Klarinet Archive - Posting 000113.txt from 2000/11

From: Bilwright@-----.net (William Wright)
Subj: [kl] Greek roots - music - intellect
Date: Thu, 2 Nov 2000 12:55:34 -0500

This post may appear off-topic and off-kilter for the first few
paragraphs, but I feel that it is not. Apologies to those who feel
opposite.

Thinking about "gymnos" vs. gymnopedies caused me to remember a
2-yr humanities course that was taught by Paul Tillich, a noted
Christian theologian but also a respected philosophy and pagan
historian. One of his major theses was that the early Greeks did not
have a concept of "self" as we do today. This says (IMO) something
important about music and how our nervous systems interpret music.
In support of his thesis, Tillich assigned many textbooks by other
noted anthropologists and historians, especially updated translations of
early Greek writings that had been revised in light of recent evidence.
In the end, there was little doubt in my mind that Tillich was correct.
The early Western cultures did not separate the human "self" from the
cosmos as a whole.

What does this have to do with music?

I have posted many times my agreement with the view that
'intellect' or 'rational thinking' depends upon and cannot exist without
crosstalk between, and feedback loops with, the neural structures that
process all of our incoming sensations. Not just our hearing, but our
visual and tactile and taste and so forth.
The common thought is that a sensation enters the body through ear,
eye, touch, taste, nose, etc. A representation of this sensation is
passed on to the brain where the 'intellect' resides, and the intellect
does its thing.
Neurologically (PET scans, EEGs, etc) this view does not hold up.
Our cortices send messages back to the very same neural structures that
received the sensation in the first place, and these structures revise
their messages to the cortices (often based on previous experience), and
the intellect "changes its mind" about its original decision. Sometimes
we are conscious of all this and therefore we declare that we 'feel' a
certain way or 'see' the proper answer. Other times, it all happens
subconsciously.
The danger of having a strong sense of "self" is that it tempts a
person to imagine and to isolate one noncorporeal aspect of himself or
herself (often described as 'the intellect') from the rest of the
cosmos. Hence ceremonies such as 'gymnopedies' may seem weird or
twisted today; but a naked dance by immature youths may be closer to a
true understanding of music than some of us would like to think. It
wouldn't surprise me if Satie had this thought in mind, perhaps in some
way the he didn't recognize himself.

.....I don't know why I typed this..... It just seems to me that
this basic concept of music does not receive as much attention as it
deserves.

Cheers,
Bill

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