Author: brycon
Date: 2019-03-03 21:03
Quote:
"What IS the definition of MUSIC, anyway?" Is it similar to "Art is in the eye of the beholder?"
This question seems to be asked more in the discipline of literature than in music (though with music, it's often asked by way of music itself--think John Cage).
With literature, there seems to be a clear difference between literary writing, such as a poem, and non-literary writing, like a grocery list. But music doesn't provide a clear analogy (Bernstein, however, tries to make one with pieces of music versus technical exercises). And to complicate things, over time, non-literary pieces of writing like ancient almanacs have become accepted as pieces of literature. In a circular kind of argument, then, literature and music are whatever people who "do" literature and music say they are.
For a more grounded approach, what literary theorists like Terry Eagleton promote--and what I think works well for thinking about music vs non-music--is Wittgenstein's family resemblance argument. In short, if you showed up at a family reunion, there would be no single trait you could point to that would be possessed by every single member. Many, but not all, for instance, might have brown eyes, big feet, bad eye sight, or stinky body odor. But out of those four traits, every member might possess one or more, resulting in "a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing."
As soon as you attempt to bound music by a single trait--say, composed, notated, expressive, etc.--I can point to something that falls outside that trait. But perhaps there is a group of traits from which every piece of music obtains of at least one.
Quote:
Music is a three-stage thing:
First, a more or less vague or precise group of ideas in the mind of a composer, then,
A vague to precise interpretation of what is wanted, which appears in the mind(s) of one or more performers (unless it's mechanism performed, and in a way, even then), and finally,
A more or less vague bunch of impressions of what was heard in the minds and memories of listeners.
These three-stages are more the semiotics of music, that is, they're a description of how "meaning" arises. Jean-Jaques Nattiez's book Music and Discourse fully explores these stages.
Post Edited (2019-03-03 21:23)
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