Klarinet Archive - Posting 000977.txt from 2000/09

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Smiling and feelings (vs. music)
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 2000 06:56:23 -0400

On Fri, 29 Sep 2000 21:02:14 -0700 (PDT), Bilwright@-----.net said:

> Tony, I'd like to 'clear the deck' of a point on which I think we
> agree; and then I will post my thought on what remains.
>
> > Art, as practised, was always the best argument against Descartes,
> > for its practitioners at least.
>
> I think we are agreed that Descartes' "error" was his attempt to
> divorce physical sensation from an imagined pure intellect. The fact
> that audiences claim to find both physical pleasure and pure
> intellectual pleasure in the same piece of music (or painting or
> whatever), and the fact that competent artists can evoke both
> pleasures from an audience, shows that Descartes was wrong. The two
> things -- intellect and physical sensation -- are intermingled
> somehow.

Or put another way, that processes that are inaccessible to our reason
contribute importantly to us, and in particular, to reason itself.

"Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point." (Pascal)

There's lots written about this, and your book, which I've only skimmed
through, isn't precisely new, as Daniel Dennett in his 1995 TLS review
points out. Dennett however goes on to say:

".....but under Damasio's boldly constructed umbrella of neuroanatomical
details, these elements join to become not just compelling, but
retrospectively obvious, provoking the theorist's ultimate accolade:
"Now why didn't I think of that?""

> But other parts of your post assert (if I read them correctly) that a
> true musician _must_ be unaware of at least some 'physical' reasons
> why his or her performance succeeds: if it is totally understood, it
> isn't art -- it's just engineering.

Well, obviously you can't be aware of everything that goes on when
you're performing, for the same sort of reason that a television set
can't contain on its screen a complete picture of its own workings at
any moment. But you don't want to confuse that with the statement that
a television's workings can't be fully understood, which is of course
false.

The best, and most useful, discussion that I know of all of this is
contained in a short paper by Gregory Bateson, entitled 'Style, Grace
and Information in Primitive Art', which can be found reprinted in his
'Steps to an Ecology of Mind'. It's worth reading, and I suggest that
you would find it practically helpful.

One important thing for a performer to see is that the process of
practice is precisely the process of relegating initially conscious
actions to the performer's unconscious. As Bateson points out, this
means that a performer's communication is a partly conscious, partly
unconscious one.

He also quotes Isadora Duncan as saying, if I could tell you what it
meant, there would be no need to *dance* it.

> This is a common theme of midnight bull sessions. It applies just as
> much to debates about religion and artificial intelligence as it does
> to music. "If you are totally explicable and quantified, you are a
> robot, not a human with a soul."

Scientific enquiry into the processes by which we are conscious
shouldn't be confused with the attempt to be totally conscious of what
we are doing while we are doing it.

As a performer, and perhaps even just as a person, you want to direct
your investigation towards the things your conscious intellect is good
at dealing with, and your *trust* towards the things your unconscious
intellect is good at dealing with.

One of the interesting things about 'practice', BTW, is watching
elements of your performance move from one domain to the other.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

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