From: elkies@ramanujan.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Help Required. Dodecacophony. ;-)
Date: 11 Nov 92 02:47:13 GMT
Article-I.D.: husc3.1992Nov10.214715.17330
Organization: Harvard Math Department

In article <1992Nov10.122239.4309@nuscc.nus.sg>
smoliar@iss.nus.sg (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
"In article <1992Nov6.230030.17188@husc3.harvard.edu>
"elkies@zariski.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) writes:
">
">~(Brahms never had to contend with music being pumped into his elevator.)
">
">*That*'s your example of a new "resource for hearing music"!?
"
"I didn't put any value judgment on those resources, Noam!

Not that I'm inclined to pretend value judgements don't matter,
but that wasn't my point --- rather that the effect of elevator
music is trivial compared to developments like the ascendancy of
recordings and much more historically informed performance practices.

>I assume you are familiar with THE POETICS OF MUSIC

Yes, ...

>(given the respect you seem to hold for the Norton lectures). [...]

...no, it's the respect I hold for Stravinsky.  The Norton Lectures
per se I don't venerate --- for instance I'm not rushing to buy
a copy of "I-VI"...

">Perhaps not absurd, but quite irrelevant to my point.  Brahms' music,
">and Chopin's, and Bach's, and other music adored by our 19th-century
">forebears still offers perceptive contemporary listeners plenty of
">substance and, yes, beauty, even if they in some sense do not
">hear it ``the way they did a hundred years ago''.
"
"I'll see your irrelevant and raise you one vacuous.  Basically, you can define
""perceptive" in such a way as to make your claim circular and, therefore,
"meaningless.

I *could* define it that way, but that is not my intent; I believe that
there is a sufficiently large community of such listeners who can cite
enough *specific* *musical* things in these pieces to refute grandiose
claims of mass cultural self-deception such as you've come close to in
previous discussions on similar topics.

"The reason I brought the elevators in in the first place is
"because our who perspective on music perception has changed radically since
"the beginning of this century.  You can, if you wish, try to force your
"perspective back to what it was in Mahler's day;  but that will require
"denying most of your life experiences.  You become a bit like Borges' Pierre
"Menard in his efforts to re-write DON QUIXOTE.  It makes for an interesting
"intellectual exercise if you do not mind negating your life.

Now don't you try to define my "life experiences" for me!  If you were
to insist that *for you* a "perceptive listening" to Bach is merely an
"interesting intellectual exercise" that "negates" *your* life, I would
take you on your word, however reluctantly.  But you're making a hell of a
lot of unfounded assumptions about *my* life to suggest I'm wilfully "trying
to force my perspective" anywhere.  Of course my perspective is partly
conditioned by cultural upbringing, and is not the same as that of
turn-of-the-century Europe, if only because it includes newer music
by Bartok, Shostakovich, Britten, or Poulenc.  But it is a perspective
that shares enough of the musical outlook of the common-practice tradition
to grok music of or continuous with that tradition much more readily than
music that self-consciously breaks with it.

:I realize that it is no longer fashionable to "buy" Sartre these days;  but I
:happened to be reading "What is Literature?" last weekend and found a passage
:which may still be appropriate:
:
:	If we no longer write as they did in the eighteenth century,
:	it is because the language of Racine and Saint-Evremond does
:	not lend itself to talking about locomotives or the proletariat.
:
:All I am saying is that the situation is not that all different in music[...]

I know little about Sartre, but if this is a typical passage I'm not
impressed.  A bunch of unwarranted assumptions there:  what if I can
more effectively and naturally write about locomotives or the proletariat
in old-fashioned prose?  What if I don't happen to care to write about
them at all?  And I see no reason to think that the situation in music
should parallel that in literature: is Debussy's Violin Sonata "about"
World War I, or anything else outside music for that matter?  Sorry,
this doesn't wash either.

--Noam D. Elkies (elkies@zariski.harvard.edu)
  Dept. of Mathematics, Harvard University
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical