Michael, Peircers,
Is the quality of music determined by the final opinion of that music?
If 'yes', do all inquiries into its quality take into consideration the music's
impact on people relative to their history? For example, Penderecki's Threnody
for the Victims of Hiroshima, a very dissonant piece, might be rightly judged
as excellent to those in the shadow of WWII but potentially not to future
people after 500 years of peace (when, say, a Kyle Gann piece with his more
sonorous intonations might be considered the greatest composition of the 20th
century!) In considering change shouldn't we then say the quality of Threnody
as played in one time period to the people with its history is incommensurable
with the quality of the same piece as played to people with a very different
history?
If 'no' and if the piece's true quality is only that which I would be opined in
the long run, then either (1) you must believe there is some principle limiting
how much people can change relative to that music, keeping perceptual judgments
in a corral, or (2) you believe people today who disagree with the final
opinion have 'perverted' tastes, perhaps due to their perverted culture, (I'm
using 'perverted' in the Buddhist sense of viparyasa*), or (3) you believe the
music has inherent quality, that is, you believe its quality should be judged
by the potential final opinion, that after the long run cancels out all
transitory effects the music has had on people there will be some effect left
to signify the music's quality. The third position without the principle of the
first position is contrary to pragmatism because there would be no quality left
to judge, (this is the Buddhist position.) If the first position is your
stance, then what is that principle and how is it established?
The 'esthetics-ethics-logic triad is easily justified with pragmatism by doing
away with 'the long run' and replacing it with historicism. How else can it be
justified?
* viparyasa contains the root 'to throw'; it's also translated as 'overthrow',
'inversion', 'perverseness', 'wrong notion', 'error', 'what can upset',
'upside-down views', all which throw one off the path toward inward calm.
Buddhist Thought in India, pg. 40. by Edward Conze
Matt
> On Dec 3, 2015, at 12:15 PM, Michael Shapiro <poo...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Harmony, Linguistic and Musical
>
> GLOSSARY
>
> cacoglossic, adj.: exhibiting or characteristic of distorted or ungrammatical
> speech
> cacophonic, adj. < cacophony, n.: harsh or discordant sound; dissonance
> dialogism, n.: the principle that all utterances (and hence all
> communication) acquiremeaning only in the context of a dialogue to which they
> contribute and in which the presence and contributions of other voices (or
> other discourses, languages, etc.) are inescapably implied, with the result
> that meaning and expression cannot be reduced to a single system or subjected
> to a single authority; the embodiment of this principle in a form of
> expression, esp. a literary text
> figurative, adj.: transferred in sense from literal or plain to abstract or
> hypothetical (as by the expression of one thing in terms of another with
> which it can be regarded as analogous)
> lexically, adv. < lexical, adj.: of or relating to words, word formatives, or
> the vocabulary of a language as distinguished from its grammar and
> construction
> Peirce: Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), American logician and scientist
> triadic, adj. < triad, n.: a union or group of three, esp. of three closely
> related persons, beings, or things
>
> My hero, Charles Peirce, rightly says that logic exists in the
> service of ethics, and ethics in the service of aesthetics. Following this
> triadic characterization of the foundations of knowledge, both language and
> music, in order to be good and beautiful, must be underpinned by
> well-formedness, alias logic. Thus even a child’s grammatically and lexically
> well-formed utterance is to be deemed superior to an adult’s cacoglossic one,
> just as the harmonically grammatical commercial jingle always puts the
> typically cacophonic piece of contemporary classical music to shame.
> In this matter, my favorite pre-Socratic philosopher, Heraclitus
> “The Obscure” (of “No man ever steps in the same river twice” fame), has
> something pertinent to say.
> One of Heraclitus’ most famously enigmatic fragments goes like
> this:
>
> Οὐ ξυνίασι ὅκως διαφερόμενον ἑωυτῷ ὁμολογέει·
>
> παλίντροπος ἁρμονίη ὅκωσπερ τόξου καὶ λύρης.
> Ou xyniasin hokōs diaferomenon heoutoi homologeei
> palintropos harmoniē hokōsper toxou kai lyres.
>
> (“They do not comprehend how a thing agrees at variance with
> itself [literally how being brought apart it is brought together with
> itself]; it is an attunement turning back on itself, like that of the bow and
> the lyre.”)
>
> This fragment is typical of Heraclitus’ forma mentis in that it
> begins with a negation (“They do not comprehend”) that seems to be a
> polemical retort to and denial of some prior position held by others. This
> immediately engages dialogism as a constitutive principle of the form of
> Heraclitus’ utterance. Leaving aside the phrase “at variance with itself” for
> the moment, what is crucial to the interpretation of the whole fragment is
> the combination palintropos harmoniē ('backward-turning structure
> [attunement/connection]'). The original sense of harmoniē seems to have been
> joining or fitting together, and that is the way it is used by Homer and
> Herodotus among others in the context of carpentry or shipbuilding. But
> harmoniē also has from the beginning a figurative meaning—“agreements” or
> “compacts” between hostile men (as in the Iliad)—from which it can move to
> the connotation of reconciliation (personified, for instance, as the child of
> Ares and Aphrodite in Hesiod’s Theogony). Finally, harmoniē occurs in the
> familiar musical sense of the “fitting together” of different strings to
> produce the desired scale or key.
> It is in this final sense that speaking harmoniously is
> accordingly a matter of fitting together the bow and the lyre. But in order
> to be aesthetically pleasing, language use must be undergirded by both ethics
> and logic. This is where Heraclitus joins hands with Peirce.
>
>
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