection between them. Pythagoras lived 2500 years ago, we are in 2018 now, lots of developments in music, physics, mathematics and philosophy have occurred since then... better to open the history books to update our views... now go, page 1, from 2500 BC to 2018.


Yes, and I did not mean that physics is in some way superior to math, as we can't communicate about physics without the math as a compact language. Math is a good illustration of the reducibility of information to a small set of symbols, just like music notation. It truly is encoded information that would be many more characters if words were used. But it does not provide its own context, or application, except as rules for manipulating the symbols. Usually the context comes from outside math, from the physical world, from the mothers of invention.

These mothers also practice art and music and stuff. But to practice science they have to follow stricter rules and be empirical. It doesn't mean they cease to make decisions about what they want to observe or learn from the data.


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## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> Ok, but just don't let these definitions get in anybody's way. They might trip over them and hurt themselves.
> 
> Then it sounds like you want to control the subjective realm, and give it limits which you prescribe, and which you deem to be universally accepted. That's fine, but the joy of life is in "playing" with ideas, and using them as tools, not in subjecting them to a curriculum. There are plenty of social institutions and ways of doing things already in place to do things like that. I'm advocating freedom of thought, and creativity. That seems to be a disappearing trend in our ever-increasingly rational, structured society.
> 
> Well, I suppose if you are a teacher of a subject, those limitations would be acceptable. But this rarely leads to real creativity or innovation.
> 
> Then if you have some theory about art that is not metaphysical, then prove it rationally. I don't think it's going to work.
> 
> Then you are in difficult territory, if you wish to control and define art.
> 
> It sounds like you are opening the door to an enforced rigidity, in which "certain" things are allowed, and others are off the table.


Well, that certainly grinds any remnant of discussion to a pulp. The above is really useless as an attempt to address anything I've said. Or maybe it's not really an attempt. Maybe it's just glib dismissal. Yeah, that's what it is.

Continue "playing" with ideas and using them as "tools." "Metaphysical" tools, no doubt. Never mind the thread topic.


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## Larkenfield

Definitions seem to have far less usefulness when the boundary lines of meaning are constantly shifting and unstable. But performance does... I draw the line when it looks like the average person on the street could perform the same way, do the same thing, as a musician who’s sitting on the stage. I like to be able to the difference and appreciate practice, dedication, and mastery of an instrument or composition. If a person has noticeably mastered an instrument, I would call that art; if they haven’t, I would call that a reason for someone to try to justify whatever they’re doing with some kind of an excuse that’s a substitute or a smokescreen for genuine talent. This is especially true when one's apparent lack of ability is fueled by anger, violence, social rebellion, or anything else that appears only as a negation, or there are obscene volume levels that can be permanently damaging the organs of hearing that a listener might not notice at the time. I see this happening to some of the young listeners who like its thrill, intensity, and power, but from a physical and health standpoint, I can't help wondering about their hearing ability in five to ten years, let alone 50... I now consider 'works that function' as art; and those that don't, I wouldn't know what to call them other than something to avoid at all costs if it seems to be having a predominantly destructive influence on the mind, body, spirit. In an age where there's an apparent lack of consensus about anything, and not just art, there are very few definitions that I find useful.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> Well, that certainly grinds any remnant of discussion to a pulp. The above is really useless as an attempt to address anything I've said. Or maybe it's not really an attempt. Maybe it's just glib dismissal. Yeah, that's what it is.
> 
> Continue "playing" with ideas and using them as "tools." "Metaphysical" tools, no doubt. Never mind the thread topic.


Well, the problem is, around here, saying something "isn't music" or "isn't art" is often a roundabout way of dismissing it as unimportant and/or useless and/or aesthetically unappealing and/or just plain godawful. And polls like this one are often a roundabout way of trying to prove one's aesthetic judgment or values are valid because they are widely held, at least among those who happen to participate in the poll.
So I'll briefly and slightly hijack this thread with a poll of my own: What is science?
A. Demonstrating the existence of Higgs bosons using the Large Hadron Collider;
B. My daughter's third-grade potato battery project;
C. Chewing a stick of Wrigley's spearmint gum, throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks;
D. This poll.
The answer is 4'33".


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## philoctetes

Nobody seems to consider that most art might be more like engineering than science.


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## Woodduck

philoctetes said:


> Nobody seems to consider that most art might be more like engineering than science.


I will consider that.

   

After careful consideration, i believe you're right.


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## Becca

People can be divided into two groups, those who divide everything into two groups and those who don't.

Personally I am most intrigued by things that don't quite fall into either of two groups.


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## Enthusiast

Woodduck said:


> At its most basic, music - like art of any sort - must be perceptibly ordered. We need to feel that the sounds chosen have been brought into some comprehensible relation to one another, some perceptible pattern according to some organizational principle embodying some purpose. Art is not accidental, it isn't a "happening," random noises are not artistic sounds, and anything that sounds accidental or random fails to attain the status of music even if it's put together by a "composer."


Sounds sensible (and possibly is!) but our perception is not a recording device. It works by interpreting sensory data and is hard wired to come up with a "whole" interpretation (a current best guess as to what the sensory data "means") and to remove ambiguity. Artists play with this. And "accidental" art accidentally plays with it, too. Of course, our experience influences this process so that what we have seen or heard before is more easily recognised than apparent randomness. We are, of course, unaware of our perceptual process working in this way: we experience our interpretation of the sensory data as "the truth".


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## eugeneonagain

millionrainbows said:


> Well, I suppose if you are a teacher of a subject, those limitations would be acceptable. But this rarely leads to real creativity or innovation.


Innovation and creativity doesn't come out of a vacuum. It is by thoroughly knowing what has come before and being able to understand it - its forms and its parameters - that you can build on it or reject parts of it and build anew.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> Well, the problem is, around here, saying something "isn't music" or "isn't art" is often a roundabout way of dismissing it as unimportant and/or useless and/or aesthetically unappealing and/or just plain godawful. And polls like this one are often a roundabout way of trying to prove one's aesthetic judgment or values are valid because they are widely held, at least among those who happen to participate in the poll.


False. The idea of this thread is simply to discuss a question of aesthetics and philosophy. Since when this elementary question (which has been discussed by many philosophers) has a moral charge? I find this point of view rather silly and philistine, it seems people are afraid of a minimal disagreement (oh, God forbid!). I guess all of those philosophers are intrinsically mean and egotistic people that only seek to validate their tastes...  Something may not be music, but may be another type of art and have a value there (e.g., conceptual art). The discussion here is about the role of boundaries in art, a cold blooded discussion, people should leave their ego at the front door before entering.

Let me put it clear: if you think that what you like is art and makes you happy, then go for it. But, in the same way in which I cannot oblige you to don't call it art if I happen to think that, you cannot oblige me to think it's art if you think it is. And then we would disagree and, if we leave our egos at the front door, have a civilized discussion. Sure, there may be some with bad intentions, but if we, the other members, continue the discussion in a civilized way, those with bad intentions will soon leave the room because their provocations were not working.

Finally, I don't even care that much about this topic, but in recent threads both the OP of those threads and the participants seemed to be interested, so it makes no sense to pretend that the discussion doesn't exist and that people are not interested in it.

Ultimately, it's just an exercise in philosophy for those with philosophical inclinations (myself included). Simply that.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> Well, I suppose if you are a teacher of a subject, those limitations would be acceptable. But this rarely leads to real creativity or innovation.


This is one of most incorrect notions I ever read on this topic. Have you ever talked to artists? Have you ever produced art yourself? (I really doubt that you have not talked to artists or tried to compose something; so I think you are not being honest here.)

All artists have a quite complex framework of notions, ideas, parameters, philosophies, limitations, rules, etc., which comprise their worldview on art when they produce. Limitations are actually one of the most fertile lands for sparking creativity.

In mathematics, for example, one usually has a set of concepts rigorously defined. The goal is to prove interesting theorems that connect those concepts with each other. But, those concepts are rather intricate in their meaning, and one also has the limitation of having to follow strict logic. Thus, the creativity comes in the sense of ideating ways to circumvent those limitations in order to prove a result that, nevertheless, follows the rules strictly. When one sees the proofs of famous theorems by famous mathematicians, one can only be in awe at the display of creativity they show in order to find a way to prove such apparently counterintuitive results.

Exactly the same is valid for music composed under a set of stylistic rules and notions about the nature of music.


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> False. The idea of this thread is simply to discuss a question of aesthetics and philosophy. Since when this elementary question (which has been discussed by many philosophers) has a moral charge? I find this point of view rather silly and philistine, it seems people are afraid of a minimal disagreement (oh, God forbid!). I guess all of those philosophers are intrinsically mean and egotistic people that only seek to validate their tastes...  Something may not be music, but may be another type of art and have a value there (e.g., conceptual art). The discussion here is about the role of boundaries in art, a cold blooded discussion, people should leave their ego at the front door before entering.
> 
> Let me put it clear: if you think that what you like is art and makes you happy, then go for it. But, in the same way in which I cannot oblige you to don't call it art if I happen to think that, you cannot oblige me to think it's art if you think it is. And then we would disagree and, if we left our egos at the front door, have a civilized discussion. Sure, there may be some with bad intentions, but if we, the other members, continue the discussion in a civilized way, those with bad intentions will soon leave the room because their provocations were not working.
> 
> Finally, I don't even care that much about this topic, but in recent threads both the OP of those threads and the participants seemed to be interested, so it makes no sense to pretend that the discussion doesn't exist and that people are not interested in it.
> 
> Ultimately, it's just an exercise in philosophy for those with philosophical inclinations (myself included). Simply that.


I think it was pretty clear that my post was not an attack on your motives in starting this particular thread, nor a general dismissal of the posts in it, many of which I find quite thoughtful and worthwhile. My comment was that the "what is music [or art]" question, or related questions, which are posed so frequently here, often accompanied by polls, too often degenerate into attempts by commenters to validate their own aesthetic tastes and invalidate those of others.

Words are like fire -- good servants, bad masters. Words like "music" and "art" are tools that should be and are defined in a way the make them useful to those who are using them to communicate with each other. Definitions evolve or expand over time not due to any formal decision or pronouncement (or poll) as to what they mean, but because those speaking the language in question find new or additional uses for them. Or they fall out of use and become archaic. Either result is a natural phenomenon of a living language.

A separate issue is created by provocateurs like John Cage or Marcel Duchamp. They are not trying to change the definition or music or art, but rather challenge the audience to reevaluate their assumptions of what could come within those definitions. The visceral reaction "This isn't music [or art]!" is an important part of what they are trying to draw from the audience. Whether it is or it isn't is much less important. Their goal is to take the audience out of their comfort zone and look at the world in a new way. That's arguably the goal of all art, but they have an especially jarring and unsubtle way of doing it.


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## JAS

fluteman said:


> A separate issue is created provocateurs like John Cage or Marcel Duchamp. They are not trying to change the definition or music or art, but rather challenge the audience to reevaluate their assumptions of what could come within those definitions. The visceral reaction "This isn't music [or art]!" is an important part of what they are trying to draw from the audience. Whether it is or it isn't is much less important. Their goal is to take the audience out of their comfort zone and look at the world in a new way. That's arguably the goal of all art, but they have an especially jarring and unsubtle way of doing it.


I think the full post is a very good one, except for this last point. Not all art (arguably or otherwise) needs to make people uncomfortable. Much art, even much great art, doesn't really challenge the audience in any meaningful way, particularly not a challenge on the notion of what makes art in the first place. (It is certainly possible, for example, for great art merely to inspire, or to encourage ideas and feelings already present.) I think that this is a conceit of much modern art, but by no means of all art.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> I think it was pretty clear that my post was not an attack on your motives in starting this particular thread, nor a general dismissal of the posts in it, many of which I find quite thoughtful and worthwhile. My comment was that the "what is music [or art]" question, or related questions, which are posed so frequently here, often accompanied by polls, too often degenerate into attempts by commenters to validate their own aesthetic tastes and invalidate those of others.
> 
> Words are like fire -- good servants, bad masters. Words like "music" and "art" are tools that should be and are defined in a way the make them useful to those who are using them to communicate with each other. Definitions evolve or expand over time not due to any formal decision or pronouncement (or poll) as to what they mean, but because those speaking the language in question find new or additional uses for them. Or they fall out of use and become archaic. Either result is a natural phenomenon of a living language.
> 
> A separate issue is created by provocateurs like John Cage or Marcel Duchamp. They are not trying to change the definition or music or art, but rather challenge the audience to reevaluate their assumptions of what could come within those definitions. The visceral reaction "This isn't music [or art]!" is an important part of what they are trying to draw from the audience. Whether it is or it isn't is much less important. Their goal is to take the audience out of their comfort zone and look at the world in a new way. That's arguably the goal of all art, but they have an especially jarring and unsubtle way of doing it.


I agree with what you say.

On the other hand, you said 'polls like this' and, being me the creator of 'this poll', it's kinda difficult not to take it as an attack. Anyway, for the record, I included the poll because I found the notion of 'deciding' this issue by a poll as rather funny in its absurdity (that's why the tongue in cheek in the title of the thread "_with poll!_", with exclamation sign, but, alas, the written medium cannot express all of those thing I had in mind).


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## fluteman

JAS said:


> I think the full post is a very good one, except for this last point. Not all art (arguably or otherwise) needs to make people uncomfortable. Much art, even much great art, doesn't really challenge the audience in any meaningful way, particularly not a challenge on the notion of what makes art in the first place. (It is certainly possible, for example, for great art merely to inspire, or to encourage ideas and feelings already present.) I think that this is a conceit of much modern art, but by no means of all art.


Yes, not all art needs to make one feel uncomfortable, but shouldn't it pique one's curiosity and take one out of the humdrum routine of daily existence at least a little bit? I suppose I should have put it that way. What I meant was, art challenges the mind and takes it out of its ordinary routine, at least for a few minutes. I didn't mean "uncomfortable" in the sense of painful, or in any negative sense.


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## Eva Yojimbo

fluteman said:


> Well, the problem is, around here, saying something "isn't music" or "isn't art" is often a roundabout way of dismissing it as unimportant and/or useless and/or aesthetically unappealing and/or just plain godawful.


Indeed. It's also often a way of someone trying to validate their own (ultimately subjective) aesthetic values rather than actually communicating anything meaningful about the object(s) in question. IE, it's often just synonymous with "I don't like it so it's bad."


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## JAS

fluteman said:


> Yes, not all art needs to make one feel uncomfortable, but shouldn't it pique one's curiosity and take one out of the humdrum routine of daily existence at least a little bit? I suppose I should have put it that way. What I meant was, art challenges the mind and takes it out of its ordinary routine, at least for a few minutes. I didn't mean "uncomfortable" in the sense of painful, or in any negative sense.


Now we are introducing another idea, as "uncomfortable" and "challenge" are not quite the same in meaning. (I suppose a sustained challenge does generally become uncomfortable.) I think of art, in this sense not limited to music, as an interpretation of reality. That interpretation may be fairly close to reality, or it may may engage in quite extreme exaggerations or mutations of reality (since imagination is often a matter of combining known things in novel ways rather than wholly new creations). For this reason, although I deeply admire the skill, I don't think very highly of photo-realism in visual arts. A simple portrait depicts the sitter, while an artistic portrait adds interpretation that says something about the sitter. There can be an idealized aspect, if that is what you mean by taking us out of the humdrum routine.


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## Eva Yojimbo

millionrainbows said:


> After reading about Sorites Paradox, and your statement "...there's often no rational reason to draw the boundary here rather than there...", "what is music?" can be said to be a matter of degree, and this is largely subjective.
> 
> Boulez' Structures, based on a self-generating process, and which he considered a failure, could be said to be on the lower end of the spectrum" than Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. Cage's 4'33" would lie even lower on the spectrum.
> 
> But since this is aesthetics, and depends greatly on subjective responses, then there can be no rational dividing line, no absolute measure, of what is or is not music.


I agree it's a matter of degree, but it's also not always a matter of either/or. Music, like many other complex objects, don't just exist on a spectrum, they exist on multiple spectrums. Even if you take the simplest notion of music as "organized sound," you can break those two words up into different kinds of organization and different types of sound. So we might say that X piece utilizes Western tonality, sonata structure, was fully pre-composed, intended to be played as-is written, with the specific instruments it's assigned; while Y piece utilizes atonality, chance structure, features improvisation, is intended to be played partly as-written but with freedom to change and/or compose on the spot, with any instruments the players want. Now, you can call both of these objects "music" because it's still "organized sound," but the kinds of organization and sound are completely different, and calling them both "music" doesn't communicate much about the ways in which they're similar or different.

In Yudkowsky's A Human's Guide to Words, he writes a short parable about bleggs and rubes: bleggs are blue, egg-shapped, furry, flexible, and opaque. Suddenly, you find an egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, PURPLE object; is it still a blegg? Yudkowsky extends the parable greatly, but the gist of the idea is that when we invent words for complex objects, and we encounter objects that contain some of the properties of those complex objects but not others, it's really a fault of cognition to ask "well is it an X?" What it is, in reality, is a complex of all its properties, asking whether it's really an X is thinking that X is, in itself, a property of the object, rather than a symbol that helps us communicate about said objects.

Whether you call all of this "largely subjective" depends on what you mean. The understanding of language, the translation of symbols into meaning, is innately subjective in that it happens in minds; but language is also largely about symbolizing and communicating ideas about objective things. The objects we call music are all objective and they all have properties that we can symbolize and talk about, but the issue is what exactly it is we're trying to communicate by saying "music."


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## Eva Yojimbo

MacLeod said:


> Well...ye..es..and no. You seem to want to say that this is simultaneously a useful and useless exercise. That arguing boundaries doesn't change reality, but since reality is at least in part what we think about things and how we discuss them and frame them in our language, actually, we _are _changing reality...
> 
> ...aren't we?


I'm not trying to say it's a useless exercise at all! Not only is it useful to try to optimize language (and, as a consequence, cognition), it's absolutely necessary for communication. All I'm doing is cautioning about some of the pitfalls associated with the endeavor.

If you look at Sorites Paradox, there are different possible solutions one can take with it, but perhaps the most common is just to set an arbitrary number for what constitutes a "heap." Say you set the number at 10000 grains. That would make 9999 grains "not a heap." But in reality, the the 9999-grain object is much closer to the 10000-grain object than a 1-grain object is to the 9999-grain object even though the former two belong to different categories and the latter two belong to the same category. The trick is to not confuse our categories with reality; or, in the common metaphor, don't confuse the map for the territory. So, if we're to define music, it's imperative that we don't lose sight of reality, the degree to which the objects we call "music" or "not music" are actually similar or dissimilar to each other. Changing our definitions doesn't change the reality, but it can certainly have a huge impact on how we think about that reality.


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## aleazk

Eva Yojimbo said:


> but the issue is what exactly it is we're trying to communicate by saying "music."


Indeed. But what I say is why we don't simply go to the core of the matter for a change. No moral preaching, no Wittgensteinization of every single word, no insults, and, above all, no over simplifications.



Eva Yojimbo said:


> Even if you take the simplest notion of music as "organized sound," you can break those two words up into different kinds of organization and different types of sound. So we might say that X piece utilizes Western tonality, sonata structure, was fully pre-composed, intended to be played as-is written, with the specific instruments it's assigned; while Y piece utilizes atonality, chance structure, features improvisation, is intended to be played partly as-written but with freedom to change and/or compose on the spot, with any instruments the players want. Now, you can call both of these objects "music" because it's still "organized sound," but the kinds of organization and sound are completely different, and calling them both "music" doesn't communicate much about the ways in which they're similar or different.


Bravo! That's exactly the kind of nuanced discussion I want to have.

But I would still call it music. The only thing we need to add, really, are the footnotes that make the adequate contextualization of what we say. No need to throw all language through the window.


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## fluteman

JAS said:


> Now we are introducing another idea, as "uncomfortable" and "challenge" are not quite the same in meaning. (I suppose a sustained challenge does generally become uncomfortable.)


Yes, this is a good example of the issue Eva Yojimbo has raised. Words are tricky things. What I actually wrote was, "take the audience out of their comfort zone", and can't taking someone out of their comfort zone mean about the same thing as challenging someone? I do concede your point that "being made uncomfortable" and "being challenged" do not necessarily mean the same thing. That's because single words can be and are used to express a range of related concepts. As Eva points out, that's another problem with a question like "What is music?"


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## Thomyum2

aleazk said:


> But, in the same way in which I cannot oblige you to don't call it art if I happen to think that, you cannot oblige me to think it's art if you think it is. And then we would disagree and, if we leave our egos at the front door, have a civilized discussion. Sure, there may be some with bad intentions, but if we, the other members, continue the discussion in a civilized way, those with bad intentions will soon leave the room because their provocations were not working.





fluteman said:


> Words are like fire -- good servants, bad masters. Words like "music" and "art" are tools that should be and are defined in a way the make them useful to those who are using them to communicate with each other. Definitions evolve or expand over time not due to any formal decision or pronouncement (or poll) as to what they mean, but because those speaking the language in question find new or additional uses for them. Or they fall out of use and become archaic. Either result is a natural phenomenon of a living language.





aleazk said:


> Anyway, for the record, I included the poll because I found the notion of 'deciding' this issue by a poll as rather funny in its absurdity (that's why the tongue in cheek in the title of the thread "_with poll!_", with exclamation sign, but, alas, the written medium cannot express all of those thing I had in mind).


Although I agree that a poll cannot 'decide' anything, I do think they are useful in helping us shed light on how we think similarly or differently about a subject. I find it very intriguing to see there is a pretty solid majority around two choices in this poll, and suggests something of a consensus in putting the boundary of music right at either silence or 4'33". It shows, and it occurs to me in these exchanges, that most of us are comfortable using a term 'music' to encompass more than just the music we like - we will acknowledge that the fact of liking or disliking is not the determining one as to whether or not something is 'music'. We seem to agree that the matter of defining music cannot be simply a subjective matter based on individual preference but must rely on a particular set of objective criteria - and that is where there isn't a consensus. Which is why I think the 'family resemblance' I mentioned in my previous post works well as a tool for understanding this - music is such a varied and multifaceted thing and there are characteristics that are shared between individual works, but no fixed set of qualities that are shared by all of them.


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## aleazk

Eva Yojimbo said:


> I'm not trying to say it's a useless exercise at all! Not only is it useful to try to optimize language (and, as a consequence, cognition), it's absolutely necessary for communication. All I'm doing is cautioning about some of the pitfalls associated with the endeavor.
> 
> If you look at Sorites Paradox, there are different possible solutions one can take with it, but perhaps the most common is just to set an arbitrary number for what constitutes a "heap." Say you set the number at 10000 grains. That would make 9999 grains "not a heap." But in reality, the the 9999-grain object is much closer to the 10000-grain object than a 1-grain object is to the 9999-grain object even though the former two belong to different categories and the latter two belong to the same category. The trick is to not confuse our categories with reality; or, in the common metaphor, don't confuse the map for the territory. So, if we're to define music, it's imperative that we don't lose sight of reality, the degree to which the objects we call "music" or "not music" are actually similar or dissimilar to each other. Changing our definitions doesn't change the reality, but it can certainly have a huge impact on how we think about that reality.


Agree.

When we do ontology, which is the exercise of classifying the objects of which reality is made of, reality is only one and simply there, what we do is to set up criteria that allow us to break it in parts according to those criteria. In physical ontology, the criteria are the laws of physics, which describe it as sub-parts of it that interact in certain ways. This is objective, although, when we get a better, more refined physical theory, that ontology is also refined, so it was not a precise map after all, it's tied to our ignorance of some finer aspects of reality when we write those provisional laws or theories.

In the case or music, the problem doesn't come from ignorance, but from certain degree of inescapable subjectivity in the way we decide what's art, but also in certain vagueness in the notion itself. It's valid to make an ontology of music, but at the same time one must admit that it will always have some degree of relativization, due to the fact that it's based on criteria that can be half objective and half subjective.

But the solution to this is simply to state those criteria clearly so that others can criticize them and thus an intelligible discussion becomes possible.


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## eugeneonagain

Eva Yojimbo said:


> In Yudkowsky's A Human's Guide to Words, he writes a short parable about bleggs and rubes: bleggs are blue, egg-shapped, furry, flexible, and opaque. Suddenly, you find an egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, PURPLE object; is it still a blegg? Yudkowsky extends the parable greatly, but the gist of the idea is that when we invent words for complex objects, and we encounter objects that contain some of the properties of those complex objects but not others, it's really a fault of cognition to ask "well is it an X?" What it is, in reality, is a complex of all its properties, asking whether it's really an X is thinking that X is, in itself, a property of the object, rather than a symbol that helps us communicate about said objects.
> 
> Whether you call all of this "largely subjective" depends on what you mean. The understanding of language, the translation of symbols into meaning, is innately subjective in that it happens in minds; but language is also largely about symbolizing and communicating ideas about objective things. The objects we call music are all objective and they all have properties that we can symbolize and talk about, but the issue is what exactly it is we're trying to communicate by saying "music."


I agree with the spectrum idea, but what matters to us for understanding is how we order things. Even the idea and word 'spectrum' tells us we have made an attempt to break up a whole into parts- which no doubt are part of a whole, but can be identified from a mass.

The point about confusing properties and objects is a very good one, but the parable of 'blegg' is not very good. Encountering something with all the other identifiable properties of something else, but with one or more altered, shouldn't present a philosophical problem. Once the blueness isn't there (and blueness is a problem all its own!) it ceases to to be a 'blegg' and the idea must be revised to include p(urple)eggs and gr(een)eggs and yell(ow)eggs etc under the collective of Col(oured)eggs. Though the original example is a bit weak because it relies upon colours to define things with properties beyond just colour and shape.

These never-ending definitions of groups can be justifiably multiplied to categorise as much as we want to categorise (not that it isn't likely to run into problems), but no-one has the time or inclination to live like that so we end up relying on the imprecise methods of aesthetics, taste, artistic license, artist's definition, audience's interpreted definitions... hence threads like these.

None of that means that we can't attempt an actual demarcation of what is and isn't music, so long as we reach agreement about what we want the word to mean. My neighbour, who has been waiting for the work to start on his kitchen extension, referred to the sound of their hammering as 'music to his ears'. I profoundly disagree.


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## Woodduck

Eva Yojimbo said:


> *I agree it's a matter of degree...*
> 
> In Yudkowsky's A Human's Guide to Words, he writes a short parable about bleggs and rubes: bleggs are blue, egg-shapped, furry, flexible, and opaque. Suddenly, you find an egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque, PURPLE object; is it still a blegg? Yudkowsky extends the parable greatly, but the gist of the idea is that *when we invent words for complex objects, and we encounter objects that contain some of the properties of those complex objects but not others, it's really a fault of cognition to ask "well is it an X?"* What it is, in reality, is a complex of all its properties, asking whether it's really an X is thinking that X is, in itself, a property of the object, rather than a symbol that helps us communicate about said objects.
> 
> Whether you call all of this "largely subjective" depends on what you mean. The understanding of language, the translation of symbols into meaning, is innately subjective in that it happens in minds; but language is also largely about symbolizing and communicating ideas about objective things. *The objects we call music are all objective and they all have properties that we can symbolize and talk about, but the issue is what exactly it is we're trying to communicate by saying "music."*


What you say is correct, but it fails to recognize the validity of the question we're debating or to identify the principles we should observe in debating it.

Asking whether something "is an X" is not a "fault of cognition." The existence of borderline cases doesn't negate the validity of classifications. There may be no clean line of separation between trees and shrubs, but it is not a fault of cognition to say that a sugar maple is a tree and a mountain laurel is a shrub. Indeed, we would suspect cognitive dysfunction in anyone saying the opposite.

We agree that categories, definitions, and words are not entities in nature. They are tools of cognition, and they're open-ended in order to accommodate new data and changing perspectives. But that doesn't give us free reign to bend and stretch them any way we want to. The statement that "it's a matter of degree" tends to obscure the issue and close off the discussion. There are reasons - sound cognitive reasons - for respecting the way words are customarily used, and debates over how and when to alter their use shouldn't be trivialized as contests of "subjectivity" or "popularity."

The debate over what we ought to classify as "music" should be guided by the same criteria we would use in any other discussion of what to call something. The important question is: what classification is most conducive to clarity of thought and mutual understanding between people and over time? Those things are, after all, what words are primarily for. We can play with words - we can talk about the "music" of falling water or say that good news is "music to my ears" - but those are not primary meanings of "music" and are not what we mean when we ask, "What kind of music do you like?"

The primary meaning of "music" is what we're debating here. Anyone proposing a definition needs to be able to argue for its cognitive and cultural usefulness, and anyone designating as music a phenomenon different in basic ways from music as it has been customarily understood needs to show why there is significant value in altering that customary understanding. To be unwilling to do that while pretending to participate in this discussion is not merely a "fault of cognition" but an act of cognitive sabotage.


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## aleazk

So, now that all the issues are clear, these are my own criteria (for example, the ones I use when I compose my own little pieces of which I only care about):

To be considered a composed piece of music, it should verify that

1) a-the sounds are produced, recorded or manipulated by explicit instructions from the composer (there can be improvisation, or randomness, but its global course must be directed by the composer); b-the instructions must have some degree of complexity (where I include a ponderable density of sounds per minute, an interplay of sounds or masses of sounds that require many or repeated interventions from the interpreter, the composer or whoever, but always by instruction from the composer's part, these instructions must require some amount of musical skill and study to be realized)

2) conceptual elements spoken by the composer should be irrelevant to decide its success in purely sonic terms (there may be conceptual or performance art elements, but the sound-web should be able to sustain itself alone for the audience; that audience can be a minority, though, like, say, the one of Ferneyhough, me included in that audience).

Those criteria can now be questioned and they don't mean that what doesn't fit them may not have some value as other type of art or that I invalidate your subjectivity, etc. What I delineated there is simply what I would write if someone asks me to write a book or essay in musical aesthetics.

Edit: I terms of Woodduck's last post, which I read only now, I think this definition is sound because it's rather uncontroversial and conveys pretty clearly what we mean by music, from the most conservative of listeners, to some forms of the avant-garde; about the latter, it certainly excludes 4'33'', Collector, or Guero). And it also leaves quite a wide room for stretching things, but without admitting things like one-liner and trivial (in sound manipulation content) instructions.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> This is one of most incorrect notions I ever read on this topic. Have you ever talked to artists? Have you ever produced art yourself? (I really doubt that you have not talked to artists or tried to compose something; so I think you are not being honest here.)
> 
> All artists have a quite complex framework of notions, ideas, parameters, philosophies, limitations, rules, etc., which comprise their worldview on art when they produce. Limitations are actually one of the most fertile lands for sparking creativity.
> 
> In mathematics, for example, one usually has a set of concepts rigorously defined. The goal is to prove interesting theorems that connect those concepts with each other. But, those concepts are rather intricate in their meaning, and one also has the limitation of having to follow strict logic. Thus, the creativity comes in the sense of ideating ways to circumvent those limitations in order to prove a result that, nevertheless, follows the rules strictly. When one sees the proofs of famous theorems by famous mathematicians, one can only be in awe at the display of creativity they show in order to find a way to prove such apparently counterintuitive results.
> 
> Exactly the same is valid for music composed under a set of stylistic rules and notions about the nature of music.


It sounds to me like you are trying to take all the joy out of art & music. What do you think creativity really is? A set of prescribed rules and limitations? That may be true on some level, but it is misleading, as well.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> It sounds to me like you are trying to take all the joy out of art & music. What do you think creativity really is? A set of prescribed rules and limitations? That may be true on some level, but it is misleading, as well.


I never said that and I already discussed that and with historical examples.


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## eugeneonagain

Actually it seems to me that the people who take all the music out of 'music' are the ones removing all the joy. Is it really 'joy' to be engaged in some intellectual exercise all the time?


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> So, now that all the issues are clear, these are my own criteria (for example, the ones I use when I compose my own little pieces of which I only care about):
> 
> To be considered a composed piece of music, it should verify that
> 
> 1) a-the sounds are produced, recorded or manipulated by explicit instructions from the composer (there can be improvisation, or randomness, but its global course must be directed by the composer); b-the instructions must have some degree of complexity (where I include a ponderable density of sounds per minute, an interplay of sounds or masses of sounds that require many or repeated interventions from the interpreter, the composer or whoever, but always by instruction from the composer's part, these instructions must require some amount of musical skill and study to be realized)
> 
> 2) conceptual elements spoken by the composer should be irrelevant to decide its purely sonic value (there may be conceptual or performance art elements, but the sound-web should be able to sustain itself alone).
> 
> Those criteria can now be questioned and they don't mean that what doesn't fit them may have some value as other type of art or that I invalidate your subjectivity, etc. What I delineated there is simply what I would write if someone asks me to write a book or essay in musical aesthetics.
> 
> Edit: I terms of Woodduck's last post, which I read only now, I think this definition is sound because it's rather uncontroversial and conveys pretty clearly what we mean by music, from the most conservative of listeners, to some forms of the avant-garde; about the latter, it certainly excludes 4'33'', Collector, or Guero). And it also leaves quite a wide room for stretching things, but without admitting things like one-liner and trivial (in sound manipulation content) instructions.


Well, I'm with you on (1)(a), but not the rest. Music is a form of human expression or communication through non-verbal sound, so it must be designed and intended to communicate to an audience. There is no intrinsic "sonic value" -- either music successfully communicates to an audience, in which case it succeeds and has value, or it doesn't, and it fails and has no value, at least as music. Your criteria lack the essential aspect of expression or communication.
As for the skill requirement, I think that idea has merit, but rather than say the composer or performer must have skill, I would put it a little differently and echo Charles Wourinen's comments and say that music, and art generally, is created in a sophisticated way that requires active intellectual and emotional involvement or participation on the part of the audience. Skill on the part of the composer and performer is probably necessary, at least most of the time, but not sufficient, to bring that about.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> I never said that and I already discussed that and with historical examples.


Then I think you are missing a basic premise. 
Listen to what Pat Martino says at 1:50-3:45.


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## Ludwig Von Chumpsky

Interesting conversation. But we should always bring things back to real life, out of pure theory. So, given any criteria at all about what constitutes music, I would say we should be able to test the criteria in a simple manner. The person or group who has devised the criteria should be able to accurately pick out examples that meet the criteria and examples that don't, without external clues such as seeing one example with a score, and one without. 

So if you think music can be arranged silence for example, great. We should be able to blindfold you, place you in a concert hall on two different occasions. One time we have a person on stage "performing" a piece of arranged silence. The other we have no one on stage. You should then be able to correctly say which one is an example that meets your criteria. If you can't, then your criteria is no good. So there's no subjectivity here, just us judging your own criteria, etc. It's just you and your criteria. And this applies to anything really, i.e. art in general. If you say splattering paint on canvas is art, fine. You should then be able to tell the difference between a piece where the artist splattered paint, and a piece where say a dog accidently kicked a couple cans of paint onto a canvas.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> Well, I'm with you on (1)(a), but not the rest. Music is a form of human expression or communication through non-verbal sound, so it must be designed and intended to communicate to an audience. There is no intrinsic "sonic value" -- either music successfully communicates to an audience, in which case it succeeds and has value, or it doesn't, and it fails and has no value, at least as music. Your criteria lack the essential aspect of expression or communication.


I think you miss my point there on how I used the sonic value term there or wasn't precise enough. I'm actually given for granted, in that headland, that the piece is successful. All I'm asking is that this success must come from the purely sonic exposition of the public to the piece, without conceptual explanations before or after the piece itself (as sonic entity, where the sounds start to... well, sound). So, if you want, replace sonic value for abstract sonic communication. On the other hand, even if it moves someone, but the piece doesn't verify my points, I maintain that I wouldn't call it music. Although, I would have nothing against that person, but I don't think that person has the right to impose his peculiar subjectivity to all of us (in reference to how we define a whole type of human activity, that is, which is art), otherwise, we end in the dead end of free subjectivity and that anything goes.



fluteman said:


> As for the skill requirement, I think that idea has merit, but rather than say the composer or performer must have skill, I would put it a little differently and echo Charles Wourinen's comments and say that music, and art generally, is created in a sophisticated way that requires active intellectual and emotional involvement or participation on the part of the audience. Skill on the part of the composer and performer is probably necessary, but not sufficient, to bring that about.


Yes, possibly true. In any case, for a rough demarcation process (i.e, that is mainly useful to say what is not music), only necessary conditions are needed.

Thanks for discussing my points and adding some nuance to my terms.


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## Eva Yojimbo

eugeneonagain said:


> The point about confusing properties and objects is a very good one, but the parable of 'blegg' is not very good. Encountering something with all the other identifiable properties of something else, but with one or more altered, shouldn't present a philosophical problem. Once the blueness isn't there (and blueness is a problem all its own!) it ceases to to be a 'blegg' and the idea must be revised to include p(urple)eggs and gr(een)eggs and yell(ow)eggs etc under the collective of Col(oured)eggs. Though the original example is a bit weak because it relies upon colours to define things with properties beyond just colour and shape.


I think you're slightly misunderstanding the point of the parable, but that's probably mostly my fault for trying to simplify a rather lengthy series of articles so that they're palatable for a forum post. Yes, if we decide that "blue" is a necessary property to categorize something a "blegg" then a purple object with all the same properties isn't a blegg "by definition," but the bigger point is that "by definition" doesn't really have much to do with how similar/dissimilar the object is to other blegg objects. There's also the point that language works closer to something like this: you find blue, egg-shaped, furry, flexible, opaque objects and call them "bleggs," without really bothering to define exactly which properties are necessary to make it a blegg. Then you encounter such an object that's not blue, or not egg-shaped, or not furry, etc. This does present a problem because it's not entirely clear whether it makes more sense to invent a new word to call this object, or to modify the existing word: maybe we call a purple, egg-shaped, etc. object a "Plegg," or maybe we call it a "purple blegg." As you change more properties, this becomes even more difficult.

In the realm of music, you can see this played out in similar ways. If you think of all the classical properties of music--tonality, form, instrumentation, pre-written, methods of performance, melody, harmony--you can then see how in the 20th century they've been altered if not removed. If you remove tonality then it probably makes more sense to say "atonal music" rather than "not music" since most atonal music will still have most, if not all, of the other properties most classical/typical music has; but what if you remove everything except the pre-written method of performance as in the Sdraulig piece? The more elements you remove or change, the more the objects become dissimilar to objects we consider typical examples of a given word. If we're just focused on the properties, the "umbrella term" of "music" really isn't telling us anything we don't already know. Back in the world of bleggs, once you know that an object is purple, egg-shaped, furred, flexible, opaque, etc. you already (for the purpose of this example) know everything about it: asking whether it's really a blegg isn't going to tell us anything new either.

Do we need words for complex objects that contain a lot of properties? Yes, absolutely for the utility of communication, but there are a lot of cognitive, rational pitfalls to using language like this. I've tried to address several of these pitfalls in this thread, but the general idea is that we can't let words get in the way of our understanding what and how reality actually is. People arguing over definitions to begin with is usually a sign that they've lost track of what's really important about the language: the purpose of communication. Really, I'm fine with anyone having any definition of any word as long as they tell me what it is beforehand, even if their definition is atypical. As long as I understand what you mean (and vice versa), we could communicate. It seems any discussions over what words mean or should mean should have as its goal the utilitarian purpose of getting everyone on the same page. Sadly, I've rarely found that's what actually happens because human brains inevitably muddle everything up. People inevitably bring in value judgments and moral inferences and subjective experiences and all kinds of excess baggage that makes agreement impossible. I can say "I think music should just be 'any organized sound for an aesthetic purpose," and Woodduck can give his as something similar to what he said on page 2; and it's clear these two definitions are very different, and refer to very different things both objectively and subjectively. What are we to do when we encounter such disagreement?


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> Then I think you are missing a basic premise.
> Listen to what Pat Martino says at 1:50-3:45.


But I agree with that and the rules I'm talking about have nothing to do with teachers. When he says freedom at the end of your quote, he refers exactly to the kind of freedom to break the "teacher's rules" I was mentioning in the case of Beethoven, Debussy, or Stravinsky. We are talking about a global set of things that pertain to a particular style and view on music. The nice music he plays there fits very clearly within the global rules of jazz, for example, even when he, indeed, can introduce his freedom to break some of them when he feels the need to do it. But he's not breaking all of them all the time, otherwise it's simply almost impossible to produce something (even more in jazz improvisation, where one is not inventing everything at every second, instead, one mainly reorders a lot of small predesigned phrases, chords successions, etc., and, of course, all of them in the jazz style.)


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> I think you miss my point there on how I used the sonic value term there or wasn't precise enough. I'm actually given for granted, in that headland, that the piece is successful. All I'm asking is that this success must come from the purely sonic exposition of the public to the piece, without conceptual explanations before or after the piece itself (as sonic entity, where the sounds start to... well, sound). So, if you want, replace sonic value for abstract sonic communication. On the other hand, even if it moves someone, but the piece doesn't verify my points, I maintain that I wouldn't call it music. Although, I would have nothing against that person, but I don't think that person has the right to impose his peculiar subjectivity to all of us (in reference to how we define a whole type of human activity which is art), otherwise, we end in the dead end of free subjectivity and that anything goes.
> 
> Yes, possibly true. In any case, for a rough demarcation process (i.e, that is mainly useful to say what is not music), only necessary conditions are needed.
> 
> Thanks for discussing my points and adding some nuance to my terms.


You're very welcome.  And sorry if I misunderstood you, but another of my pet peeves around here is that people think they can discuss the merits, or the success or failure, of a piece of music without considering whether it has communicated with, or had an impact on, an audience in a significant way. Either that, or they define "audience" and "communication" in a very narrow way, which is especially misleading as the age of technology has greatly expanded what communication with an audience can be. Some people still seem to think if is isn't played by musicians wearing black formal attire on traditional acoustical instruments in a concert hall in front of an audience sitting in upholstered seats, it isn't music.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> You're very welcome.  And sorry if I misunderstood you, but another of my pet peeves around here is that people think they can discuss the merits, or the success or failure, of a piece of music without considering whether it has communicated with, or had an impact on, an audience in a significant way. Either that, or they define "audience" and "communication" in a very narrow way, which is especially misleading as the age of technology has greatly expanded what communication with an audience can be. Some people still seem to think if is isn't played by musicians wearing black formal attire on traditional acoustical instruments in a concert hall in front of an audience sitting in upholstered seats, it isn't music.


Actually, it was my mistake now that I think of it. When I said sonic value I was really thinking in a piece which was played and enjoyed by someone or an audience, not some dry abstract value that one could calculate just by looking the score.


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## Eva Yojimbo

Woodduck said:


> What you say is correct, but it fails to recognize the validity of the question we're debating or to identify the principles we should observe in debating it.
> 
> Asking whether something "is an X" is not a "fault of cognition." The existence of borderline cases doesn't negate the validity of classifications. There may be no clean line of separation between trees and shrubs, but it is not a fault of cognition to say that a sugar maple is a tree and a mountain laurel is a shrub. Indeed, we would suspect cognitive dysfunction in anyone saying the opposite.
> 
> We agree that categories, definitions, and words are not entities in nature. They are tools of cognition, and they're open-ended in order to accommodate new data and changing perspectives. But that doesn't give us free reign to bend and stretch them any way we want to. The statement that "it's a matter of degree" tends to obscure the issue and close off the discussion. There are reasons - sound cognitive reasons - for respecting the way words are customarily used, and debates over how and when to alter their use shouldn't be trivialized as contests of "subjectivity" or "popularity."
> 
> The debate over what we ought to classify as "music" should be guided by the same criteria we would use in any other discussion of what to call something. The important question is: what classification is most conducive to clarity of thought and mutual understanding between people and over time? Those things are, after all, what words are primarily for. We can play with words - we can talk about the "music" of falling water or say that good news is "music to my ears" - but those are not primary meanings of "music" and are not what we mean when we ask, "What kind of music do you like?"
> 
> The primary meaning of "music" is what we're debating here. Anyone proposing a definition needs to be able to argue for its cognitive and cultural usefulness, and anyone designating as music a phenomenon different in basic ways from music as it has been customarily understood needs to show why there is significant value in altering that customary understanding. To be unwilling to do that while pretending to participate in this discussion is not merely a "fault of cognition" but an act of cognitive sabotage.


As always, Woodduck, your posts are quite content-dense and I hesitate either to respond too thoroughly (thus making this discussion too lengthy/unwieldy) or too little (thus ignoring many of the interesting points you bring up). In truth, there's not much here I disagree with. By "Asking whether something is an X is a fault of cognition." I simply mean when people think X is a property itself, an "entity in nature" as you later call it, so I don't think we really disagree there. I strongly agree with you that: "The debate over what we ought to classify as "music" should be guided by... what classification is most conducive to clarity of thought and mutual understanding between people and over time?" Sadly, though, I've rarely found these kinds of discussions/debates to achieve that, and it's rare that they even seem to have that as an actual goal. Rather, it seems most use them precisely as a mean to assert their own subjective values into the term being debated, so it really becomes a debate about values rather than a debate about how best to communicate.

If it were up to me and I was made king of the forum (and definitions), I'd simply define music as "organized sound for an intended aesthetic purpose/experience." Then, I'd say we have sub-categories for all the different ways in which music can be organized, can be sound, and can have/create an aesthetic purpose/experience. So under my definition, 4'33" isn't music (it isn't organized sound; it's more organized silence) and the Sdraulig piece is.


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## endelbendel

This notion about form and structure would be fundamental to all art, to all logos. The initial list and many comments seem to be more about style including styles of different eras, which would mean taste in classical music.
Instead, i read the Q as What is it that is called music but it isn't? To that i would answer all rap, hip-hop, and other Black styles of pop music which being antisocial are also anti-Black (ref. to Stanley Crouch). Sometimes extended silence is music; you cannot have music without silence; depends on the content and intention and the feeling of it. A child's cries, a puppy's whine, moans of the beloved are music, except not when the kid is grown, the dog really hurt, or the lover in real pain. Mostly, in the current strange new impersonal culture silence is for thinking (this includes boredom) and the omnipresence of external mostly alien sounds prevents thinking, thus being noise. The worst environmental stress is noise pollution.


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## aleazk

Eva Yojimbo said:


> What are we to do when we encounter such disagreement?


Well, discuss the rationale behind our views, agree on which we can agree (and hope the best in terms of communicative content, that's a good point that has been pointed out now), and then move on in life.

Humans have a hard time understanding two basic premises of this reality, that seems obviously true to me: we will never agree in all aspects with all people; and there are things that, likely, we will never know (like, say, the true nature of reality itself). Instead of accepting that, people simply deny it, and fall prey of all sorts of superficial stuff, like pathological political correctness that avoids any minimal possibility of conflict, or, in the second case I mentioned, religions.


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## endelbendel

These would be the Qs that arise from any musical experience.
Listening right now, it gives awareness of how one listens. Similar to the dadaists' Decalcomania without preconceived object. And in much the same way as Cage's classic denoted period of silence. i also think of Blue Man Group which results in awareness of how one watches, witnesses, attends to theater.
Maybe this Ligetti is like a tonic for a' tha', but even so it is not not music.
If you are compulsive about labelling, maybe you would want to call Ligetti and Lachemann meta-music.


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## fluteman

endelbendel said:


> This notion about form and structure would be fundamental to all art, to all logos. The initial list and many comments seem to be more about style including styles of different eras, which would mean taste in classical music.
> Instead, i read the Q as What is it that is called music but it isn't? To that i would answer all rap, hip-hop, and other Black styles of pop music which being antisocial are also anti-Black. Sometimes extended silence is music; you cannot have music without silence; depends on the content and intention and the feeling of it. A child's cries, a puppy's whine, moans of the beloved are music, except not when the kid is grown, the dog really hurt, or the lover in pain. Mostly, in the current strange new impersonal culture silence is for thinking (this includes boredom) and the omnipresence of external mostly alien sounds prevents thinking, thus being noise. The worst environmental stress is noise pollution.


I find it very sad that someone would feel the need to turn this into a racial issue. But I respect your right to your opinion, and agree wholeheartedly that the worst environmental stress is noise pollution.


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## Eva Yojimbo

aleazk said:


> Well, discuss the rationale behind our views, agree on which we can agree (and hope the best in terms of communicative content, that's a good point that has been pointed out now), and then move on in life.


Perhaps I should've asked: "how do we SOLVE such a disagreement." Discussion is fine, but doesn't necessarily lead to agreement, especially on issues where you can't prove what side/view is correct or better.

If I was to attempt a "rationale" behind my view of defining music as "organized sound with an aesthetic purpose," it would simply be that that seems to be one thing all objects we have called "music" have in common, and that I also think it carves out a particular human activity that needs to have a word to refer to it, no matter how different the methods or results are of the "organized sound with aesthetic purposes."


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## Merl

I once went to the ICA in London to see a number of 'art-rock' bands. The Aussie band, Severed Heads, came on stage, set a repetitive keyboard motif going on the synths , tied a dog to the mic stand and walked off the stage. The dog barked for 10 mins and then they returned, turned the synths off and walked offstage. Was that music? The guy next to me thought not and wasn't impressed. I enjoyed it tbh (although i did feel sorry for the dog, even though it didnt seem upset). The point of my post? No idea! I've forgotten. I blame Brexit.


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## aleazk

Eva Yojimbo said:


> Perhaps I should've asked: "how do we SOLVE such a disagreement." Discussion is fine, but doesn't necessarily lead to agreement, especially on issues where you can't prove what side/view is correct or better.
> 
> If I was to attempt a "rationale" behind my view of defining music as "organized sound with an aesthetic purpose," it would simply be that that seems to be one thing all objects we have called "music" have in common, and that I also think it carves out a particular human activity that needs to have a word to refer to it, no matter how different the methods or results are of the "organized sound with aesthetic purposes."


But in many cases can only partially be solved (actually, I think you want to point this issue). Fine and true. For instance, you would perhaps be surprised (assuming you are not a scientist, I don't know, you may be one since you sound like one sometimes in your vocabulary... that's good ) how much physicists can do and how much information they can extract from somethig without even solving the relevant equations (which in most cases, like general relativity, do not even have general solutions). I'm inspired by this in my views about this.

Of course, I mean discussion with the aim of finding some agreement and for the sake of making communication easy (and, why not, to have a worldview, even if we know it cannot be pure objectively true, but we humans crave for cosmovisions to understand reality and to communicate, this was pointed out by Aristotle in his metaphysics).

It baffles me a bit that you have such poor hopes on this task. Maybe you are more Wittgenstenian than me? According to him (at some stage of his career), meaning is given to concepts by its pragmatic use. That's not quite correct in my view. I adhere to a theory of meaning called the 'synthetic view', which goes back to G.Frege (and, in particular, which is the truly useful theory for giving meaning to scientific concepts, for example, not Wittgenstein's pragmatic one, which is akin to nasty operationalism). In this view, meaning is given by the sense and reference of a concept or construct. Reference is the denotation process, to state to which element in reality (or maybe formal element in the formal sciences like mathematics) the concept refers to. The sense is the web of logical interconnections with other concepts (them with their own references) on which the concept at issue is inserted in.

Now, in the case of music, the reference may be the sounds that comprise the music itself when played. The sense, I think, is a combined web of inter-subjectivity, related to the reactions we have to those sounds, and the logical web in which the good qualities, as concepts, that we ascribe to the music we like are inserted in and related to other human concepts (these qualities can be counterpoint, melody, etc.) All this will give a meaning to the concept of music. Now, based on this meaning, we can distill some basic necessary conditions to state the concept in more succinct ways. And this is what I tried to do in the definition I gave before.

If this is done correctly, the adequacy of this definition for pragmatic use will come along by itself, since the definition is based on the true meaning of the concept (which, of course, takes inter-subjectivity into account). Thus, the synthetic view is much more powerful, since it actually gives clear rationales behind the definitions and also explains the success of its pragmatic use. This is why I always found the pragmatic view a bit superficial and unsatisfactory in terms of explanatory powers.


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## JAS

What would solving the disagreement even mean? Would pinpointing your boundary really solve anything? Or pinpointing my boundary? (Actually, I suspect that I have multiple boundaries.)


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## Guest

aleazk said:


> Edit: I terms of Woodduck's last post, which I read only now, I think this definition is sound because it's rather uncontroversial and conveys pretty clearly what we mean by music, from the most conservative of listeners, to some forms of the avant-garde; about the latter, it certainly excludes 4'33'', Collector, or Guero).


I'm interested in why _Guero _is excluded.



fluteman said:


> Music is a form of human expression or communication through non-verbal sound, so it must be designed and intended to communicate to an audience. There is no intrinsic "sonic value" -- either music successfully communicates to an audience, in which case it succeeds and has value, or it doesn't, and it fails and has no value, at least as music. Your criteria lack the essential aspect of expression or communication.


Must there be an audience? Or rather, must the composer's purpose include communication with an audience? I might concede the point, but I wouldn't concede that a failure to communicate means that the composition can no longer be classed as music. There's lots of music that doesn't succeed in communicating with some of its audience (I used the example of Brahms elsewhere - he fails to communicate with me!) but...?


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## aleazk

MacLeod said:


> I'm interested in why _Guero _is excluded.


Hmm... I guess because I didn't found the sounds nor the manipulations of them to be that interesting or relevant, nor that the piece required much thought or skill to be conceived and executed. The whole premise of the piece seems to be more about using a piano in non-standard ways to mimic the sound of a güero (the caribean instrument), i.e., conceptual and performance art. Although, yes, I could say one day I may not consider it music, and on another day a type of utterly empty music. It's a bit on the verge for me, that's why I went for the Ligeti metronomic thing to be in more solid grounds.


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## Woodduck

aleazk said:


> So, now that all the issues are clear, these are my own criteria (for example, the ones I use when I compose my own little pieces of which I only care about):
> 
> To be considered a composed piece of music, it should verify that
> 
> 1) a-the sounds are produced, recorded or manipulated by explicit instructions from the composer (there can be improvisation, or randomness, but its global course must be directed by the composer); b-the instructions must have some degree of complexity (where I include a ponderable density of sounds per minute, an interplay of sounds or masses of sounds that require many or repeated interventions from the interpreter, the composer or whoever, but always by instruction from the composer's part, these instructions must require some amount of musical skill and study to be realized)
> 
> 2) conceptual elements spoken by the composer should be irrelevant to decide its purely sonic value (there may be conceptual or performance art elements, but the sound-web should be able to sustain itself alone).
> 
> Those criteria can now be questioned and they don't mean that what doesn't fit them may have some value as other type of art or that I invalidate your subjectivity, etc. What I delineated there is simply what I would write if someone asks me to write a book or essay in musical aesthetics.
> 
> Edit: I terms of Woodduck's last post, which I read only now, I think this definition is sound because it's rather uncontroversial and conveys pretty clearly what we mean by music, from the most conservative of listeners, to some forms of the avant-garde; about the latter, it certainly excludes 4'33'', Collector, or Guero). And it also leaves quite a wide room for stretching things, but without admitting things like one-liner and trivial (in sound manipulation content) instructions.


I believe you're trying to establish some minimal criteria for calling something "music," and I think that's a sound approach (pun intended). I'd do it a little differently, and state my fundamentals as follows:

1. Music is an art. As such its primary value is not utilitarian (though it may be used for practical purposes) but aesthetic.

2. Music, like all art, is man-made. (It may be that some animals produce and listen to sound primarily for the pleasure of doing so. If a bird is enjoying its own or another bird's twittering, apart from any practical function the vocalization may have, then birdsong might be considered a sort of "pre-music," but it would be true music only if the bird were conscious of producing it for pleasure and able to control it with pleasure in mind.)

3. Music is made of sound. (There's no need to be clever or cute and point out that musical ideas in the mind and musical notation on paper are silent.)

4. Musical sounds, being elements of art, are intentionally organized (patterned). Not all the sound elements of music need be fully patterned or controlled, but the overall form of a piece of music has to be purposeful and provide a meaningful framework for whatever sounds are made.

I think these are basic criteria for the thing we know as music. Most music throughout history and around the globe has also assumed that music is made up mostly of pitched sounds (as opposed to mere noises), except in the case of percussion music, which is primarily rhythmic. Today we can generate an infinite variety of unpitched sounds which have no connection to noises produced by everyday objects, and attempts are made to compose music with them. We can debate the merits of the products, but the essential requirement for music of whatever sort is that its sound elements be purposefully organized into an aesthetically meaningful object of perception. It's my observation that there's a lot of "experimental" stuff being offered as music which doesn't fulfill even this most basic criterion.


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## eugeneonagain

Speaking of birds and birdsong, even though a great number of birds emit their _calls_ purely for territorial reasons (threat language) or for defence, the human interpretation is sometimes of the opinion that they are beautiful and therefore constitute 'music' or 'song'.

This snippet from Wikipedia about the definitions should by now be familiar to participants in this thread:



Wikipedia (and thus all 100% true!) said:


> The distinction between songs and calls is based upon complexity, length, and context. Songs are longer and more complex and are associated with courtship and mating, while calls tend to serve such functions as alarms or keeping members of a flock in contact[SUP].[/SUP] Other authorities such as Howell and Webb (1995) make the distinction based on function, so that short vocalizations, such as those of pigeons, and even non-vocal sounds, such as the drumming of woodpeckers and the "winnowing" of snipes' wings in display flight, are considered songs.


So are we to say that the people making these definitions are doing it predicated upon objective reasoning and classification or that they are also influenced by a common-sense idea of what 'music' or 'song' is.

Food for thought anyway.


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## aleazk

eugeneonagain said:


> So are we to say that the people making these definitions are doing it _predicated upon objective reasoning and classification or that they are also influenced by a common-sense idea of what 'music' or 'song' is._


But I don't see why the two options should be dichotomic. I see the first one as a more refined version of the second.


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## eugeneonagain

aleazk said:


> But I don't see why the two options should be dichotomic. I see the first one as a more refined version of the second.


I'm okay with that, but there are clearly differences of opinion in the ornithological world. They face the same issue we do in this thread. Have you heard some bird calls which sound like the extraction of a rusty screw?


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## fluteman

MacLeod said:


> Must there be an audience? Or rather, must the composer's purpose include communication with an audience?


I'd say the latter. After all, a great work of art can be buried in a tomb and seen by no one for thousands of years.


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## aleazk

eugeneonagain said:


> I'm okay with that, but there are clearly differences of opinion in the ornithological world. They face the same issue we do in this thread. Have you heard some bird calls which sound like the extraction of a rusty screw?


Ah, I see, yes. I didn't quite get at first what you were getting at. Well, the only answers I have are the ones I already gave, first the meaning machinery I described some posts above, and then from that the definition.


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## Woodduck

I'd say that the distinction between bird "calls" and bird "songs" is anthropomorphic metaphor. They're our feathered friends, after all.


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## millionrainbows

This grasping at definitions seems unnecessary and irrelevant to me, because since the 1970s I've known about John Cage as part of the New York art scene, when conceptual things like Fluxus were going on, which trails into Philip Glass later (whose biography is worth reading). I was listening to Cage's "Variations" on vinyl, when it came out. A lot of this over-reaction, and need to define and control, is due to being uninformed and not having any cross-discipline in the visual arts. The emotionally charged overreactions of some here, and this desperate need to define what music is, leaves me feeling somewhat amused and detached from the proceedings. 
You can have your definition of music, but that's not going to change what has already happened. To make a pun, this is "much ado about nothing."
BTW, I did not vote in the poll; there was no category for "no boundary necessary."


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## JAS

Woodduck said:


> I'd say that the distinction between bird "calls" and bird "songs" is anthropomorphic metaphor. They're our feathered friends, after all.


Male birds also use calls and songs to attract mates. Oddly, for classical music and humans the same idea seems to have the opposite effect, so perhaps it isn't really relevant.


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## eugeneonagain

I don't know, I did a pretty good jazz version of a Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square on the trumpet in my salad days and went home with a blonde from the audience.


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## JAS

eugeneonagain said:


> I don't know, I did a pretty good jazz version of a Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square on the trumpet in my salad days and went home with a blonde from the audience.


Jazz, not classical . . . stick to the rules.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> This grasping at definitions seems unnecessary and irrelevant to me, because since the 1970s I've known about John Cage as part of the New York art scene, when conceptual things like Fluxus were going on, which trails into Philip Glass later (whose biography is worth reading). I was listening to Cage's "Variations" on vinyl, when it came out. A lot of this over-reaction, and need to define and control, is due to being uninformed and not having any cross-discipline in the visual arts. The emotionally charged overreactions of some here, and this desperate need to define what music is, leaves me feeling somewhat amused and detached from the proceedings.
> You can have your definition of music, but that's not going to change what has already happened. To make a pun, this is "much ado about nothing."


I bet I know much more about visual arts than you, being raised in an ambient full of them, visual artists, and of visual art books, expositions, etc. Control, desperation? We are just calmly chatting in a chat forum whose only purpose is to chat about music, duh... The only one getting emotional and over-reacting here is really you, in all threads. Everything was fine and then you came with your superficial dismissals of the topic in discussion. I'm sorry that you don't have anything substantial to contribute, and that nobody is giving too much attention to the few things you keep repeating, ignoring what others have said. The truth is that you simply run out of arguments, if you had any in the first place, as evidenced in the other thread. I note you know only a few things, and superficially, and that you only repeat that in different combinations, like Cage and the zen, the ratios of intervals and cosmic math (?). Meh.


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## Guest

aleazk said:


> Hmm... I guess because I didn't found the sounds nor the manipulations of them to be that interesting or relevant, nor that the piece required much thought or skill to be conceived and executed. The whole premise of the piece seems to be more about using a piano in non-standard ways to mimic the sound of a güero (the caribean instrument), i.e., conceptual and performance art. Although, yes, I could say one day I may not consider it music, and on another day a type of utterly empty music. It's a bit on the verge for me, that's why I went for the Ligeti metronomic thing to be in more solid grounds.


Hang on - now you're adding heaps more criteria than your original two. They all just add up to the idea that as it wasn't very good (no interest for you, no skill, no relevance) it can't be music. I liked it, but even if I loathed it, it was sound organised by the composer - it even has a score you can follow!


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## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> This grasping at definitions seems unnecessary and irrelevant to me, because since the 1970s I've known about John Cage as part of the New York art scene, when conceptual things like Fluxus were going on, which trails into Philip Glass later (whose biography is worth reading). I was listening to Cage's "Variations" on vinyl, when it came out. A lot of this over-reaction, and need to define and control, is due to being uninformed and not having any cross-discipline in the visual arts. The emotionally charged overreactions of some here, and this desperate need to define what music is, leaves me feeling somewhat amused and detached from the proceedings.
> You can have your definition of music, but that's not going to change what has already happened. To make a pun, this is "much ado about nothing."
> BTW, I did not vote in the poll; there was no category for "no boundary necessary."


No one is desperate - we're just interested. If you're not, why are you here?


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## millionrainbows

eugeneonagain said:


> I don't know, I did a pretty good jazz version of a Nightingale Sang in Berkley Square on the trumpet in my salad days and went home with a blonde from the audience.


Is that why Angela Davis is glaring at you from your avatar?


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> I bet I know much more about visual arts than you, being raised in an ambient full of them, visual artists, and of visual art books, expositions, etc. Control, desperation? We are just calmly chatting in a chat forum whose only purpose is to chat about music, duh... The only one getting emotional and over-reacting here is really you, in all threads. Everything was fine and then you came with your superficial dismissals of the topic in discussion. I'm sorry that you don't have anything substantial to contribute, and that nobody is giving too much attention to the few things you keep repeating, ignoring what others have said. The truth is that you simply run out of arguments, if you had any in the first place, as evidenced in the other thread. I note you know only a few things, and superficially, and that you only repeat that in different combinations, like Cage and the zen, the ratios of intervals and cosmic math (?). Meh.


What is this all about? It's pretty dramatic stuff, whatever it is.
If you have something meaningful to say, then say it. I just commented on the general thrust of the discussion, and I'm not impressed by what I see here. Just sayin'.


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## millionrainbows

MacLeod said:


> No one is desperate - we're just interested. If you're not, why are you here?


How can you speak for others? You can't. The "desperate" is simply my take on it. I'm here for the same reason everyone else is; to praise John Cage! Just kidding...


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## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> How can you speak for others? You can't. The "desperate" is simply my take on it. I'm here for the same reason everyone else is; to praise John Cage! Just kidding...


You dare to characterise those who hold different views from you on this topic thus:

"This *grasping *at definitions [...] this *over-reaction*, and need to define and control, is due to being *uninformed *and not having any cross-discipline in the visual arts. The *emotionally charged overreactions *of some here, and this *desperate need *to define what music is"

And you then have the temerity to challenge my rebuttal of your characterisation? All I'm doing is, like you, taking the temperature of the debate. I've just come up with a different reading than you.


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## Enthusiast

Woodduck said:


> I believe you're trying to establish some minimal criteria for calling something "music," and I think that's a sound approach (pun intended). I'd do it a little differently, and state my fundamentals as follows:
> 
> 1. Music is an art. As such its primary value is not utilitarian (though it may be used for practical purposes) but aesthetic.


Your attempts to pin down the world (/to keep the chaos at bay?) often spur my devil's advocate so please excuse the nitpicking element in my responses. And I guess that as you are laying down foundations for thinking it is well worth being precise and correct so as to avoid building leaning towers.

Does utilitarian value exclude aesthetic value? Surely, if something has aesthetic value it is useful to us? It seems to me that aesthetic value is a subset of utilitarian value so you are perhaps increasing specificity with this rule but you may also be closing doors - something can be useful and can come to be seen as beautiful as a result of that or even as a result of a history of having been useful in the past.



Woodduck said:


> 3. Music is made of sound. (There's no need to be clever or cute and point out that musical ideas in the mind and musical notation on paper are silent.)


Although I don't want to add to the - to me - somewhat tedious to-ing and fro-ing about 433, music is not made of sound alone. Consider a painting. The artist primes the canvas and then paints on it. What if they don't cover it but leave some areas as blank primed canvas (or even - shock! - _un_primed canvas)? Are these unpainted parts not part of the art? Clearly they are. Isn't it the same with music? Only more so and with a much longer history: music has always been about sound and no-sound and interactions between them.



Woodduck said:


> 4. Musical sounds, being elements of art, are intentionally organized (patterned). Not all the sound elements of music need be fully patterned or controlled, but the overall form of a piece of music has to be purposeful and provide a meaningful framework for whatever sounds are made.


As I think I have posted before, the perception of patterns (and meaning) is something that we are hard-wired to do even when confronted with pure ambiguity. And, indeed, randomness itself tends to be patterned: true randomness has repeating figures and patterns of figures and only artificial randomness (something designed by a person to _appear_ random) lacks these. These two points don't disprove your point here but they do suggest it is a very unstable and fluid foundation. An artist choosing to use true randomness (chance) is more likely to "create" patterns than an artist seeking to imitate randomness or create a total lack of pattern. And, even then, our tendency as an audience will be to perceive patterns. And the patterns we see will vary to the extent that we draw on different musical experiences.



Woodduck said:


> I think these are basic criteria for the thing we know as music. Most music throughout history and around the globe has also assumed that music is made up mostly of pitched sounds (as opposed to mere noises), except in the case of percussion music, which is primarily rhythmic. Today we can generate an infinite variety of unpitched sounds which have no connection to noises produced by everyday objects, and attempts are made to compose music with them. We can debate the merits of the products, but the essential requirement for music of whatever sort is that its sound elements be purposefully organized into an _*aesthetically meaningful *_object of perception. It's my _*observation *_that there's a lot of "experimental" stuff being offered as music which doesn't fulfill even this most basic criterion.


I am not sure what measure there is, save self-report from audience members, for judging whether a work is aesthetically meaningful. Indeed, the term relies on audience perceptions. From the above (my arguments suggesting that your foundations are not solid enough to build on) it does seem that the measure is a very fluid one where very different perceptions might very well be equally valid. So your "observation" is in fact a prejudice! There is nothing wrong with that, I think, for the enjoyment, and the valuing, of art is about discrimination. But I don't think you can use rules (in the way you seem to want to) to invalidate the views of others or to bolster (perhaps to yourself?) your own discriminations.


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## eugeneonagain

Enthusiast said:


> Although I don't want to add to the - to me - somewhat tedious to-ing and fro-ing about 433, music is not made of sound alone. Consider a painting. The artist primes the canvas and then paints on it. What if they don't cover it but leave some areas as blank primed canvas (or even - shock! - _un_primed canvas)? Are these unpainted parts not part of the art? Clearly they are. Isn't it the same with music? Only more so and with a much longer history: music has always been about sound and no-sound and interactions between them.


The thing in question here is whether a totally blank and (shock) _un_primed canvas is 'art'. Not just bits of blank canvas among paint.
Leaving blank spaces is normal. We leave spaces between sentences and paragraphs, but this:

T o r le u t a I' y o mm.*

Right? Maybe you can make sense of that? Or perhaps it stands alone on aesthetic grounds?
_
*tells you very little about what I'm trying to communicate. _And with not much sense,


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## Enthusiast

eugeneonagain said:


> The thing in question here is whether a totally blank and (shock) _un_primed canvas is 'art'. Not just bits of blank canvas among paint.
> Leaving blank spaces is normal. We leave spaces between sentences and paragraphs, but this:
> 
> T o r le u t a I' y o mm.*
> 
> Right? Maybe you can make sense of that? Or perhaps it stands alone on aesthetic grounds?
> _
> *tells you very little about what I'm trying to communicate. _And with not much sense,


I know that ... but was responding to Woodduck's posting of rules that are, he says, at the foundation of his thinking. Several of them seemed unreliable to me for this purpose. It isn't that they may not be fixable but a foundation needs to be strong. That (and only that) is the point I wanted to make.

I was not trying to get involved in the discussion of the merits or otherwise of works like 433 - indeed I am specifically trying to avoid being dragged into that because (a) it doesn't interest me as a piece and (b) it really doesn't bother me that some people find it meaningful and others don't.

As for your example, my wife is very fast with anagrams and missing letter games while I am not. She would probably see your intended meaning if you have one. My analytical approach leads me to wonder how many words end with a double "m" whereas she would approach it as a whole and just "see" it. I just see no meaning in your letters _at the moment_. If there was something that drew me in enough to spend time with it I might find a meaning but there is nothing that does that. And, as said, I am not really interested in purely conceptual art - although I can _respect _some of the more successful examples - and my disinterest goes to the extent of not caring that some people find some of it filled with insight and meaning.

One thing I am interested in is the way that something - an image, a motif, a sound, a riff, perhaps even an idea - can gain something that gives it artistic power (by which I mean the power to move me!) through its life over time within the community and within our minds. I can't pin that down at all. I'm not sure I even describe it properly. But it is very real.


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## Ludwig Von Chumpsky

Ludwig Von Chumpsky said:


> Interesting conversation. But we should always bring things back to real life, out of pure theory. So, given any criteria at all about what constitutes music, I would say we should be able to test the criteria in a simple manner. The person or group who has devised the criteria should be able to accurately pick out examples that meet the criteria and examples that don't, without external clues such as seeing one example with a score, and one without.
> 
> So if you think music can be arranged silence for example, great. We should be able to blindfold you, place you in a concert hall on two different occasions. One time we have a person on stage "performing" a piece of arranged silence. The other we have no one on stage. You should then be able to correctly say which one is an example that meets your criteria. If you can't, then your criteria is no good. So there's no subjectivity here, just us judging your own criteria, etc. It's just you and your criteria. And this applies to anything really, i.e. art in general. If you say splattering paint on canvas is art, fine. You should then be able to tell the difference between a piece where the artist splattered paint, and a piece where say a dog accidently kicked a couple cans of paint onto a canvas.


Sorry to quote myself, but I believe most of the thread I read after my post was answered by my post. You are discussing definitions and how you come to some kind of proof that someone's definition of music is THE definition or a legit definition. Well here it is. Maybe my post was a thread stopper so it was ignored? Sometimes the answer to a question isn't necessarily that difficult or complex.


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## Enthusiast

Woodduck said:


> What you say is correct, but it fails to recognize the validity of the question we're debating or to identify the principles we should observe in debating it.
> 
> Asking whether something "is an X" is not a "fault of cognition." The existence of borderline cases doesn't negate the validity of classifications. There may be no clean line of separation between trees and shrubs, but it is not a fault of cognition to say that a sugar maple is a tree and a mountain laurel is a shrub. Indeed, we would suspect cognitive dysfunction in anyone saying the opposite.
> 
> We agree that categories, definitions, and words are not entities in nature. They are tools of cognition, and they're open-ended in order to accommodate new data and changing perspectives. But that doesn't give us free reign to bend and stretch them any way we want to. The statement that "it's a matter of degree" tends to obscure the issue and close off the discussion. There are reasons - sound cognitive reasons - for respecting the way words are customarily used, and debates over how and when to alter their use shouldn't be trivialized as contests of "subjectivity" or "popularity."
> 
> The debate over what we ought to classify as "music" should be guided by the same criteria we would use in any other discussion of what to call something. The important question is: what classification is most conducive to clarity of thought and mutual understanding between people and over time? Those things are, after all, what words are primarily for. We can play with words - we can talk about the "music" of falling water or say that good news is "music to my ears" - but those are not primary meanings of "music" and are not what we mean when we ask, "What kind of music do you like?"
> 
> The primary meaning of "music" is what we're debating here. Anyone proposing a definition needs to be able to argue for its cognitive and cultural usefulness, and anyone designating as music a phenomenon different in basic ways from music as it has been customarily understood needs to show why there is significant value in altering that customary understanding. To be unwilling to do that while pretending to participate in this discussion is not merely a "fault of cognition" but an act of cognitive sabotage.


I'm not picking on you, Woodduck, but perhaps your clarity of expression invites disagreement or suggests that it might be fruitful? Anyway, when it comes to classifying things we are talking of two very different worlds. One concerns what we do in our (naive, as it were) perception of things while the other concerns the systems we have developed for discussing and examining things. That we have produced categories of things with rules and boundaries is important for intellectual pursuits but does it reflect what we do in perception? Probably not, or not wholly anyway. The one - how we _perceive _something as a tree or whatever - is more or less a natural phenomenon and varies according to the uses we might have for the object. It is holistic. The other - how we define things - is a system we have created together. It needs to be rigorous and precise; it is analytical. Even then it varies according to use or to which discipline we are in. A tomato is a fruit to a botanist but a vegetable to a cook. I'm not sure how gardeners view it.

So far we probably agree. It may be your last paragraph where we see things differently. What is wrong with simply recognising that some people think of X as music? Indeed, on what possible _cultural _grounds could anyone disagree with that? So we are left with the _cognitive_. That concerns our mental processing of it. We have already noted that some people have processed X as music but we may disagree. We may disagree as experts or merely as equal members of the audience. If we disagree as experts I suppose we should check that we are all talking in the same filed to avoid the situation of a cook and a botanist arguing about what a tomato is. But with this done I doubt that logic and rationality will help us very much because in an artistic field it is ultimately a community (albeit of experts rather than lay people) that will decide what the ground rules are and how to apply them. I doubt that a music lovers discussion forum is the best place to influence those fundamental things. And if we disagree as lay people then are we really saying more than "X is not music _to me_"? So I don't see any cognitive sabotage or pretense in participating in a discussion on (actually) artistic _merit _without defining what music is. Indeed, arguments about that definition here seem doomed to failure and to do that without throwing up much of incidental interest.


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## JAS

My father always said that there were two kinds of people: Those who like to divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't.


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## aleazk

JAS said:


> My father always said that there were two kinds of people: Those who liked to divide the world into two kinds of people, and those who don't.


The thing is that we are not really talking about people here, only about music. We are trying to understand what music is, simply because we like music, we like to talk about and discuss it, and this is a forum made just for that. Is this really a sin? I really can't believe the reactions of some. We get accused of being "desperate for definitions", of trying to "to pin down the world (to keep the chaos at bay?)". Ugh, this is getting really tiring. What I see here is that there are some that don't like or are not interested in this topic (as I said, I'm really not that interested myself, but I play the game just to see what comes out from it), but that's not enough for them, they, it seems, also would prefer this topic not to be discussed. That's why they need to add those snarky remarks and to accuse us of being "control freaks". It seems they are actually the ones that want to talk about people and to divide them into "the morally superior ones" (for them, this topic is way lower for their standars, it's not worth even discussing because, oh, god forbid!, people may disagree and because a consensus is difficult) and the "the ones suffering from OCD". Really, I'm ***.king tired of all this moralizing and cheap psicologizing of people that they don't even know.


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## JAS

This longish response quotes my, I think obviously, humorous comment, as if it is directed at me. But the content of the post seems not relevant to mine, nor to pretty much anything I have posted, so I am a bit confused about its intent.


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## aleazk

JAS said:


> This longish response quotes my, I think obviously, humorous comment, as if it is directed at me. But the content of the post seems not relevant to mine, nor to pretty much anything I have posted, so I am a bit confused about its intent.


It's not a response to you, I used your comment to respond to others. I thought you were interested in the topic, actually. I'm correct?


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## JAS

aleazk said:


> It's not a response to you, I used your comment to respond to others. I thought you were interested in the topic, actually. I'm correct?


I am interested in the idea, but it is sometimes a complication when we quote a post, which suggests a measure of specificity, and then respond in broader terms. This is why I was seeking clarification. (I have sometimes seen misunderstandings of this sort become very intense private battles, for no real reason at all other than mistaken assumptions of intent.)


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## Art Rock

I would put the boundary smack right on top of Cage's 4'33". I love Cage in general, but this particular work still has me on the fence whether it is music or not.


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## JAS

aleazk said:


> The thing is that we are not really talking about people here, only about music.


If you will forgive more parsing of posts, we are people taking about music, so both the music and the people are necessarily present in the discussion.



aleazk said:


> We are trying to understand what music is, simply because we like music, we like to talk about and discuss it, and this is a forum made just for that. Is this really a sin?


Offense, much like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder. (And, as my beloved grandmother often told me, there are people who are defined by their sense of being offended, and people who seek offense, will find it everywhere.)



aleazk said:


> I really can't believe the reactions of some. We get accused of being "desperate for definitions", of trying to "to pin down the world (to keep the chaos at bay?)". Ugh, this is getting really tiring. What I see here is that there are some that don't like or are not interested in this topic (as I said, I'm really not that interested myself, but I play the game just to see what comes out from it), but that's not enough for them, they, it seems, also would prefer this topic not to be discussed.


I suspect that a more accurate summary would be that they have seen these battles before and that they almost never end in any kind of resolution, and thus feel that they are pointless. (Worse than merely pointless, they may see them as actively stirring up hostility to little or no purpose.) To some degree, they are not wrong, but mostly because few people are actually willing and able to have a more productive discussion about a deeply divisive topic, one about which they may feel quite strongly in their opposing views. I have come to accept the probability that I am never going to appreciate modern music in the sense of it having any personal appeal to me. But it exists, and it isn't going away, and it keeps asserting itself in the world of classical music, which I love, and so I am very much interested in understanding something about it.



aleazk said:


> That's why they need to add those snarky remarks and to accuse us of being "control freaks". It seems they are actually the ones that want to talk about people and to divide them into "the morally superior ones" (for them, this topic is way lower for their standars, it's not worth even discussing because, oh, god forbid!, people may disagree and because a consensus is difficult) and the "the ones suffering from OCD". Really, I'm ***.king tired of all this moralizing and cheap psicologizing of people that they don't even know.


I think I summarized my own view of the situation fairly well in another thread that has been going on about the same time and formed, perhaps unintentionally, a kind of mirror discussion (although it quickly went in a very different direction): https://www.talkclassical.com/56611-music-ok-deride-60.html#post1506608

I will add further that it is extremely difficult to comment on these ideas that people take very personally, without the discussion quickly becoming personal. Disagreement is most often seen as a direct threat instead of an opportunity for discussion. Discussion most often becomes a pitched battle, as if each side sees a meaningful resolution coming out as a result (when it is really just a tiny discussion on the internet, of no great importance in the broader world). And many, many people just inherently dislike the idea of subjecting their thoughts to scrutiny, perhaps because it takes more concentration than they like, or it necessarily becomes a matter of semantics which they may not enjoy, or that the times we live in really do tend to divide us into irreconcilable camps like some kind of Survivor Game. (Politics, for example, has essentially become a tribal sport, partly because clearly defined tribes are easier to manipulate, even against their own interests.)


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## aleazk

JAS said:


> If you will forgive more parsing of posts, we are people taking about music, so both the music and the people are necessarily present in the discussion.


Yes, but we should be able to put personal issues at a side. If we start accusing and being dismissive, well... and yes, I also can become snarky too, but it's usually when I get tired of receiving snarky answers and have to repeat myself since my points were deliberately ignored and thus I then to doubt the initial answer was interested in having a discussion and seems to me they simply wanted to deride things.



JAS said:


> Offense, much like beauty, is often in the eye of the beholder.


Well, those beholders should behold their own reaction, since discussing music in a music forum is not a sin.



JAS said:


> I suspect that a more accurate summary would be that they have seen these battles before and that they almost never end in any kind of resolution, and thus feel that they are pointless. To some degree, they are not wrong, but mostly because few people are actually willing and able to have a more productive discussion about a deeply divisive topic, one about which they may feel quite strongly in their opposing views. I have come to accept the probability that I am never going to appreciate modern music in the sense of it having any personal appeal to me. But it exists, and it isn't going away, and it keeps asserting itself in the world of classical music, which I love, and so I am very much interested in understanding something about it.


Indeed, most of us here have already mentioned that repeatedly and agreed in trying to not fall in the usual traps of the discussion. Of course, with relative success, but we are human, does that need to kill the discussion?



JAS said:


> I think I summarized my own view of the situation fairly well in another thread that has been going on about the same time and formed, perhaps unintentionally, a kind of mirror discussion: https://www.talkclassical.com/56611-music-ok-deride-60.html#post1506608
> 
> I will add further that it is extremely difficult to comment on these ideas that people take very personally, without the discussion quickly becoming personal. Disagreement is most often seen as a direct threat instead of an opportunity for discussion. Discussion most often becomes a pitched battle, as if each side sees a meaningful resolution coming out as a result (when it is really just a tiny discussion on the internet, of no great importance in the broader world). And many, many people just inherently dislike the idea of subjecting their thoughts to scrutiny, perhaps because it takes more concentration than they like, or it necessarily becomes a matter of semantics which they may not enjoy, or that the times we live in really do tend to divide us into irreconcilable camps like some kind of Survivor Game.


Well, I couldn't agree more with that. But, in that case, let the ones who want to discuss, discuss, and the others can find other topics that interest them in the many threads on this forum.

I also add that I have had enough of this topic for now, I'll better spend the rest of my day playing the piano or some other non-forum activity. So, with your permission, I'm leaving the room. People here have a nice day.


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## Enthusiast

aleazk said:


> It's not a response to you, I used your comment to respond to others. I thought you were interested in the topic, actually. I'm correct?


The maybe it is a comment to me - albeit one who reads 10 times more into my post than I wrote or dreamed of? It seems you want to say that you are not interested but have agreed to play and that those who don't play by your rules deserve foul language? My questions are as legitimate a part of the bigger question. Or perhaps asking "why are we doing this?" isn't allowed?

No, I suspect you are not responding to me .... but I can't actually read any posts that fit your objections. Maybe tempered language combined with a direct approach showing what you are objecting to will serve you and all of us better?


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## aleazk

Enthusiast said:


> The maybe it is a comment to me - albeit one who reads 10 times more into my post than I wrote or dreamed of? It seems you want to say that you are not interested but have agreed to play and that those who don't play by your rules deserve foul language? My questions are as legitimate a part of the bigger question. Or perhaps asking "why are we doing this?" isn't allowed?
> 
> No, I suspect you are not responding to me .... but I can't actually read any posts that fit your objections. Maybe tempered language combined with a direct approach showing what you are objecting to will serve you and all of us better?


... and I get back for a moment...

If you don't want people to read more into your comments, be careful with the terms you use. We don't see our faces here, only what's written, and in a context of repeated accusations of control freak, you come with your "to pin down the world (to keep the chaos at bay?)". Was that necessary? And no, I'm simply tired of constant impugnment, moralizing and psicologizing, that's not even playing in a "different way", it's unnecessary and uncalled for. I have seen you do that in the other thread repeteadly and now here. So, yes, it was explicitly directed at you.


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## Captainnumber36

One concept I'd like to add to the discussion is that silence used in composition is very important. Use of space is very important, sometimes the most intense portions of a piece are the quietest, or even the rests!


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## aleazk

Captainnumber36 said:


> One concept I'd like to add to the discussion is that silence used in composition is very important. Use of space is very important, sometimes the most intense portions of a piece are the quietest, or even the rests!


Yes, that's true, but 4'33'', for example, is not about silence and if it were, it would be only silence. Those silences you mention are often powerful due to the context of sounds before and after it. That's the magic that a good composer can do. It has nothing to do with total silence for extended periods of time. Anyway, thank you for actually addressing something related to the topic and worth thinking about it.


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## Enthusiast

aleazk said:


> ... and I get back for a moment...
> 
> If you don't want people to read more into your comments, be careful with the terms you use. We don't see our faces here, only what's written, and in a context of repeated accusations of control freak, you come with your "to pin down the world (to keep the chaos at bay?)". Was that necessary? And no, I'm simply tired of constant impugnment, moralizing and psicologizing, that's not even playing in a "different way", it's unnecessary and uncalled for. I have seen you do that in the other thread repeteadly and now here. So, yes, it was explicitly directed at you.


Why do people think if they don't name their target it is OK to be abusive? Anyway, at least we have direct, now.

I see nothing wrong with the words I used and they were chosen carefully. If you choose to read beyond them (perhaps on the basis of previous experience) then I cannot be held responsible for that. There was no impugning or moralising in my post (although there was an attempt to redress the platonic-aristotelian - both sides have a place - balance a little) and as for "psychologising", well given that I was responding to a post that was about cognitive realities, I don't see how that could be avoided. I see nothing at all uncalled for or abusive in _my_ posts which were addressed to Woodduck and which praised his clarity and precision.

Hey, mate - if you don't like the thinking of someone by all means disagree in as civilised way as you are able. Or, if you can't, then just ignore it. I feel quite put out by your abuse (there was no ambiguity in it) and as I come here for pleasure feel cheated by that. I am still at a loss about why you are so offended that was not aimed at you and that did not come close to saying any of the things you have read into it. I will watch your posts more closely in future to see if I can gain some understanding of where you are coming from. If you do have a reasoned response to what I actually wrote I will, of course, be interested in it.


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## aleazk

Enthusiast said:


> So far we probably agree. It may be your last paragraph where we see things differently. What is wrong with simply recognising that some people think of X as music? Indeed, on what possible _cultural _grounds could anyone disagree with that? So we are left with the _cognitive_. That concerns our mental processing of it. We have already noted that some people have processed X as music but we may disagree. We may disagree as experts or merely as equal members of the audience. If we disagree as experts I suppose we should check that we are all talking in the same filed to avoid the situation of a cook and a botanist arguing about what a tomato is. But with this done I doubt that logic and rationality will help us very much because in an artistic field it is ultimately a community (albeit of experts rather than lay people) that will decide what the ground rules are and how to apply them. I doubt that a music lovers discussion forum is the best place to influence those fundamental things. And if we disagree as lay people then are we really saying more than "X is not music _to me_"? So I don't see any cognitive sabotage or pretense in participating in a discussion on (actually) artistic _merit _without defining what music is. Indeed, arguments about that definition here seem doomed to failure and to do that without throwing up much of incidental interest.


You are wrong. What do you know if others are experts or not? Some people here are actually university music professors, did you know that. Others are musicians and composers (like myself), professional and non-professional. We have visual artists too (there was a particularly knowledgeable member some time ago, which was, again, a university professor). And, in general, many members here have an amazing knowledge of art history, philosophy, etc. So, you are grossly underestimating your interlocutors.

Next, you dismiss the discussion in general terms, as well as the content of the posts made here ("without throwing up much of incidental interest.") Well, many pages have flown in the thread now, it would be nice, since you are here posting, if you addressed them if you want to dismiss their content. And, indeed, your points ("But with this done I doubt that logic and rationality will help us very much because in an artistic field it is ultimately a community (albeit of experts rather than lay people) that will decide what the ground rules are and how to apply them.") were already addressed by at least three members in previous pages (Woodduck, Eva, and me). Perhaps we are not worth of an adequate rebuttal from your Highness, after all, we are all a pair of idio.ts that didn't even think in your amazing insight (when, in fact, it's the first point we discussed since it was the more obvious) and the mere repetition of a general dismissal (that only repeats an obvious concern and not the answers that were given to it, like the importance of the pragmatic use in the meaning of a term) is all we deserve. I'm very sorry we are not at your level and that we are only banal people commenting on a forum about topics that only the "experts" should have access (and where, paradoxically, there are actually some experts here; possibly not me, but I quite respect Woodduck's knowledge, for instance.)


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## aleazk

Enthusiast said:


> Why do people think if they don't name their target it is OK to be abusive? Anyway, at least we have direct, now.
> 
> I see nothing wrong with the words I used and they were chosen carefully. If you choose to read beyond them (perhaps on the basis of previous experience) then I cannot be held responsible for that. There was no impugning or moralising in my post (although there was an attempt to redress the platonic-aristotelian - both sides have a place - balance a little) and as for "psychologising", well given that I was responding to a post that was about cognitive realities, I don't see how that could be avoided. I see nothing at all uncalled for or abusive in _my_ posts which were addressed to Woodduck and which praised his clarity and precision.
> 
> Hey, mate - if you don't like the thinking of someone by all means disagree in as civilised way as you are able. Or, if you can't, then just ignore it. I feel quite put out by your abuse (there was no ambiguity in it) and as I come here for pleasure feel cheated by that. I am still at a loss about why you are so offended that was not aimed at you and that did not come close to saying any of the things you have read into it. I will watch your posts more closely in future to see if I can gain some understanding of where you are coming from. If you do have a reasoned response to what I actually wrote I will, of course, be interested in it.


I don't buy that for a second, my friend. You are violent, albeit in a tacit way. I'm more direct since I don't like hypocrisy.

For the only thing I apologize is for the misspelling of "psychologising" (and perhaps other words too) and maybe some imperfect writting, which doesn't express things in the most efficient way possible. I'm not a native english speaker and I do my best here.


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## Enthusiast

aleazk said:


> I don't buy that for a second, my friend. You are violent, albeit in a tacit way. I'm more direct since I don't like hypocrisy.
> 
> For the only thing I apologize is for the misspelling of "psychologising" (and perhaps other words too) and maybe some imperfect writting, which doesn't express things in the most efficient way possible. I'm not a native english speaker and I do my best here.


This one is easy to answer. I don't care about spelling so long as meaning is clear. As for your suggestion that I am violent ... I find it silly. I have spent quite a few periods of my life surrounded and under threat of violence and, although I can look after myself and my fellows, would not use the word so lightly. It hasn't been me that has been abusive. I see no grounds to call me a hypocrite. Are you OK? I suggest we let the matter rest although I will respond briefly to your post immediately prior to this one.


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## aleazk

Enthusiast said:


> I will respond briefly to your post immediately prior to this one.


Great, that's the only thing I really care here. I come here to think and to be challenged in my opinions.


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## JAS

I may also note that I generally approach these discussion from the assumption that we are not understanding each other (made all the more complicated by the mode of posts made in the electronic ether, and sometimes in the carelessness of haste, and from typing in small boxes). I try not to presume offense is intended until it is clearly the case, and when it does become clear, I still prefer not to take offense since that is usually what the other person is going for and I refuse to grant the satisfaction. I also try to keep in mind that it is an Internet discussion, and hardly anything else in the world is less important. Its only value lies in the degree to which it is or is not interesting to the participants. When it ceases to be of interest to me, I cease to be a participant.


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## Enthusiast

aleazk said:


> You are wrong. What do you know if others are experts or not? Some people here are actually university music professors, did you know that. Others are musicians and composers (like myself), professional and non-professional. We have visual artists too (there was a particularly knowledgeable member some time ago, which was, again, a university professor). And, in general, many members here have an amazing knowledge of art history, philosophy, etc. So, you are grossly underestimating your interlocutors.


I may have been wrong. I may also have expressed myself clumsily and most of us do when struggling to identify and express what we think on a topic that is new to us. But I didn't say that there are no experts here. There are indeed many experts in many different fields. What I said was that in the arts definitions are not arrived at by analysis alone but by consent among experts. They do this in fora where rigour is more to the fore than it is in a discussion forum. This should not be controversial. And it does not mean that we all have to agree with the uses of terms that currently hold sway among the community of experts. But we cannot wish away that consensus.



aleazk said:


> Next, you dismiss the discussion in general terms, as well as the content of the posts made here ("without throwing up much of incidental interest.") Well, many pages have flown in the thread now, it would be nice, since you are here posting, if you addressed them if you want to dismiss their content. And, indeed, your points ("But with this done I doubt that logic and rationality will help us very much because in an artistic field it is ultimately a community (albeit of experts rather than lay people) that will decide what the ground rules are and how to apply them.") were already addressed by at least three members in previous pages (Woodduck, Eva, and me). Perhaps we are not worth of an adequate rebuttal from your Highness, after all, we are all a pair of idio.ts that didn't even think in your amazing insight (when, in fact, it's the first point we discussed since it was the more obvious) and the mere repetition of a general dismissal (that only repeats an obvious concern and not the answers that were given to it, like the importance of the pragmatic use in the meaning of a term) is all we deserve. I'm very sorry we are not at your level and that we are only banal people commenting on a forum about topics that only the "experts" should have access (and where, paradoxically, there are actually some experts here; possibly not me, but I quite respect Woodduck's knowledge, for instance.)


Yes, like you (or so you said a few posts back) I do find this debate that has been going on a little tedious. I therefore stayed away from it until a couple of posts that grabbed my interest came along. My own involvement came when something I do know a bit about - cognitive processing - was mentioned.

If I have only responded to the posts that caught my interest, I mean no offense to those who posted the many other posts that did not engage my interest. I am sure you are not hurt that I didn't respond to some of your earlier posts but that is how you read here. It is precisely because I am not His Majesty that I can pick and choose what engages my interest without a justifiable fear that I may be offending those who I did not respond to! Don't put me on a pedestal!

I do not think Woodduck or Eva will resent that I disagree with some points that Woodduck made. And I'm sure both will recognise that the discussion - whether a piece that is widely regarded (by the experts, even those who dislike it) as belonging to music really belongs there - is somewhat specialised and esoteric. I assume they posted all that they posted as part of a _discussion_. Also, both are quite able to respond robustly if they see things differently to me! Just occasionally we all learn things when we put our take together with someone else's counter claims.

I really do not know where you are coming from. If I express views that are not identical to yours and those others who you feel you support you say I am looking down on you from on high. If I don't post, you say I am dismissive! You seem so off ... that I haven't even become angry with you!


----------



## fluteman

Enthusiast said:


> This one is easy to answer. I don't care about spelling so long as meaning is clear. As for your suggestion that I am violent ... I find it silly. I have spent quite a few periods of my life surrounded and under threat of violence and, although I can look after myself and my fellows, would not use the word so lightly. It hasn't been me that has been abusive. I see no grounds to call me a hypocrite. Are you OK? I suggest we let the matter rest although I will respond briefly to your post immediately prior to this one.


I think a major reason discussions of this issue become so personal and antagonistic is, if we accept a broad but common definition of music as human expression of ideas (aesthetic, emotional, intellectual) using non-verbal sound, the success or merit of a particular work must be directly tied to whether it ever succeeds in expressing or communicating its ideas to anyone.

When someone says, "I like X because it successfully expressed aesthetic, emotional or intellectual ideas to me", that alone establishes the artistic success of the work in as demonstrative and objective a way as possible, though the composer or performer would probably be happier with an audience of more than one. That person is of course fully entitled to his or her opinion, and often understandably not interested in attempts to prove that the opinion is somehow invalid or irrelevant.

When someone says, "I don't like X because it expressed nothing to me", that only establishes that the work failed as music or art for that person alone, which means very little. Sometimes those people fill threads here with attempts to show their opinions are widely held or otherwise valid, through polls, theoretical analysis or otherwise, that also mean very little, and that many, including me, find tiresome after a certain point. Finding and analyzing the audience a work of art has generated or the cultural impact is has had is a much more difficult and subtle task than that, as I've tried to show with numerous comments and examples in many threads here.

Finally, though it's obviously perfectly OK to object to the definition of music I've given above as too broad, that's a purely semantic issue and not a very meaningful one, as Eva Yojimbo, millionrainbows and others here have explained in as accurate and articulate way as I think is possible in an internet discussion forum such as this one.


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## millionrainbows

I don't think a definition of music is going to solve anything, and a definition will be impossible to agree on, anyway. But that's a moot point; the definition of music is just a distraction, an intellectual exercise, and it will only separate people.

My advice is: get a grip, act like an adult, and take responsibility for your _own views_ and "definition" of music.

The only thing about 4'33" we need to know is: do you choose to enter into the agreement with the artist, and listen/view it as valid? Or not? Either way, it's _your decision, your responsibility_, and no amount of "defining" is going to change anything or anyone's opinion. Definitions are simply a clever distraction, an attempt to push the discussion into an "objective" realm.

It has nothing to do with the art itself; only your response to it, based on whether or not you have committed to engage with it.

All of this "defining" masquerading as "rational thinking" is really just an excuse to _exclude_ the art (and maybe the _"kinds of people"_) that we don't like and accept.

Yes, this discussion IS about people, and their taste and decisions and opinions. We should already know that.


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## Woodduck

Enthusiast said:


> *Your attempts to pin down the world (/to keep the chaos at bay?)* often spur *my devil's advocate* so please excuse *the nitpicking element in my responses*. And I guess that as you are laying down foundations for thinking it is well worth being precise and correct so as to avoid building leaning towers.
> 
> *Does utilitarian value exclude aesthetic value?* *Surely, if something has aesthetic value it is useful to us?* It seems to me that aesthetic value is a subset of utilitarian value so you are perhaps increasing specificity with this rule but you may also be closing doors - something can be useful and can come to be seen as beautiful as a result of that or even as a result of a history of having been useful in the past.
> 
> Although I don't want to add to the - to me - somewhat tedious to-ing and fro-ing about 433, *music is not made of sound alone.* Consider a painting. The artist primes the canvas and then paints on it. What if they don't cover it but leave some areas as blank primed canvas (or even - shock! - _un_primed canvas)? Are these unpainted parts not part of the art? Clearly they are. Isn't it the same with music? Only more so and with a much longer history: music has always been about sound and no-sound and interactions between them.
> 
> As I think I have posted before, the perception of patterns (and meaning) is something that we are hard-wired to do even when confronted with pure ambiguity. And, indeed,* randomness itself tends to be patterned: true randomness has repeating figures and patterns of figures and only artificial randomness (something designed by a person to appear random) lacks these. These two points don't disprove your point here but they do suggest it is a very unstable and fluid foundation. *An artist choosing to use true randomness (chance) is more likely to "create" patterns than an artist seeking to imitate randomness or create a total lack of pattern. And, even then, *our tendency as an audience will be to perceive patterns.* And the patterns we see will vary to the extent that we draw on different musical experiences.
> 
> *I am not sure what measure there is, save self-report from audience members, for judging whether a work is aesthetically meaningful.* Indeed, the term relies on audience perceptions. *From the above (my arguments suggesting that your foundations are not solid enough to build on) it does seem that the measure is a very fluid one where very different perceptions might very well be equally valid. So your "observation" is in fact a prejudice! *There is nothing wrong with that, I think, for the enjoyment, and the valuing, of art is about discrimination. But *I don't think you can use rules (in the way you seem to want to) to invalidate the views of others or to bolster (perhaps to yourself?) your own discriminations.*


A noble effort, Enthusiast! Alas, when you call yourself out as a nit-picker you are correct. Most of your objections amount only to semantic legerdemain.

1.) The distinction between aesthetic and utilitarian value is a commonplace and I am absolutely certain that you understand what it means. Pointing out that enjoyment is a sort of use is not devil's advocacy but mere devilishness. Shame on you.

2.) To say that music is made of sound no more excludes silence than to say that speech consists of words excludes the necessity of spaces between them. More devilishness.

3.) The fact that the human brain by its nature looks for pattern in sense data does not excuse the artist from his job of creating pattern by intention. An artist may "use" chance - uncontrolled elements occur quite normally and unavoidably in art and may have specific value - but as a basic premise in the conception or execution of a work, chance or randomness results only in meaninglessness. Art is intended to mean something, and meaning is a function of order. You will no doubt want to point out that the communication of meaninglessness does itself have meaning, and you would be correct; but an artist who wants to say that existence is meaningless has to say it by means of a structured statement. Complete disorder, disorder as such, communicates nothing and is fundamentally inartistic, and anyone who proceeds purely on the basis of chance or puts forward something in which no design or purpose is discernible is not functioning as an artist (or, I can't resist remarking, as anything else worthwhile).

4.) Humans may attribute any meaning or value to anything. They may be very capable or less capable of aesthetic appreciation. There is no necessity that every hearer respond to a piece of music in the same way, and obviously they will not. That has no bearing on the nature of art or on the artist's task.

Your sly inquiries about my need to keep chaos at bay and to bolster my discriminations "perhaps to myself" are no doubt best passed over without comment.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> Finally, though it's obviously perfectly OK to object to the definition of music I've given above as too broad, that's a purely semantic issue and not a very meaningful one, as Eva Yojimbo, millionrainbows and others here have explained in as accurate and articulate way as I think is possible in an internet discussion forum such as this one.


But that's simply not true at all. It's not just a semantic issue and not meaningful (and even if it were just a semantic issue, it has some interest). As I mentioned uncountably times, Woodduck, Eugene, too, artists don't create out of nothing, like if they were pulling musical rabbits from a hat. They operate under rather strict cosmovisions about art (and they will defend them rather strongly, think about Boulez, Babbitt, and pretty much all the great artists). A notion about what is music is also often included there. For god's sake, even in Cage's work there's an evident desire to redefine or simply discard the old western notion. So, if it's of so vital interest to them, why it wouldn't be for us. Millions simply has ignored this point. I don't think Eva did, since she mentioned different particular styles and their notion of what music is. What she was pointing at were other issues, I think.

Furthermore, while we have our particular tastes, I don't think any of the participants here showed that type of behaviour (which, true, does exist). In my case, I even like some of the music by those composers for which some of their pieces do not fall into my notion of music (Cage 4'33'', the Ligeti metronomes, Lachenmann guero). So, I don't get it. And I don't get the constant reminder of those very general points that we have accepted (what was acceptable) and moved on.


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## aleazk

Enthusiast said:


> I may have been wrong. I may also have expressed myself clumsily and most of us do when struggling to identify and express what we think on a topic that is new to us. But I didn't say that there are no experts here. There are indeed many experts in many different fields. What I said was that in the arts definitions are not arrived at by analysis alone but by consent among experts. They do this in fora where rigour is more to the fore than it is in a discussion forum. This should not be controversial. And it does not mean that we all have to agree with the uses of terms that currently hold sway among the community of experts. But we cannot wish away that consensus.
> 
> Yes, like you (or so you said a few posts back) I do find this debate that has been going on a little tedious. I therefore stayed away from it until a couple of posts that grabbed my interest came along. My own involvement came when something I do know a bit about - cognitive processing - was mentioned.
> 
> If I have only responded to the posts that caught my interest, I mean no offense to those who posted the many other posts that did not engage my interest. I am sure you are not hurt that I didn't respond to some of your earlier posts but that is how you read here. It is precisely because I am not His Majesty that I can pick and choose what engages my interest without a justifiable fear that I may be offending those who I did not respond to! Don't put me on a pedestal!
> 
> I do not think Woodduck or Eva will resent that I disagree with some points that Woodduck made. And I'm sure both will recognise that the discussion - whether a piece that is widely regarded (by the experts, even those who dislike it) as belonging to music really belongs there - is somewhat specialised and esoteric. I assume they posted all that they posted as part of a _discussion_. Also, both are quite able to respond robustly if they see things differently to me! Just occasionally we all learn things when we put our take together with someone else's counter claims.
> 
> I really do not know where you are coming from. If I express views that are not identical to yours and those others who you feel you support you say I am looking down on you from on high. If I don't post, you say I am dismissive! You seem so off ... that I haven't even become angry with you!


I'm not offended that you didn't answer my posts, that's silly. I was just a bit baffled that you were raising points that were already discussed at some lenght, but without even mentioning those discussions and even dismissing the content of the thread (or 'some threads like this', but, c'mon, we are in one of such threads, so that dismissal evidently applies to it).

Anyway, I don't have much more to add. I'm not angry, just frustrated at the type of inter personal dynamics in these discussions lately. Have a nice day.


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> As I mentioned uncountably times, Woodduck, Eugene, too, artists don't create out of nothing, like if they were pulling musical rabbits from a hat. They operate under rather strict cosmovisions about art (and they will defend them rather strongly, think about Boulez, Babbitt, and pretty much all the great artists)..


That's very true, and an important observation. As I've said before, artists don't work in a vacuum, and not only the cultural context, often including a foundation of sophisticated and well-developed cultural traditions, but also the social, and even the political and economic environments in which they work or worked, are critical factors. Art must always be considered in context.

What I meant was, music can be defined more narrowly than I have, for example, organized sound produced by singing or people playing instruments, having the elements of melody, harmony and rhythm, in order to give aesthetic pleasure to listeners. That definition is just as valid as the one I suggested. All the debate in the world won't establish which is better.

But I also said earlier that all successful art challenges and forces us to reconsider our preconceptions and assumptions about the world, at least some of them, and at least in a subtle way. If we always hear exactly what we expect to hear, that wouldn't engage us in quite the same way. When you watch a movie do you always watch one you've seen before? Eventually, you want to see something new, and the same is true with music. That would be true regardless of how one chooses to define music.

Now I admit, at the avant-garde edge there are always some provocateurs in all fields of art, and perhaps one of the things they sometimes do is try to shatter the audience's most basic preconceptions of what art or music can be. For example: "You think music has to have harmony? No, it doesn't!!!" But that's less a linguistic issue that philosophers fight over and more a question of what your ear is trained to, and expects to, hear. Once the shock wears off and your ear adjusts, do you find anything worth listening to? That to me is the real question, whether you define it as music or as a yellow-bellied sapsucker.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> Anyway, I don't have much more to add. I'm not angry, just frustrated at the type of inter personal dynamics in these discussions lately. Have a nice day.


Really? I couldn't tell:



aleazk said:


> Ya, ya, I'm an obtuse and you reached the nirvana. Congratulations. Bye.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> Really? I couldn't tell:


Pft, that's not angry, simply completely uninterested in continuing arguing with you.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> That definition is just as valid as the one I suggested. All the debate in the world won't establish which is better.


I think this is the central point in which I disagree with you. I simply think we actually can. I think terms and concepts can be defined, can have a general meaning, and that there are ways to find what's the optimal meaning. I explained how I think one can do that in this post. But it seems people are not very interested or find the discussion at that level to become too theoretic for its own good. Fair enough. But that's what I think and at least people can now know where I'm coming from.

A simple way to implement what I said is the following. Consider just one listener, and that considers pure silence as music. I think not many would agree with his view. Now let's start to include more listeners. Possibly, they will all have disagreements about where's exactly the boundary point and that. But we also start to see something new, while many don't share the view of the first listener, they all do share the notion that some things are indeed music (like, say, a Beethoven piano sonata). What we need to do, next, to find what would be the optimal and most common notion of what's music in our time, is to, first, consider the total set T of devoted and informed classical listeners, then build the function f(p) which tells, for each piece p, what's the percentage of people from T that consider the piece p to be music. Now we decide a value for the percentage of T, a critical mass of listeners, that, if they think the considered piece is music, then it shouldn't be controversial to officialy consider the piece at issue as music (let's say, the 51% of the community?, just fixing one value, could be less; this means that the notion of music we will get will have a dose of convention, but one whose origin we know; nothing new, most of these difficult notions to define are like this.) In this way, we get an inequation f(p)>=51% and solve for p. We now take, from all those solutions, the piece p' with the minimal value for f (possibly the 51% itself). Thus, we take the minimal solution piece p' as the one that defines the most optimal boundary. Of course, nobody is saying that artists cannot take that boundary and challenge us. Great artists have been challenging the boundary so defined since ever (but they need to know first what's the boundary of their audience, in order to break it if they wish to do so), and the result is sometimes great art and insight, and other times just uninteresting mannerism (if the piece doesn't even reach the 51%). This piece p' defines the meaning of music in the way I mentioned in that post. It takes into account the inter-subjectivity of a majority of listeners and the things they find valuable in what they call music. Thus, we just call that thing they say... music.

Of course, we are unlikely to build such a function in this forum, one would need to do an actual research work with samples with lots of people, etc. What we can only do here (and perhaps what I consider the true weak point of these threads) is simply to try, based in our experience and knowledge as being ourselves part of the community, to guess what the piece p' might be. Thus, we can throw our definitions (as, e.g., Woodduck and I did) and see what kind of discussion and minimal consensus arises from this. This has some interest since members here are knowledgeable.

Granted, many will find my approach too theoretic, too verbose, etc., and millions probably will consider that I have no soul and of being a control freak. But, to them, I repeat, I'm just trying to find some sort of solution to a topic that evidently interests some members here, as evidenced in that other thread (of which I was not the starter). Kill me if you want, but you will only be killing the messenger, not the topic nor the interest in it.


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> I think this is the central point in which I disagree with you. I simply think we actually can. I think terms and concepts can be defined, can have a general meaning, and that there are ways to find what's the optimal meaning. I explained how I think one can do that in this post. But it seems people are not very interested or find the discussion at that level to become too theoretic for its own good. Fair enough. But that's what I think and at least people can now know where I'm coming from.
> 
> A simple way to implement what I said is the following. Consider just one listener, and that considers pure silence as music. I think not many would agree with his view. Now let's start to include more listeners. Possibly, they will all have disagreements about where's exactly the boundary point and that. But we also start to see something new, while many don't share the view of the first listener, they all do share the notion that some things are indeed music (like, say, a Beethoven piano sonata). What we need to do, next, to find what would be the optimal and most common notion of what's music in our time, is to, first, consider the total set T of devoted and informed classical listeners, then build the function f(p) which tells, for each piece p, what's the percentage of people from T that consider the piece p to be music. Now we decide a value for the percentage of T, a critical mass of listeners, that, if they think the considered piece is music, then it shouldn't be controversial to officialy consider the piece at issue as music (let's say, the 51% of the community?, just fixing one value, could be less; this means that the notion of music we will get will have a dose of convention, but one whose origin we know; nothing new, most of these difficult notions to define are like this.) In this way, we get an inequation f(p)>=51% and solve for p. We now take, from all those solutions, the piece p' with the minimal value for f (possibly the 51% itself). Thus, we take the minimal solution piece p' as the one that defines the most optimal boundary. Of course, nobody is saying that artists cannot take that boundary and challenge us. Great artists have been challenging the boundary so defined since ever (but they need to know first what's the boundary of their audience, in order to break it if they wish to do so), and the result is sometimes great art and insight, and other times just uninteresting mannerism (if the piece doesn't even reach the 51%). This piece p' defines the meaning of music in the way I mentioned in that post. It takes into account the inter-subjectivity of a majority of listeners and the things they find valuable in what they call music. Thus, we just call that thing they say... music.
> 
> Of course, we are unlikely to build such a function in this forum, one would need to do an actual research work with samples with lots of people, etc. What we can only do here (and perhaps what I consider the true weak point of these threads) is simply to try, based in our experience and knowledge as being ourselves part of the community, to guess what the piece p' might be. Thus, we can throw our definitions (as, e.g., Woodduck and I did) and see what kind of discussion and minimal consensus arises from this. This has some interest since members here are knowledgeable.
> 
> Granted, many will find my approach too theoretic, too verbose, etc., and millions probably will consider that I have no soul and of being a control freak. But, to them, I repeat, I'm just trying to find some sort of solution to a topic that evidently interests some members here, as evidenced in that other thread (of which I was not the starter). Kill me if you want, but you will only be killing the messenger, not the topic nor the interest in it.


No, that won't work. Art does not have a solution, at least not one we're ever likely to find. We're just going to have to rely on humble empiricism, as Galileo and Isaac Newton did, as David Hume and John Locke told us to. It may not be perfect, but it's been doing a pretty good job.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> No, that won't work. Art does not have a solution, at least not one we're ever likely to find. We're just going to have to rely on humble empiricism, as Galileo and Isaac Newton did, as David Hume and John Locke told us to. It may not be perfect, but it's been doing a pretty good job.


I don't think you even cared to read it. The solution is purely empirical, precisely in the way you ask, since it consists in asking people what they think music is and then to use the most common view among them, I only tried to make that more precise to avoid certain objections that could naturally arise.. Besides, nobody is looking for a solution for art, what does that even mean, you are using that word and making a useless play of words. Meh, I'm tired of being taken as fool here, I'm leaving this discussion. Bye.


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## fluteman

...............


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## Sid James

aleazk said:


> We all agree that a Beethoven sonata is music. And we all agree that pure silence (without the sound of the public, or any sound, we are in outer space, just silence) is not music. Thus, the fact that those extremes exist means that there must be some boundary in the middle at some point. Of course, where exactly that boundary is has a lot of convention and artists like to break those conventions, and therefore to push the boundary...


I think that anything which a composer or musicians deems to be music is music. With rules being constantly broken during the last 100-200 years in music, its hard to argue that there are any rules as such today. There's a number of notorious pieces more or less accepted as music, now about half a century old (such as Cage's 4'33" or La Monte Young's Piano Piece for David Tudor No. 1) which have no musical content in terms of the dictionary definition of music. There are also other things related such as Alan Kaprow's happenings. They are still controversial, but not so much as to exclude them from being accepted as setting precedents in music which still stand.

So total silence can be music, if a composer deems it to be. I wouldn't have given the same answer a few years ago. I am not a fan of this type of radical composition, but the way I see it is that the anything goes approach at least gives freedom of expression for all practitioners of music, wherever they are on the musical spectrum. They can make their music without worrying too much about manifestos, ideology and philosophy which did have a tendency to divide and bog down creativity in the past. I think its good to open things up as much as possible.


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## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> I don't think a definition of music is going to solve anything, and a definition will be impossible to agree on, anyway. But that's a moot point; the definition of music is just a distraction, an intellectual exercise, and it will only separate people.


Well, given that some people have agreed on a definition, it hasn't separated them. As for whether it will "solve" anything, I don't think anyone is setting out to do that. It _is _an intellectual exercise that the OP invited us to share. That's fine by me, and by most of those joining in the exercise.



millionrainbows said:


> My advice is: get a grip, act like an adult, and take responsibility for your _own views_ and "definition" of music.


We'll take that under advisement, I'm sure.



millionrainbows said:


> The only thing about 4'33" we need to know is: do you choose to enter into the agreement with the artist, and listen/view it as valid? Or not? Either way, it's _your decision, your responsibility_, and no amount of "defining" is going to change anything or anyone's opinion. Definitions are simply a clever distraction, an attempt to push the discussion into an "objective" realm.


You start off well, but then it all goes downhill. Yes, it _is _a personal decision whether to enter into agreement with the artist. I've made my decision, and, at the invitation of the OP, shared my decision with others. But I made _my _decision on the basis of _my_ "definition" of what does and not constitute music - where the boundary falls for _me_. This is not an attempt to push the discussion into an "objective" realm. It's an attempt to have a conversation, to see where there are commonalities and differences in our thinking, to enjoy the exchange. It's the shared interest that _does _bring people together, even if they disagree. I can't tell you how lonely I feel  being the only one who puts the boundary bewteen _Guero _and _Collector_, but also special - I'm clearly a unique thinker. 

That advice you gave? You might try some yourself.


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## eugeneonagain

I'm considering reporting your post MacLeod (for my maiden voyage into reporting people's posts as a mere outside observer), since I 'feel' that it mocks millionrainbows. Are you okay with that?


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## Guest

eugeneonagain said:


> I'm considering reporting your post MacLeod (for my maiden voyage into reporting people's posts as a mere outside observer), since I 'feel' that it mocks millionrainbows. Are you okay with that?


Whatever you "feel" is right.


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## Tallisman

The point of 4'33 is to show that music isn't just the notes (or lack of them). Something becomes 'music' based on context, more than anything. When I drop a saucepan on the floor in my home, it's not music. The annoying thing is, that sound becomes music once some 'composer' decides to put it in a concert hall or in an environment that we intersubjectively agree can be considered a place (or event) for performance or capital-C 'Culture' in general. Even that doesn't get to a _definition_, because I can introduce too many examples to refute it (I play a guitar in my room, and that's clearly 'music' but it's not in a performance environment etc).

It's so clear that there's no hard-and-fast 'definition' for the particular word 'music' that traverses centuries and remains unchanged. If there was, we probably wouldn't be arguing about it now, would we? But that doesn't mean the term 'music' can't have meaning. If there's one thing 20th century philosophy has taught us, it's that the meaning of words is in their _use_, and attempts to 'fix the sense' of a word within that same language misses the nature of language. It's useful when you're learning a language to have 'definitions', but we all know how to use the word 'music' without providing a fixed definition.

Millionrainbows is right (!?). Defining a word like 'music' is not like defining a word like 'carrot'. It's a pointless exercise. With 'carrot' we can provide an ostensive definition. 'Music' is entirely different, and is a general term with virtually infinite usage possibilities. It dwells in context.

The best definition we can give for 'music' is something stupid and recursive like 'music refers to anything musical'.

Now I know personally the things I consider to fall under 'bad' music and the things I consider to fall under 'good' music right now at least (i.e Boulez is bad music, R. Strauss is good music). That's subjective. But when providing a definition for 'Music' an-sich, I can't even come up with something solidly _subjective_, let alone _ob_jective, because 'music' is a _public_ word, whereas my distaste for Boulez and admiration for Strauss is (largely) not.


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## Enthusiast

Woodduck said:


> A noble effort, Enthusiast! Alas, when you call yourself out as a nit-picker you are correct. Most of your objections amount only to semantic legerdemain.
> 
> 1.) The distinction between aesthetic and utilitarian value is a commonplace and I am absolutely certain that you understand what it means. Pointing out that enjoyment is a sort of use is not devil's advocacy but mere devilishness. Shame on you.
> 
> 2.) To say that music is made of sound no more excludes silence than to say that speech consists of words excludes the necessity of spaces between them. More devilishness.
> 
> 3.) The fact that the human brain by its nature looks for pattern in sense data does not excuse the artist from his job of creating pattern by intention. An artist may "use" chance - uncontrolled elements occur quite normally and unavoidably in art and may have specific value - but as a basic premise in the conception or execution of a work, chance or randomness results only in meaninglessness. Art is intended to mean something, and meaning is a function of order. You will no doubt want to point out that the communication of meaninglessness does itself have meaning, and you would be correct; but an artist who wants to say that existence is meaningless has to say it by means of a structured statement. Complete disorder, disorder as such, communicates nothing and is fundamentally inartistic, and anyone who proceeds purely on the basis of chance or puts forward something in which no design or purpose is discernible is not functioning as an artist (or, I can't resist remarking, as anything else worthwhile).
> 
> 4.) Humans may attribute any meaning or value to anything. They may be very capable or less capable of aesthetic appreciation. There is no necessity that every hearer respond to a piece of music in the same way, and obviously they will not. That has no bearing on the nature of art or on the artist's task.
> 
> Your sly inquiries about my need to keep chaos at bay and to bolster my discriminations "perhaps to myself" are no doubt best passed over without comment.


I'm disappointed with this reply as I had expected something more considered. Never mind.

To start at the end my suggestion that you seem to need to pin things down and to keep chaos at bay were not intended as "sly" at all. I perhaps assumed more familiarity than was appropriate and it genuinely hadn't struck me that you would see me as competing in anything or attacking you. Indeed I am not sure I would have bothered to respond at all - my points were not that important - if I hadn't held you in respect. I naively thought some of what I said might be useful to you. Anyway, I continue to think that my description of your cognitive style has truth but never intended it to carry shame. Perhaps I should have added the word heroic. Rest assured I will be more respectful and guarded in any future interactions with you.

For the rest I find you do not answer much of what I said.

1. You just accuse me of devilry - whatever that means - and clearly read me as arguing against you rather than contributing a few thoughts. These may have been minor but they have implications that can grow if they are ignored. So, the distinction between aesthetic and utilitarian value is a commonplace, yes, but does that mean that no-one can pick it apart a little? It continues to seem to me that aesthetic value is a subset of utlitarian value rather than an opposite. Setting them in opposition is a neat trick but it leaves music as being for the ears of ... God? But then you are clear (indeed your point 2 seems to say this) that music is made by people for people. And once that is acknowledged is it possible to avoid accepting that if some people enjoy and are moved by, say, rap music then it is serving a purpose and is desired by many?

2. (originally your earlier point 3) I was sure that you did know that music involved silence as well as sound but in your rule/foundation you stated that music "is made of sound. (There's no need to be clever or cute and point out that musical ideas in the mind and musical notation on paper are silent.)". So clearly it needed tweaking.

3. (originally a response to your earlier point 4). I know you don't like me saying that you seem to need to pin things down but it _is _relevant here. It is the _fluidity _that an effective definition of art must have if it is to serve us adequately that you ignore. What you actually say in your reply here is OK (even if it goes to suggest that my position here is extreme and absurd) but it misses my point - an element that is surely (i.e. to me!) the most interesting aspect of this question. What seemed to many to lack purpose or meaning a few decades ago is now imbued with purpose and meaning by many (Warhol's soup tins might be an example) - some of this might have been an artist's intent and some s/he might have foreseen. But there is something derived and accumulated, I think, from the interaction of the work with other cultural elements.

4. (a response to my closing comments) I don't presume to define the artist's task and neither of us has been addressing artistic value but if it comes to saying whether something is a work of art or not I stand by my original statement. Your response to this reads as a personal manifesto - perhaps a sound one - rather than a universal truth. That's fine, of course, but not what I was responding to.

Perhaps we would agree more if the subject was "what art is of value" - I seem to remember that we are not so far apart on that question (although we have very different tastes). But there are many threads that try to open it up and so far little that suggests that a forum wide agreement is possible. Indeed the battles over it have sent many very interesting members packing!

No need to respond to what I say here. I misread this thread as a discussion when - judging by reactions to posts that I had intended as considered contributions - it is about dissent and competition and these are not really what I seek in this forum.


----------



## Enthusiast

Tallisman said:


> The point of 4'33 is to show that music isn't just the notes (or lack of them). Something becomes 'music' based on context, more than anything. When I drop a saucepan on the floor in my home, it's not music. The annoying thing is, that sound becomes music once some 'composer' decides to put it in a concert hall or in an environment that we intersubjectively agree can be considered a place (or event) for performance or capital-C 'Culture' in general. Even that doesn't get to a _definition_, because I can introduce too many examples to refute it (I play a guitar in my room, and that's clearly 'music' but it's not in a performance environment etc).
> 
> It's so clear that there's no hard-and-fast 'definition' for the particular word 'music' that traverses centuries and remains unchanged. If there was, we probably wouldn't be arguing about it now, would we? But that doesn't mean the term 'music' can't have meaning. If there's one thing 20th century philosophy has taught us, it's that the meaning of words is in their _use_, and attempts to 'fix the sense' of a word within that same language misses the nature of language. It's useful when you're learning a language to have 'definitions', but we all know how to use the word 'music' without providing a fixed definition.
> 
> Millionrainbows is right (!?). Defining a word like 'music' is not like defining a word like 'carrot'. It's a pointless exercise. With 'carrot' we can provide an ostensive definition. 'Music' is entirely different, and is a general term with virtually infinite usage possibilities. It dwells in context.
> 
> The best definition we can give for 'music' is something stupid and recursive like 'music refers to anything musical'.
> 
> Now I know personally the things I consider to fall under 'bad' music and the things I consider to fall under 'good' music right now at least (i.e Boulez is bad music, Strauss is good music). That's subjective. But when providing a definition for 'Music' an-sich, I can't even come up with something solidly _subjective_, let alone _ob_jective, because 'music' is a _public_ word, whereas my distaste for Boulez and admiration for Strauss is (largely) not.


Exactly - except for your choice of bad music ... but, as you you allow me my taste and experience, all is fine!


----------



## eugeneonagain

MacLeod said:


> Whatever you "feel" is right.


So that's your criteria? I guess a lot of people have been sent to the gallows on that basis. The DDR would have loved you.


----------



## JAS

. . . and a few people wonder why the discussion never moves very far from 4'33". We may not be any closer to discovering the boundary of music, but I think we have some idea of where the outer boundary for the disagreement is.


----------



## Tallisman

Enthusiast said:


> Exactly - except for your choice of bad music ... but, as you you allow me my taste and experience, all is fine!


Thanks, and as long as you also allow me to ask you to get out of my sight seeing as you like Boulez, all is fine!

^(Just so the TalkClassical Stasi know, that utterance above was entirely in jest. _Schild und Schwert der Forum!_)


----------



## Tallisman

aleazk said:


> And we all agree that pure silence (without the sound of the public, or any sound, we are in outer space, just silence) is not music.


I didn't agree to this. I think after an hour of listening to Morton Feldman, pure outer space silence would be music to my ears!


----------



## fluteman

MacLeod said:


> I can't tell you how lonely I feel  being the only one who puts the boundary bewteen _Guero _and _Collector_, but also special - I'm clearly a unique thinker.
> .


I know this is mostly or even entirely tongue-in-cheek on your part, but I think this is the kind of thinking that is the main cause of much of the antagonism here. It doesn't matter how many people share your views, aesthetic, intellectual, linguistic, or semantic, about what music or art is or ideally ought to be. That's not how language works, that's not how music, art or culture works.

Yes, people have a natural tendency to seek confirmation or validation of their values and tastes from others, but especially in the long run, there are much deeper and more powerful forces at work.

So I say, trust your ears, have the courage of your convictions, and resist the temptation to make snide, condescending or nasty comments to or about anyone who hears or sees things differently, or worse yet, attempt to prove your own view is somehow more valid. We are all but grains of sand in the mortar between the bricks of the mighty edifice that is Western culture.


----------



## Guest

fluteman said:


> I know this is mostly or even entirely tongue-in-cheek on your part, but I think this is the kind of thinking that is the main cause of much of the antagonism here. It doesn't matter how many people share your views, aesthetic, intellectual, linguistic, or semantic, about what music or art is or ideally ought to be. That's not how language works, that's not how music, art or culture works.
> 
> Yes, people have a natural tendency to seek confirmation or validation of their values and tastes from others, but especially in the long run, there are much deeper and more powerful forces at work.
> 
> So I say, trust your ears, have the courage of your convictions, and resist the temptation to make snide, condescending or nasty comments to or about anyone who hears or sees things differently, or worse yet, attempt to prove your own view is somehow more valid. We are all but grains of sand in the mortar between the bricks of the mighty edifice that is Western culture.


Sorry...if you're saying that I've made condescending or snide or nasty remarks, can you please point out specifics. I might at least know whether to apologise or defend. Thanks.


----------



## aleazk

Sid James said:


> I think that anything which a composer or musicians deems to be music is music. With rules being constantly broken during the last 100-200 years in music, its hard to argue that there are any rules as such today. There's a number of notorious pieces more or less accepted as music, now about half a century old (such as Cage's 4'33" or La Monte Young's Piano Piece for David Tudor No. 1) which have no musical content in terms of the dictionary definition of music. There are also other things related such as Alan Kaprow's happenings. They are still controversial, but not so much as to exclude them from being accepted as setting precedents in music which still stand.
> 
> So total silence can be music, if a composer deems it to be. I wouldn't have given the same answer a few years ago. I am not a fan of this type of radical composition, but the way I see it is that the anything goes approach at least gives freedom of expression for all practitioners of music, wherever they are on the musical spectrum.


I can accept that whatever an artist presents like art, is art. But music is a subfield of art, a specific kind of art. Thus, it makes some sense to try to pin down what it may be. And, anyway, nobody is saying that what doesn't fall into that music category (say, 4'33') is not art, it very likely is, but just a different type of art than music (in the 4'33'' case, say, conceptual art). One is really trying to make some categorization or ontologization of the different types of art, I don't see why that should be so controversial (I mean, the notion of doing it, not the actual result, which will always have debatable points.) And, even more, nobody is saying that artists should feel constrained by that, they are free to break it whenever they want and we, as audience, will judge the result, and, maybe based on that, will decide if our category of music is worth to be re-defined in light of this new work. It's really a historical dynamical process.



Sid James said:


> They can make their music without worrying too much about manifestos, ideology and philosophy which did have a tendency to divide and bog down creativity in the past. I think its good to open things up as much as possible.


I strongly disagree with that. I think those philosophies are actually crucial for sparking creativity, either for breaking those philosophies or to find new ways to work under the rules. I think this is the way art always worked. Think about Debussy, and even Cage. They didn't create revolutionary music out of the blue, they were reacting to previous standards. All I'm claiming is that, in order to do that, one must first establish what those standards are. Of course, that's not the task for a single person, but of the whole community, artists and perhaps audience, and in a given period of time. The so called 'ethos' of each epoch.

Your view is akin to Feyerabend's in the philosophy of science. In the 20th century, due to all the revolutions in science that questioned old cherished theories, philosophers were quite puzzled on how to interpret this in regards to the philosophy of science and even to the very notion of science itself. Thus, on the scientific method, Feyerabend concluded that "anything goes", which became a famous lemma associated with him. I strongly disagree with that view, as well as most philosophers, and think it only refuses to address the problem and just gives an easy answer by kicking the whole chess board from the table.


----------



## Tallisman

aleazk said:


> I think this is the central point in which I disagree with you. I simply think we actually can. I think terms and concepts can be defined, can have a general meaning, and that there are ways to find what's the optimal meaning. I explained how I think one can do that in this post. But it seems people are not very interested or find the discussion at that level to become too theoretic for its own good. Fair enough. But that's what I think and at least people can now know where I'm coming from.
> 
> A simple way to implement what I said is the following. Consider just one listener, and that considers pure silence as music. I think not many would agree with his view. Now let's start to include more listeners. Possibly, they will all have disagreements about where's exactly the boundary point and that. But we also start to see something new, while many don't share the view of the first listener, they all do share the notion that some things are indeed music (like, say, a Beethoven piano sonata). What we need to do, next, to find what would be the optimal and most common notion of what's music in our time, is to, first, consider the total set T of devoted and informed classical listeners, then build the function f(p) which tells, for each piece p, what's the percentage of people from T that consider the piece p to be music. Now we decide a value for the percentage of T, a critical mass of listeners, that, if they think the considered piece is music, then it shouldn't be controversial to officialy consider the piece at issue as music (let's say, the 51% of the community?, just fixing one value, could be less; this means that the notion of music we will get will have a dose of convention, but one whose origin we know; nothing new, most of these difficult notions to define are like this.) In this way, we get an inequation f(p)>=51% and solve for p. We now take, from all those solutions, the piece p' with the minimal value for f (possibly the 51% itself). Thus, we take the minimal solution piece p' as the one that defines the most optimal boundary. Of course, nobody is saying that artists cannot take that boundary and challenge us. Great artists have been challenging the boundary so defined since ever (but they need to know first what's the boundary of their audience, in order to break it if they wish to do so), and the result is sometimes great art and insight, and other times just uninteresting mannerism (if the piece doesn't even reach the 51%). This piece p' defines the meaning of music in the way I mentioned in that post. It takes into account the inter-subjectivity of a majority of listeners and the things they find valuable in what they call music. Thus, we just call that thing they say... music.
> 
> Of course, we are unlikely to build such a function in this forum, one would need to do an actual research work with samples with lots of people, etc. What we can only do here (and perhaps what I consider the true weak point of these threads) is simply to try, based in our experience and knowledge as being ourselves part of the community, to guess what the piece p' might be. Thus, we can throw our definitions (as, e.g., Woodduck and I did) and see what kind of discussion and minimal consensus arises from this. This has some interest since members here are knowledgeable.
> 
> Granted, many will find my approach too theoretic, too verbose, etc., and millions probably will consider that I have no soul and of being a control freak. But, to them, I repeat, I'm just trying to find some sort of solution to a topic that evidently interests some members here, as evidenced in that other thread (of which I was not the starter). Kill me if you want, but you will only be killing the messenger, not the topic nor the interest in it.


I hope this doesn't sound rude, because you've gone into serious theoretical depth and raised some interesting questions, and I can tell you that unlike (I suspect) a lot of people, I read it all. But the very idea of 'optimal meaning' is simply absurd, because even your meta-research into people's tastes relies on arbitrary notions.

I don't see how introducing functions will provide a better answer than no answer. Because the question you've answered thanks to Uncle Euler is precisely just 'what's the general consensus?', which is something different, and certainly not the way to establish 'optimal meaning', because we'd have to all intersubjectively agree upon what constitutes 'optimal meaning', and then perhaps try to intersubjectively establish what constitutes the thing that constitutes 'optimal meaning'... ad infinitum.

Perhaps Ol' Man Objectivity never existed at all, as many over the years have suggested. Even so, it's certain that what we think of as objective is not as arbitrary as that.

Complete consensus is no more 'objective' than complete disagreement. Each revolves around decision, and it doesn't matter how many make the decision. If we can point to nothing beyond ourselves to serve as a measure, even that complete consensus will evolve and change over decades, so why not leave music undefined? It still has meaning undefined, and actually defining it would limit its meaning significantly by restricting when and where it can be used in conversation, and its usage would be determined as valid or invalid based on rule-governed criteria that would eventually just come to be seen as precisely what they are - basically pointless.


----------



## aleazk

Tallisman said:


> The point of 4'33 is to show that music isn't just the notes (or lack of them). Something becomes 'music' based on context, more than anything. When I drop a saucepan on the floor in my home, it's not music. The annoying thing is, that sound becomes music once some 'composer' decides to put it in a concert hall or in an environment that we intersubjectively agree can be considered a place (or event) for performance or capital-C 'Culture' in general. Even that doesn't get to a _definition_, because I can introduce too many examples to refute it (I play a guitar in my room, and that's clearly 'music' but it's not in a performance environment etc).


Well, you are giving your definition, so thanks for playing  And yes, under that notion, the Cage piece is music. But if I don't share your view, then I would say instead "The point of 4'33 is to _try to_ show that _maybe_ music isn't just the notes (or lack of them)" 



Tallisman said:


> It's so clear that there's no hard-and-fast 'definition' for the particular word 'music' that traverses centuries and remains unchanged. If there was, we probably wouldn't be arguing about it now, would we? But that doesn't mean the term 'music' can't have meaning. If there's one thing 20th century philosophy has taught us, it's that the meaning of words is in their _use_, and attempts to 'fix the sense' of a word within that same language misses the nature of language. It's useful when you're learning a language to have 'definitions', but we all know how to use the word 'music' without providing a fixed definition.


Nobody in his sane mind has tried to propose such an 'objective and historically fixed' definition of music. In fact, quite the opposite, we have all agreed since page 1 of this thread that what you say is true. Furthermore, notions of music based on the philosophical ideas of the 20th century have been already proposed and discussed here by many members that participated.



Tallisman said:


> Millionrainbows is right (!?). Defining a word like 'music' is not like defining a word like 'carrot'. It's a pointless exercise. With 'carrot' we can provide an ostensive definition. 'Music' is entirely different, and is a general term with virtually infinite usage possibilities. It dwells in context.


I already tried to address such semiotic issues. People here seem to disagree with my view but, unfortunately, without telling where exactly, only with generic dismissals by the mere repeating of the same points to which my replies tried to answer. A better strategy would be to actually attack the arguments behind my answers.



Tallisman said:


> The best definition we can give for 'music' is something stupid and recursive like 'music refers to anything musical'.


Not really the best at all, it's really trivial, with no thought behind it. Much better things can be done. Such definitions, with their debatable points, have been provided by several participants here.



Tallisman said:


> Now I know personally the things I consider to fall under 'bad' music and the things I consider to fall under 'good' music right now at least (i.e Boulez is bad music, R. Strauss is good music). That's subjective. But when providing a definition for 'Music' an-sich, I can't even come up with something solidly _subjective_, let alone _ob_jective, because 'music' is a _public_ word, whereas my distaste for Boulez and admiration for Strauss is (largely) not.


What's wrong with "sound organized by a composer"? (with the addition of some clauses, of course)

Anyway, thanks for the calm tone of your message, even when it disagrees with pretty much most of my views (including when you say that Boulez's is bad music!)


----------



## aleazk

Tallisman said:


> I hope this doesn't sound rude, because you've gone into serious theoretical depth and raised some interesting questions, and I can tell you that unlike (I suspect) a lot of people, I read it all. But the very idea of 'optimal meaning' is simply absurd, because even your meta-research into people's tastes relies on arbitrary notions.


No problem at all!  Yes, maybe the word 'optimal' gives a feel of objectivity, which would be (perhaps, partially) false. By optimal I meant for its usage in practice, for theoretical books, for background for composers (so they can actually know what most people think music is and then use that for either break it or to follow it in their works) since it would be the most shared view by all the community.



Tallisman said:


> I don't see how introducing functions will provide a better answer than no answer. Because the question you've answered thanks to Uncle Euler is precisely just 'what's the general consensus?', which is something different, and certainly not the way to establish 'optimal meaning', because we'd have to all intersubjectively agree upon what constitutes 'optimal meaning', and then perhaps try to intersubjectively establish what constitutes the thing that constitutes 'optimal meaning'... ad infinitum.


Oh, the function stuff was just to make it more clear and precise and to state clearly the theoretical basis behind my views. I don't think such a function can even be constructed explicitly. Perhaps it was not such a good idea to put it in that way, since it may induce people to think that I want to introduce some kind of pseudo-scientific notion of objectivity into this. It was really a shortcut for precision, nothing more than that. I even tried to address at each step the corresponding relativizations of each notion. But I don't think that the choosing of the conventional percentage (my 51%) is that controversial; at least, I think it's much less controversial than to directly state what one thinks music is.



Tallisman said:


> Perhaps Ol' Man Objectivity never existed at all, as many over the years have suggested. Even so, it's certain that what we think of as objective is not as arbitrary as that.
> 
> Complete consensus is no more 'objective' than complete disagreement. Each revolves around decision, and it doesn't matter how many make the decision. If we can point to nothing beyond ourselves to serve as a measure, even that complete consensus will evolve and change over decades, so why not leave music undefined? It still has meaning undefined, and actually defining it would limit its meaning significantly by restricting when and where it can be used in conversation, and its usage would be determined as valid or invalid based on rule-governed criteria that would eventually just come to be seen as precisely what they are - basically pointless.


Not really, I addressed thess issues on a reply to your previous post. I mean, I agree with your dynamical historical view, but don't think that should kill the task of finding each local (in time) definition. Think about the change of scientific theories, do we renounce to state them because they surely will be proven wrong in the future? Of course not, we state them and they provide the cosmovision of our time, which probably will be only that, of our time.


----------



## aleazk

fluteman said:


> I know this is mostly or even entirely tongue-in-cheek on your part, but I think this is the kind of thinking that is the main cause of much of the antagonism here. It doesn't matter how many people share your views, aesthetic, intellectual, linguistic, or semantic, about what music or art is or ideally ought to be. That's not how language works, that's not how music, art or culture works.
> 
> Yes, people have a natural tendency to seek confirmation or validation of their values and tastes from others, but especially in the long run, there are much deeper and more powerful forces at work.
> 
> So I say, trust your ears, have the courage of your convictions, and resist the temptation to make snide, condescending or nasty comments to or about anyone who hears or sees things differently, or worse yet, attempt to prove your own view is somehow more valid. We are all but grains of sand in the mortar between the bricks of the mighty edifice that is Western culture.


I don't think anyone is trying to state what music 'ought' to be (except, perhaps, very conservative and combative listeners). I tried to explain the semantic issues, what gives meaning to terms and concepts. Furthermore, I explained why to have such meaning may be usefull. With my semantic view, the meaning of music that arises is related to the momentary consensus of the community at each epoch. Thus, it's dynamical, empirical, takes what they find valuable in music (i.e., what they find in music that communicates to them, if I may use your terms), has an optimal pragmatic use, etc.

Actually, by tying a couple of your sentences in several posts, I think we have a rather similar view on the things that may influence what we think music is. Perhaps you don't think such a definition can be stated (too complicated, diverse, etc.), and that, even if possible, we are not going to succeed in doing so in a forum, and that, even if possible, it's not helpful for nothing. I disagree with the first, partially agree with the second (but I think some interesting points related to the issue can be successfully discussed here, and we are actually doing so and even succeeded with some advance in many points), as for the third, not sure exactly if you disagree (since you admitted some true in it), but, as I said many times now, I think is crucial for artists (and I say this as a, granted, non-professional, composer, and as a son of an artist and by growing up surrounded by artists because of that).


----------



## Tallisman

aleazk said:


> Well, you are giving your definition, so thanks for playing  And yes, under that notion, the Cage piece is music. But if I don't share your view, then I would say instead "The point of 4'33 is to _try to_ show that _maybe_ music isn't just the notes (or lack of them)"
> 
> Nobody in his sane mind has tried to propose such an 'objective and historically fixed' definition of music. In fact, quite the opposite, we have all agreed since page 1 of this thread that what you say is true. Furthermore, notions of music based on the philosophical ideas of the 20th century have been already proposed and discussed here by many members that participated.
> 
> I already tried to address such semiotic issues. People here seem to disagree with my view but, unfortunately, without telling where exactly, only with generic dismissals by the mere repeating of the same points to which my replies tried to answer. A better strategy would be to actually attack the arguments behind my answers.
> 
> Not really the best at all, it's really trivial, with no thought behind it. Much better things can be done. Such definitions, with their debatable points, have been provided by several participants here.
> 
> Anyway, thanks for the calm tone of your message, even when it disagrees with pretty much most of my views (including when you say that Boulez's is bad music!)


I don't think I gave a definition, and if it seems that I did, then I was unclear. What I was trying to say in that first paragraph about Cage was that he at least pointed us towards the 'definitionless' nature of 'music', in showing that the word had no continually existing fixed set of _referents_, either possible or actual, and was certainly not reducible to 'a predicate of notes on paper or otherwise'. (whatever 'notes' might be, etc etc)

Apropos your good points on historicity and science, I've come to the view that the best way to approach this business and all 'discourse' that aims at some progression of understanding is through something like a Nietzschean 'gay science', where we talk for the sake of talking and enjoy giving our own definitions without _necessarily_ supposing that there is a non-subjective final state behind it and that yet that lies in knowable objects. I think this is the kind of thing you endorse, and I entirely agree; with my response I was certainly not trying to simply shut down the discussion, because that would indicate I was still grieving for some residual notion of objectivity, that 'God that failed'. This is what I think Millionrainbows' attitude was, and it is entirely inappropriate. Whether such a 'gay science' is even possible or an attractive idea to people is not certain. You can count on some of the Christian conservatives on this forum being automatically put off by the first word...



aleazk said:


> What's wrong with "sound organized by a composer"? (with the addition of some clauses, of course)


Nothing! What's wrong with 'music'?

From the standpoint of my new musicological gay science, I don't dismiss the activity of giving definitions because of its unscientific nature or because it provides no fixed answers. I just think there are probably more lively discussions elsewhere (i.e, 'isn't Boulez awful?' ), and also, despite what you say about none of the participants in the discussion aiming at an objective definition, I actually do think a lot of them are actually looking for a hard-and-fast criterion, if only for themselves, and I just find this an exercise that misses the point. Much more interesting is the meta-discussion about the very act of defining that you and I are having now...

I'll try and look for some of your views on the linguistic/semiotic issues in this forum and get back to you.


----------



## aleazk

Tallisman said:


> I don't think I gave a definition, and if it seems that I did, then I was unclear. What I was trying to say in that first paragraph about Cage was that he at least pointed us towards the 'definitionless' nature of 'music', in showing that the word had no continually existing fixed set of _referents_, either possible or actual, and was certainly not reducible to 'a predicate of notes on paper or otherwise'. (whatever 'notes' might be, etc etc)
> 
> Apropos your good points on historicity and science, I've come to the view that the best way to approach this business and all 'discourse' that aims at some progression of understanding is through something like a Nietzschean 'gay science', where we talk for the sake of talking and enjoy giving our own definitions without _necessarily_ supposing that there is a non-subjective final state behind it and that yet that lies in knowable objects. I think this is the kind of thing you endorse, and I entirely agree; with my response I was certainly not trying to simply shut down the discussion, because that would indicate I was still grieving for some residual notion of objectivity, that 'God that failed'. This is what I think Millionrainbows' attitude was, and it is entirely inappropriate. Whether such a 'gay science' is even possible or an attractive idea to people is not certain. You can count on some of the Christian conservatives on this forum being automatically put off by the first word...
> 
> Nothing! What's wrong with 'music'?
> 
> From the standpoint of my new musicological gay science, I don't dismiss the activity of giving definitions because of its unscientific nature or because it provides no fixed answers. I just think there are probably more lively discussions elsewhere (i.e, 'isn't Boulez awful?' ), and also, despite what you say about none of the participants in the discussion aiming at an objective definition, I actually do think a lot of them are actually looking for a hard-and-fast criterion, if only for themselves, and I just find this an exercise that misses the point. Much more interesting is the meta-discussion about the very act of defining that you and I are having now...
> 
> I'll try and look for some of your views on the linguistic/semiotic issues in this forum and get back to you.


Ah, Tallisman, I think you touch the key point there, and perhaps this shows the utility of using more precise semantic terminology and theories of meaning. Indeed, that's exactly what Cage does there. But, we now have to confront this. In this semantic theory, if the referents of a term are more in the formal realm than in the physical world, then it is said that this term belongs to a formal discipline (like math), and in the other case, to an empirical discipline (like physics). Now, if pretty much all of the power of the Cage piece is in the conceptual realm rather than in the empirical of actual composed organized sounds (granted, supposedly we should hear to the ambient noises, but that's a rather weak referent in the sense of composed and deliberately organized sounds, the only true compositional instruction is a conceptual one, not one of explicit working of the sound material, as if Cage didn't want to get his hands dirty by touching the raw material, it is eastern ascetism, it all goes on in the mind, both of the composer and the listener, a mere suggestion or invitation to change our perspective regarding to what should we be listening to, in millions words, like that Schopenhauer suggestion of a mental excercise to avoid suffering in life: concentrate and turn away from the ego or the Will, a typical eastern idea that is key in Cage's worldview and of this piece in particular). Thus, if the pulp of the matters goes on in the conceptual realm, the referents are conceptual, then it belongs to a formal discipline rather than to an empirical one. In art, that formal discipline is conceptual art. That's why I think 4'33'', and pieces based on similar ideas, is conceptual art and not music.

Now, someone may point out what if we take the referents to be just sound, not necessarily organized, so as to include 4'33'' and the like. Problem is that this makes everything and at the same time nothing to be music. It's a trivial referent (it would be like saying that some very specific word in a specific human discipline refers to all of reality, it's vacuous, and we already have a term for that, reality; in the Cage piece, that already existing term is completely random ambient sounds). Thus, the main instruction remains a conceptual one and is only made music, in this approach, by a semantic move that would be unacceptable in any language. Really, this is the only point in which I may claim some objectivity, since I think the flaws are purely on the notion of what language is*, and how should be used, and that has little to do with art itself and our subjective responses to it. By reading Woodduck's posts, I think he pretty much understood this subtle point and he has been remarking it, albeit in his own words and style. After that, my notion of music pretty much includes the rest of all the examples one can throw.

*note: usually, languages and terms which have meaning given by, say, a specific scientific theory or, in music, a range of human concepts which are logically related to the experiences we feel when listening to it, will imply some ontology for the world. In the art case, will divide it into subdisciplines (music, painting, conceptual art, etc.). In this sense, I think that, while this ontology is very time dependent, can be subjective, etc., what I do think is that I see very difficult, despite all that relativization, that it could include things like 4'33'' and similar as music without completely subverting the very notion of language, a linguistic "anything goes". If we take such positions, then we should simply renounce to all form of meaningful communication, since all concepts and word are meaningless. This position may sound attractive because of subjectivity in art, etc., but I think people with that position do not realize that even taking subjectivity into account, that position is untenable by mere logical and linguistic reasons. Also, I find it a bit 'hypocritical' (hey, no value judgement, just a metaphor), since nobody goes in real life applying that notion, it's only shooted in discussions like this, but a second after that everyone goes back to their lives and communicate with their family by using words and concepts that they know have more or less precise meanings (they may even ask someone to put some music... or do they really say "put some of that concept which has no meaning at all"  )


----------



## fluteman

MacLeod said:


> Sorry...if you're saying that I've made condescending or snide or nasty remarks, can you please point out specifics. I might at least know whether to apologise or defend. Thanks.


No, nothing condescending or snide or nasty from you, you've been entirely civil as far as I can tell, and when you disagree with someone, you give your reasons, which is all I could ask.


----------



## Tallisman

aleazk said:


> Ah, Tallisman, I think you touch the key point there, and perhaps this shows the utility of using more precise semantic terminology and theories of meaning. Indeed, that's exactly what Cage does there. But, we now have to confront this. In this semantic theory, if the referents of a term are more in the formal realm than in the physical world, then it is said that this term belongs to a formal discipline (like math), and in the other case, to an empirical discipline (like physics). Now, if pretty much all of the power of the Cage piece is in the conceptual realm rather than in the empirical of actual composed organized sounds (granted, supposedly we should hear to the ambient noises, but that's a rather weak referent in the sense of composed and deliberately organized sounds, the only true compositional instruction is a conceptual one, not one of explicit working of the sound material, as if Cage didn't want to get his hands dirty by touching the raw material, it is eastern ascetism, it all goes on in the mind, both of the composer and the listener, a mere suggestion or invitation to change our perspective regarding to what should we be listening to, in millions words, like that Schopenhauer suggestion of a mental excercise to avoid suffering in life: concentrate and turn away from the ego or the Will, a typical eastern idea that is key in Cage's worldview and of this piece in particular). Thus, if the pulp of the matters goes on in the conceptual realm, the referents are conceptual, then it belongs to a formal discipline rather than to an empirical one. In art, that formal discipline is conceptual art. That's why I think 4'33'', and pieces based on similar ideas, is conceptual art and not music.
> 
> Now, someone may point out what if we take the referents to be just sound, not necessarily organized, so as to include 4'33'' and the like. Problem is that this makes everything and at the same time nothing to be music. It's a trivial referent (it would be like saying that some very specific word in a specific human discipline refers to all of reality, it's vacuous, and we already have a term for that, reality; in the Cage piece, that already existing term is completely random ambient sounds). Thus, the main instruction remains a conceptual one and is only made music, in this approach, by a semantic move that would be unacceptable in any language. Really, this is the only point in which I may claim some objectivity, since I think the flaws are purely on the notion of what language is*, and how should be used, and that has little to do with art itself and our subjective responses to it. By reading Woodduck's posts, I think he pretty much understood this subtle point and he has been remarking it, albeit in his own words and style. After that, my notion of music pretty much includes the rest of all the examples one can throw.
> 
> *note: usually, languages and terms which have meaning given by, say, a specific scientific theory or, in music, a range of human concepts which are logically related to the experiences we feel when listening to it, will imply some ontology for the world. In the art case, will divide it into subdisciplines (music, painting, conceptual art, etc.). In this sense, I think that, while this ontology is very time dependent, can be subjective, etc., what I do think is that I see very difficult, despite all that relativization, that it could include things like 4'33'' and similar as music without completely subverting the very notion of language, a linguistic "anything goes". If we take such positions, then we should simply renounce to all form of meaningful communication, since all concepts and word are meaningless. This position may sound attractive because of subjectivity in art, etc., but I think people with that position do not realize that even taking subjectivity into account, that position is untenable by mere logical and linguistic reasons. Also, I find it a bit 'hypocritical' (hey, no value judgement, just a metaphor), since nobody goes in real life applying that notion, it's only shooted in discussions like this, but a second after that everyone goes back to their lives and communicate with their family by using words and concepts that they know have more or less precise meanings (they may even ask someone to put some music... or do they really say "put some of that concept which has no meaning at all"  )


Certainly the renunciation of meaningful communication is absurd. The philosophical question was never and should never be, 'is there meaning?'. It should rather be 'there is such a thing as meaning/meaningful communication, but what is it precisely that constitutes it/makes it possible?'. You make a good point that those who claim there is no meaningful communication because we don't all see the world in the same way is just clearly wrong, because language was public before it was private. Language is neither subjective nor objective but intersubjective. Meaning just _*is*_ use.

When you say that Cage's move of calling silence music was an untenable semantic move, I couldn't tell whether that was your own opinion or whether you were commenting on some other group's views on language/concepts. I personally don't deem it to be an untenable move at all. The closest thing to an untenable move in a language game would just be something like: you've been talking for hours articulately, in a calm manner, with your friend about Beethoven, and suddenly you erupt into a series of yelps, shrieks, foreign words, and absolute obscenities. That, for the ensuing seconds at least, would simply be untenable and would be so totally alien as to just lack meaning. Either that or just saying something that is grammatically uninterpretable.

I was reading Quine's essay 'On What There Is' recently, and this was a turning point in how I viewed language, because he in that essay, along with later Wittgenstein, just reduces to dust any attempt to link grammar with ontology, and just very simply argues that words don't even need referents to be meaningful, and that we need not even posit 'meanings' as fixed entities, either. We can apply predicates 'musical', 'red', 'meaningful' without needing to simultaneously posit the universals 'musicality', 'redness', 'meaning(fulness)'. And even if we did posit the universal 'musicality', in itself it gives us no clue as to which real objects or even concepts do or should 'take part in it'.

The use of a conceptual word e.g 'music', similarly does not necessarily imply _criteria_ at all (not even temporally changing criteria) for judging whether a possible object is fit to receive it as a predicate. But this has ZERO effect on our ability to use it effectively in conversation with others which is ALL it means to 'know the meaning of a word'. It grew into language organically, it's range of _possible_ referents can't be entirely predicted, whereas we can predict and picture fairly easily what type of object the word 'carrot' will refer to, at least in the near future before it possibly evolves and widens its referents organically, which is unlikely. In any case, a word's extension is not somehow _in the word_. Meaning is a property of actual utterances, or 'speech episodes' to use the Strawsonian term. A word taken in itself, out of language is a series of letters, a collection of phonemes. Once we've divorced the word from its home in conversation and society, it becomes like that strange spectre of the word repeated over and over again in isolation which begins to sound totally ridiculous.

It's a strangely depressing thought at the end of the day. Language constitutes the horizon of all we can think and say, and yet we are trapped in it like a cage (): the only way we can try to understand it is through itself, by turning it in on itself, which is, when you step back, a ridiculous notion. It's like a mouth trying to eat itself.


----------



## Woodduck

Enthusiast said:


> I'm disappointed with this reply as I had expected something more considered. Never mind.
> 
> To start at the end my suggestion that you seem to need to pin things down and to keep chaos at bay were not intended as "sly" at all. I perhaps assumed more familiarity than was appropriate and it genuinely hadn't struck me that you would see me as competing in anything or attacking you. Indeed I am not sure I would have bothered to respond at all - my points were not that important - if I hadn't held you in respect. I naively thought some of what I said might be useful to you. Anyway, I continue to think that my description of your cognitive style has truth but never intended it to carry shame. Perhaps I should have added the word heroic. Rest assured I will be more respectful and guarded in any future interactions with you.
> 
> For the rest I find you do not answer much of what I said.
> 
> 1. You just accuse me of devilry - whatever that means - and clearly read me as arguing against you rather than contributing a few thoughts. These may have been minor but they have implications that can grow if they are ignored. So, the distinction between aesthetic and utilitarian value is a commonplace, yes, but does that mean that no-one can pick it apart a little? It continues to seem to me that aesthetic value is a subset of utlitarian value rather than an opposite. Setting them in opposition is a neat trick but it leaves music as being for the ears of ... God? But then you are clear (indeed your point 2 seems to say this) that music is made by people for people. And once that is acknowledged is it possible to avoid accepting that if some people enjoy and are moved by, say, rap music then it is serving a purpose and is desired by many?
> 
> 2. (originally your earlier point 3) I was sure that you did know that music involved silence as well as sound but in your rule/foundation you stated that music "is made of sound. (There's no need to be clever or cute and point out that musical ideas in the mind and musical notation on paper are silent.)". So clearly it needed tweaking.
> 
> 3. (originally a response to your earlier point 4). I know you don't like me saying that you seem to need to pin things down but it _is _relevant here. It is the _fluidity _that an effective definition of art must have if it is to serve us adequately that you ignore. What you actually say in your reply here is OK (even if it goes to suggest that my position here is extreme and absurd) but it misses my point - an element that is surely (i.e. to me!) the most interesting aspect of this question. What seemed to many to lack purpose or meaning a few decades ago is now imbued with purpose and meaning by many (Warhol's soup tins might be an example) - some of this might have been an artist's intent and some s/he might have foreseen. But there is something derived and accumulated, I think, from the interaction of the work with other cultural elements.
> 
> 4. (a response to my closing comments) I don't presume to define the artist's task and neither of us has been addressing artistic value but if it comes to saying whether something is a work of art or not I stand by my original statement. Your response to this reads as a personal manifesto - perhaps a sound one - rather than a universal truth. That's fine, of course, but not what I was responding to.
> 
> Perhaps we would agree more if the subject was "what art is of value" - I seem to remember that we are not so far apart on that question (although we have very different tastes). But there are many threads that try to open it up and so far little that suggests that a forum wide agreement is possible. Indeed the battles over it have sent many very interesting members packing!
> 
> No need to respond to what I say here. I misread this thread as a discussion when - judging by reactions to posts that I had intended as considered contributions - it is about dissent and competition and these are not really what I seek in this forum.


The reason you're disappointed in my replies is that they didn't say the sorts of things you thought your remarks deserved. It isn't that my replies were not "considered," but that I didn't think your remarks, as you stated them, required more consideration. It's certainly possible that your meanings were not clear to me, and that if they had been I would have considered them further.

It's rarely safe, on the internet, to assume much about how other people "feel." You're wrong in supposing that I felt your post as either competition or an attack. If I'm actually attacked I don't hesitate to call people out on it explicitly. There is no need to be guarded in talking to me, unless you feel that plain talk is something to guard against.

You prefaced your remarks by saying that I had "spurred your Devil's advocate," and that I should "excuse your nitpicking." It's difficult to know what to make of such statements when someone you don't know is debating you. Do they mean that they aren't arguing for what they actually believe? Do they mean that they fundamentally agree with you? It seems an odd sort of equivocating or game-playing, neither of which I have a taste for. I try simply to say what I mean, I always mean what I say, and I can only proceed on the assumption that others are doing the same.

To the substance:

1. In the context of this topic, which asks us to suggest boundaries for that is music and what isn't, the customary distinction between aesthetic and utilitarian value is worth mentioning only in establishing that music is a form of art. That's the only reason I brought I up. Pointing out that aesthetic responses fulfill a need and thus are useful doesn't negate the distinctive nature of aesthetic responses, which is the real issue. As for what those responses might consist of, that's certainly a subject worth exploring.

2. You read my statement that "music is made of sound" as incomplete. Technically, of course, it is, and had my purpose been to describe music exhaustively I would have had to mention the silent pauses between movements and the rests which might occur in the musical texture. But I was not describing music's possible forms; we were asked to define, not to describe, and I was presenting music's essential defining traits. Music may, but need not, include silences. It must, however, include sound.

3. I can't disagree with your statement that "what seemed to many to lack purpose or meaning a few decades ago is now imbued with purpose and meaning by many...." But this may or may not have applicability to the way we define our concepts of art. I've explicitly _not_ insisted that definitions are fixed for all time; if you'll review my past discussions of the cognitive function of definitions and the process by which they're formed (discussions echoed in those of other members, including Eva Yojimbo), you'll see that I regard definitions as open-ended, contingent upon new information and understanding. Ideally, we choose our definitions with this possibility in mind. But cognitive needs require that we employ limited definitions in the present even while knowing that they are ultimately provisional. Applying this to the concept of "music," our question regarding any new phenomenon that we are offered in the name of music needs to be: is there any compelling reason, given what music has customarily been thought to be, to classify this new phenomenon under that term and so redefine the term?

A traditional definition of music says that it is, at minimum, an arrangement of sounds in a perceptible pattern for an aesthetic purpose. Other definitions are conceivable; we might eliminate one or more of the terms of the traditional definition, and say that the sounds need not be arranged but might occur randomly or by chance (or might appear so), or that there needn't be an aesthetic purpose governing their arrangement, or that music might consist of something other than sound (something visual or tactile, perhaps, or something merely "conceptual"). Another possibility would be to regard "music" not as an art but as a wholly perceptual phenomenon, and assert that any sound one listens to for the pleasure of it becomes music by virtue of our listening to it. We might even (though I hope we wouldn't) go to the extreme of asserting that anything anyone wants to call music actually "is" - i.e., ought to be called - music.

The questions we would (and should) ask about any of these alternatives are: _why_ should we call this music? Why does this, whatever it is, make necessary or desirable the replacement of the traditional definition of music? Might there be a better - more useful, more accurate, more informative - name for it? Some here have been asking questions of this nature when confronted with some of the odder productions of the "avant garde." Others seem to resent the questions and the questioners.

There is something to be said for respecting the continuity of thought, language, and culture, even in the face of change and innovation, but especially in the face of aggressive mediocrity and irrationality. This is not closed-mindedness. It's epistemological sanity.


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## Tallisman

Woodduck said:


> There is something to be said for respecting the continuity of thought, language, and culture, even in the face of change and innovation, but especially in the face of aggressive mediocrity and irrationality. This is not closed-mindedness. It's epistemological sanity.


I agree to a certain extent, but in the face of aggressive mediocrity and irrationality I would simply dismiss mediocre works as 'bad music', not as 'not music'. Saying something is music isn't making a value judgement, in my opinion. I call Boulez's Structures music. I also call them basically musical nonsense.

As to 'why' we should call something music and thereby 'replace the traditional definition', well, for exactly the same reason that the people who developed the 'traditional definition' replaced the definition before them, or created it out of nowhere! I don't see that because we invented the term music and it was historically applied to certain sounds and not others that somehow stretching the word's range of referents is being unfaithful to the word itself. To someone in the 18th century, the sound of a door creaking wasn't music. But not due to some strict normative aesthetic notion. It wasn't music, but it wasn't consciously 'not-music' either, if you get what I'm trying to say.

There was language and meaning long before there was a dictionary.


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## eugeneonagain

I'm attracted to your approach (because it somehow clarifies my own opinion for me...such vanity). It's much easier to just include everything purporting to be music or painting or whatever, then to declare works as not very good or not one's cup of tea. Much easier than working hard to define a fundamental idea of music.


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## aleazk

Tallisman said:


> When you say that Cage's move of calling silence music was an untenable semantic move, I couldn't tell whether that was your own opinion or whether you were commenting on some other group's views on language/concepts. I personally don't deem it to be an untenable move at all. The closest thing to an untenable move in a language game would just be something like: you've been talking for hours articulately, in a calm manner, with your friend about Beethoven, and suddenly you erupt into a series of yelps, shrieks, foreign words, and absolute obscenities. That, for the ensuing seconds at least, would simply be untenable and would be so totally alien as to just lack meaning. Either that or just saying something that is grammatically uninterpretable.


It wasn't that much of an opinion, but rather a reasoned argument as to why that move is untenable from the point of view of the theory of meaning I'm using. My view of what is 'nonsense' is a bit narrower than your "sudden eruption into Tourette syndrome-like" gestures. In my view, someone can come and say something that seems to be meaningful (say, "4'33'' is music"), but that, under a rigorous semantic analysis, proves to be meaningless due to the fact that, to be meaningful, it requires a complete subversion of the most elementary rules of language itself (which entails to renounce to communication then). Consider the following example. Suppose that I come here and propose that the term x has for physical referent the whole of reality but that it's, nevertheless, different in meaning from the term "the whole of reality", and, also, claim that both terms are inserted into the same context or logical web of other terms, i.e., the _sense_ (which we simply take as all the concepts that comprise the whole of human discourse). Thus, evidently, either x is forcefully equal to the term "the whole of reality" and then they have the same meaning or the whole of language becomes meaningless since both terms have the same sense and reference but, nevertheless, I'm claiming that they have different meaning (which is defined as, precisely, sense plus reference). The only way out (if we want the terms to have different meaning) is to, either modify the reference of x to just a subset of the whole of reality, or change the sense, or both things. In the case of 4'33'', x is music and "the whole of reality" is "any random ambient noises". Thus, either the term music has the same meaning of the term "any random ambient noises" (in which case, why do we even bother in having such term, 'music', we should erase it from our discourse, here on the forum, in 'real' life, etc.), or language is meaningless (since music and "any random ambient noises" have equal sense and reference but different meanings), or we must change the reference of music to just a subset of "any random ambient noises" (to, e.g., "only those sounds explicitly organized by a composer"), or change both its sense and reference. I choose the second option, i.e., to restrict the referent of music. Thus, there can be no such piece of music whose referent is just sound in all its generality (purely random, included; locally random but with global direction from the composer is music, since it's a form of explicit sound organization, even if there are local random elements). But, what is 4'33'' then? If its referent is "any random ambient noises", then it would be just that. But its referent is not actually that, it's a concept (the concept of changing perspective regarding to what should we be listening to). Thus, this makes 4'33'' conceptual art, since its referent is not sound, but a concept (much less, explicitly organized sound and therefore music). Another option would be to restrict the sense (e.g., to trim away from the logical web those concepts that make possible the common sensical notion of "any random ambient noises" and just maintain those which only allow us to think of those noises in a special way because the composer 'invited' us to do so). But, again, all the action seems to be going on in the conceptual level, physical reality is completely unchanged, we could be seated, still, in a chair all the time with all these changes going on in our minds. Thus, even when there seems to be some physical referent here, it's really trivial and could be easily eliminated, but the instruction or invitation to change perspectives would still be there, since that's really the core of the work. Ultimately, people that consider it music take this option. It's technically valid, but it only becomes empirical by introducing a spurious physical referent that changes nothing. In semantic jargon, these type of referents are called 'ghosts' since they go around without really interating with anything and making no matterial difference (they are ghosts, don't have a body). Thus, this option is really isomorphic to the one in which the referent is purely formal. That's why most people feel that the move to call it music is a 'scam'. It's indeed a semantic handwaving.

Really, I think these types of argumentations really prove that if one wishes to insist in "4'33'' is music", then one must either renounce to language as a whole or to this semantic theory of meaning (and, of course, propose an alternative one which proves to be equally useful and makes that statement about the work to be meaningful, otherwise it's not fair play). But, why to go to such trouble if one can simply recategorize the work as a different type of art and then happily go home. It is not even rendering it as "non-art", it is art. And, also, I have nothing against it, I'm only using it because I think it sets the boundary, and even that already shows that it has some value.



Tallisman said:


> I was reading Quine's essay 'On What There Is' recently, and this was a turning point in how I viewed language, because he in that essay, along with later Wittgenstein, just reduces to dust any attempt to link grammar with ontology, and just very simply argues that words don't even need referents to be meaningful, and that we need not even posit 'meanings' as fixed entities, either. We can apply predicates 'musical', 'red', 'meaningful' without needing to simultaneously posit the universals 'musicality', 'redness', 'meaning(fulness)'. And even if we did posit the universal 'musicality', in itself it gives us no clue as to which real objects or even concepts do or should 'take part in it'.


Yeah, Quine's view is the so called "extensionalism", in which things get a meaning by grouping them into subsets of things that share common characteristics, and I guess that goes well with Wittgenstein's late pragmatic view. But those are philosophies I don't share. They have fatal flaws that have been discussed in the literature (for instance, it's not how semantics in science works, which is a good test for any philosophy that claims to be rigorous thought).

As for ontology, it depends how you view ontology. I view ontology, in science, as always tied to a particular theory, and, in general discourse, as always tied to a social context and time framework (think about the notion of gender in the social sense, today, the binary view is being challenged, this is nothing more than a new epoch asking for a change in the ontology of our cosmovision to adapt to the values we currently have; thus, ontology is not fixed, it can be changed and refined; for instance, I recently finished a small book that describes how the ontologies implied by the different physical theories evolved and were refined in time as those theories were being superseded by more accurate ones). Ontology has been declared dead so many times, and, yet, it has survived all of its executioners!



Tallisman said:


> The use of a conceptual word e.g 'music', similarly does not necessarily imply _criteria_ at all (not even temporally changing criteria) for judging whether a possible object is fit to receive it as a predicate. But this has ZERO effect on our ability to use it effectively in conversation with others which is ALL it means to 'know the meaning of a word'. It grew into language organically, it's range of _possible_ referents can't be entirely predicted, whereas we can predict and picture fairly easily what type of object the word 'carrot' will refer to, at least in the near future before it possibly evolves and widens its referents organically, which is unlikely. In any case, a word's extension is not somehow _in the word_. Meaning is a property of actual utterances, or 'speech episodes' to use the Strawsonian term. A word taken in itself, out of language is a series of letters, a collection of phonemes. Once we've divorced the word from its home in conversation and society, it becomes like that strange spectre of the word repeated over and over again in isolation which begins to sound totally ridiculous.


Yeah, late Wittgenstein, pragmatism, etc. Thing is that my view on meaning doesn't contradict those features, it explains them from a deeper theory of meaning, and, most important, shows where are the limitations of those features. That's why I much more prefer it over Lugi's one.



Tallisman said:


> It's a strangely depressing thought at the end of the day. Language constitutes the horizon of all we can think and say, and yet we are trapped in it like a cage (): the only way we can try to understand it is through itself, by turning it in on itself, which is, when you step back, a ridiculous notion. It's like a mouth trying to eat itself.


Yeah, but language, and its implied ontology, also evolves as we know more and change our worldviews and values. Of course, there may be some ultimate limit, in the sense of Kant, where the mind may not be showing us what reality really is, and, of course, we cannot escape our minds, so we may never know what that deep reality is. Curiously enough for all this discussion (Cage and Buddhism included), the only philosopher, earlier to himself, that Wittgenstein read and truly digested was Schopenhauer, as strange as that may sound (if one reads the Tractatus and Schop's. The World as Will..etc., they couldn't look more dissimilar!), which is basically rationalized Buddhism, and Schopenhauer was very influenced by Kant. Maybe all these guys, probably much more intelligent than any of us here, know each other and are playing games to us and having great fun! :lol:

This has been a very good chat, in which the topic was seen from different theories of meaning and where the differences in both theories and the results have been explained by each of us. It shows one can have opposite views on some points (I don't think we disagree on everything, though, just on the small letter) and yet have a civilized discussion. At least, speaking for myself, I enjoyed it and it forced me to put my ideas in even more precise terms and to think more about it. Certainly this gymnastics will pay some fruits if I have to write some new essay that uses this same theory of meaning for something.


----------



## aleazk

eugeneonagain said:


> I'm attracted to your approach (because it somehow clarifies my own opinion for me...such vanity). It's much easier to just include everything purporting to be music or painting or whatever, then to declare works as not very good or not one's cup of tea. Much easier than working hard to define a fundamental idea of music.


I had the same view until these discussions started some weeks ago. Ha! maybe I should go back in time for my own good. :lol:


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> Applying this to the concept of "music," our question regarding any new phenomenon that we are offered in the name of music needs to be: is there any compelling reason, given what music has customarily been thought to be, to classify this new phenomenon under that term and so redefine the term?


My only caveat to all of that concerns the part I quote above. Both music and verbal language evolve not due to conscious and carefully considered decisions, but due to a natural non-conscious and usually gradual process of accumulated practical experience and consensus. Yes, attempts are made. With their Académie française, the French had the idea of trying to formally control what new words would be allowed into the language in a foolish attempt to keep it purely "French". Consider that while you listen to le jazz and eat le hamburger.

Similar things have been attempted with painting, sculpture and music. But with little success. The folly of Pierre Boulez in pronouncing what music is or must be has nothing to do with his insistence on atonality and everything to do with his mistaken idea that he or any one person is in a position to pronounce such a thing. In time, some attempts at artistic expression have a profound, long-term impact on our culture, others have a lesser impact, and still others have little or no long-term impact. There are a multitude of reasons why, so much so they are all but impossible to fully describe and categorize. That's why I keep saying the question is ultimately an empirical one. And not an empirical question that can be answered simply by polling some TC members. One has to step out into the street, a lot of streets actually, and listen to what's going on.


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## Tallisman

fluteman said:


> My only caveat to all of that concerns the part I quote above. Both music and verbal language evolve not due to conscious and carefully considered decisions, but due to a natural non-conscious and usually gradual process of accumulated practical experience and consensus. Yes, attempts are made. With their Académie française, the French had the idea of trying to formally control what new words would be allowed into the language in a foolish attempt to keep it purely "French". Consider that while you listen to le jazz and eat le hamburger.


That's precisely my argument, but phrased much more lucidly:lol:


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## Woodduck

Tallisman said:


> I agree to a certain extent, but in the face of aggressive mediocrity and irrationality I would simply dismiss mediocre works as 'bad music', not as 'not music'. Saying something is music isn't making a value judgement, in my opinion. I call Boulez's Structures music. I also call them basically musical nonsense.
> 
> *As to 'why' we should call something music and thereby 'replace the traditional definition', well, for exactly the same reason that the people who developed the 'traditional definition' replaced the definition before them, or created it out of nowhere! *I don't see that because we invented the term music and it was historically applied to certain sounds and not others that somehow stretching the word's range of referents is being unfaithful to the word itself.
> 
> There was language and meaning long before there was a dictionary.


When was the traditional definition of music ever either invented or replaced? Practitioners of the _ars antiqua_, so far as I know, didn't accuse the innovators of the _ars nova_ of not composing music. Europeans, discovering the music of Asia, recognized it as music. Saint-Saens, his cranky remarks to the contrary, knew very well that Debussy was writing music. The idea of music is a big tent, and I'm unaware of any moment in history before recent times when its ability to accommodate contemporary or past offerings in its name was seriously questioned. We've stretched its range of referents enormously, and it's been unproblematic to do so as long as those referents have had something very basic in common.

I think that for the most part the traditional idea of music remains what it always was. A handful of "avant garde" bohemians and their academic apologists who delight in smashing cultural categories, outdoing one another in the pursuit of novelty, and collecting tax-funded grants for doing very little work, can use words any way they wish, but there's no reason to rewrite those dictionaries to accommodate them.


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## Tallisman

aleazk said:


> It wasn't that much of an opinion, but rather a reasoned argument as to why that move is untenable from the point of view of the theory of meaning I'm using. My view of what is 'nonsense' is a bit narrower than your "sudden eruption into Tourette syndrome-like" gestures. In my view, someone can come and say something that seems to be meaningful (say, "4'33'' is music"), but that, under a rigorous semantic analysis, proves to be meaningless due to the fact that, to be meaningful, it requires a complete subversion of the most elementary rules of language itself (which entails to renounce to communication then). Consider the following example. Suppose that I come here and propose that the term x has for physical referent the whole of reality but that it's, nevertheless, different in meaning from the term "the whole of reality", and, also, claim that both terms are inserted into the same context or logical web of other terms, i.e., the _sense_ (which we simply take as all the concepts that comprise the whole of human discourse). Thus, evidently, either x is forcefully equal to the term "the whole of reality" and then they have the same meaning or the whole of language becomes meaningless since both terms have the same sense and reference but, nevertheless, I'm claiming that they have different meaning (which is defined as, precisely, sense plus reference). The only way out (if we want the terms to have different meaning) is to, either modify the reference of x to just a subset of the whole of reality, or change the sense, or both things. In the case of 4'33'', x is music and "the whole of reality" is "any random ambient noises". Thus, either the term music has the same meaning of the term "any random ambient noises" (in which case, why do we even bother in having such term, 'music', we should erase it from our discourse, here on the forum, in 'real' life, etc.), or language is meaningless (since music and "any random ambient noises" have equal sense and reference but different meanings), or we must change the reference of music to just a subset of "any random ambient noises" (to, e.g., "only those sounds explicitly organized by a composer"), or change both its sense and reference. I choose the second option, i.e., to restrict the referent of music. Thus, there can be no such piece of music whose referent is just sound in all its generality (purely random, included; locally random but with global direction from the composer is music, since it's a form of explicit sound organization, even if there are local random elements). But, what is 4'33'' then? If its referent is "any random ambient noises", then it would be just that. But its referent is not actually that, it's a concept (the concept of changing perspective regarding to what should we be listening to). Thus, this makes 4'33'' conceptual art, since its referent is not sound, but a concept (much less, explicitly organized sound and therefore music). Another option would be to restrict the sense (e.g., to trim away from the logical web those concepts that make possible the common sensical notion of "any random ambient noises" and just maintain those which only allow us to think of those noises in a special way because the composer 'invited' us to do so). But, again, all the action seems to be going on in the conceptual level, physical reality is completely unchanged, we could be seated, still, in a chair all the time with all these changes going on in our minds. Thus, even when there seems to be some physical referent here, it's really trivial and could be easily eliminated, but the instruction or invitation to change perspectives would still be there, since that's really the core of the work. Ultimately, people that consider it music take this option. It's technically valid, but it only becomes empirical by introducing a spurious physical referent that changes nothing. In semantic jargon, these type of referents are called 'ghosts' since they go around without really interating with anything and making no matterial difference (they are ghosts, don't have a body). Thus, this option is really isomorphic to the one in which the referent is purely formal. That's why most people feel that the move to call it music is a 'scam'. It's indeed a semantic handwaving.
> 
> Really, I think these types of argumentations really prove that if one wishes to insist in "4'33'' is music", then one must either renounce to language as a whole or to this semantic theory of meaning (and, of course, propose an alternative one which proves to be equally useful and makes that statement about the work to be meaningful, otherwise it's not fair play). But, why to go to such trouble if one can simple recategorize the work as a different type of art and then happily go home. That's, it is not even rendering as "non-art", it is. And, also, I have nothing against it, I'm only using it because I think it sets the boundary, and even that already shows that it has some value.
> 
> Yeah, Quine's view is the so called "extensionalism", in which things get a meaning by grouping them into subsets of things that share common characteristics, and I guess that goes well with Wittgenstein's late pragmatic view. But those are philosophies I don't share. They have fatal flaws that have been discussed in the literature (for instance, it's not how semantics in science works, which is a good test for any philosophy that claims to be rigorous thought).
> 
> As for ontology, it depends how you view ontology. I view ontology, in science, as always tied to a particular theory, and, in general discourse, as always tied to a social context and time framework (thing about the notion of gender in the social sense, today, the binary view is being challenged, this is nothing more that a new epoch asking for a change in the ontology of our cosmovision to adapt to the values we currently have; thus, ontology is not fixed, it can be changed and refined; for instance, I recently finished a small book that describes how the ontologies implied by the different physical theories evolved and were refined in time as those theories were being superseded by more accurate ones). Ontology has been declared dead so many times, and, yet, it has survived all of its executioners!
> 
> Yeah, late Wittgenstein, pragmatism, etc. Thing is that my view on meaning does't contradict those features, it explains them from a deeper theory of meaning, and, most important, shows where are the limitations of those features. That's why I much more prefer it over Lugi's one.
> 
> Yeah, but language, and its implied ontology, also evolves as we know more and change our worldviews and values. Of course, there may be some ultimate limit, in the sense of Kant, where the mind may not be showing us what reality really is, and, of course, we cannot escape our minds, so we may never know what that deep reality is. Curiously enough for all this discussion (Cage and Buddhism included), the only philosopher, earlier to himself, that Wittgenstein read and truly digested was Schopenhauer, as strange as that may sound (if one reads the Tractatus and Schop's. The World as Will..etc., they couldn't look more dissimilar!), which is basically rationalized Buddhism, and Schopenhauer was very influenced by Kant. Maybe all these guys, probably much more intelligent than any of us here, know each other and are playing with us and having great fun! :lol:


Ah... philosophical discussions... 

I think I could sum up the basic difference in our semantic views by saying that whilst you think the Fregean 'sense + reference' analysis can actually inform later-Wittgenstein/Austin/Strawson/Pragmatism, I deem the progression of linguistic analysis since the beginning of the 'linguistic turn' to be a series of positive blows to the Fregean/Russellian view of what meaning actually is, a progression that has steadily moved us away from trying to precisely locate the structures of meaning and studying the varieties of reference and resolved the philosophy of language into actual linguistics (particularly evolutionary, cognitive studies). As a hard-and-fast 'theory of meaning', the 'sense + reference' formula was shown to be crude and with too many complications. That's my view anyway. It has its uses, but it is not fundamental. We moved from objects, into words, to propositions, to utterances, and then finally back to objects after a fruitful journey. Trust me, it wasn't an intellectual change I thrust myself into - I resisted a kind of Rortian/Wittgensteinian pragmatism (about language) for a long time, but have come to regard it as essentially the view that has the least theoretical difficulties, and which most closely aligns with the idea of language as the organic phenomenon it is, emerging organically out of the evolution of humans as social creatures and not necessarily designed for the scientific articulation of the world. The other prong of the fork led down into Kripke and we happily resolved ourselves back into metaphysics and ontology, which is something I'm much more willing to be speculative and theoretical about 

As for Schopenhauer, I've never been much of a fan. Kant was my first real obsession, and I follow him down into Schelling and Hegel, and think of grumpy Arthur as a rather singular figure, and not someone who can be theoretically redeemed in the way Kant and Hegel have been in recent years. Wittgenstein was also keen on a guy called Otto Weininger in his younger years, who was clearly much worse :lol:


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## eugeneonagain

One really has to remain open-minded at the frontiers of art, which means that you also must take, and sometimes waste, time evaluating things.
There is, however, one major aspect of 'new music' which greatly annoys me. Over the previous century there were many great and serious efforts (mostly forgotten or ignored) made at finding new pathways in classical music composition; especially in the first thirty years. Instead of these entering the listening canon or being developed, and as is always the case, the most outlandish and noisy (or quiet as the case may be) and, frankly, ridiculous efforts have succeeded in hogging all the attention, in some respects smothering everything like a fire blanket.

It is also evident in other areas of the arts world. It's a really fine balancing act and I can't claim to be the undisputed arbiter of what is and isn't great, yet I'm fairly confident about identifying some things that are not very good at all. There are a lot of deluded charlatans about who are encouraged by an art world that is afraid of appearing too conservative and waffling critics who make stuff up on the fly.

This is why I can find agreement with Tallisman. There _is_ good avant-garde and general modern music being produced, but we end up being caged (not a pun!) by discussions about sensationalist tripe and then end up with established artists like Damien Hirst.


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## fluteman

Tallisman said:


> Ah... philosophical discussions...
> 
> I think I could sum up the basic difference in our semantic views by saying that whilst you think the Fregean 'sense + reference' analysis can actually inform later-Wittgenstein/Austin/Strawson/Pragmatism, I deem the progression of linguistic analysis since the beginning of the 'linguistic turn' to be a series of positive blows to the Fregean/Russellian view of what meaning actually is, a progression that has steadily moved us away from trying to precisely locate the structures of meaning and studying the varieties of reference and resolved the philosophy of language into actual linguistics (particularly evolutionary, cognitive studies). As a hard-and-fast 'theory of meaning', the 'sense + reference' formula was shown to be crude and with too many complications. That's my view anyway. It has its uses, but it is not fundamental. We moved from objects, into words, to propositions, to utterances, and then finally back to objects after a fruitful journey. Trust me, it wasn't an intellectual change I thrust myself into - I resisted a kind of Rortian/Wittgensteinian pragmatism (about language) for a long time, but have come to regard it as essentially the view that has the least theoretical difficulties, and which most closely aligns with the idea of language as the organic phenomenon it is, emerging organically out of the evolution of humans as social creatures and not necessarily designed for the scientific articulation of the world. The other prong of the fork led down into Kripke and we happily resolved ourselves back into metaphysics and ontology, which is something I'm much more willing to be speculative and theoretical about
> 
> As for Schopenhauer, I've never been much of a fan. Kant was my first real obsession, and I follow him down into Schelling and Hegel, and think of grumpy Arthur as a rather singular figure, and not someone who can be theoretically redeemed in the way Kant and Hegel have been in recent years. Wittgenstein was also keen on a guy called Otto Weininger in his younger years, who was clearly much worse :lol:


You're right. I do put it more lucidly. :lol:


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## Tallisman

Woodduck said:


> When was the traditional definition of music ever either invented or replaced? Practitioners of the _ars antiqua_, so far as I know, didn't accuse the innovators of the _ars nova_ of not composing music. Europeans, discovering the music of Asia, recognized it as music. Saint-Saens, his cranky remarks to the contrary, knew very well that Debussy was writing music. The idea of music is a big tent, and I'm unaware of any moment in history before recent times when its ability to accommodate contemporary or past offerings in its name was seriously questioned. We've stretched its range of referents enormously, and it's been unproblematic to do so as long as those referents have had something very basic in common.
> 
> I think that for the most part the traditional idea of music remains what it always was. A handful of "avant garde" bohemians and their academic apologists who delight in smashing cultural categories, outdoing one another in the pursuit of novelty, and collecting tax-funded grants for doing very little work can use words any way they wish, but there's no reason to rewrite those dictionaries to accommodate them.


I can't help but think that you view modernity onwards as history's Grand Perversion, the time in which all culture becomes fuzzy, and reliable old notions were pushed unnecessarily. I'm saying that it is _with modernity that we become self-conscious about definitions at all_, which makes our successive attempts to limit the range of a notion just not very worthwhile. I deem the massive challenges to old definitions made in modernity just as 'organic' as the little changes made in the centuries before.

I have no interest in 'rewriting dictionaries' because dictionaries are an expression of consensus, and the large consensus would refuse to view 4'33 as music. Fair enough. But what precisely is it in common that you demand things may possess in order to be 'music'? I call the silences inbetween the chords at the end of the first movement of Sibelius 5th among the most deeply musical inventions in the symphonic repertoire. I grant that the products of the 'avant garde bohemians' and freeze-dried post-serialist academic composers are particularly frustrating in that they are very _self-consciously_ directed challenges against a perfectly functioning old notion and make a rather childish attempt to stretch it to its notional breaking point until it dissolves into allowing the totality of sounds. In that sense, I think it is fairer to challenge their status as 'music' than it is to challenge a Beethoven sonata's, because while Beethoven's sonatas fit 'music''s notional capacity without any real question, these modern works do not do so as easily. I can thus make the judgement that while _both are music_, Beethoven today is perhaps 'more musical' because he doesn't actually try to dissolve the very concept as the others do. It fits the notion _as known and used for longer stretches of time_. But not much more.


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## aleazk

Tallisman said:


> Ah... philosophical discussions...
> 
> I think I could sum up the basic difference in our semantic views by saying that whilst you think the Fregean 'sense + reference' analysis can actually inform later-Wittgenstein/Austin/Strawson/Pragmatism, I deem the progression of linguistic analysis since the beginning of the 'linguistic turn' to be a series of positive blows to the Fregean/Russellian view of what meaning actually is, a progression that has steadily moved us away from trying to precisely locate the structures of meaning and studying the varieties of reference and resolved the philosophy of language into actual linguistics (particularly evolutionary, cognitive studies). As a hard-and-fast 'theory of meaning', the 'sense + reference' formula was shown to be crude and with too many complications. That's my view anyway. It has its uses, but it is not fundamental. We moved from objects, into words, to propositions, to utterances, and then finally back to objects after a fruitful journey. Trust me, it wasn't an intellectual change I thrust myself into - I resisted a kind of Rortian/Wittgensteinian pragmatism (about language) for a long time, but have come to regard it as essentially the view that has the least theoretical difficulties, and which most closely aligns with the idea of language as the organic phenomenon it is, emerging organically out of the evolution of humans as social creatures and not necessarily designed for the scientific articulation of the world. The other prong of the fork led down into Kripke and we happily resolved ourselves back into metaphysics and ontology, which is something I'm much more willing to be speculative and theoretical about
> 
> As for Schopenhauer, I've never been much of a fan. Kant was my first real obsession, and I follow him down into Schelling and Hegel, and think of grumpy Arthur as a rather singular figure, and not someone who can be theoretically redeemed in the way Kant and Hegel have been in recent years. Wittgenstein was also keen on a guy called Otto Weininger in his younger years, who was clearly much worse :lol:


Yes.

I would only like to add that the theory I use is not exactly the ol' Frege one, but a modern version of it that takes into account the insights by Wittgenstein and all that. The result is much more on the organic-like thing that you mention (Frege's notion of sense, for instance, is rather vague; in the theory I use, this notion is make much more precise and it's thanks to this that the contextual, time included, dependence is included in the meaning; it basically is to reduce sense to the logical framework of each theory; in music, I would say to the intersubjectivity of each epoch). But it would take a big detour here to explain what are the modifications to the old theory. I tend to be partial to that theory because it fuses pretty well with science's philosophical core and gave me quite a lot of insight on the meaning of some rather elusive notions there (like, "what's the physical referent of quantum physics?", seas of ink have flowed to try to answer that and the only theory that really seems to give some insight, in my view, is this one; it's tied, too, to the old fight of realism vs. anti-realism, the pragmatic view, of course, goes well with the anti realist view to which I oppose, I'll stick with metaphysics too, as you say). Another view I have, which may be more controversial (although it should be much less than it actually is), is that a philosophy that doesn't complement well with science is suspicious (e.g., postmodernism). Since logical positivism, this point of view is central in modern analytical philosophy (although positivism has been largely superseded there). This doesn't mean that one is advocating rigidness into the rest of human activities that are not science (thing which makes the alarms to sound when these disciplines are related to art, where 'subjectivity rules'). I think those are rather chlichéd prejudices that are difficult to explain why they are not true to someone not in science. Anyway, not something that we could discuss here.

Ha, Schopy didn't have very good things to say about Hegel and friends. I think his famous pessimism can be ignored and that he offers some interesting insight into Kant, metaphysics, and Buddhism.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> My only caveat to all of that concerns the part I quote above. Both music and verbal language evolve not due to conscious and carefully considered decisions, but due to a natural non-conscious and usually gradual process of accumulated practical experience and consensus. Yes, attempts are made. With their Académie française, the French had the idea of trying to formally control what new words would be allowed into the language in a foolish attempt to keep it purely "French". Consider that while you listen to le jazz and eat le hamburger.
> 
> Similar things have been attempted with painting, sculpture and music. But with little success. The folly of Pierre Boulez in pronouncing what music is or must be has nothing to do with his insistence on atonality and everything to do with his mistaken idea that he or any one person is in a position to pronounce such a thing. In time, some attempts at artistic expression have a profound, long-term impact on our culture, others have a lesser impact, and still others have little or no long-term impact. There are a multitude of reasons why, so much so they are all but impossible to fully describe and categorize. That's why I keep saying the question is ultimately an empirical one. And not an empirical question that can be answered simply by polling some TC members. One has to step out into the street, a lot of streets actually, and listen to what's going on.


That's certainly true, but I think that attempt fails because it's absurdly conservative and even moraly questionable in its real motivations. If any, is an example of what we should avoid, but I don't think it means that attempts at definitions are useless or baseless.

Regarding Boulez, it served him to spark his creativity and good (if not central) pieces came from that (e.g., 2nd piano sonata). That's enough to justify it, at least applied to him. Certainly not the latter dogmatic view which was imposed on music students of that time.

As for the poll, I already said it was just a joke. It would be really silly to extrapolate anything from it. If anything, at least it was useful for some, e.g., MacLeod, to familiarize with new, to him pieces. That is good, I would say.

But, in general, what you say seems pretty close to my view, not sure where's the disagreement.


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## aleazk

Tallisman said:


> I can't help but think that you view modernity onwards as history's Grand Perversion, the time in which all culture becomes fuzzy, and reliable old notions were pushed unnecessarily. I'm saying that it is _with modernity that we become self-conscious about definitions at all_, which makes our successive attempts to limit the range of a notion just not very worthwhile. I deem the massive challenges to old definitions made in modernity just as 'organic' as the little changes made in the centuries before.
> 
> I have no interest in 'rewriting dictionaries' because dictionaries are an expression of consensus, and the large consensus would refuse to view 4'33 as music. Fair enough. But what precisely is it in common that you demand things may possess in order to be 'music'? I call the silences inbetween the chords at the end of the first movement of Sibelius 5th among the most deeply musical inventions in the symphonic repertoire. I grant that the products of the 'avant garde bohemians' and freeze-dried post-serialist academic composers are particularly frustrating in that they are very _self-consciously_ directed challenges against a perfectly functioning old notion and make a rather childish attempt to stretch it to its notional breaking point until it dissolves into allowing the totality of sounds. In that sense, I think it is fairer to challenge their status as 'music' than it is to challenge a Beethoven sonata's, because while Beethoven's sonatas fit 'music''s notional capacity without any real question, these modern works do not do so as easily. I can thus make the judgement that while _both are music_, Beethoven today is perhaps 'more musical' because he doesn't actually try to dissolve the very concept as the others do. It fits the notion _as known and used for longer stretches of time_. But not much more.


If you see his definition of music in the first pages, it's quite wide, and it certainly includes lots of examples as music that I don't think he likes at all. But that was deliberate, I think, since that was the idea, to think a bit, not to throw our immediate tastes as the definition.


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## Woodduck

Tallisman said:


> I can't help but think that you view modernity onwards as history's Grand Perversion, the time in which all culture becomes fuzzy, and reliable old notions were pushed unnecessarily. I'm saying that it is _with modernity that we become self-conscious about definitions at all_, which makes our successive attempts to limit the range of a notion just not very worthwhile. I deem the massive challenges to old definitions made in modernity just as 'organic' as the little changes made in the centuries before.
> 
> I have no interest in 'rewriting dictionaries' because dictionaries are an expression of consensus, and the large consensus would refuse to view 4'33 as music. Fair enough. But what precisely is it in common that you demand things may possess in order to be 'music'? I call the silences inbetween the chords at the end of the first movement of Sibelius 5th among the most deeply musical inventions in the symphonic repertoire. I grant that the products of the 'avant garde bohemians' and freeze-dried post-serialist academic composers are particularly frustrating in that they are very _self-consciously_ directed challenges against a perfectly functioning old notion and make a rather childish attempt to stretch it to its notional breaking point until it dissolves into allowing the totality of sounds. In that sense, I think it is fairer to challenge their status as 'music' than it is to challenge a Beethoven sonata's, because while Beethoven's sonatas fit 'music''s notional capacity without any real question, these modern works do not do so as easily. I can thus make the judgement that while _both are music_, Beethoven today is perhaps 'more musical' because he doesn't actually try to dissolve the very concept as the others do. It fits the notion _as known and used for longer stretches of time_. But not much more.


You want to make this a matter of degree and distinguish that from a difference in kind. First, I don't think the difference between the "Hammerklavier Sonata" and Cage's "Water Walk" is merely a matter of degree. A great enough difference in degree can bring about a difference in kind (are humans really just smarter apes, or did we become something qualitatively different?), but I don't think we even need to factor that in here. The "Hammerklavier," a mass by Machaut, Sibelius's 5th, Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron," a raga by Ali Akbar Khan, a Javanese gamelan, and an Apache war chant have things in common that "Cactus and Feather," and even probably Sdraulig's "collector," don't have in common with any of them.

I don't think it's true at all that it's only with modernity that we became self-conscious about definitions (depending, I suppose, on what you mean by "modernity" and "self-consciousness"); heck, Aristotle was pretty busy defining things. And I have to ask why self-consciousness is a reason for busting up the past. Saying that "the massive challenges to old definitions made in modernity" are "just as 'organic' as the little changes made in the centuries before" mixes categories a bit awkwardly: "challenges" as organic as "changes"? And what makes an innovation "organic," if it isn't some outgrowth of past practice? The mere attitude of "questioning" and shaking things up hardly constitutes a practice, but it is a handy excuse for not practicing anything. It lends superficial plausibility to the idea of touting a performance centered on the absence of music as a new kind of music.


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## Tallisman

aleazk said:


> If you see his definition of music in the first pages, it's quite wide, and it certainly includes lots of examples as music that I don't think he likes at all. But that was deliberate, I think, since that was the idea, to think a bit, not to throw our immediate tastes as the definition.


I find that if a definition is so wide and long, that's usually a good sign that the word works better undefined, or that the definition, in its desperate attempt to grasp a fluid concept, finds itself lost in its own excessive and unnecessary complexities and problems.


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## Woodduck

aleazk said:


> If you see his definition of music in the first pages, it's quite wide, and it certainly includes lots of examples as music that I don't think he likes at all. But that was deliberate, I think, since that was the idea, to think a bit, not to throw our immediate tastes as the definition.


Very deliberate. Sincere thanks for understanding. :tiphat:


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## aleazk

Woodduck said:


> You want to make this a matter of degree and distinguish that from a difference in kind. First, I don't think the difference between the "Hammerklavier Sonata" and Cage's "Water Walk" is merely a matter of degree. A great enough difference in degree can bring about a difference in kind (are humans really just smarter apes, or did we become something qualitatively different?), but I don't think we even need to factor that in here. The "Hammerklavier," a mass by Machaut, Sibelius's 5th, Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron," a raga by Ali Akbar Khan, a Javanese gamelan, and an Apache war chant have things in common that "Cactus and Feather," and even probably Sdraulig's "collector," don't have in common with any of them.
> 
> I don't think it's true at all that it's only with modernity that we became self-conscious about definitions (depending, I suppose, on what you mean by "modernity" and "self-consciousness"); heck, Aristotle was pretty busy defining things. And I have to ask why self-consciousness is a reason for busting up the past. Saying that "the massive challenges to old definitions made in modernity" are "just as 'organic' as the little changes made in the centuries before" mixes categories a bit awkwardly: "challenges" as organic as "changes"? And what makes an innovation "organic," if it isn't some outgrowth of past practice? The mere attitude of "questioning" and shaking things up hardly constitutes a practice, but it is a handy excuse for not practicing anything. It lends superficial plausibility to the idea of touting a performance centered on the absence of music as a new kind of music.


That's a good example and exactly the kind of ontologization which scientific theories suggest of which I was talking about. In fact, it's known that Darwin had some trouble in defending his theory from some attackers at that time because his lack of philisophical background made difficult for him to define what was exactly an animal species since those species were constantly mutating from one to a new one. And it also shows how vacuous the discourse becomes if we do not define* things (are we all mere apes then?, are all apes human then? Etc.)

*which, I repeat, are not necessarily set on stone, if the theory changes, so do the definitions, although a minimal thing is always common. For example, animal species will always refer to a subset of animals (what specific features make us decide what defines the notion in a more detailed way?, that will depend on the specific theory about species that we adopt). If we make it refer to the set of all animals, then we kill the notion, and to what gain? To the impoverishment of language. That's the kind of issues we are mentioning here.


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## Tallisman

Woodduck said:


> You want to make this a matter of degree and distinguish that from a difference in kind. First, I don't think the difference between the "Hammerklavier Sonata" and Cage's "Water Walk" is merely a matter of degree. A great enough difference in degree can bring about a difference in kind (are humans really just smarter apes, or did we become something qualitatively different?), but I don't think we even need to factor that in here. The "Hammerklavier," a mass by Machaut, Sibelius's 5th, Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron," a raga by Ali Akbar Khan, a Javanese gamelan, and an Apache war chant have things in common that "Cactus and Feather," and even probably Sdraulig's "collector," don't have in common with any of them.
> 
> I don't think it's true at all that it's only with modernity that we became self-conscious about definitions (depending, I suppose, on what you mean by "modernity" and "self-consciousness"); heck, Aristotle was pretty busy defining things. And I have to ask why self-consciousness is a reason for busting up the past. Saying that "the massive challenges to old definitions made in modernity" are "just as 'organic' as the little changes made in the centuries before" mixes categories a bit awkwardly: "challenges" as organic as "changes"? And what makes an innovation "organic," if it isn't some outgrowth of past practice? The mere attitude of "questioning" and shaking things up hardly constitutes a practice, but it is a handy excuse for not practicing anything. It lends superficial plausibility to the idea of touting a performance centered on the absence of music as a new kind of music.


Look, let's not forget we both share a rather profound distaste for the cultural practices of aesthetically resentful academic mortician-composers. However:
1) Modernity was caused. It happened. It happened in history. It's not some inexplicable intrusion. It's also over. It takes its place in a causal chain as one in a series of attitudes to musical composition, one that chronologically followed from others. Whether it was/is _justified_ I just deem a pointless question, because the fact that it_ did_ happen in musical circles takes precedence in our conversation.
2) I just simply don't agree that 'questioning' and 'shaking things up' for their own sake don't constitute a practice. It's a less worthy practice for a composer, in my view, but nonetheless a practice, and a practice made manifest in (often bad) creative works.
3) Why isn't modernity an outgrowth of past practice? How is it _not_ an outgrowth of past practice? Isn't everything an outgrowth of a past something? 
4) Philosophers musing upon 'being' and 'humanity' is different to swathes of academic composers toying with a less patently philosophical notion. It is not so much that with modernity we become concerned with defining, but rather we become much more consciously concerned with the historical fragility of a notion/definition; and so swathes of actual creative artists in actual creative domains begin toying with concepts and notions, testing them, pointing to their inherent problematics.

I don't see us ever really arriving at an agreement other than agreeing to disagree, if you don't find that too boring :lol: I'm not arguing for calling what you don't consider music, 'bad music' because I think it's just conceptually correct - rather I just think it's simpler, and is dogged with fewer semantic issues and doesn't require me to draw a line of criteria beyond myself. Cactus and feathers I regard as performance art before music, but music nonetheless (particularly boring performance art, too, just like most performance art, actually).


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> Regarding Boulez, it served him to spark his creativity and good (if not central) pieces came from that (e.g., 2nd piano sonata). That's enough to justify it, at least applied to him. Certainly not the latter dogmatic view which was imposed on music students of that time.


Yes, this is a point I have made here repeatedly. The creative artist often needs an almost fanatical belief in the validity and importance of his own vision to give him the courage to ignore hostile critics, empty concert halls, uninterested patrons and employers, and assorted naysayers and stay on his creative path. Or as I've put it before, it takes strength to swim against the tide to reach new shores. So I don't mean to be presumptuous in calling a brilliant musician like Boulez mistaken with his famous manifesto. He well knew what he was doing. But announcing what the future of music must be doesn't somehow make it true. It ain't his call.

As to the rest, feel free to disagree with me. I can take it. ;-)


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## aleazk

I think we have reached a point in which we are all just repeating ourselves. That may mean we don't have much to add to what we already said (certainly, in my case, I'm done). Better to move on to other threads. I think it was a fruitful discussion, where the topic was touched from all possible angles. Some may have found that just a lot of inconclusive babble. Actually, we reached very soon to conclusions once we adopted a rigorous philosophical framework, be it Wittgenstenians or neo-Fregenians. And now the discussion, or fight, goes to the philosophy literature for discussing the merits of the different philosophies... at least we concluded or agreed now in throwing the ball back at them, i.e., the philosophers :lol:


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> Yes, this is a point I have made here repeatedly. The creative artist often needs an almost fanatical belief in the validity and importance of his own vision to give him the courage to ignore hostile critics, empty concert halls, uninterested patrons and employers, and assorted naysayers and stay on his creative path. Or as I've put it before, it takes strength to swim against the tide to reach new shores. So I don't mean to be presumptuous in calling a brilliant musician like Boulez mistaken with his famous manifesto. He well knew what he was doing. But announcing what the future of music must be doesn't somehow make it true. It ain't his call.
> 
> As to the rest, feel free to disagree with me. I can take it. ;-)


Yes, that was rather silly, as well as Schoenberg's "german domination on music for the next 100 years". Sounds like the 1000 years 3rd Reich...


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## Woodduck

aleazk said:


> I think we have reached a point in which we are all just repeating ourselves. That may mean we don't have much to add to what we already said (certainly, in my case, I'm done). Better to move on to other threads. I think it was a fruitful discussion, where the topic was touched from all possible angles. Some may have found that just a lot of inconclusive babble. Actually, we reached very soon to conclusions once we adopted a rigorous philosophical framework, be it Wittgenstenians or neo-Fregenians. And now the discussion, or fight, goes to the philosophy literature for discussing the merits of the different philosophies... at least we concluded or agreed now in throwing the ball back at them, i.e., the philosophers :lol:


Yes, it's probably time to sit back and watch as our thoughts revolutionize the culture.

OK, maybe not. But it will be a real relief to go back to using terms loosely. The next time a car passes me with its radio blaring out some teenage rap thing I'll feel free to yell, "How can you call that **** music?!" Wittgenstein be damned.


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## Sid James

aleazk said:


> I can accept that whatever an artist presents like art, is art. But music is a subfield of art, a specific kind of art. Thus, it makes some sense to try to pin down what it may be. And, anyway, nobody is saying that what doesn't fall into that music category (say, 4'33') is not art, it very likely is, but just a different type of art than music (in the 4'33'' case, say, conceptual art). One is really trying to make some categorization or ontologization of the different types of art, I don't see why that should be so controversial (I mean, the notion of doing it, not the actual result, which will always have debatable points.) And, even more, nobody is saying that artists should feel constrained by that, they are free to break it whenever they want and we, as audience, will judge the result, and, maybe based on that, will decide if our category of music is worth to be re-defined in light of this new work. It's really a historical dynamical process.


My argument is that from a historical perspective, boundaries between music and other things traditionally seen as separate from them - eg. performance, noise, scores that are written with words and not notes - don't exist. If they are applied, they are arbitrary. Cage is the best example of a composer who saw no boundaries between art and life. Kaprow, who I mentioned, devised his happenings with methods similar to Cage (basically controlled chance).



> I strongly disagree with that. I think those philosophies are actually crucial for sparking creativity, either for breaking those philosophies or to find new ways to work under the rules. I think this is the way art always worked. Think about Debussy, and even Cage. They didn't create revolutionary music out of the blue, they were reacting to previous standards. All I'm claiming is that, in order to do that, one must first establish what those standards are. Of course, that's not the task for a single person, but of the whole community, artists and perhaps audience, and in a given period of time. The so called 'ethos' of each epoch.


If only they where not so polarising, but yes the manifestos and so on do give a snapshot of what composers or movements in music where aiming at. I think Debussy was wise to avoid setting up a school (which he could have, but it was anathema to him). Others like Respighi changed from one thing to another (he signed a modernist manifesto then an anti-modernist one), yet others like Cage (apart from the art equals life mantra) where illogical and extremely contradictory, even changing direction within the same interview. In any case, its the actual music these and other composers left behind which are their real legacy, not whatever words have been left by them.



> Your view is akin to Feyerabend's in the philosophy of science. In the 20th century, due to all the revolutions in science that questioned old cherished theories, philosophers were quite puzzled on how to interpret this in regards to the philosophy of science and even to the very notion of science itself. Thus, on the scientific method, Feyerabend concluded that "anything goes", which became a famous lemma associated with him. I strongly disagree with that view, as well as most philosophers, and think it only refuses to address the problem and just gives an easy answer by kicking the whole chess board from the table.


Well, music isn't a science but at the end of the day the whole matter is entirely academic. The barbarians have stormed the gate, all we can do now is accept that fact. To use your analogy, the chess board has long been kicked from the table, half a century at least. I'm sorry to bother you if you don't believe that I am not addressing the problem. I'm addressing it the most direct way I can. I think that ultimately the whole debate is about freedom to create.


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## Guest

eugeneonagain said:


> So that's your criteria? I guess a lot of people have been sent to the gallows on that basis. The DDR would have loved you.


My criteria? I'm not sure I understand. I was just responding briefly, in kind, to what I assumed was not a serious post. I guess I misunderstood.



fluteman said:


> No, nothing condescending or snide or nasty from you, you've been entirely civil as far as I can tell, and when you disagree with someone, you give your reasons, which is all I could ask.


Thanks.



Tallisman said:


> Defining a word like 'music' is not like defining a word like 'carrot'. It's a pointless exercise. With 'carrot' we can provide an ostensive definition. 'Music' is entirely different, and is a general term with virtually infinite usage possibilities. It dwells in context.


It may, in this Forum, be an exercise, but I don't think it's pointless. After all, if what you say is true, there are many artists making money and/or reputation on exploring what music is and isn't - they just don't use words to express their view.


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## Woodduck

Sid James writes:

My argument is that from a historical perspective, boundaries between music and other things traditionally seen as separate from them - eg. performance, noise, scores that are written with words and not notes - don't exist. 

I don't understand a "historical perspective" as a dictator of thought. From which historical perspective? Any historical perspective is just one more way of thinking. Who gets to write history?

If they are applied, they are arbitrary. 

They may be according to one historical perspective, one biased by Modernism. We are still inhabiting a "postmodern" culture. In a longer historical perspective, Modernism may turn out to be a weird aberration. Some of us have such a perspective now.

Cage is the best example of a composer who saw no boundaries between art and life. 

If life is art, why make art? Why not do something useful to humanity?

...the manifestos and so on do give a snapshot of what composers or movements in music where aiming at. ...others like Cage (apart from the art equals life mantra) were illogical and extremely contradictory, even changing direction within the same interview.

If life is art, those illogical and contradictory manifestos must also be art.

In any case, its the actual music these and other composers left behind which are their real legacy, not whatever words have been left by them.

That's debatable. Cage for many is less a composer than a cultural icon.

Well, music isn't a science but at the end of the day the whole matter is entirely academic. The barbarians have stormed the gate, all we can do now is accept that fact. To use your analogy, the chess board has long been kicked from the table, half a century at least. I think that ultimately the whole debate is about freedom to create.

That isn't what it's about for everyone. No one is stopping people from creating whatever silliness they want and calling it art. But no one has to agree that that's what it is. Ultimately the whole debate is about freedom - and precision - of thought, and about values.


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## JeffD

I have no problem with fuzzy borders. There are things everyone will acknowledge are music, and somethings nobody will acknowledge are music, and there is the inbetween, which is disputed. Sets don't have to have hard edges or agreed upon edges. A fuzzy border is a border.

Like tall person. How tall is a tall person.What is the shortest tall person. There are people everyone would agree are tall, and those that nobody would consider tall, and the inbetween. That doesn't mean that we don't know what one means when they say a tall person.

Fuzzy borders does not mean that everything is music, or nothing is music, or that i have to agree with what you consider music or that you have to agree with me.


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## eugeneonagain

The thing about fuzzy borders is that people tend to not know where they are, or that they're even there. What then happens is that things wander willy-nilly into every area.

What you suggest is not much different to the 'it's a spectrum' argument. Righty-ho, but then we acknowledged that even the spectrum is divided into coherent pieces or we're just dealing with a homogenous mass.


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## hpowders

It would be so nice if I could see an actual latitude/longitude intersection to be able to more precisely pinpoint the actual boundary between music and non-music. Without that, everything else on this thread is simply "hearsay".


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## fluteman

hpowders said:


> It would be so nice if I could see an actual latitude/longitude intersection to be able to more precisely pinpoint the actual boundary between [....]


I've seen many posts here at TC that start more or less like this. Alas, when it comes to things like art and aesthetics, or language (and music can be seen as a non-verbal language), however that sentence ends, the problem is more often than not a thorny one. Even the simplest-seeming questions -- Is this passage in C major? Or C minor? Or some other key? can be anything but simple.

It's true that one trend we saw in the modern music era was a deliberate and drastic departure from relative stability, clarity and predictability. Perhaps this was a commentary on similar trends in Western society, or what increasingly became a global society, as a whole (I certainly think so). And perhaps we will proceed to a new artistic era with increased stability, clarity and predictability. But even if this is the case, I think the poster who says, "It would be so nice to more precisely pinpoint ...." is always bound to be at least somewhat frustrated in the world of art, especially since that is exactly what artists do not want you to be able to do, at least not completely. The artist always wants to confound your perceptions or expectations, though often only slightly and/or in a very subtle way.


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## Sid James

Woodduck said:


> I don't understand a "historical perspective" as a dictator of thought. From which historical perspective? Any historical perspective is just one more way of thinking. Who gets to write history?


My focus is on people and events, but of course history does include our interpretation of those. My recent posts on other threads can give you an idea of how I'm less interested in agendas and more interested in history:

https://www.talkclassical.com/56865-contemporary-music-blurring-lines-4.html#post1502640

https://www.talkclassical.com/56839-experimental-avant-garde-music-17.html#post1502605



> They may be according to one historical perspective, one biased by Modernism. We are still inhabiting a "postmodern" culture. In a longer historical perspective, Modernism may turn out to be a weird aberration. Some of us have such a perspective now.


Postmodernism doesn't attempt to necessarily supplant modernism but accept it for what it is, accept its contradictions. In any case, whatever ideologies we look at, they are products of their time. Its not always about them being right or wrong and more about them helping us understand why things happened the way they did. Figures like Cage and Boulez straddled the modernist and post-modernist periods. Consensus is that change from one to the other was during the 1960's.



> If life is art, why make art? Why not do something useful to humanity?...If life is art, those illogical and contradictory manifestos must also be art.


Cage saw theory and practice as linked. Its complicated to discuss at length here. Best is to read what he said and wrote about these, if you want to understand those contradictions in his thinking. Same goes with others of the period.



> That's debatable. Cage for many is less a composer than a cultural icon.


Yes he wore many hats but first he was a composer, and his partnership (in life and art) with choreographer Merce Cunningham is also of importance.



> That isn't what it's about for everyone. No one is stopping people from creating whatever silliness they want and calling it art. But no one has to agree that that's what it is. Ultimately the whole debate is about freedom - and precision - of thought, and about values.


I'm not arguing against freedom of thought. That and freedom of creativity is obviously linked, always has been. The reality is that I can and have been to performances of a variety of different sorts of classical music, from ancient to present day. Anyone who lives in a major city can do the same. So if in reality classical music includes the likes of Cage and his successors, then as I said the old definitions of music have to fall. That's reality, its not about what I like or what I don't like, or what I call music or what I call other things like noise or performance. Perhaps the difference in our points of view is that I am more interested in how history bears out in reality today. That's not to invalidate yours or others view on all of this. Its a controversial topic, which is why our conclusions and the reasons behind them are all quite different.


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## JeffD

eugeneonagain said:


> The thing about fuzzy borders is that people tend to not know where they are, or that they're even there. What then happens is that things wander willy-nilly into every area.
> 
> What you suggest is not much different to the 'it's a spectrum' argument. Righty-ho, but then we acknowledged that even the spectrum is divided into coherent pieces or we're just dealing with a homogenous mass.


I know what you mean, and yea, that's the threat. But most of the time the definitions that most people use are not invalidated and folks are still able to have a conversation. If i say, "hey why don't you come over after dinner I have some music i want you to hear", the fellow i say it to is not expecting four minutes and thirty three seconds of my air conditioner and refrigerator.

In my experience, the lack of concrete borders threatens only the fringes for the most part, and one or two doodles who want to include floor wax and desert toppings under music.

Not that the discussions are not worthwhile. Is it Poland, is it Russia, its interesting and good stuff as long as nobody tries to bully their position onto anyone else.

The world is flat, just stay away from the edge.


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## fluteman

JeffD said:


> I know what you mean, and yea, that's the threat. But most of the time the definitions that most people use are not invalidated and folks are still able to have a conversation. If i say, "hey why don't you come over after dinner I have some music i want you to hear", the fellow i say it to is not expecting four minutes and thirty three seconds of my air conditioner and refrigerator.
> 
> In my experience, the lack of concrete borders threatens only the fringes for the most part, and one or two doodles who want to include floor wax and desert toppings under music.
> 
> Not that the discussions are not worthwhile. Is it Poland, is it Russia, its interesting and good stuff as long as nobody tries to bully their position onto anyone else.
> 
> The world is flat, just stay away from the edge.


But the fuzziness is not just at the borders. Even the (seemingly) most classical, stable, clear, predictable and comfortably familiar art can confound our perceptions and expectations in a subtle way. What's more classically designed, clear and symmetrical than the Parthenon in Athens, Greece? Yet its architect had some pretty radical tricks up his sleeve (turns out it's not as symmetrical as it may seem):
http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/projects/perspective/parthenon.htm 
Yes, the artistic radicals and extremists are often controversial, especially those who want to shock and/or confuse to the greatest possible degree. But Leonardo da Vinci and Franz Joseph Haydn were also radicals in their time and cultural context who could incite a bit of shock or confusion, much like the ancient architect Iktinos.


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## Thomyum2

Ludwig Von Chumpsky said:


> Interesting conversation. But we should always bring things back to real life, out of pure theory. So, given any criteria at all about what constitutes music, I would say we should be able to test the criteria in a simple manner. The person or group who has devised the criteria should be able to accurately pick out examples that meet the criteria and examples that don't, without external clues such as seeing one example with a score, and one without.
> 
> So if you think music can be arranged silence for example, great. We should be able to blindfold you, place you in a concert hall on two different occasions. One time we have a person on stage "performing" a piece of arranged silence. The other we have no one on stage. You should then be able to correctly say which one is an example that meets your criteria. If you can't, then your criteria is no good. So there's no subjectivity here, just us judging your own criteria, etc. It's just you and your criteria. And this applies to anything really, i.e. art in general. If you say splattering paint on canvas is art, fine. You should then be able to tell the difference between a piece where the artist splattered paint, and a piece where say a dog accidently kicked a couple cans of paint onto a canvas.





Ludwig Von Chumpsky said:


> Sorry to quote myself, but I believe most of the thread I read after my post was answered by my post. You are discussing definitions and how you come to some kind of proof that someone's definition of music is THE definition or a legit definition. Well here it is. Maybe my post was a thread stopper so it was ignored? Sometimes the answer to a question isn't necessarily that difficult or complex.


I think you've asked an interesting question here, the sort of an empirical test you've proposed, and I'm actually kind of surprised that no one (that I've seen) has directly responded or commented on your idea. I've actually been mulling it over in my mind for a few days and trying to get a clearer idea of what this would really best testing for - I gather that such a measure would say more about the people using a definition than it would about the nature of the art itself. But I think it's an idea worth exploring more and would be interested if anyone else have any thoughts to share about this.

The last line about being "_able to tell the difference between a piece where the artist splattered paint, and a piece where say a dog accidently kicked a couple cans of paint onto a canvas_" resonates for me. I've always felt that there is a certain amount of pretense in making high claims or judgments about works of art without really having a substantive knowledge of the subject or ability to articulate what it is that distinguishes a work of quality - so perhaps this test could be said to be sort of a hypothetical 'pretense detector'. It brings to mind for me a favorite line in the theatrical version of Peter Schaffer's _Amadeus_ (which sadly did not make it into the movie version) where the Salieri character, coming to the understanding of his own hollow victory of being the more popular composer in his time while at the same time realizing that Mozart was truly the better composer, laments that "I was called distinguished by people incapable of distinguishing."


----------



## isorhythm

Having thought about this a little more, I have to abandon my definition that music is anything that someone is offering as music, and adopt the view that it's a deliberate organization of sound, to avoid some hypothetical absurdities.

My line ends up being drawn at the same place, 4'33", which is a deliberate organization of sound.


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## JAS

isorhythm said:


> My line ends up being drawn at the same place, 4'33", which is a deliberate organization of sound.


Except that 4'33" isn't a deliberate organization of sound. It is a fixed period of time during which sound, not specified in the score, simply happens (or doesn't happen).


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## isorhythm

JAS said:


> Except that 4'33" isn't a deliberate organization of sound. It is a fixed period of time during which sound, not specified in the score, simply happens (or doesn't happen).


Yes, the organization in this case is just the time interval.

I'm not saying anything about its artistic merit, just trying to posit a simple definition so I can move on from the deeply uninteresting question of what "counts as music" to more fruitful subjects.


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## millionrainbows

Originally Posted by *JAS* 
_Except that 4'33" isn't a deliberate organization of sound. It is a fixed period of time during which sound, not specified in the score, simply happens (or doesn't happen)._



isorhythm said:


> Yes, the organization in this case is just the time interval.


But what about the listener?



> I'm not saying anything about its artistic merit, just trying to posit a simple definition so I can move on from the deeply uninteresting question of what "counts as music" to more fruitful subjects.


These "objectivists" always leave out the subjective aspect of the work, and that is, we are to listen to the sounds as if they are music. You seem to have forgotten this aspect of the work's organization.

If you keep insisting that "sounds" are the substance or content of the piece, you will be confounded, and might as well not engage with the piece, or attempt criticism of it which will be incorrect.


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## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Originally Posted by *JAS*
> _Except that 4'33" isn't a deliberate organization of sound. It is a fixed period of time during which sound, not specified in the score, simply happens (or doesn't happen)._
> 
> But what about the listener?
> 
> These "objectivists" always leave out the subjective aspect of the work, and that is, we are to listen to the sounds as if they are music. You seem to have forgotten this aspect of the work's organization.
> 
> If you keep insisting that "sounds" are the substance or content of the piece, you will be confounded, and might as well not engage with the piece, or attempt criticism of it which will be incorrect.


I'm just proposing a definition of the word "music" that I find most useful, so none of that is relevant.

Someone, I think Berio, said music is whatever we hear when we set out to listen to music. You may like that definition better.


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## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> Having thought about this a little more, I have to abandon my definition that music is anything that someone is offering as music, and adopt the view that it's a deliberate organization of sound, to avoid some hypothetical absurdities.


All the "hypothetical absurdities" are valid only in a rational, objective context. They become self-explanatory when we abandon the objectivist stance, and take responsibility for our own subjective contribution to the piece. Of course, this lies outside the parameters of your objective argument. This should be obvious by now.

And in a way, these sorts of refutations are valuable, in that they reveal to us the rationalist stance, and how this is incompatible with a piece such as 4'33" which plays with the objective and subjective aspects of music.


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## millionrainbows

Thomyum2 said:


> I think you've asked an interesting question here, the sort of an empirical test you've proposed, and I'm actually kind of surprised that no one (that I've seen) has directly responded or commented on your idea. I've actually been mulling it over in my mind for a few days and trying to get a clearer idea of what this would really best testing for - I gather that such a measure would say more about the people using a definition than it would about the nature of the art itself. But I think it's an idea worth exploring more and would be interested if anyone else have any thoughts to share about this.
> 
> The last line about being "_able to tell the difference between a piece where the artist splattered paint, and a piece where say a dog accidently kicked a couple cans of paint onto a canvas_" resonates for me. I've always felt that there is a certain amount of pretense in making high claims or judgments about works of art without really having a substantive knowledge of the subject or ability to articulate what it is that distinguishes a work of quality - so perhaps this test could be said to be sort of a hypothetical 'pretense detector'. It brings to mind for me a favorite line in the theatrical version of Peter Schaffer's _Amadeus_ (which sadly did not make it into the movie version) where the Salieri character, coming to the understanding of his own hollow victory of being the more popular composer in his time while at the same time realizing that Mozart was truly the better composer, laments that "I was called distinguished by people incapable of distinguishing."


All of this extremely detailed argument is irrelevant, because it seeks to find objective solutions to a problem which is subjective in nature. It reminds me of someone who is wearing eyeglasses, while looking for them, assuming they are lost.


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## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> All the "hypothetical absurdities" are valid only in a rational, objective context. They become self-explanatory when we abandon the objectivist stance, and take responsibility for our own subjective contribution to the piece. Of course, this lies outside the parameters of your objective argument. This should be obvious by now.
> 
> And in a way, these sorts of refutations are valuable, in that they reveal to us the rationalist stance, and how this is incompatible with a piece such as 4'33" which plays with the objective and subjective aspects of music.


No, I'm not making any argument about 4'33" whatsoever, only making a suggestion about the most useful way to use a particular English word, music.


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## philoctetes

Perhaps one should not be surprised when, after letting someone else try their glasses, the glasses are returned with a shrug, or even, a "wow, how do you see through those things!"...


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## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> No, I'm not making any argument about 4'33" whatsoever, only making a suggestion about the most useful way to use a particular English word, music.


Of course! You're keeping your distance from such things.


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## millionrainbows

philoctetes said:


> Perhaps one should not be surprised when, after letting someone else try their glasses, the glasses are returned with a shrug, or even, a "wow, how do you see through those things!"...


Or, 
"You cannot *possibly* be seeing correctly through these obviously flawed eyeglasses! If you say otherwise, that's total poppycock! BTW, I'll be reporting you to the National Institute on Clear Vision!"


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## philoctetes

So, if the organization is in the time frame, can I think of every 4'33" span to be a living performance of Cage's piece? I can already imagine the objections, just spare me the insults.

Furthermore, if the piece, like other Cage pieces, is entitled and organized on a precise frame of time, how does this make it "classical"? It may be music, but what other classical compositions are created on these terms? Only if Cage specified signature and metronome would this make sense to me. As it is, maybe it's more like a "fake chart", and the time length is really more of a nudge at recorded popular music.

3) later in life, Cage composed the "number" pieces, which, to me, almost signal a concession, or lookback, to classical "definitions" of music, working with traditional components in new ways. How these compare to the earlier mm'ss" pieces, from intention, to structure, to the titles themselves, could be indicative of something I haven't yet identified about Cage, as I haven't studied him enough to know.


----------



## KenOC

It just occurred to me that John Cage is the Borat of music.


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## isorhythm

philoctetes said:


> So, if the organization is in the time frame, can I think of every 4'33" span to be a living performance of Cage's piece?


I would say there has to be an intention of performing or listening to 4'33".


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> So, if the organization is in the time frame, can I think of every 4'33" span to be a living performance of Cage's piece? I can already imagine the objections, just spare me the insults.
> 
> Furthermore, if the piece, like other Cage pieces, is entitled and organized on a precise frame of time, how does this make it "classical"? It may be music, but what other classical compositions are created on these terms? Only if Cage specified signature and metronome would this make sense to me. As it is, maybe it's more like a "fake chart", and the time length is really more of a nudge at recorded popular music.
> 
> 3) later in life, Cage composed the "number" pieces, which, to me, almost signal a concession, or lookback, to classical "definitions" of music, working with traditional components in new ways. How these compare to the earlier m'ss" pieces, from intention, to structure, to the titles themselves, could be indicative of something I haven't yet identified, as I haven't studied Cage enough to know.


I think Cage never abandoned his "zen" inspired ideas, including his late career and the number pieces. 4'33'' was simply an obvious and logical idea to explore, for him at least, that was consistent with that view. Thing is that it is a one-trick ponny, once you have done it, there's not much to explore in that particular direction (besides obvious rehash like an hypothetical 5'43'' or, to some extent, Collector). It's simply a dead end. Thus, he moved on to explore other directions, like the number pieces, but still always in that zen or eastern mindset.


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## philoctetes

So art requires intent? We're down to the essentials here, the major point of the discussion. For me, anyway.

The metaphysical implications of that statement seem enormous. As I'm not a metaphysician, I will certainly bungle up my reasons for saying so. But I'll just begin with the notion that a lot of art is inspired by the sense and the world we sense. So does that world exist by "intention"? Some people see intention, or design, everywhere in nature, and that's a whole nuther banana to peel.

OTOH, art is also a means of communication, before other languages existed, and while we speak of it separately from science, we use many of the same media and language tools for both purposes. So there you have not only intention but unification and representation of individual thoughts on a common platform.

Finally, I could say that Cage's intent is all that's required, whether the actual performance is intended or not. Well I just did. Doesn't a composition exist even if it's never performed? Wouldn't the unintended sounds within any 4'33" time frame satisfy the requirements of the composition? Is there a note on the score that says "with intent"?

Just having fun.


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> So, if the organization is in the time frame, can I think of every 4'33" span to be a living performance of Cage's piece?


Careful, you shouldn't be thinking such forbidden and sinful questions. But, also, we are being told that we should think about the piece. Conclusion: you are only allowed to think about it in the strict direction indicated by the high priests.


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> Finally, I could say that Cage's intent is all that's required, whether the actual performance is intended or not. Well I just did.


For being art, sure, that's probably enough. But for being music? Only if we renounce to any division of art into sub-disciplines.


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## isorhythm

philoctetes said:


> So art requires intent? We're down to the essentials here, the major point of the discussion.
> 
> The metaphysical implications of that statement seem enormous. As I'm not a metaphysician, I will certainly bungle up my reasons for saying so. But I'll just begin with the notion that a lot of art is inspired by the sense and the world we sense. So does that world exist by "intention"?
> 
> OTOH, art is also a means of communication, before other languages existed, and while we speak of it separately from science, we use many of the same media and language tools for both purposes. So there you have not only intention but unification and representation of individual thoughts on a common platform.
> 
> Finally, I could say that Cage's intent is all that's required, whether the actual performance is intended or not. Well I just did.


At the risk of sounding really obtuse, conventional pieces contain rests. A half second interval might be a quarter note rest in a Haydn sonata, depending on what's going on around it. Same goes for 4'33".


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## philoctetes

aleazk said:


> For being art, sure, that's probably enough. But for being music? Only if we renounce to any division of art into sub-disciplines.


Well, I trted to derationalize the idea that 4'33" is CLASSICAL music, to make more sense of the confusion. Given what goes for music in other genres, why not 4'33"? It could have a genre of its own.


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> Well, I trted to derationalize the idea that 4'33" is CLASSICAL music, to make more sense of the confusion. Given what goes for music in other genres, why not 4'33"? It could have a genre of its own.


It already has one: conceptual art, i.e., an art whose raw material are concepts rather than organized sounds


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## philoctetes

isorhythm said:


> At the risk of sounding really obtuse, conventional pieces contain rests. A half second interval might be a quarter note rest in a Haydn sonata, depending on what's going on around it. Same goes for 4'33".


Not obtuse at all, but considering that Cage is a God of silence and broke so many rules, kinda humorous. I assume we can agree that 4'33" is not conventional, except for MR, possibly


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## philoctetes

aleazk said:


> It already has one: conceptual art, i.e., an art whose raw material are concepts rather than organized sounds


Indeed just realized that Cage was working in the complex plane and that 4'33" represents a high-order pole on the unit circle.


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> Indeed just realized that Cage was working in the complex plane and that 4'33" represents a high-order pole on the unit circle.


That's how I see it, actually.

Think about it in this way. 4'33'' is basically Duchamp's Fountain but with ambient noise instead of the fountain. The fact that one can change the physical element, but the idea is always the same, shows that the core of this art is the concept. The physical reality is never altered, everything is going on in the mind, we are just being pointed to different elements in reality and asked to think about them in different ways. Composer, interpreter and audience never change anything in the actual reality, we could simply be brains in jars and still be able to do it.

On the other hand, if we insist that the mere pointing and invitation to change perspective makes the object what the inviting person says it is, then I invite you to see me as Albert Einstein. Then, where's my Nobel prize, gimme the prize back, since I genuinely won it in the 1920s!


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## Thomyum2

aleazk said:


> It already has one: conceptual art, i.e., an art whose raw material are concepts rather than organized sounds


In response to all the discussion about this piece, I recently listened to what I thought was a pretty good lecture on this topic called 'What 4'33" is' given by Julian Dodd at the London Aesthetics Forum in 2016 which I think is worth checking out (it's available for free download from iTunes, and I also see he has a similarly titled lecture out there on YouTube). He comes to this same conclusion, via what I consider a pretty cogent case, for calling 4'33" 'conceptual art' rather than 'music'. But the lecture also has some other interesting discussion about Cage and his views, among which he points out that Cage did not seem to mind if people laughed at his work, as perhaps there was a certain amount of fun intended in all this, but that he was surprised and dismayed that people were offended or made angry by it. It's interesting to see that that same spectrum of reactions continues to this day. It's also striking to listen to the lecture and realize that most of these arguments we're making here in this forum are really nothing new at all.


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## aleazk

Thomyum2 said:


> In response to all the discussion about this piece, I recently listened to what I thought was a pretty good lecture on this topic called 'What 4'33" is' given by Julian Dodd at the London Aesthetics Forum in 2016 which I think is worth checking out (it's available for free download from iTunes, and I also see he has a similarly titled lecture out there on YouTube). He comes to this same conclusion, via what I consider a pretty cogent case, for calling 4'33" 'conceptual art' rather than 'music'. But the lecture also has some other interesting discussion about Cage and his views, among which he points out that Cage did not seem to mind if people laughed at his work, as perhaps there was a certain amount of fun intended in all this, but that he was surprised and dismayed that people were offended or made angry by it. It's interesting to see that that same spectrum of reactions continues to this day. It's also striking to listen to the lecture and realize that most of these arguments we're making here in this forum are really nothing new at all.


Yes, I think I saw that vid some years ago. Yes, the debate is old and people over reacts, both the detractors but also the supporters. I see it more as an ignitor for some chat that may or not give some insights related to some ideas around all this and have some fun with that.


----------



## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> Careful, you shouldn't be thinking such forbidden and sinful questions. But, also, we are being told that we should think about the piece.


No, all you are being asked to do is listen as if the sounds were music.



> Conclusion: you are only allowed to think about it in the strict direction indicated by the high priests.


No, you are being asked to cooperate with the intention of the piece, and not try to invalidate it.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> For being art, sure, that's probably enough. But for being music? Only if we renounce to any division of art into sub-disciplines.


Again, this is a fallacy which assumes that the piece must exist as an objective work with "content." If we assume the subjective stance, then this is no longer a consideration.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> It already has one: conceptual art, i.e., an art whose raw material are concepts rather than organized sounds


That's a fallacy, since 4'33" consists of actual sounds which will occur during the performance. It does have a necessary conceptual content, in order for this performance to work, since it reverses the role of composer and audience. It's playing with the notions of music as "objective" and as "subjective."


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## millionrainbows

Originally Posted by *isorhythm* 
_At the risk of sounding really obtuse, conventional pieces contain rests. A half second interval might be a quarter note rest in a Haydn sonata, depending on what's going on around it. Same goes for 4'33"._



philoctetes said:


> Not obtuse at all, but considering that Cage is a God of silence and broke so many rules, kinda humorous. I assume we can agree that 4'33" is not conventional, except for MR, possibly


Again, what does silence have to do with 4'33"? It consists of actual sounds which are intended to be listened to, with your cooperation.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> Again, this is a fallacy which assumes that the piece must exist as an objective work with "content." If we assume the subjective stance, then this is no longer a consideration.


So, let me see if I get you clearly. You admit that the piece doesn't exist as an objective work with "content", but that, nevertheless, it has a subjective content (subjective, by definition, means it's all in the mind). That's one of the most eloquent arguments in this theread for calling the piece a work of conceptual art. Thank you, millions


----------



## fluteman

KenOC said:


> It just occurred to me that John Cage is the Borat of music.


Borat, as Ali G, interviewed a former Secretary General of the United Nations (Boutros Boutros-Ghali), and after introducing him as Boutros Boutros Boutros-Ghali, asked him, "Is Disneyland a member of the United Nations?" I agree that John Cage would have been delighted.


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> That's a fallacy, since 4'33" consists of actual sounds which will occur during the performance. It does have a necessary conceptual content, in order for this performance to work, since it reverses the role of composer and audience. It's playing with the notions of music as "objective" and as "subjective."


But those sounds exist in any everyday life situation. It seems the only new element that 4'33'' is bringing to it is the concept which you call "playing" with some notions. The sounds are only a purely circumstantial element into the work to be able to enunciate the concept, it's completely functional to that. Thus, the sounds are not the main theme of the work, but the concept behind it.


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## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Originally Posted by *isorhythm*
> _At the risk of sounding really obtuse, conventional pieces contain rests. A half second interval might be a quarter note rest in a Haydn sonata, depending on what's going on around it. Same goes for 4'33"._
> 
> Again, what does silence have to do with 4'33"? It consists of actual sounds which are intended to be listened to, with your cooperation.


If I decide right now to listen to the sounds around me for a while, what's the difference between that and listening to 4'33", in your view?


----------



## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> Think about it in this way. 4'33'' is basically Duchamp's Fountain but with ambient noise instead of the fountain. The fact that one can change the physical element, but the idea is always the same, shows that the core of this art is the concept. The physical reality is never altered, everything is going on in the mind, we are just being pointed to different elements in reality and asked to think about them in different ways. Composer, interpreter and audience never change anything in the actual reality, we could simply be brains in jars and still be able to do it.


No, 4'33" is only partly concept, as part of the "framing" of the piece. The actual sounds which occur in the piece will be different every performance. You can't predict what sounds might occur during any performance which might take place.

On the other hand, if we insist that the mere pointing and invitation to change perspective makes the object what the inviting person says it is, then I invite you to see me as Albert Einstein. Then, where's my Nobel prize, gimme the prize back, since I genuinely won it in the 1920s![/QUOTE]

No, Cage does not tell us "what the sounds are," but only to listen. The actual experience is what matters, and that is totally subjective. Cage's "intent" or control is not what you should focus on, and that's not what the piece is about.

I think Duchamp's Fountain is more about artistic intent and confrontation than Cage's is. Remember that a lot of Dada was about destroying the idea of art. I think Cage was more concerned with a statement about consciousness than he was about making a statement about the institution of art. In this sense, the work is actually "religious" in nature, or has that dimension in a spiritual sense.


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> So, let me see if I get you clearly. You admit that the piece doesn't exist as an objective work with "content", but that, nevertheless, it has a subjective content (subjective, by definition, means it's all in the mind). That's one of the most eloquent arguments in this theread for calling the piece a work of conceptual art. Thank you, millions


Still, I think to view 4'33" as "totally conceptual" is incorrect, since you are supposed to be listening to actual sounds. What is "conceptual" is this attempt to talk about 4'33" so abstractly. "Just do it."


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## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> But those sounds exist in any everyday life situation. It seems the only new element that 4'33'' is bringing to it is the concept which you call "playing" with some notions.


Yes, sounds exist, but we don't always listen to them mindfully as we are asked to do in 4'33".



> It seems the only new element that 4'33'' is bringing to it is the concept which you call "playing" with some notions.


Yes, listening mindfully. After all, that's its purpose. Why do you keep trying to invalidate it?



> The sounds are only a purely circumstantial element into the work to be able to enunciate the concept, it's completely functional to that. Thus, the sounds are not the main theme of the work, but the concept behind it.


The conceptual part is the conceptual part. The actual sounds which occur are the actual "content" of the work, but this is a subjective experience.


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## fluteman

millionrainbows said:


> Yes, sounds exist, but we don't always listen to them mindfully as we are asked to do in 4'33".
> 
> Yes, listening mindfully. After all, that's its purpose. Why do you keep trying to invalidate it?
> 
> The conceptual part is the conceptual part. The actual sounds which occur are the actual "content" of the work, but this is a subjective experience.


I admire your effort, millionrainbows, but there will always be those who feel, as JeffD put it, "the Earth is flat, just stay away from the edge." They do not want their assumptions challenged. Others analyze the ground they are standing on carefully and minutely, detect a slight curvature, and extrapolate that into a theory that the entire Earth is spherical. Still others set sail for the horizon and see what happens. Of course, the Earth is not flat, nor is it perfectly spherical. So the analogy holds pretty well.


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> I admire your effort, millionrainbows, but there will always be those who feel, as JeffD put it, "the Earth is flat, just stay away from the edge." They do not want their assumptions challenged. Others analyze the ground they are standing on carefully and minutely, detect a slight curvature, and extrapolate that into a theory that the entire Earth is spherical. Still others set sail for the horizon and see what happens. Of course, the Earth is not flat, nor is it perfectly spherical. So the analogy holds pretty well.


I think you may have bought the thing that milllions reached the nirvada and the rest are dumb idiots. I always check the state of products before buying them, if you eat products in bad state, you may get into a nirvana state, but it could also be that it was just an intoxication-induced coma. Anyway, thanks for your insults, if I had any intellectual respect for you, now is gone, since that's just a silly attack.


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## aleazk

This is so boring, we get back to the insults because some have nothing to say and then they resort to this. Meh.


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## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Yes, sounds exist, but we don't always listen to them mindfully as we are asked to do in 4'33".


I'll ask again - what if I decide to listen mindfully on my own? What's the difference between that and listening to 4'33"?


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## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> I think Duchamp's Fountain is more about artistic intent and confrontation than Cage's is. Remember that a lot of Dada was about destroying the idea of art. I think Cage was more concerned with a statement about consciousness than he was about making a statement about the institution of art. In this sense, the work is actually "religious" in nature, or has that dimension in a spiritual sense.


I concede that. But, in terms of being 'invited' to think about something as something else, the analogy still holds and you didn't address it, as well as the reductio ad absurdum below it.


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## aleazk

Millions says we try to 'invalidate' it. No, just to put it into the artistic field to which it belongs. It seems you are the one invalidating conceptual art, since you seem to abhor the idea of thinking about the work as belonging to it. Besides, Cage not only composed music, he also made drawings, paintings, and happenings. I don't think he would care that much if somone sees this work as conceptual art if that person accepts it as an invitation to a meditative state and of special awareness of the surroundings. From the perspective of eastern thought, that seems much more in line with it than seeing it as music.


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## KenOC

isorhythm said:


> I'll ask again - what if I decide to listen mindfully on my own? What's the difference between that and listening to 4'33"?


The former you can do for free, the latter requires that you purchase a ticket. So the latter boosts the GDP, a good thing in anybody's book.* 

*Anybody who's a capitalist, anyway.


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## JAS

fluteman said:


> I admire your effort, millionrainbows, but there will always be those who feel, as JeffD put it, "the Earth is flat, just stay away from the edge." They do not want their assumptions challenged. Others analyze the ground they are standing on carefully and minutely, detect a slight curvature, and extrapolate that into a theory that the entire Earth is spherical. Still others set sail for the horizon and see what happens. Of course, the Earth is not flat, nor is it perfectly spherical. So the analogy holds pretty well.


I think it is millionrainbows who is arguing that the world is flat.


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> I think you may have bought the thing that milllions reached the nirvada and the rest are dumb idiots. I always check the state of products before buying them, if you eat products in bad state, you may get into a nirvana state, but it could also be that it was just an intoxication-induced coma. Anyway, thanks for your insults, if I had any intellectual respect for you, now is gone, since that's just a silly attack.


??? Actually, I had no intent to insult anyone. The moral of my story was, the Earth is not flat, nor is it perfectly spherical, but both can be useful approximations depending on the context. You approach music with your assumptions, millionrainbows with his, you are both entitled to your approaches, and there is no point in his attempting to convince you to abandon your assumptions and adopt his or vice versa. Neither side is wrong, so long as you both acknowledge that neither side is inherently right, either. Millionrainbows seems to acknowledge this, yet he keeps arguing for his approach. You, or perhaps not you but others who oppose him, evoke "proof" for your approach that will never be conclusive, as reasonable as your approach may be.


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## philoctetes

I find here that many roads to accessing the particular piece in question are either dismissed or too vageuely specified by its foremost advocate. It amazes me that advocacy can express itself as a stream of negatories to define "understanding". Indeed, it reminds me of a religion, or a cult, one with very few followers and too many "no, you're wrong" hazing drills to pass through.

I get more nirvana from raga music or even Sibelius. I have a lot more fun listening to Partch's Barstow. That 4'33" that I don't understand actually belongs to me and can be whatever I want, and nobody has the right to judge my intelligence, spirit, or anything else for that. 

In other words, if I compare this thing called 4'33" to other equal segments of time, in my experience, how does it rate? Quite low, except as one thing, a conversation piece for certain music lovers, i.e. by serving the role it serves on this thread, to spawn discussion that far exceeds the "music". But do I want to pursue its performance? Which recordings should I buy? This is where the conceptual Cage becomes the shaggy dog Cage with a big grin on his face.

Maybe I'm projecting, like Tom Hulce with Mozart, but I sense that Cage was as playful as he was profound, to the point where the two qualities were almost one in a zen-like fashion. Like Messiaen he exploited mystical associations in art which adds to the mythology. But I listen to them a lot more.


----------



## aleazk

fluteman said:


> ??? Actually, I had no intent to insult anyone. The moral of my story was, the Earth is not flat, nor is it perfectly spherical, but both can be useful approximations depending on the context. You approach music with your assumptions, millionrainbows with his, you are both entitled to your approaches, and there is no point in his attempting to convince you to abandon your assumptions and adopt his or vice versa. Neither side is wrong, so long as you both acknowledge that neither side is inherently right, either. Millionrainbows seems to acknowledge this, yet he keeps arguing for his approach. You, or perhaps not you but others who oppose him, evoke "proof" for your approach that will never be conclusive, as reasonable as your approach may be.


Okay, sorry if I missunderstood you, but I interpreted that you were implying that the ones not thinking like millions were akin to flat earth lunatics.

Anyway, I do admit that my position has some assumptions. My assumption is that of ontologizing art, that is, to divide it into subfields. I defend that assumption by saying that it's necessary in order to have any possible meaningful conversation (here or anywhere) about the different arts, and that pragmatism is too vague for that. Those arguments, are, of course, debatable. In any case, I then claim that, under my assumptions, music has to be about ordered sounds and not mere unchanged or untouched ambient noise, this to avoid semantic contradictions and nullification of the ontologization, and that this is simply a mere logical consequence in this framework and that has nothing to do with art itself nor its subjective elements. For example, the concept of animal species refers to subsets of the total of all animals, no matter how dynamic and relative is the notion we actually use to define what's an animal species; but, if we make it to refer to the set of all animals, then the concept loses all of its power and becomes meaningless and useless, one simply kills the ontologization of the animal world into sub classes. Thus, that's why I say it's simply a logical consequence from that assumption. One certainly may challenge the assumption, but the options then would be ontological nihilism or simply to use a vague language with lots of inner contradictions. And, actually, artists certainly love to play with those contradictions and to make them come to the fore, this is what Cage or Duchamp are doing here. Fine. I'm simply saying what the options would be if one tried to use a more precise language, without inner contradictions. Why I do such a thing? I do it since that was the idea of the thread.


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## Sloe

Voted 4,33 I want to hear something roundom sounds doesn´t count. I also don´t consider Imaginary landscape number 4 as music since the radios can have anything.

Listened to the Lachenmann piece and was pleasantly surprised.


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## aleazk

philoctetes said:


> I find here that many roads to accessing the particular piece in question are either dismissed or too vageuely specified by its foremost advocate. It amazes me that advocacy can express itself as a stream of negatories to define "understanding". Indeed, it reminds me of a religion, or a cult, one with very few followers and too many "no, you're wrong" hazing drills to pass through.
> 
> I get more nirvana from raga music or even Sibelius. I have a lot more fun listening to Partch's Barstow. That 4'33" that I don't understand actually belongs to me and can be whatever I want, and nobody has the right to judge my intelligence, spirit, or anything else for that.
> 
> In other words, if I compare this thing called 4'33" to other equal segments of time, in my experience, how does it rate? Quite low, except as one thing, a conversation piece for certain music lovers, i.e. by serving the role it serves on this thread, to spawn discussion that far exceeds the "music". But do I want to pursue its performance? Which recordings should I buy? This is where the conceptual Cage becomes the shaggy dog Cage with a big grin on his face.
> 
> Maybe I'm projecting, like Tom Hulce with Mozart, but I sense that Cage was as playful as he was profound, to the point where the two qualities were almost one in a zen-like fashion. Like Messiaen he exploited mystical associations in art which adds to the mythology. But I listen to them a lot more.


I also don't get this questioning of our understanding, intelligence, etc. I mean, question my intelligence if you want (I even have doubts about it myself sometimes!), but it's pretty evident that we do understand the idea behind the work, we do know what's the framework of ideas that Cage had in mind when he did it, and we also known what's the original source of those ideas. So, we know and understand. The discussion is about a completely different thing. It's about how much sense there's in calling it music if one tries to analize with more precision what that term means. And there we can have manifold views and opinions. Don't know why it has to be taken as 'invalidation', stubbornness, etc. If anything, Cage wanted us to think about what music is. And if he listened to our different views, I don't even think he would be upset like some are here if he had a disagreement (assuming one shows that one has knowledge about the context, the ideas involved, etc.), since he was a calm, serene, appreciative and understanding guy.


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## fluteman

aleazk said:


> I'm simply saying what the options would be if one tried to use a more precise language, without inner contradictions.


That's all fine, and in my opinion quite well stated, so long as you recognize that all languages either have inner contradictions or, if strictly logical and consistent, are limited in scope. Either way, there are limitations that you must choose and accept.


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## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> I'll ask again - what if I decide to listen mindfully on my own? What's the difference between that and listening to 4'33"?


None, really, except that you will not be engaging with the piece 4'33". But I think Cage's overall intent was that we listen to all sounds openly, with curiosity, and as we would music. He imparted this to many students.


----------



## millionrainbows

aleazk said:


> Millions says we try to 'invalidate' it. No, just to put it into the artistic field to which it belongs. It seems you are the one invalidating conceptual art, since you seem to abhor the idea of thinking about the work as belonging to it. Besides, Cage not only composed music, he also made drawings, paintings, and happenings. I don't think he would care that much if somone sees this work as conceptual art if that person accepts it as an invitation to a meditative state and of special awareness of the surroundings. From the perspective of eastern thought, that seems much more in line with it than seeing it as music.


I don't like labels, but I have no problem with seeing 4'33" as conceptual music/art, as long as that definition is not used to somehow invalidate it. I think it's a good piece, with good intentions, and I think we should all engage with it (if we chosse to do so) in the same spirit as Cage intended it to be engaged with. 
As far as fart jokes, Cage said after a bad performance of one of his works, "I give musicians freedom and they end up making fools of themselves."


----------



## millionrainbows

KenOC said:


> The former you can do for free, the latter requires that you purchase a ticket. So the latter boosts the GDP, a good thing in anybody's book.*
> 
> *Anybody who's a capitalist, anyway.


Oh, yeah, KenOC, 4'33" is a BIG money-maker.


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## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> None, really, except that you will not be engaging with the piece 4'33". But I think Cage's overall intent was that we listen to all sounds openly, with curiosity, and as we would music. He imparted this to many students.


That's helpful for understanding your thinking.

The thing is that John Cage doesn't really get to sign his name to the concept of mindful listening to sound. He was just some guy.


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## millionrainbows

JAS said:


> I think it is millionrainbows who is arguing that the world is flat.


No, I'm heading for the horizon, after carefully analyzing the ground I am standing on. And if it turns out not to be perfectly spherical, at least the net result is close enough.


----------



## millionrainbows

philoctetes said:


> I find here that many roads to accessing the particular piece in question are either dismissed or too vageuely specified by its foremost advocate. It amazes me that advocacy can express itself as a stream of negatories to define "understanding". Indeed, it reminds me of a religion, or a cult, one with very few followers and too many "no, you're wrong" hazing drills to pass through.


That seems to be the nature of the internet, though. There is so much rational thought out there that I just "appear" to be coming from some sort of "nirvana cult," but the truth is, I'm simply being positive rather than negative. That doesn't fit in to the negative scheme of things sometimes.



> I get more nirvana from raga music or even Sibelius. I have a lot more fun listening to Partch's Barstow. That 4'33" that I don't understand actually belongs to me and can be whatever I want, and nobody has the right to judge my intelligence, spirit, or anything else for that.


Just last night, as I was nursing my wounds and having a cigar, I used the 4'33" idea to listen to the distant traffic and sounds around me. That was easy to do, and did not require calling anyone "stupid." Maybe the key here is "keep it simple, stupid."



> In other words, if I compare this thing called 4'33" to other equal segments of time, in my experience, how does it rate? Quite low, except as one thing, a conversation piece for certain music lovers, i.e. by serving the role it serves on this thread, to spawn discussion that far exceeds the "music". But do I want to pursue its performance? Which recordings should I buy? This is where the conceptual Cage becomes the shaggy dog Cage with a big grin on his face.


I think that misses the point, and Cage's intent, which was to simply suggest that we listen mindfully.



> Maybe I'm projecting, like Tom Hulce with Mozart, but I sense that Cage was as playful as he was profound, to the point where the two qualities were almost one in a zen-like fashion. Like Messiaen he exploited mystical associations in art which adds to the mythology. But I listen to them a lot more.


I like happy endings, even if they have caveats.


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> That's helpful for understanding your thinking.
> 
> The thing is that John Cage doesn't really get to sign his name to the concept of mindful listening to sound. He was just some guy.


I'm sure that he would agree with you. Nonetheless, let's make damn sure that John Cage's ego is kept in check. Your vigilance is appreciated. Why, how _dare_ he publish a work like this!

I don't get that from it. People seem to feel threatened by 4'33", and that's their own insecurity. It has nothing to do with the work or its intent.


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> I'm sure that he would agree with you. Nonetheless, let's make damn sure that John Cage's ego is kept in check. Your vigilance is appreciated. Why, how _dare_ he publish a work like this!
> 
> I don't get that from it. People seem to feel threatened by 4'33", and that's their own insecurity. It has nothing to do with the work or its intent.


I don't have a problem with the work and never said I did. I'm on the side that says it's music, remember? Just not for exactly the same reasons that you think it's music.


----------



## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> I don't like labels, but I have no problem with seeing 4'33" as conceptual music/art as long as that definition is not used to somehow invalidate it.


Come on, name and shame those here (and in the other thread) who have actually "invalidated" it?


----------



## eugeneonagain

I will name myself as having invalidated it as 'music'. It is a performance art piece.


----------



## millionrainbows

MacLeod said:


> Come on, name and shame those here (and in the other thread) who have actually "invalidated" it?


That would take_ way_ too long. I prefer to just put it all under the heading of "groupthink."
You know this is true. 4'33" has been accused of being an elaborate joke on many occasions.


----------



## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> That would take_ way_ too long. I prefer to just put it all under the heading of "groupthink."
> You know this is true. 4'33" has been accused of being an elaborate joke on many occasions.


Let's just stick to this thread. It's us talking here - not many others on many other occasions. What's the point of referring to historical "invalidation" when the conversation is about our opinions about what is/is not music?


----------



## millionrainbows

eugeneonagain said:


> I will name myself as having invalidated it as 'music'. It is a performance art piece.


That's because you are basing your opinion on an objective definition of music, which is inaccurate, since the piece must be based on subjective experience.
Furthermore, it is conceptual music, since it consists of a conceptual element and uses a real time frame which will contain actual sounds, heard as music, ideally, if one chooses to engage. 
Admit it, eugene: I've got an air-tight case.


----------



## Guest

eugeneonagain said:


> I will name myself as having invalidated it as 'music'. It is a performance art piece.


Exactly so. So did I.


----------



## millionrainbows

MacLeod said:


> Exactly so. So did I.


Meditate on that for a while.


----------



## eugeneonagain

millionrainbows said:


> Meditate on that for a while.


Can't I just listen mind(lessly)fully for a while? Much less effort required.


----------



## millionrainbows

eugeneonagain said:


> Can't I just listen mind(lessly)fully for a while? Much less effort required.


That probably won't be much of a problem for you, eugene.


----------



## JAS

millionrainbows said:


> That's because you are basing your opinion on an objective definition of music, which is inaccurate, since the piece must be based on subjective experience.
> Furthermore, it is conceptual music, since it consists of a conceptual element and uses a real time frame which will contain actual sounds, heard as music, ideally, if one chooses to engage.
> Admit it, eugene: I've got an air-tight case.


This is not an air-tight case. It is absolute, unequivocal, irredeemable drivel. It is word salad with no substance or meaning. It is madness.


----------



## isorhythm

Isn't mindless a good thing in zen? Serious question.


----------



## millionrainbows

JAS said:


> This is not an air-tight case. It is absolute, unequivocal, irredeemable drivel. It is word salad with no substance or meaning. It is madness.


Oh yeah? And your mother's ideas wear army boots!


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> Isn't mindless a good thing in zen? Serious question.


No, not in the way you probably mean it.


----------



## JeffD

fluteman said:


> I admire your effort, millionrainbows, but there will always be those who feel, as JeffD put it, "the Earth is flat, just stay away from the edge." They do not want their assumptions challenged. Others analyze the ground they are standing on carefully and minutely, detect a slight curvature, and extrapolate that into a theory that the entire Earth is spherical. Still others set sail for the horizon and see what happens. Of course, the Earth is not flat, nor is it perfectly spherical. So the analogy holds pretty well.


My point was and is that the borders of music, the acceptance or not of floor wax under the term "music" in no way threatens my enjoyment of Scarlatti. I am not a composer. I do not have to challenge musical conventions, or to sail for the edge, or push the envelope. I don't have to listen to anything i don't want to, and, if you or anyone wants me to listen to something, it might help if it is something I want to listen to. AND... _That this is not an anti-intellectual anti-challenge ignorant or under experienced point of view._

To take the analogy that holds pretty well a little further, knowledge of the curvature of the earth is of little value when driving to work or getting directions to the camp site. I don't need to contemplate spherical geometry, or that all longitudes meet at the poles, to turn east, and then north, and get home, and enjoy the drive the entire way.

The assumptions I have made are pretty darned serviceable for what I need, and when I need more I have the flexibility of mind to question them.

I am not in the least threatened or provoked by the challenges to the definitions in border cases.

What is threatening, and disturbing, and gets me hooked i admit, is the insult, direct, or implied, or perhaps sometimes incorrectly inferred (I will readily admit) _that it is evidence of intellectual lapse_ not to consider legitimate "music" that cannot, even in theory, be distinguished from nothing, or from a fraud.

Those of you who ask us to accept before understanding are no threat to those of us who seek to understand before accepting. Those of you who insult and bully and imply the intellectual inferiority of those who try to understand before accepting, well.. it sure is not the best way to make friends and influence people.


----------



## Guest

millionrainbows said:


> That's because you are basing your opinion on an objective definition of music


I missed the _objective _definition - all that's been offered here are people's subjective opinions.



millionrainbows said:


> which is inaccurate,


What is the "inaccuracy" in the definition you are rejecting?



millionrainbows said:


> Furthermore, it is conceptual music, since it consists of a conceptual element and uses a real time frame which will contain actual sounds, heard as music, ideally, if one chooses to engage.


No, it's not a matter of "engagement". I don't have to engage with Beethoven's 5th to validate it as music, do I?



millionrainbows said:


> I've got an air-tight case.


No, you've got a case (I think) that you restate, but it's not "air-tight", any more than my case is.


----------



## millionrainbows

JeffD said:


> My point was and is that the borders of music, the acceptance or not of floor wax under the term "music" in no way threatens my enjoyment of Scarlatti. I am not a composer. I do not have to challenge musical conventions, or to sail for the edge, or push the envelope. I don't have to listen to anything i don't want to, and, if you or anyone wants me to listen to something, it might help if it is something I want to listen to. AND... That this is not an anti-intellectual anti-challenge ignorant or under experienced point of view.


I understand. That sounds like a reasonably intelligent response. Likewise, I've only got so many years left to listen to good music, and I'd rather it be Cage's prepared piano works, not the sound of traffic in the distance, an occasional bird chirping, and the ubiquitous "echo-dog-barking". And there's always that teenager who wants to rev his motorcycle up all the way, and take off down the highway.



> To take the analogy that holds pretty well a little further, knowledge of the curvature of the earth is of little value when driving to work or getting directions to the camp site. I don't need to contemplate spherical geometry, or that all longitudes meet at the poles, to turn east, and then north, and get home, and enjoy the drive the entire way...The assumptions I have made are pretty darned serviceable for what I need, and when I need more I have the flexibility of mind to question them.


I think most members here would agree that you've done a good job at what needs to be done. And don't even talk to me about directions! I get lost all the time. No sense of direction whatsoever!



> I am not in the least threatened or provoked by the challenges to the definitions in border cases.


The political forum is there, if you want to discuss this border problem any further.



> What is threatening, and disturbing, and gets me hooked i admit, is the insult, direct, or implied, or perhaps sometimes incorrectly inferred (I will readily admit) _that it is evidence of intellectual lapse_ not to consider legitimate "music" that cannot, even in theory, be distinguished from nothing, or from a fraud.


Well, at least you're not in denial about it, just going along with it. I think you have a right to feel insulted.



> Those of you who are ask us to accept before understanding are no threat to those of us who seek to understand before accepting. Those of you who insult us and bully and imply intellectual inferiority, those who try to understand before accepting, well.. it sure is not a way to make friends and influence people.


That's understandable. I'm sure that John Cage would be dismayed at your reaction, if he were alive, but you can't please everyone. I know exactly how you feel, BTW. My observations have been called "utter nonesense", "poppycock", and "new age drivel." I still like them, though. I can't help but respect Woodduck's musical knowledge, really. KenOC's humor always gets me, as well. You gotta love this bunch of wacky music-lovers!


----------



## eugeneonagain

millionrainbows said:


> That probably won't be much of a problem for you, eugene.


Now now, none of that famous 'ad hominem'. You know it puts your nose out of joint when you perceive it directed at yourself.



millionrainbows said:


> Admit it, eugene: I've got an air-tight case.


It's depriving you of oxygen and making you light-headed.


----------



## millionrainbows

MacLeod said:


> I missed the _objective _definition - all that's been offered here are people's subjective opinions.


Ouch! You got me there, MacLeod! And, ironically, on the issue of definitions! Go figure!



> What is the "inaccuracy" in the definition you are rejecting?


I can't tell you. I'm so confused, now, that I can't tell the inside from the outside!



> No, it's not a matter of "engagement". I don't have to engage with Beethoven's 5th to validate it as music, do I?


No. I think that there are enough people in the world to back you up on that one.



> No, you've got a case (I think) that you restate, but it's not "air-tight", any more than my case is.


Well, that's the problem with things of an aesthetic, metaphysical, or spiritual nature. You just gotta believe!


----------



## millionrainbows

Originally Posted by *eugeneonagain* 
_Can't I just listen mind(lessly)fully for a while? Much less effort required._



eugeneonagain said:


> Now now, none of that famous 'ad hominem'. You know it puts your nose out of joint when you perceive it directed at yourself.


Well, you said it, eugene! You couldn't expect me to pass up a chance like that, could you?



> It's depriving you of oxygen and making you light-headed.


Can I faint into your arms?


----------



## eugeneonagain

Go on then. We'll do that game of trust. I will not let you fall.


----------



## JAS

On my drive home from work, I suddenly had a revelation. Eureka! I now fully understand 4'33" to be . . . . a cantaloupe! I know it to be a cantaloupe because I can go to any of my local grocery stores, indeed any grocery store anywhere, and count the cantaloupes, and counting involves numbers and the title 4'33" is entirely made up of numbers. (Punctuation is not relevant because, as everyone knows, you cannot really do math with punctuation.) Therefore, I pronounce 4'33" to be a cantaloupe! It is so clear to me now that I cannot imagine how it escaped me before.


----------



## Woodduck

millionrainbows said:


> I prefer to just put it all under the heading of "groupthink."
> You know this is true. 4'33" has been accused of being an elaborate joke on many occasions.


The only groupthink on view here is the "anti-think" of those who are stuck in the pretentious hypersubjectivism of the beatnik-to-flowerchild era, the intellectual impotence of which is represented by the precious, esoteric, hothouse hybrid of Dada and watered-down Far Easternism represented by Cage and his "conceptual art" descendants, with their anti-establishment posturing (which, to their consternation, was co-opted by the establishment). The drinkers of the pot-laced Kool-Aid who still speak of 4'33" as if it were a revelation fresh from the guru's lips are as much thought-groupies as the propagandists of any cult.

If Cage did really understand Buddhism he would have had no problem with people laughing at 4'33." For all I know he found it amusing himself; he does say in his published "score" that the piece can last as long as the performers want it to (hence the title!). To one who never drank the Kool-Aid, 4'33" is a period-piece and a curiosity, a goofy and awkward facsimile of a koan ("what is the sound of no music playing?") that doesn't owe its apparently eternal fascination to any artistic merit (or any art, period). The discussion seems to be kept alive by two groups: those still in awe of the decadent, down-to-the-empty-canvas, where-can-we-go-from-here Modernism of the mid-20th century, and those whose pleasure in rational inquiry and eye for the absurd makes the solemn pretensions of the first group, given the obvious opportunities presented by 4'33," irresistible. That anyone would frame the debates as being between cultural sophisticates and benighted conservatives only demonstrates how strong the Kool-Aid is.


----------



## Phil loves classical

I always think of Cage as being only half-serious about his own music, and knows he is playing a certain specific role. I don't think it rude to laugh at certain works like Cage's. People thought one of Beethoven's violin sonatas playing a melody on a single note was hilarious. We can appreciate music and laugh at its contradictions at the same time. Especially those composers who are clearly out to shock the audience, they can only expect the mainstream audience to laugh. It is a certain sensibility, a human one. I think it is missing a point to only respect music even when it is clearly playing with your sensibility. I wouldn't let any "modernist" composer determine the "right" way of how I should react to his/her music.


----------



## millionrainbows

JAS said:


> On my drive home from work, I suddenly had a revelation. Eureka! I now fully understand 4'33" to be . . . . a cantaloupe! I know it to be a cantaloupe because I can go to any of my local grocery stores, indeed any grocery store anywhere, and count the cantaloupes, and counting involves numbers and the title 4'33" is entirely made up of numbers. (Punctuation is not relevant because, as everyone knows, you cannot really do math with punctuation.) Therefore, I pronounce 4'33" to be a cantaloupe! It is so clear to me now that I cannot imagine how it escaped me before.


Congratulations, JAS! You've now achieved "vegetable consciousness!"


----------



## millionrainbows

Woodduck said:


> The only groupthink on view here is the "anti-think" of those who are stuck in the pretentious hypersubjectivism of the beatnik-to-flowerchild era, the intellectual impotence of which is represented by the precious, esoteric, hothouse hybrid of Dada and watered-down Far Easternism represented by Cage and his "conceptual art" descendants, with their anti-establishment posturing (which, to their consternation, was co-opted by the establishment). The drinkers of the pot-laced Kool-Aid who still speak of 4'33" as if it were a revelation fresh from the guru's lips are as much thought-groupies as the propagandists of any cult.


So, you don't like hippies?



> If Cage did really understand Buddhism he would have had no problem with people laughing at 4'33." For all I know he found it amusing himself; he does say in his published "score" that the piece can last as long as the performers want it to (hence the title!). To one who never drank the Kool-Aid, 4'33" is a period-piece and a curiosity, a goofy and awkward facsimile of a koan ("what is the sound of no music playing?") that doesn't owe its apparently eternal fascination to any artistic merit (or any art, period). The discussion seems to be kept alive by two groups: those still in awe of the decadent, down-to-the-empty-canvas, where-can-we-go-from-here Modernism of the mid-20th century, and those whose pleasure in rational inquiry and eye for the absurd makes the solemn pretensions of the first group, given the obvious opportunities presented by 4'33," irresistible. That anyone would frame the debates as being between cultural sophisticates and benighted conservatives only demonstrates how strong the Kool-Aid is.


4'33" is in the great Western tradition of religious music, although some here prefer Germanic mythology in drag...


----------



## philoctetes

MR sez "I think that misses the point, and Cage's intent, which was to simply suggest that we listen mindfully."

Well, this is how threads go bad. I know I digress, but I get sick of "points" that never connect and remain isolated in space forever.

If I make my point, that doesn't mean I have "missed" a different, not exclusive, point, made by someone else. This applies in so many cases where people pretend it doesn't for the sake of argument. Making my point doesn't mean I missed anything, it's just not the point I'm making. People are always criticizing each other for what they don't say, in order to dismiss what they have said. 

MR does this every day from his bunker. So he sets himself up kinda like the guy in the dunk tank at the county fair.


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> 4'33" is in the great Western tradition of religious music


Did Cage ever express this view himself? Seems wrong.


----------



## millionrainbows

philoctetes said:


> MR sez "I think that misses the point, and Cage's intent, which was to simply suggest that we listen mindfully."
> 
> Well, this is how threads go bad. I know I digress, but I get sick of "points" that never connect and remain isolated in space forever.
> 
> If I make my point, that doesn't mean I have "missed" a different, not exclusive, point, made by someone else. This applies in so many cases where people pretend it doesn't for the sake of argument. Making my point doesn't mean I missed anything, it's just not the point I'm making. People are always criticizing each other for what they don't say, in order to dismiss what they have said.
> 
> MR does this every day from his bunker. So he sets himself up kinda like the guy in the dunk tank at the county fair.


So, philocetes, what is your point?

From my perspective, "threads go bad" when critics and haters who shouldn't even be there start going on these emotional harangues, blaming it all on John Cage. 
Not you, philocetes; you seem to remain calm while castigating.


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> Did Cage ever express this view himself? Seems wrong.


Why would Cage have to declare this? Are you looking for
"proof" again?

Besides, that's only my observation. Now it will be easier for you to invalidate the idea. But that's only _your _opinion.


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Why did Cage have to declare this? Do we need
> proof" again?
> It's only my observation. Now it will be easier to invalidate the idea. But that's only _your _opinion.


I'm open to the idea. In what sense is it part of the great Western tradition of religious music? Is it enough to say it's religious and written by a classically trained westerner, or do you mean something more than that?


----------



## philoctetes

millionrainbows said:


> So, philocetes, what is your point?


The dunk tank is rigged.


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> I'm open to the idea. In what sense is it part of the great Western tradition of religious music? Is it enough to say it's religious and written by a classically trained westerner, or do you mean something more than that?


Well, that. It's not "religious" in strict terms, but I think Cage's entire output, all of it, was colored by his involvement on Buddhism. Anyone who's read anything about the man would know this as a given.


----------



## millionrainbows

philoctetes said:


> The dunk tank is rigged.


What, is there a lobster in there? Is it filled with liquid nitrogen?


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Well, that. It's not "religious" in strict terms, but I think Cage's entire output, all of it, was colored by his involvement on Buddhism. Anyone who's read anything about the man would know this as a given.


Here's something that was not colored at all by Buddhism though: the great Western tradition of religious music.


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> Here's something that was not colored at all by Buddhism though: the great Western tradition of religious music.


Well, that's debatable. Beethoven had been reading the Upanishads when he composed the Ninth, and he was a Mason, also. Those Masons had all sorts of fringe ideas that were frowned upon by the Catholic Church. And the Masonic thing goes all the way back to Mozart.


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Well, that's debatable. Beethoven had been reading the Upanishads when he composed the Ninth, and he was a Mason, also. Those Masons had all sorts of fringe ideas that were frowned upon by the Catholic Church. And the Masonic thing goes all the way back to Mozart.


The Upanishads aren't Buddhist!

Anyway it seems like you've walked back your claim about 4'33" being part of the western religious music tradition so I won't pursue this further.


----------



## KenOC

isorhythm wrote, "_Here's something that was not colored at all by Buddhism though: the great Western tradition of religious music."_



millionrainbows said:


> Well, that's debatable. Beethoven had been reading the Upanishads when he composed the Ninth, and he was a Mason, also. Those Masons had all sorts of fringe ideas that were frowned upon by the Catholic Church. And the Masonic thing goes all the way back to Mozart.


I probably don't need to point out that Hinduism is not Buddhism, and that the 9th Symphony is a secular work, not a religious one.

In any event, around 1817-1818 Beethoven copied out a fairly long passage, apparently from a German book on Indian philosophy. The passage may or may not be a quote from the Upanishads. At the time he had in interest in Hinduism, the Egyptian mystery cults, and other such things, an interest not unusual in Vienna at the time. There is no evidence that he was "reading the Upanishads."

Similarly, there is no evidence he was ever a Mason, although one lodge in Canada claims he was. I don't believe any recent biographer accepts that he was a Mason.

If you have any support for either of your claims, I'd love to see it.


----------



## DeepR

I am God!

I am nothing, I am play, I am freedom, I am life.

*I am the boundary*, I am the peak.

- A.N. Scriabin

Ladies and gentlemen, I've found the boundary. Anything beyond Scriabin is not music.


----------



## Haydn70

Woodduck said:


> The only groupthink on view here is the "anti-think" of those who are stuck in the pretentious hypersubjectivism of the beatnik-to-flowerchild era, the intellectual impotence of which is represented by the precious, esoteric, hothouse hybrid of Dada and watered-down Far Easternism represented by Cage and his "conceptual art" descendants, with their anti-establishment posturing (which, to their consternation, was co-opted by the establishment). The drinkers of the pot-laced Kool-Aid who still speak of 4'33" as if it were a revelation fresh from the guru's lips are as much thought-groupies as the propagandists of any cult.
> 
> If Cage did really understand Buddhism he would have had no problem with people laughing at 4'33." For all I know he found it amusing himself; he does say in his published "score" that the piece can last as long as the performers want it to (hence the title!). To one who never drank the Kool-Aid, 4'33" is a period-piece and a curiosity, a goofy and awkward facsimile of a koan ("what is the sound of no music playing?") that doesn't owe its apparently eternal fascination to any artistic merit (or any art, period). The discussion seems to be kept alive by two groups: those still in awe of the decadent, down-to-the-empty-canvas, where-can-we-go-from-here Modernism of the mid-20th century, and those whose pleasure in rational inquiry and eye for the absurd makes the solemn pretensions of the first group, given the obvious opportunities presented by 4'33," irresistible. That anyone would frame the debates as being between cultural sophisticates and benighted conservatives only demonstrates how strong the Kool-Aid is.


Yet another superb post, Woodduck...love it! Many thanks!


----------



## Jacck

4'33 is a theatrical piece, it is not music. Is it art? yes. Is it music? no. and this simple fact has generated over 300 comments


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> The Upanishads aren't Buddhist!


Oww, you got me! What a debater! Anyway, Hinduism shares many ideas with Buddhism.



> Anyway it seems like you've walked back your claim about 4'33" being part of the western religious music tradition so I won't pursue this further.


Suit yourself, make false assertions about what I think, but I've always thought that 4'33" was in the Western religious tradition. In fact, I started a thread on this very subject, which has been going for some years now.

Are ya happy now? Smile, like John Cage.


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Suit yourself, make false assertions about what I think, but I've always thought that 4'33" was in the Western religious tradition. In fact, I started a thread on this very subject, which has been going for some years now.


Yes, I'm aware of the thread in which you very clearly placed 4'33" outside of, if not in opposition to, the Western sacred music tradition, and would have gotten around to asking you about it if the conversation had shown signs of being fruitful.


----------



## JAS

isorhythm said:


> Yes, I'm aware of the thread in which you very clearly placed 4'33" outside of, if not in opposition to, the Western sacred music tradition, and would have gotten around to asking you about it if the conversation had shown signs of being fruitful.


We already did cantaloupe and pink grapefruit, with a hint of pears and peaches. How much more fruitful do you need?


----------



## fluteman

JAS said:


> We already did cantaloupe and pink grapefruit, with a hint of pears and peaches. How much more fruitful do you need?


This much more:


----------



## Larkenfield

*4:33* well done. Everyone in _playing_ position. Great fun... There are about 931,000 search results for 'John Cage 4'33."' Many with videos. There are a great number of performing musicians around the world who are obviously getting something out of it and consider it worth doing. It has been or is being accepted in the concert and recital halls, except by those whose wants, needs, or expectations are not being met.






Anyone unable to sit still for that brief length of time without wailing or complaining bloody murder, trying to rip someone a new one, or blowing a gasket is not being much of a help. Silence is not the enemy and it's an essential part of anything in music, including the spaces, silences and rests between the notes, and before and after any concert work where the conductor is waiting for the audience to be silent before beginning. Its importance is simply being singled out by Cage, and I entirely agree with him. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to notice the compulsive thinking and noise of one's own mind.


----------



## eugeneonagain

You can also just sit in the park before and after the performance; which is probably more comfortable, with interesting sounds and sights (are these allowed in this multi-media fest?) and likely a lot cheaper than a performance of listening to the sounds of the world from a good seat in the concert hall.

I believe in shared knowledge in a creative commons way. I'm drawn to think of the way the Japanese 'appreciate' cherry blossom trees in a conscious way (I believe it has a name). I've seen this and no one charges money for it and you can sit where you want, and there are no costs for mounting a performance.

Why contain this life-affirming idea into a dry academic exercise (stolen from the Paris avant-garde and made quite boring)?


----------



## Woodduck

Larkenfield said:


> *4:33* well done. There are about 931,000 search results for 'John Cage 4'33."' Many with videos. So there are a great number of performing musicians around the world who are obviously getting something out of it and consider it worth doing.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Anyone unable to sit still for that brief length of time without wailing or complaining bloody murder, trying to rip someone a new one, or blowing a gasket is not being much of a help. Silence is not the enemy and it's an essential part of anything in music, including the space, silences and rests between the notes, and such as before and after any concert performance. Its importance is simply being singled out by Cage, and I entirely agree with him. If nothing else, it's an opportunity to notice the compulsive thinking and noise of the mind.


How can you tell that it's well done? What distinguishes a good performance?

No sooner did I get into the silence, punctuated by the crying of a baby (_who_ is so thoughtless as to bring a baby to a concert?), than the conductor waved his arms and ruined the spell. And then he did it again, and again. How can we meditate if someone taps us on the shoulder every minute or so and says "start meditating"? If Cage is trying, as has been said, to "remove himself" from his work and make us the "composers," why does he keep butting in? The fact that there are "movements" to this "piece" is certainly an indication that Cage is joking with us. Either that, or he just doesn't know how best to implement his own idea.


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## jdec

Cage 4'33" is probably the only score I can write down completely from memory.


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## Taggart

Please concentrate on the topic and reserve personal arguments for PM's.

A number of posts with personal arguments have been removed.


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## millionrainbows

KenOC said:


> isorhythm wrote, "_Here's something that was not colored at all by Buddhism though: the great Western tradition of religious music."_
> 
> *I probably don't need to point out that Hinduism is not Buddhism, *and that the 9th Symphony is a secular work, not a religious one.
> 
> In any event, around 1817-1818 Beethoven copied out a fairly long passage, apparently from a German book on Indian philosophy. The passage may or may not be a quote from the Upanishads. At the time he had in interest in Hinduism, the Egyptian mystery cults, and other such things, an interest not unusual in Vienna at the time. There is no evidence that he was "reading the Upanishads."
> 
> Similarly, there is no evidence he was ever a Mason, although one lodge in Canada claims he was. I don't believe any recent biographer accepts that he was a Mason.
> 
> If you have any support for either of your claims, I'd love to see it.


Hmmm...to both Isorhythm and KenOC, I never claimed that the Upanishads were Buddhist.

I got my info from _Late Beethoven._ Maybe in a cloud of hippie marijuana fog, I misinterpreted it.

At any rate, let's take this refutation as good evidence that Beethoven was not a spiritual man, and was not in any way interested in "new-age drivel."










"With a bow to the immortal study by J.W.N. Sullivan, Late Beethoven could have also been called "Beethoven: His Spiritual Development." Solomon weaves amazingly diverse threads, chapter by chapter, into the fabric of Beethoven's belief system, his take on nature, divinity, human purpose, morality, and the mission of music."

"In general, Solomon finds Beethoven's beliefs changed from the rational, enlightment, classical thought that characterized, for Solomon, the first and second period works, to a more romantic belief system that focused on inwardness, theology, (I found it fascinating that Beethoven showed awareness of and interest in Eastern thought in the Tagebuch), nature, and imagination."


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## JAS

Beethoven's makeup looks to be a bit heavy-handed in that portrait.


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## millionrainbows

JAS said:


> Beethoven's makeup looks to be a bit heavy-handed in that portrait.


He'd just gotten back from an outdoor love-in/free concert in the park, and got a little sunburned.


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> The Upanishads aren't Buddhist!
> 
> Anyway it seems like you've walked back your claim about 4'33" being part of the western religious music tradition so I won't pursue this further.


I never said that the Upanishads were Buddhist.


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## eugeneonagain

So Beethoven had a sideline in quack ideas? That's good. No wonder he developed rosacea, or embarrassment maybe.


----------



## isorhythm

millionrainbows said:


> Hmmm...to both Isorhythm and KenOC, I never claimed that the Upanishads were Buddhist.
> 
> I got my info from _Late Beethoven._ Maybe in a cloud of hippie marijuana fog, I misinterpreted it.
> 
> At any rate, let's take this refutation as good evidence that Beethoven was not a spiritual man, and was not in any way interested in "new-age drivel."


I think many of us knew about Beethoven and his interest in the Upanishads. It's just not relevant to what we were talking about, which was Cage, Buddhism and their relationship to western sacred music.

Beethoven was of course not interested in "new age drivel," which did not yet exist.


----------



## millionrainbows

isorhythm said:


> I think many of us knew about Beethoven and his interest in the Upanishads. It's just not relevant to what we were talking about, which was Cage, Buddhism and their relationship to western sacred music.
> 
> Beethoven was of course not interested in "new age drivel," which did not yet exist.


That's not much of a defense. Personally, I think Beethoven was "tuned in" to the cosmic drone.


----------



## KenOC

millionrainbows said:


> That's not much of a defense. Personally, I think Beethoven was "tuned in" to the cosmic drone.


So was Schumann. As I recall, he didn't much like it.


----------



## millionrainbows

KenOC said:


> So was Schumann. As I recall, he didn't much like it.


So being tuned in is being crazy? Ok, but remember, it was "sane" people who developed the hydrogen bomb.


----------



## KenOC

millionrainbows said:


> So being tuned in is being crazy? Ok, but remember, it was "sane" people who developed the hydrogen bomb.


A little research might remedy your confusion. Here's Schumann's "drone":

"Schumann did indeed hear an "A" at the end of his life. It was a form of tinnitus, or perhaps an auditory hallucination related to his major depressive episode. At times, he had musical hallucinations which were longer than just the single "A", but his diaries include comments from him about hearing that annoying single note. However, he didn't go mad from hearing it…" --Wiki

BTW "sane" people also invented the disinfection of drinking water, electric lighting, antibiotics, ways for people to move around quickly without horses, ways to fly through the air, recorded music and pocket-size playback devices, and so on. If you are making a point, it escapes me.


----------



## millionrainbows

KenOC said:


> A little research might remedy your confusion. Here's Schumann's "drone":
> 
> "Schumann did indeed hear an "A" at the end of his life. It was a form of tinnitus, or perhaps an auditory hallucination related to his major depressive episode. At times, he had musical hallucinations which were longer than just the single "A", but his diaries include comments from him about hearing that annoying single note. However, he didn't go mad from hearing it…" --Wiki


Oh, I thought you were referring to Beethoven's mental state after his deafness, which produced results like the Grosse Fugue. And Schumann jumped into the river, as I recall.


----------



## aleazk

I can even buy that 4'33'' is a 'sacred act' in relation to Buddhism. Does that make it music? I can't see how...

Besides, can Buddhism be even considered a religion in the first place? As far as I know, it has nothing to do with theism. It seems more a philosophy on how to live your life without suffering, based on some predicaments about the un-reality of material reality, all of this, true, clothed into some mystical stuff.


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## eugeneonagain

It's only necessary to know that there are some people who are perpetually convinced that there is always some ancient, often mystical, secret knowledge behind whatever their interests are. 

Instead of this being based upon ordinary rigorous research it relies upon bog-standard religious thought given a new twist by co-opting the vocabulary and writing styles of both philosophy and particularly science. 

It is the province of people who are just religiously-minded, but imagine they are far in advance of of ordinary superstitious crankery. It replaces ordinary religion for them because it appears to offer an ideal platform for marrying the quackery they can't let go of, with something that appears like rigorous thought.

Even the great are susceptible; Isaac Newton wrote reams of superstitious twaddle alongside his great work. His personal beliefs were couched in a world-view pre-dating the enlightenment thinking his scientific work helped usher in.


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## aleazk

The New Age?...


----------



## JAS

aleazk said:


> Besides, can Buddhism be even considered a religion in the first place? As far as I know, it has nothing to do with theism. It seems more a philosophy on how to live your life without suffering, based on some predicaments about the un-reality of material reality, all of this, true, clothed into some mystical stuff.


Yes, as actually practiced in most of the world, Buddhism is a religion, with all its hallmarks, including lots of superstitious stuff. Only in the West is it pushed as mostly a secular philosophy.


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## isorhythm

My understanding is that while Buddhism includes supernatural beliefs (e.g. reincarnation), it's fundamentally atheistic, while Hinduism is fundamentally theistic. It's a big difference!


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## JAS

isorhythm said:


> My understanding is that while Buddhism includes supernatural beliefs (e.g. reincarnation), it's fundamentally atheistic, while Hinduism is fundamentally theistic. It's a big difference!


As is so often the case, things are more complicated than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhist_deities

But I don't want to derail the topic further, since I think we are far from the boundary of music.


----------



## Jacck

isorhythm said:


> My understanding is that while Buddhism includes supernatural beliefs (e.g. reincarnation), it's fundamentally atheistic, while Hinduism is fundamentally theistic. It's a big difference!


Buddhism is many things and many sects, from the primitive superstial ritualistic forms that pray at golden Buddha statues to the sophistication of zen buddhism or thai forest monk traditions. I would not say that buddhism does not believe in god, nor that it believes in god. It believes in transcending thought and thus reaching enlightenment and believing or nonbelieving in god are forms of thought


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## eugeneonagain

Transcending thought by appealing to the thinking apparatus? No one can tell anyone what 'enlightenment' is, you're supposed to just 'experience' it. 
That ought to lead to a position where you wouldn't be able to conceive of it until that point and therefore wouldn't be able to speak about it, recommend it, have a methodology for reaching it and certainly not talk about it. Yet the opposite is the case, with every cut-price guru and gullible person who feels a psychological need, buying into contradictory nonsense and empty rhetoric; which is made all the more seemingly genuine by being 'ancient' and mysterious.

The very same thinking has polluted this thread all through.


----------



## Jacck

eugeneonagain said:


> Transcending thought by appealing to the thinking apparatus? No one can tell anyone what 'enlightenment' is, you're supposed to just 'experience' it.


then forget about enlightment and think about a state of inner peace, harmony and happiness. But this state is not brought about by external circumstances but by finding it within yourself through deep self-knowledge. I have studied extensively buddhism (tibetan, zen) also also sufism, christian mysticism and you would be surprised how similar the descriptions of 12th century Christian monk such as Meister Eckhart sound to 8th century chan (zen) masters such as Hui Hai or Huang Po or to 12 century sufi Mewlana Rumi. And of course I had also my own experiences to convince myself, that these things are real. But I understand that not everyone is lucky enough to experience these things and so it is best not to worry about it. 
you say that nobody can explain what enlightment is. The problem is that it cannot be translated into words, because the limitless cannot be confined by narrow language. The buddhists use words such as non-dwelling or non-abiding to indirectly describe this state, but you cannot form a mental concept about it. So think about it as inner peace.


----------



## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> How can you tell that it's well done? What distinguishes a good performance?
> 
> No sooner did I get into the silence, punctuated by the crying of a baby (_who_ is so thoughtless as to bring a baby to a concert?), than the conductor waved his arms and ruined the spell. And then he did it again, and again. How can we meditate if someone taps us on the shoulder every minute or so and says "start meditating"? If Cage is trying, as has been said, to "remove himself" from his work and make us the "composers," why does he keep butting in? The fact that there are "movements" to this "piece" is certainly an indication that Cage is joking with us. Either that, or he just doesn't know how best to implement his own idea.


Having read Cage's own comments about 4'33" and other of his compositions, I think I could anticipate what his answer would be to your question. But I won't bother, as you could read up on him yourself, and perhaps you already have, and your review is entirely reasonable and legitimate regardless. In fact, one could make similar comments about much of what Cage did, especially after 1950, when he routinely played the role of the provocateur to the hilt and courted controversy, therefore inviting reactions like yours, if not making them inevitable. Not everyone wants to be provoked, at least not to that extent.

Had he only lived until 1950, this might remain his most famous musical composition (assuming it falls within the definition of "music", a hot topic here):






Perhaps you would find that more meditative. Either way, his work never was, never will be, and likely was never intended to be, for everyone. The ire he continues to arouse in this forum continues to mystify me.


----------



## millionrainbows

millionrainbows said:


> 4'33" is in the great Western tradition of religious music...





isorhythm said:


> I'm open to the idea. In what sense is it part of the great Western tradition of religious music? Is it enough to say it's religious and written by a classically trained westerner, or do you mean something more than that? Did Cage ever express this view himself? Seems wrong.



I'm just making a general observation. I think Cage's entire output, all of it, was colored by his involvement on Buddhism. Anyone who's read anything about the man would know this as a given.


----------



## Luchesi

fluteman said:


> Having read Cage's own comments about 4'33" and other of his compositions, I think I could anticipate what his answer would be to your question. But I won't bother, as you could read up on him yourself, and perhaps you already have, and your review is entirely reasonable and legitimate regardless. In fact, one could make similar comments about much of what Cage did, especially after 1950, when he routinely played the role of the provocateur to the hilt and courted controversy, therefore inviting reactions like yours, if not making them inevitable. Not everyone wants to be provoked, at least not to that extent.
> 
> Had he only lived until 1950, this might remain his most famous musical composition (assuming it falls within the definition of "music", a hot topic here):
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Perhaps you would find that more meditative. Either way, his work never was, never will be, and likely was never intended to be, for everyone. The ire he continues to arouse in this forum continues to mystify me.


Here's the moving score;


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## isorhythm

^I would bet that zero people question whether the prepared piano pieces are music.


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## aleazk

isorhythm said:


> ^I would bet that zero people question whether the prepared piano pieces are music.


Actually, I mentioned this piece in the other thread. See discussion with @JAS after it.


----------



## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> The ire he continues to arouse in this forum continues to mystify me.


"Ire" may be a bit of an overstatement. :lol: But if the ire (or whatever it is) Cage arouses is mystifying to you, the devotion he inspires might be as mystifying to others.

Some people are just constitutionally allergic to things that don't appear to be what they claim to be, and when such things are put forward seriously, those people are inclined to question them. In this case 4'33" and what's proposed about it - which may or may not be true of it - raise questions. Whether the claims that it's a piece of music make sense is one question. Whether it actually succeeds in doing what Cage supposedly intended it to do is another question. I think it can succeed (though perhaps not entirely) only if we know what's going to happen during the ritual so that we can be prepared for, and decide not to be distracted by, the trappings of it and the actions involved in performing it. Once we know what to expect, we can play along if we wish, but nothing in the work itself provides any guidance. And, finally, we can ask whether playing this particular game is the best way to experience the sort of things we're told Cage would have us experience.

People who think that 4'33" doesn't qualify as music, that its structure gets in the way of its achieving its own objectives, and that those objectives can be achieved not only better but wonderfully well by not sitting through it at all, are going to be highly skeptical of the seriousness of the piece and of the advocacy of those who insist it should be taken seriously. But my guess is that most of us skeptics don't spend a moment thinking about the subject until someone here brings it up. It appears that that will never stop happening, and so I guess the "ire" - and the jokes - won't either.


----------



## isorhythm

aleazk said:


> Actually, I mentioned this piece in the other thread. See discussion with @JAS after it.


Huh, I wouldn't have predicted that.

Wrong on Buddhism, now this. I'm striking out in this thread.


----------



## aleazk

Jacck said:


> then forget about enlightment and think about a state of inner peace, harmony and happiness. But this state is not brought about by external circumstances but by finding it within yourself through deep self-knowledge. I have studied extensively buddhism (tibetan, zen) also also sufism, christian mysticism and you would be surprised how similar the descriptions of 12th century Christian monk such as Meister Eckhart sound to 8th century chan (zen) masters such as Hui Hai or Huang Po or to 12 century sufi Mewlana Rumi. And of course I had also my own experiences to convince myself, that these things are real. But I understand that not everyone is lucky enough to experience these things and so it is best not to worry about it.
> you say that nobody can explain what enlightment is. The problem is that it cannot be translated into words, because the limitless cannot be confined by narrow language. The buddhists use words such as non-dwelling or non-abiding to indirectly describe this state, but you cannot form a mental concept about it. So think about it as inner peace.


I think Schopenhauer explains all this in a much more transparent way and without any fancy concepts or states of transcendency. Actually, it's rather simple. Basically, each person has some basic and visceral desires (sexual impulse being, of course, the most obvious of them), which he calls the Will. But all the other people, besides you, also have their Will, which may collide with your own. All the things in reality also have their Wills (but in their case, it's just their mere existence and tendency according to the laws of nature), which also may collide with your Will. The result is that, if you follow your Will, very likely you are not going to succeed in satisfying it, since pretty much all the rest of reality conspires against that goal. Thus, since those desires are visceral, one suffers because of that failure of achieving satisfaction. The suggestion is, then, to make an effort to ignore the desires of your own Will (of course, this is itself an act of Will, so you will suffer while you do it before its satisfaction, which is the abolition of all willing). The human mind, in this view, is at its basic level the Will, and above it, the consciousness, that doesn't will, it only sees and perceives things in a detached way, without any emotions (which are more related to the Will and its satisfaction or non-satisfaction). In this way, if one achieves the suppression of all willing, one becomes some sort of pure consciousness that only sees and perceives the reality in a detached way, without emotions (and, in particular, without suffering, of course). Also, since all the problem of suffering is because of our very localized Will which conflicts with the other parts of reality, if one achieves the suppression of all willing, then one becomes some sort of delocalized consciousness, since the 'I' comes mainly from the localized Will. All of this, of course, is just simply stuff going on in the mind, mere changes of perspective about how one perceives reality. In particular, no mystical stuff, transcendental states, etc., are invoked, what is proposed is just a mental exercise to try to avoid suffering. Also, he says that when one perceives an artistic idea (either as spectator or creator), a thing similar to this goes on in the mind.

I found it moderately useful sometimes, although I certainly don't agree with all of that philosophy.


----------



## JeffD

millionrainbows said:


> I'm just making a general observation. I think Cage's entire output, all of it, was colored by his involvement on Buddhism. Anyone who's read anything about the man would know this as a given.





> Although Cage was best known for his musical endeavors, he also created works of visual art. A series of graphite drawings were inspired by the garden of the Rinzai Zen Buddhist temple Ryōanji in Kyoto, Japan. The garden is an austere arrangement of 15 rocks resting on a bed of white gravel. Cage used 15 stones in composing the series. He placed each stone on the paper, its location determined by chance, and traced around it a certain number of times, also determined by chance, until the paper carried the images of all fifteen stones. Cage turned to the ancient Chinese book of wisdom-the I Ching, or Book of Changes-to govern these aesthetic decisions. He stated, "I use chance operations instead of operating according to my likes and dislikes." This approach allowed Cage to escape his own preferences and open himself up to new possibilities.


From: https://www.guggenheim.org/arts-curriculum/topic/buddhism-and-the-neo-avant-garde


----------



## Jacck

aleazk said:


> I think Schopenhauer explains all this in a much more transparent way and without any fancy concepts or states of transcendency.


with all respect to Schoppenhauer, compared to Buddha, Eckhart (the original, not the fake one Eckhart Tolle), Rumi etc. he was a little out of his depth. He was certainly interested in buddhism and used his sharp intellect to create a philosophy out of it, but he did not conquer his own ego and lacked their wisdom and insight.


----------



## millionrainbows

Yes, Schoppenhauer does not represent Buddhism except in some surface qualities. He's more like an existentialist.


----------



## aleazk

Jacck said:


> with all respect to Schoppenhauer, compared to Buddha, Eckhart (the original, not the fake one Eckhart Tolle), Rumi etc. he was a little out of his depth. He was certainly interested in buddhism and used his sharp intellect to create a philosophy out of it, but he did not conquer his own ego and lacked their wisdom and insight.


I didn't say he was a Buddhist, he also didn't create his philosophy out of it, since he read the Upanishads much after he completed the first part of his book where he sets up the main tenets of his philosophy, he was merely satisfied that he reached the same conclusions but just by following the western philosophical tradition. As for his personal life, yes, he didn't follow those advices, so what, he didn't have the personal strength needed to do so (as he admitted when confronted with that same criticism you mention.) That's the advantadge of the western approach, one can explain something rationally without having to relate it to personal experience. Anyway, I find his insight to be more interesting since similar ideas than those of Buddhism are presented but exposed in a systematic and transparent way, and related to the rest of the western philosophical canon. Hey, I am a westerner, I don't see any good in throwing all our tradition just because the supposed superiority of the antique easterns. Better to have the best of both words. Better to be said that the reality we directly experience may not be the true reality because of Kant's argumentations rather than be said to accept that dogmatically. The buddha lived more than two millennia ago, I think there's more than can be said than the words of the 'master', I don't really care about that type of religious sainthood.


----------



## aleazk

millionrainbows said:


> Yes, Schoppenhauer does not represent Buddhism except in some surface qualities. He's more like an existentialist.


Again, I didn't say it did, I only said that that particular point was clearer in his philosphy than the usual vague sayings of buddhism. I would say he was a proto-existentialist.


----------



## Jacck

aleazk said:


> Again, I didn't say it did, I only said that that particular point was clearer in his philosphy than the usual vague sayings of buddhism. I would say he was a proto-existentialist.


things in zen are purposefully unclear, so as not to create philosophies, because philosophies cloud and condition the mind. And the goal of zen/buddhism is to uncondition the mind
https://www.theemotionmachine.com/the-power-of-koans-to-destroy-conceptual-thinking/


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## JAS

. . . and wiggle room avoids getting caught in an inconsistency.


----------



## aleazk

Jacck said:


> things in zen are purposefully unclear, so as not to create philosophies, because philosophies cloud and condition the mind. And the goal of zen/buddhism is to uncondition the mind
> https://www.theemotionmachine.com/the-power-of-koans-to-destroy-conceptual-thinking/


I don't find that approach to be insightful, to be honest. I think that kind of stuff was the most effective way that those ancient people found to transmit the views of that religion, due, precisely, to their lack of a well developed tradition of rational thinking.


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## isorhythm

aleazk said:


> I don't find that approach to be insightful, to be honest. I think that kind of stuff was the most effective way that those ancient people found to transmit the views of that religion, due, precisely, to their lack of a well developed tradition of rational thinking.


I don't think that's true. Some of the earliest insights in mathematics came from India. I think the language you're talking about comes out of an attempt to convey things that can't be grasped by reason.

There is similar stuff in medieval Christian mysticism e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing


----------



## aleazk

isorhythm said:


> I don't think that's true. Some of the earliest insights in mathematics came from India. I think the language you're talking about comes out of an attempt to convey things that can't be grasped by reason.
> 
> There is similar stuff in medieval Christian mysticism e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cloud_of_Unknowing


Are you going to compare those scattered results with the western tradition, starting from the pre-socratics to modern science? And, anyway, I think those things can be grasped by reason, as shown by Schopenhauer. As for Christianism, most of its actual insight was probably stolen from buddhism.

There are probably some things that can't be grasped by reason, but I think it has more to do with what Kant said (related to how the mind may distort reality for us and the limitations of the principle of sufficient reason, also analyzed by Schopenhauer in his essay on the four incarnations of that principle).


----------



## Jacck

aleazk said:


> I don't find that approach to be insightful, to be honest. I think that kind of stuff was the most effective way that those ancient people found to transmit the views of that religion, due, precisely, to their lack of a well developed tradition of rational thinking.


Do you understand the concept of conditioning? A conditioned mind is caught in some form of belief/prejudice/ideology/philosophy. To illustrate the point with an extreme example, look at some Jehova witness, how he is conditioned by his beliefs/religions and is entangled in them. The way he perceives the world and acts in the world happens through a thick filter of prejudices and his perception of life and reality is completely shaped and controlled by it. We may laugh at the stupidity of a Jehova witness, but we have our own conditionings and prejudices and ideologies and worldviews. And those might be similarly limited. A so called rational person, say a scientist, is conditioned by the science. His mind has been educated, trained, shaped by his studies and he perceives life and reality through these experiences and implicit beliefs. Even atheism is a form of contitioning created by thought. 
And the goal of zen is to uncondition the mind, so that the mind is made new/fresh, like the mind of young children. So that you can look at life through innocent eyes. It is called non-abiding mind, because it does not abide in any thought, any conceptual cage. So the goal of zen is completely different from creating useless philosophies which condition the mind. 
Mysticism is more than philosophy, it is incompatible with philosophy and has very different goals. Philosophers view mystics as muddled thinkers, mystics view philosophers are superficial materialists entangled in their limited worldviews. Beyond Lao Tze, my favorite taoist is Master Zhuang. He wrote some nice parables, for example about a frog in a well. A parables, poetic language etc. are best suited to speak about mystical experiences
http://ramblingtaoist.blogspot.com/2010/05/liberation-of-well-frog.html


----------



## aleazk

Jacck said:


> Do you understand the concept of conditioning? A conditioned mind is caught in some form of belief/prejudice/ideology/philosophy. To illustrate the point with an extreme example, look at some Jehova witness, how he is conditioned by his beliefs/religions and is entangled in them. The way he perceives the world and acts in the world happens through a thick filter of prejudices and his perception of life and reality is completely shaped and controlled by it. We may laugh at the stupidity of a Jehova witness, but we have our own conditionings and prejudices and ideologies and worldviews. And those might be similarly limited. A so called rational person, say a scientist, is conditioned by the science. His mind has been educated, trained, shaped by his studies and he perceives life and reality through these experiences and implicit beliefs. Even atheism is a form of contitioning created by thought.
> And the goal of zen is to uncondition the mind, so that the mind is made new/fresh, like the mind of young children. So that you can look at life through innocent eyes. It is called non-abiding mind, because it does not abide in any thought, any conceptual cage. So the goal of zen is completely different from creating useless philosophies which condition the mind.
> Mysticism is more than philosophy, it is incompatible with philosophy and has very different goals. Philosophers view mystics as muddled thinkers, mystics view philosophers are superficial materialists entangled in their limited worldviews. Beyond Lao Tze, my favorite taoist is Master Zhuang. He wrote some nice parables, for example about a frog in a well. A parables, poetic language etc. are best suited to speak about mystical experiences
> http://ramblingtaoist.blogspot.com/2010/05/liberation-of-well-frog.html


I think that to compare Jehova witness with scientists is quite a stretch. In principle, scientists are only conditioned by reason and experimental confirmation (of course, in practice, things are more complex, since there are also conditionings of sociological origin). As for reason, its only limits are those studied by Kant and Schopenhauer, as I mentioned. Renunciation to the mind is something that sounds profound but it's meaningless, since that's simply impossible, unless you are in coma or dead (even the argument behind why one should try it is a mind-made argumentation and backed by a certain cosmovision of reality). One can renounce to certain aspects of the mind, like the will, that's certainly possible to some extent.

Besides, the cosmovision behind that supposed mind renunciation is quite uninteresting, since it's a form of nihilistic view. That is, by the fear that cosmovisions may get things wrong, we simply take that for granted and adopt that cosmovision. I prefer approaches with some actual positive content rather than only mere going back to our children corner of innocence, but also of ignorance. There are things that can be known. Reason, philosophy, and science are tools for that, not cosmovisions.


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## Jacck

I read all those philosophers a while ago. Kant would be a neuroscientist today. He explored the limits of our cognitive aparata, ie brains. Those apriori judgements etc. of his are the limitations of our biological hardware. Schoppenhauer, Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Sartre etc were all sad, unhappy, lost souls and their philosophies reflect it. Enlightment is not about renunciation, that is a popular misconception. It is rather about the realization, that fundamentally there is nothing to gain and nothing to get rid off, because everything is already there, perfect, ie about finding peace within yourself. Part of the problem why there is no peace are wrong concepts which make us chase after wrong values. At a certain level, you are right about the scientific method. But you must realize that rationality/science are only a small section of life and that life as a whole is much more complex and interesting. The Indians considered thinking/though/rationality as the sixth sense organ, ie the purpose of thought is to help with orientation in the world and just like the other senses are imprecise and can suffer from illusions, so can thought. You yourself know that rationality is limited. Kurt Gödel showed that logic itself is incomplete in itself and has its limits. Or consider how thought and logic break down when faces with infinity. George Cantor went crazy when trying to understand the different orders of infinity and there are logical paradoxes in the very foundations of mathematics such as set theory (Russell's paradox) and axiomatizations need to be introduced to solve these paradoxes. All I want to say - reason and logic are limited and they do not grasp the full reality.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> But my guess is that most of us skeptics don't spend a moment thinking about the subject until someone here brings it up. It appears that that will never stop happening, and so I guess the "ire" - and the jokes - won't either.


That's fine, of course, but for me the "subject" is the mid- to late-20th century post-modern, post-technological revolution, era John Cage lived and worked in, not post-modern music or art in isolation, not John Cage in isolation, and certainly not 4'33" in isolation. In other threads I've argued for considering art, not only in its cultural context, but also in its social, economic, political and historical context. 
For example, Cage's was the first generation for whom recording, radio and later TV and computers were universal standards. How can you even begin to discuss Cage, Stockhausen, Earle Brown, or the minimalists without considering that? Or popular musicians like Isao Tomita and Walter Carlos?
People here who pretend our culture, including our music and art generally, was not profoundly and permanently changed by these technological developments are forever doomed to be puzzled and even angered by any number of musical developments. The good news for them is, the 18th and 19th centuries have not been forgotten, and many aspects of the art of those eras remain very much with us and no doubt will enjoy a renaissance of their own from time to time. That's how artistic evolution works. But the historical artistic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries will not return in their entirety.


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## JAS

No one has _the answer_. No one has ever had _the answer_. And, I think it is pretty safe to say, no one ever will have _the answer_. (If someone did have _the answer_, how would we know?)


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> That's fine, of course, but for me the "subject" is the mid- to late-20th century post-modern, post-technological revolution, era John Cage lived and worked in, not post-modern music or art in isolation, not John Cage in isolation, and certainly not 4'33" in isolation. In other threads I've argued for considering art, not only in its cultural context, but also in its social, economic, political and historical context.
> For example, Cage's was the first generation for whom recording, radio and later TV and computers were universal standards. How can you even begin to discuss Cage, Stockhausen, Earle Brown, or the minimalists without considering that? Or popular musicians like Isao Tomita and Walter Carlos?
> People here who pretend our culture, including our music and art generally, was not profoundly and permanently changed by these technological developments are forever doomed to be puzzled and even angered by any number of musical developments. The good news for them is, the 18th and 19th centuries have not been forgotten, and many aspects of the art of those eras remain very much with us and no doubt will enjoy a renaissance of their own from time to time. That's how artistic evolution works. But the historical artistic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries will not return in their entirety.


I agree with everything here except the idea that we can't begin to discuss Cage (or anyone) without considering all those things. When we experience music, we aren't generally listening to its cultural context, even though a knowledge of that can inform our listening and our understanding of what we hear. Works of art do ultimately have to stand on their own intrinsic qualities, those qualities have to transcend culture, and there's plenty that we can say about them.


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## JeffD

Jacck said:


> All I want to say - reason and logic are limited and they do not grasp the full reality.


Very reasonably and logically stated. 

That reason and logic are limited and that "the full reality" cannot be accurately and concretely grasped does in no way justify the abandonment of reason, or logic, or belief in a full reality.


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## aleazk

Jacck said:


> I read all those philosophers a while ago. Kant would be a neuroscientist today. He explored the limits of our cognitive aparata, ie brains. Those apriori judgements etc. of his are the limitations of our biological hardware. Schoppenhauer, Nietzche, Kierkegaard, Sartre etc were all sad, unhappy, lost souls and their philosophies reflect it.


What's relevant of Kant on this issue are not the a priori judgements, but the possibility of their existence. Thus, this opens up the possibility that the reality we directly perceive is not the true one. In this way, since many of those things are very likely illusions, better not to stick too much to them (not that I personally completely agree with that). As far as I know, an important point in zen is the illosory nature of reality as we perceive it.

As for Schopenhauer and other pessimists, yes, he is a pessimist, but that's only a particular coloration he gives to his philosophy, but which is not logically connected to it, it is also compatible with an optimistic or with an agnostic view on that aspect.



Jacck said:


> Enlightment is not about renunciation, that is a popular misconception. It is rather about the realization, that fundamentally there is nothing to gain and nothing to get rid off, because everything is already there, perfect, ie about finding peace within yourself. Part of the problem why there is no peace are wrong concepts which make us chase after wrong values.


I certainly agree with your last sentence there, and perhaps that's really the only relevant thing in all this issue. Regarding renunciation, well, once you realize what you say, one must get rid of those wrong values, in case one had some, that's the only thing I'm saying when using that word.

But I don't agree with the view in which everything is relative, e.g., Jehova witness and scientists, and therefore that the best thing is the non-abiding mind. The mere realization of the fact that conflict is artificial since it may come from wrong notions is an utterly rational realization. Certainly, one solution to achieve peace is to avoid conflict altogether, thing which the non-abiding mind may facilitate. But I see that as rather extreme. What if some things, values are actually right? Bottom line from all this is that it's better to stick to cold reason, to the full-abiding mind  In this way, one can realize that conflict may be artificial, to analyze the clash of values behind it and to investigate the true ones, if any and if possible. One may also realize that the source of personal suffering is the impossible task of the satisfaction of the visceral and irrational will. All of this consequences of rational thought.



Jacck said:


> At a certain level, you are right about the scientific method. But you must realize that rationality/science are only a small section of life and that life as a whole is much more complex and interesting. The Indians considered thinking/though/rationality as the sixth sense organ, ie the purpose of thought is to help with orientation in the world and just like the other senses are imprecise and can suffer from illusions, so can thought. You yourself know that rationality is limited. Kurt Gödel showed that logic itself is incomplete in itself and has its limits. Or consider how thought and logic break down when faces with infinity. George Cantor went crazy when trying to understand the different orders of infinity and there are logical paradoxes in the very foundations of mathematics such as set theory (Russell's paradox) and axiomatizations need to be introduced to solve these paradoxes. All I want to say - reason and logic are limited and they do not grasp the full reality.


What you say in your last sentence is probably correct. My take is that, if we cannot answer some aspect of it by reason, then better to accept that rather than taking second hand answers. One simply has to learn to live knowing that there are things you will never know, since they are not accesible by reason even in principle. Most people cannot accept that and go to religions. I say that's for people that is unwilling to accept the precariety of our existence and knowledge about it. It's precisely when we do not add things that cannot be explained, when we avoid conflicts, since there's no clash of people proposing opposite views that have to be accepted by faith.

Religions and views which pretend to relegate reason to some small corner understimate it grossly as well as they grossly overstimate their own methods and supposed insight achieved with them. They also understimate reason's power and understimate its hardwired role in our mind. Reason is our best tool for achieving insight, we should know that by now in the 21st century. Besides, it's not incompatible with the resolution of artificial conflict, pretty much the opposite.

Gödel's result is not really against reason, but against the practical possibility of certain paradigm of thought in mathematics put forward by Hilbert. Besides, the counterexamples it shows to exist, by the use of reason, are extremely bizarre, to the point in which all practicing mathematicians still work under the Hilbert paradigm, since they work in a zone very far away from the province of those propositions that cannot be proved by Hilbert's method inside the axiom system. Its importance as a limitation to reason has been widely exaggerated. It's a limitation, but a minor one, there are other limitations which are much more serious, like the fact that every reasoning has to start from some given, one cannot reason by a chain that goes infinitely backwards in the assumptions of the assumptions of the reasonings. This is one of the limitations of science as well, which explains reality in material terms, since it takes the existence and properties of matter as a given and only uses that to explain other phenomena. At best, it only pushes that and refines it. Today, matter at the fundamental level are the quantum fields, and tomorrow probably something more refined than that, but still a form of matter, since matter is the basic substance of which reality is made of according to science. What one should do is to use reason to probe its very own limits and once you reach them, that's the end of what is knowable _with certainty_ for us humans.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> I agree with everything here except the idea that we can't begin to discuss Cage (or anyone) without considering all those things. When we experience music, we aren't generally listening to its cultural context, even though a knowledge of that can inform our listening and our understanding of what we hear. Works of art do ultimately have to stand on their own intrinsic qualities, those qualities have to transcend culture, and there's plenty that we can say about them.


Ahh, but we do have to understand the cultural context of classical music (classical visual art, theater, literature and poetry, too). That's why only a tiny minority of people such as those in little communities like this one are serious and knowledgeable listeners. Everyone else either never listens to classical music or only occasionally puts on some Mozart or Debussy when they need something to help them or their infants fall asleep.

Look at the amount of context you've gone to the trouble of acquiring when it comes to Richard Wagner, and no doubt other composers whose music you are particularly interested in.

In fact, that right there is the difference between classical, serious or art music on one hand and popular music on the other. Popular music does not have to be put into context, since its context is the current, everyday lives and world of its audience, or at least the more conventional aspects of that world. Thus, it requires no special effort to understand, relate to and enjoy. That's why it is popular. Of course, each young up and coming generation wants its own popular music and in general its own popular culture. So, the popular music and culture of today's up and coming generation may not sit well with you. That's showbiz. ;-)


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## Guest

JAS said:


> No one has _the answer_. No one has ever had _the answer_. And, I think it is pretty safe to say, no one ever will have _the answer_. (If someone did have _the answer_, how would we know?)


That's odd...I could have sworn I gave _The Answer _back in post #28. It's hardly my fault if no one can recognise it as such!


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## Jacck

JeffD said:


> Very reasonably and logically stated.
> That reason and logic are limited and that "the full reality" cannot be accurately and concretely grasped does in no way justify the abandonment of reason, or logic, or belief in a full reality.


I was using it in the context of enlightment/religious experience. Reason and logic have their place in their respective domains (gaining of knowledge about the external world), but are not that usefull when dealing with morality, mystical experience etc. On the contrary, knowledge is fragmentary, partial, limited. To quote Krishnamurti

"_In our search for knowledge, in our acquisitive desires, we are losing love, we are blunting the feeling for beauty, the sensitivity to cruelty; we are becoming more and more specialized and less and less integrated. Wisdom cannot be replaced by knowledge, and no amount of explanation, no accumulation of facts, will free man from suffering. Knowledge is necessary, science has its place; but if the mind and heart are suffocated by knowledge, and if the cause of suffering is explained away, life becomes vain and meaningless...

Information, the knowledge of facts, though ever increasing, is by its very nature limited. Wisdom is infinite, it includes knowledge and the way of action; but we take hold of a branch and think it is the whole tree. Through the knowledge of the part, we can never realize the joy of the whole. Intellect can never lead to the whole, for it is only a segment, a part.

We have separated intellect from feeling, and have developed intellect at the expense of feeling. We are like a three-legged object with one leg much longer than the others, and we have no balance. We are trained to be intellectual; our education cultivates the intellect to be sharp, cunning, acquisitive, and so it plays the most important role in our life. Intelligence is much greater than intellect, for it is the integration of reason and love; but there can be intelligence only when there is self-knowledge, the deep understanding of the total process of oneself."_


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## JAS

MacLeod said:


> That's odd...I could have sworn I gave _The Answer _back in post #28. It's hardly my fault if no one can recognise it as such!


But that was when the thread was still at least vaguely about the topic in the title. We have moved on . . .


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## Larkenfield

I believe one of the biggest questions for composers since the 20th century is whether _noise_ should be considered _music_. My own personal view is that noise, whether random or not, is _not_ music but can still be enjoyable. But that it can be enjoyable does not make it music or organized sound... I'm not interested in random noise with a frame put around it so it can be called Art. I want to hear the composer's skill and hand in it... I consider music the _antidote_ of noise, or I could open the window and listen to the jackhammers, backfiring cars, leaf blowers, and vacuum cleaners all day and settle for that because someone like Duchamp put a label on it like his urinal and called it Art. And people bit on that.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> Ahh, but we do have to understand the cultural context of classical music (classical visual art, theater, literature and poetry, too). That's why only a tiny minority of people such as those in little communities like this one are serious and knowledgeable listeners. Everyone else either never listens to classical music or only occasionally puts on some Mozart or Debussy when they need something to help them or their infants fall asleep.
> 
> Look at the amount of context you've gone to the trouble of acquiring when it comes to Richard Wagner, and no doubt other composers whose music you are particularly interested in.
> 
> In fact, that right there is the difference between classical, serious or art music on one hand and popular music on the other. Popular music does not have to be put into context, since its context is the current, everyday lives and world of its audience, or at least the more conventional aspects of that world. Thus, it requires no special effort to understand, relate to and enjoy. That's why it is popular. Of course, each young up and coming generation wants its own popular music and in general its own popular culture. So, the popular music and culture of today's up and coming generation may not sit well with you. That's showbiz. ;-)


I think you're assuming a lot, possibly assuming your own conclusion, when you say "that's why only a tiny minority of people such as those in little communities like this one are serious and knowledgeable listeners." You're defining what a serious and knowledgeable listener is in advance. I think we can be serious and knowledgeable listeners, having a considerable understanding of music, with very little knowledge of its cultural context. I know I started out that way, riveted by classical music before I had any real understanding of the worlds from which it came. In many cases my enjoyment of a musical work has been enhanced by extra-musical knowledge, but in other cases it has remained more or less the same, and nowadays when I encounter new music, I'm likely to require that it speak for itself and give me a good reason to investigate further. As we can see from this and similar threads, it's absolutely necessary to have some ideological background to understand "conceptual art," which is intended to make some sort of point and may communicate nothing without verbal annotations. But how much do we need of explanations, philosophies and biographies to appreciate the "Well-Tempered Klavier" or the "Hammerklavier"?


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## Luchesi

fluteman said:


> That's fine, of course, but for me the "subject" is the mid- to late-20th century post-modern, post-technological revolution, era John Cage lived and worked in, not post-modern music or art in isolation, not John Cage in isolation, and certainly not 4'33" in isolation. In other threads I've argued for considering art, not only in its cultural context, but also in its social, economic, political and historical context.
> For example, Cage's was the first generation for whom recording, radio and later TV and computers were universal standards. How can you even begin to discuss Cage, Stockhausen, Earle Brown, or the minimalists without considering that? Or popular musicians like Isao Tomita and Walter Carlos?
> People here who pretend our culture, including our music and art generally, was not profoundly and permanently changed by these technological developments are forever doomed to be puzzled and even angered by any number of musical developments. The good news for them is, the 18th and 19th centuries have not been forgotten, and many aspects of the art of those eras remain very much with us and no doubt will enjoy a renaissance of their own from time to time. That's how artistic evolution works. But the historical artistic movements of the 18th and 19th centuries will not return in their entirety.


"People here who pretend our culture, including our music and art generally, was not profoundly and permanently changed by these technological developments are forever doomed to be puzzled and even angered by any number of musical developments."

The opposite. Art and its valuable attributes should not have been 'changed' by the gimmickry of modern technology. And I think they have. Maybe it was unavoidable, but it's still bad. Do I want to go back? No, but it's still bad.


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## aleazk

JAS said:


> But that was when the thread was still at least vaguely about the topic in the title. We have moved on . . .


I was thinking about that. Maybe it wasn't that off topic after all, since Millions argues that people that don't consider things like 4'33'' as music are trapped into definitions and 'rationality', while that work is a 'sacred act' which should be 'felt' rather than thought about. And this leads to Buddhism and the equal exaltation of vagueness in its doctrines, the latter which supposedly inform Cage.


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## aleazk

Luchesi said:


> "People here who pretend our culture, including our music and art generally, was not profoundly and permanently changed by these technological developments are forever doomed to be puzzled and even angered by any number of musical developments."
> 
> The opposite. Art and its valuable attributes should not have been 'changed' by the gimmickry of modern technology. And I think they have. Maybe it was unavoidable, but it's still bad. Do I want to go back? No, but it's still bad.


What would you say about Stockhausen's Oktophonie and Dhomont's Je te salue, vieil océan!, both pieces mentioned in the poll. Are these pieces music?


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## Guest

Jacck said:


> Reason and logic have their place in their respective domains (gaining of knowledge about the external world), but are not that usefull when dealing with morality, mystical experience etc.


Reason and logic cannot be compartmentalised any more than emotion can. They belong everywhere.



aleazk said:


> I was thinking about that. Maybe it wasn't that off topic after all, since Millions argues that people that don't consider things like 4'33'' as music are trapped into definitions and 'rationality', while that work is a 'sacred act' which should be 'felt' rather than thought about. And this leads to Buddhism and the equal exaltation of vagueness in its doctrines, the latter which supposedly inform Cage.


Millions is entitled to his view, of course. But I don't see how that means the thread should divert into discussions about Buddhism and rationality. So what if Cage was influenced by Buddhism? I don't see how that gets us nearer an answer to the OP.


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## fluteman

Luchesi said:


> Maybe it was unavoidable, but it's still bad. Do I want to go back? No, but it's still bad.


That's fine, it's your legitimate opinion that you are perfectly entitled to have. Even if you are rejecting an entire artistic era in one broad statement, there is absolutely nothing wrong with your having that opinion.

If you thought I was going to argue with you, you misunderstood what I was trying to say.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> I think you're assuming a lot, possibly assuming your own conclusion, when you say "that's why only a tiny minority of people such as those in little communities like this one are serious and knowledgeable listeners."


I'm sorry to have to differ with you on this, Woodduck, but I've been on this planet a few years, and I can say with confidence that, at least here in the US of A, very few people give a @#$% about classical music of any kind. Some might enjoy Handel's Messiah or even Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite during the Christmas season. But even most of them would cheerfully admit they haven't a clue about most other classical music, and aren't much interested in changing that. I've spoken with many people about this over the years.

The frustrating thing is, I've found that when people are exposed to more classical music, many discover to their great surprise that they like it. But in my humble opinion, diminishing public support for the arts, especially in the public schools, greatly reduces that exposure at the most critical time. But that's a topic for another thread.


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## millionrainbows

Larkenfield said:


> I believe one of the biggest questions for composers since the 20th century is whether _noise_ should be considered _music_. My own personal view is that noise, whether random or not, is _not_ music but can still be enjoyable. But that it can be enjoyable does not make it music or organized sound... I'm not interested in random noise with a frame put around it so it can be called Art. I want to hear the composer's skill and hand in it... I consider music the _antidote_ of noise, or I could open the window and listen to the jackhammers, backfiring cars, leaf blowers, and vacuum cleaners all day and settle for that because someone like Duchamp put a label on it like his urinal and called it Art. And people bit on that.


You don't sound like a candidate for the percussion section.


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## Luchesi

aleazk said:


> What would you say about Stockhausen's Oktophonie and Dhomont's Je te salue, vieil océan!, both pieces mentioned in the poll. Are these pieces music?


 
I was in a real war so Oktophonie is not for a person like me.

The Salute to the Ancient Ocean with the idea that the embodiment of evil is so close to us in a huge, unsettled, unlimited 'stockpile' did 'force' me to do some thinking. We have atheists in our church and just the other day I was asked why most people don't believe devils created everything instead of some nice gods?

Advances in the concept of reality according to string theorists have opened up a new, big picture in my mind at least. Our Calabi Yau shapes and vibrational states allow us to SEE this universe and to therefore know that we are just a small minority type of matter. This realization shouldn't bother us in fact it's such an improbable miracle which allowed our improbable emergence here. But being human we find it a bit spooky. Thinking about it logically we shouldn't expect that the majority of condensed energy will interact with electromagnetic fields. According to your posts I've read you think about the physics. 

The piece arrests me and forces me to conjure up perspectives which enrich - in ways that words don't help me, so yes it's music in that sense.


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## fluteman

Luchesi said:


> The piece arrests me and forces me to conjure up perspectives which enrich - in ways that words don't help me, so yes it's music in that sense.


For me, that's the only sense that matters. In fact, you put it better than I did. So, now do we argue about Dhomont for another 400 posts?


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## Luchesi

fluteman said:


> For me, that's the only sense that matters. In fact, you put it better than I did. So, now do we argue about Dhomont for another 400 posts?


Yes, it's great to have a quiet place to discuss these things. Especially when we can be assured that other posters know what we're talking about even if they don't agree with us.


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## aleazk

MacLeod said:


> Millions is entitled to his view, of course. But I don't see how that means the thread should divert into discussions about Buddhism and rationality. So what if Cage was influenced by Buddhism? I don't see how that gets us nearer an answer to the OP.


Well, I also know a bit about Cage, and Millions' view is probably not that far away from what Cage himself thought about it. Thus, if those views are behind a piece which is for many the boundary in question, some discussion about that won't kill anybody, even when, yes, it's a bit off topic.


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## aleazk

Luchesi said:


> I was in a real war so Oktophonie is not for a person like me.
> 
> The Salute to the Ancient Ocean with the idea that the embodiment of evil is so close to us in a huge, unsettled, unlimited 'stockpile' did 'force' me to do some thinking. We have atheists in our church and just the other day I was asked why most people don't believe devils created everything instead of some nice gods?
> 
> Advances in the concept of reality according to string theorists have opened up a new, big picture in my mind at least. Our Calabi Yau shapes and vibrational states allow us to SEE this universe and to therefore know that we are just a small minority type of matter. This realization shouldn't bother us in fact it's such an improbable miracle which allowed our improbable emergence here. But being human we find it a bit spooky. Thinking about it logically we shouldn't expect that the majority of condensed energy will interact with electromagnetic fields. According to your posts I've read you think about the physics.
> 
> The piece arrests me and forces me to conjure up perspectives which enrich - in ways that words don't help me, so yes it's music in that sense.


Yes, Oktophonie is inspired on the imaginery of a war in space. Okay, what do you think about Boulez's Repons or Fujikura's Sparking Orbit. Both pieces combine standard instruments with electronic sounds, effects and processes (and are among my favorites in that category).

------------------------ wildly off topic alert --------------------------

As for string theory, hmm, I share your fascination for the possibilities of those ideas, but not so much your enthusiasm for the theory itself, since I think it's deeply flawed (precisely, among other things, because the 10^500 possible Calabi-Yau compactifications of the extra dimensions, thing which makes the theory to predict everything and the opposite of everything, i.e., at the end, it predicts nothing.) And, regarding quantum gravity, I actually favor the competence, LQG (which is actually background independent, another issue I have with string theory, which is not). As for the unification of the fundamental forces, I may favor Connes' spectral standard model.

----------------------- alert off (... for now ) ------------


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## aleazk

fluteman said:


> For me, that's the only sense that matters. In fact, you put it better than I did. So, now do we argue about Dhomont for another 400 posts?


Excellent! Dhomont is my favorite composer of musique concrète. So, to frame it in the topic of the thread, is this music?: Francis Dhomont - Lettre de Sarajevo.


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## Luchesi

aleazk said:


> Yes, Oktophonie is inspired on the imaginery of a war in space. Okay, what do you think about Boulez's Repons or Fujikura's Sparking Orbit. Both pieces combine standard instruments with electronic sounds, effects and processes (and are among my favorites in that category).
> 
> ------------------------ wildly off topic alert --------------------------
> 
> As for string theory, hmm, I share your fascination for the possibilities of those ideas, but not so much your enthusiasm for the theory itself, since I think it's deeply flawed (precisely, among other things, because the 10^500 possible Calabi-Yau compactifications of the extra dimensions, thing which makes the theory to predict everything and the opposite of everything, i.e., at the end, it predicts nothing.) And, regarding quantum gravity, I actually favor the competence, LQG (which is actually background independent, another issue I have with string theory, which is not). As for the unification of the fundamental forces, I may favor Connes' spectral standard model.
> 
> ----------------------- alert off (... for now ) ------------


The Boulez expands the horizons. It's uncomfortable for me to think of how much of his being he put into that, and in the writing of it out. He evidently was up to the task and much more.
If a piece successfully invites dedicated musicians to play their instruments with an artistic intent then they can call it music. That's what I call works like this. I call them, "a piece that successfully invites dedicated musicians to play their instruments with an artistic intent". If it doesn't have all those ingredients it's something else for me (an experience?). If it reminds me of trivial space sounds or a child at play I lose interest quickly.

We can call the Grosse Fugue loud, ill-sounding noise. LvB and many performers of it didn't.

"...i.e., at the end, it predicts nothing."

There are 2 or 3 predictions that it makes - which I can't think of the details right now. lol Very technical.

But it does give us one explanation for how this universe is so finely balanced and finely tuned (its parameter space and interactions between the bumps in the fields).

Also a framework for thinking about Dark Matter and why it's not like normal matter and why there's more of it.

It gives a logical reason to think about other universes in a multiverse.

The mathematical unification of all the forces requiring a tenth spatial dimension recently by Witten.

Why no deterministic theory has been found.

Why no new bosons have been found. Therefore posing the outlandish hint to physicists that this time we're REALLY at the end of physics. We're not getting any more clues or puzzle pieces, because the super-cooled Higgs field formation mechanism is so very randomizing.

Last but not least, the sense of how unique we might be.


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## Woodduck

fluteman said:


> I'm sorry to have to differ with you on this, Woodduck, but I've been on this planet a few years, and I can say with confidence that, at least here in the US of A, very few people give a @#$% about classical music of any kind. Some might enjoy Handel's Messiah or even Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite during the Christmas season. But even most of them would cheerfully admit they haven't a clue about most other classical music, and aren't much interested in changing that. I've spoken with many people about this over the years.
> 
> The frustrating thing is, I've found that when people are exposed to more classical music, many discover to their great surprise that they like it. But in my humble opinion, diminishing public support for the arts, especially in the public schools, greatly reduces that exposure at the most critical time. But that's a topic for another thread.


Somehow I didn't get my point across. I know that classical music is a minority interest, and people whose interest is more than casual are an even smaller minority. That wasn't the point under discussion. I thought the rest of my post would explain the first sentence.


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## fluteman

Woodduck said:


> I think we can be serious and knowledgeable listeners, having a considerable understanding of music, with very little knowledge of its cultural context.


Well, I go back to my comment that music is a language. If one is thoroughly versed in a certain language from early childhood, and has the talent for it, one can take to it easily, almost intuitively. A few have the extraordinary ability to learn multiple languages quickly even as adults. But in my experience, and I have known some of these musical prodigies personally, even for them it takes an understanding of the world the music comes from to achieve a deeper understanding of the music. A well-known conductor whom I know very well personally always does some historical and cultural background research each time he prepares to perform a work or a composer who is new to him, in addition to learning the score thoroughly (though these days only the most obscure composers would be new to him, other than contemporary composers newly arrived on the scene).

But for most people not raised on or well-educated in classical music when young, as with new languages generally, it usually takes more than just listening to it a few times it to understand it even in a basic way. Do you know the work of Ruth Draper? One of her funniest monologues takes a tourist from the midwest to Italy in a tour group, where she hunts for the sights her guide book tells her are the most worth seeing, and upon finding them calls out "Three stars!" with ever diminishing enthusiasm, until finally she sighs and concedes that what she would really like to find is a juicy midwestern steak. The point being, standing in front of what one is told is A Great Work Of Art is not enough, at least for most people.


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## fluteman

fluteman said:


> Well, I go back to my comment that music is a language. If one is thoroughly versed in a certain language from early childhood, and has the talent for it, one can take to it easily, almost intuitively. A few have the extraordinary ability to learn multiple languages quickly even as adults. But in my experience, and I have known some of these musical prodigies personally, even for them it takes an understanding of the world the music comes from to achieve a deeper understanding of the music. A well-known conductor whom I know very well personally always does some historical and cultural background research each time he prepares to perform a work or a composer who is new to him, in addition to learning the score thoroughly (though these days only the most obscure composers would be new to him, other than contemporary composers newly arrived on the scene).
> 
> But for most people not raised on or well-educated in classical music when young, as with new languages generally, it usually takes more than just listening to it a few times it to understand it even in a basic way. Do you know the work of Ruth Draper? One of her funniest monologues takes a tourist from the midwest to Italy in a tour group, where she hunts for the sights her guide book tells her are the most worth seeing, and upon finding them calls out "Three stars!" with ever diminishing enthusiasm, until finally she sighs and concedes that what she would really like to find is a juicy midwestern steak. The point being, standing in front of what one is told is A Great Work Of Art is not enough, at least for most people.


I might have added that Ruth Draper's brother Paul was a well-known tenor in the early 20th century and close friend of celebrated pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Tragically, Paul Draper died in 1925 at the age of only 38. Ruth Draper was a brilliant and hilarious monologist who in a later era would have been a star on Saturday Night Live. Late in her life she recorded many of her best monologues, which remain available on CD, and though she felt she was a bit past her prime at that point, I cannot recommend them highly enough.


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