Gerald Berg:
Thanks David! Most wonderfully argued.
And you too Andrew...
Thenk yew.
Music can have function but doesn't require function. Bird song does require function otherwise it wouldn't exist.
This I think goes to the very core of the argument. I believe (on suggestive but admittedly incomplete evidence) that human musical response--the pleasure we get from hearing music--is an evolved capacity of the human brain, and therefore does indeed have a function that enhanced the survivability and/or reproductive success of our ancestors. As to what that function is/might be, chapter 11 of Bruno Nettl's _The Study of Ethnomusicology_ is entirely devoted to the question, and I recommend the whole book most heartily to everyone who has had the patience to endure this thread thus far.
Another way of thinking about it: Imagine a distant planet inhabited by an intelligent species, air-breathing and land-dwelling, with hands or tentacles or something, and an auditory apparatus very close to our own in its specifications. Question: do these beings have music? I would say "maybe, but quite possibly not." But if you think musical response is simply the application of a generalized esthetic sensibility (itself a direct consequence of intelligence) to the realm of sound, then you would answer "yes, definitely." A further question: If they do have music, would it appeal to us, and ours to them? I would say "only in the most feeble and tentative way," but my opponent would suggest that their music would differ from ours no more than the musics of any two human cultures differ.
A better example is sex -- by Andrew's thinking everything on this good earth enjoys sex --- and I like that thought.
'Fraid not. I'd say definitely yes only for amniote tetrapods, and many cephalopods, but whether and to what extent consciousness inheres in the rest of the animal kingdom, I'm very dubious. I don't think any arthropod is at all conscious, e.g., and I have my doubts about fish.
But in every example, except man, sex is solely a function. For man there is function in sex but it is also an activity for pleasure --
Nature is full of examples of non-human sexual behavior that could not possibly lead to reproduction.
Chomsky -- I'm not so sure Darcy -- but it has been a while since I read anything on the subject -- I'm pretty sure the last thing was a dis. ------- :)
Chomsky was right in thinking of language as a biologically based capacity of the human brain, but incredibly he did not accept that this capacity was an evolved one. The other main problem with his theories is that he thinks every detail of grammar, syntax, etc. is a consequence of rules learned by the brain during language acquisition. Steven Pinker's recent book about irregular word forms demonstrates pretty conclusively that irregular forms are stored in the brain as if they were separate words, not as grammatical inflections.
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Andrew Stiller
Kallisti Music Press
http://home.netcom.com/~kallisti/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
