From: tomanix@sintra.xip.dec.com (Antonio Rodrigues)
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Bach and religious feelings
Date: 21 Aug 92 10:24:59 GMT
Reply-To: tomanix@sintra.xip.dec.com (Antonio Rodrigues)
Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation



roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:

>>Maybe I'm wrong but it seems that you are that kind of people that
>>listens music in their cars on the way home after a working day.

>I'd say you're wrong.  I do occasionally listen to music in the car, but
>I also listen at many other times.  Sometimes, for pay.  You see, I'm a
>musicologist.  I study the stuff.

 It's funny I had commented your reply with a friend and he told me, and I 
agreed, that you seem to be one of 'those academics'.

 I don't have nothing against that, the problem is that you people easily
became attacked by what I usually call the 'tiny-little-thing syndrome',
more concerned about the details and lose the whole thing.

>>Music, the way I see it, is an image, a projection of something that is
>>beyond itself. 

>An image of what?  Could you be more specific?  Give an example?  

>No, better not.  That would be explaining, I suppose.

I think you got it !!

>>When you' re listen
>>music, and Bach is a good example, you 're transported to other reality. 

>Now, ask yourself why.  Is it sheerly because of something within the
>music?  Or is it something within *you* that responds to the music? 

Both, the 'something' within the music is the 'something' within me that
responds. It's like a resonance phenomena.

Why do you think, we should had started with this, that a bunch of sounds 
striped from some instrument in a particular order cause, what you call, 
'esthetic pleasures' and the same sounds in a different order can cause
pain ?!

>And is that something perhaps culturally and historically influenced?  I
>would argue strongly that it is.  And then I would argue that without
>the cultural background, you would *not* be transported to "other
>reality" -- in whatever sense it's real...

Your cultural background influence the way you apprehend things, not THE
THINGS itself.
Let me ask you something, do you think a deaf person cannot 'feel' music ? 

>I took a lot of math in college, and was quite "Sensitive" so some of it,
>too. (Nor was it a language...)

With "Sensitive" I don't mean have good classifications ! It's something
more. I believe if you were that "Sensitive" you would understand what I mean. 

>(There *is* some cultural aspect to the appreciation of mathematical "beauty",
>to be sure.)

Ah, that's a good one, I can assure you, when you look to a bunch of numbers
and symbols and 'see' what's in it, it doesn't matter if you are Portuguese,
Chinese or even Martian :-), you can jump, say Eureka, stay in silence but 
deeply you feel the same joy.
 
............

 The player and the instrument are as necessary to music as the air to your 
ideas. Let me ask you, never happens to you to have an idea and when you
tried to express that idea you feel that you have difficulties in saying 
exactly what's on your mind ? 

>>Please try to 'explain' to 
>>me 'The Goldberg Variations' ..., no, I don't mean that text you found in
>>your CD, 

>Found it?  I *wrote* it!  8-)

>Without those things, you'd never *hear* any Bach.  None.  Not a bit.

>And if I did play you some Bach, and you had no connection to those
>things, or if they didn't exist, you wouldn't know what to make of it.
>Not at all.  

 It seems that you think that the 'musicologists' are the true responsible for 
example the  Bach's music. 
 No, my friend, I don't intend to offend you but you play an infinitely small 
role. The text you wrote for the CD cannot be compared with it's contents, 
whatever you say in it.

tomanix
Newsgroups: rec.music.classical