[MD] Music as Intellectual?

[MarshaV]

And wasn't this a very nice demonstration of discourse as Intellectual?



At 03:49 PM 12/15/2007, you wrote:

>
>    The question "Music as intellectual ?" may 
> perhaps be discussed through an exploration 
> of  what may be called,  provisionally, "the 
> music experience" (a shorthand of "music as 
> experience", which is too long).  I write 
> "provisionally" because I am not entirely 
> certain of its being a distinct type 
> of  experience as ,say, the aesthetic 
> experience is accepted to be. If I may be 
> allowed to use for a while the notion of a 
> distinct 'music experience' as a working 
> hypothesis; then I could proceed to explore the 
> various components of such experience (components, not parts).
>
>    The preceding posts here provide a good 
> insight about the possible components. First 
> and foremost the aesthetic experience, as 
> emphasized in previous posts: Although few may 
> disagree, there is an overall consensus about 
> considering aesthetic experiences as 
> intellectual; hence a positive answer to "Music 
> as Intellectual?". However you might agree that 
> to consider a music experience as solely 
> aesthetic is to severely limit it, leaving out 
> experiences connected with the so-called 
> 'banal' music. There is far more to our 
> experiencing of a certain piece of music than 
> its aesthetic value. A piece of music may have 
> a profound emotional effect on some of us 
> because of associations with childhood memories 
> (i.e. lullabies), or associations with a dear 
> one, or of our complex identification with a 
> group or nation (as in dmb's example of "God 
> Save the Queen") or cause (like in protest and 
> revolutionary songs). The list is long and also 
> heterogeneous; but if we were to include them 
> into a set (which I don't intend to) the only 
> common property would be "non-aesthetic 
> experiences". For lack of a better name I'd 
> call them 'musical experiences involving strong 
> positive affect'. As to how these fit into the 
> "Music as intellectual?" question, it depends 
> on whether we think of emotions as 
> 'intellectual' or not
 a question that I studiedly try to avoid.
>
>  Yet another group of experiences may be 
> envisaged which have in common that they entail 
> body movements as reactions to the music (see also dmb's post).
>Surely our ancestors, as far back as the 
>Cro-Magnons, had intense music experiences, long 
>before the Greeks ever pondered about 
>aesthetics. Music and dance were later separated 
>at some stage of our History, but experiencing a 
>certain piece of music resulting on more or less 
>gracious movements of our body continues strong, 
>up to our very days (what R. Jourdain calls 
>muscular representation). At one end of the 
>spectrum we have, in our culture, what we see in 
>discotheques, people absorbed in the music and 
>moving with the beat or rhythm ( clearly also a 
>non-aesthetic experience) at the other end the 
>body twitching and hand movements that some of 
>us find hard to repress in concert halls, when carried away by the music.
>
>         I have not set up to 'classify' 
> different kinds of music experiences, only to 
> exemplify experiences of different kinds which 
> in an actual music experience may constitute it 
> as components, to a larger or lesser degree. 
> Take some of  Bach's compositions for instance, 
> for many of them what Arlo says about 
> mathematics may hold:  "It may help to liken 
> music to mathematics in this particualr 
> instance. Both are the arrangement of symbols 
> towards some symbolic representation. And both 
> when done properly, open the door to an 
> aesthetic experience which trascends the particular symbols."
>
>But the difference between that and the 
>aesthetic experience of , say, solving  a 
>differential equation, lies largely in the fact 
>that we experience it also as dance, as body 
>movement (I'm thinking of some of his Partitas). 
>There's no doubt that the musical experience on 
>listening to his Mathew's Passion will not be 
>the same for an atheist as for a devout 
>Christian, the added component being a religious experience.
>
>          As an end line, I'd venture to say 
> that to consider the music experience as an 
> intellectual one, holds only for a very limited 
> section of the broad range of the multitude of our music experiences.
>
>  Jorge Goldfarb.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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