At 2:37 PM -0500 1/18/07, David W. Fenton wrote:
On 17 Jan 2007 at 23:22, John Howell wrote:
But I like your wording, Johannes. If we can agree that Joshua's
belief is indeed an hypothesis--an interesting hypothesis, a
suggestive hypothesis, even a brilliant hypothesis--then the next
stage in the scientific method follows. Test the hypothesis. Test it
in Bach's own church. Test it with the instruments he would have
used. Most importantly, test it with two boys and two university
students who are NOT operatically trained soloists!! Arguments and
opinions are easy; proof is not.
Such tests can't prove such a hypothesis, it can only show if the
hypothesis is plausible. Musicological proof doesn't work the way
science does because you can't actually establish a chain of
causality because you don't know everything about the historical
conditions involved. It's basically an example of "correlation does
not prove causation." This is something Bradley Lehman of "Bach
temperament" fame does not understand, for instance.
Indeed, and of course I had my tongue about 14% in cheek! Even most
controlled scientific experiments can neither prove nor disprove an
hypothesis to the extent that future refinements may change or even
reverse the results, like the elegant experiment that predicted what
light would do around the sun if Einstein's theory were true, and it
did. (I don't remember the details.)
If only musicological questions could be tested with anything close
to that accuracy, but as Johannes says, the church as it once existed
no longer does. I'll still hold out for non-operatically-trained
singers, though, before I'll consider Rifkin's hypothesis.
John
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David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com
David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/
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