Thus the musician feels Mathematic, the mathematician thinks Music… each to receive its consummation from the other when the human intelligence, elevated to the perfect type, shall shine forth glorified in some future Mozart-Dirichlet, or Beethoven-Gauss – a union already not indistinctly foreshadowed in the genius and labours of a Helmholtz!
This is an occasional blog; though I do have visions of one day becoming a Regular Blogger. I don’t know when that day will come, however. In the meantime, feel free to comment on what’s here. (No guarantee of a timely reply, but I usually will get around to it eventually.)
Nom de Plume:
James Cook was the discoverer of Australia and Hawaii. My aspiration is to discover intellectual territory of similar beauty and exoticity.
N.B.: The author of this blog is not the son of computer scientist Stephen Cook.
October 15, 2009 at 8:43 am |
I just read your comments from a different blog that discussed alternate approaches to music theory. In response to a comment by the blog’s author, you wrote (scroll past this excerpt for my comments):
“Oh dear, where to start?
Well, you certainly have put your finger on it when you write:
‘Forgive my generalizations, but it seems to me that the compositional approach stems from a time when composition and theory were basically the same thing, hence, this approach is favored by an earlier generation of pedagogues.’
Yes, indeed! The whole distinction on which your post is premised, namely that which is alleged to exist between “compositional” and “analytical” approaches to music, exists only because, once upon a time, “theory” (or “analysis”) stopped yielding insight into composition! And instead of saying “Oops, we must have gotten our theory wrong” and fixing the problem, which would have been the proper thing to do, people instead decided that they were involved in a new distinct field of study called “analytical theory”. That way, they didn’t have to discard the erroneous ideas to which they had become attached; they could simply relabel their occupation and move down the hall.
Sadly, people do this kind of thing all the time, and not just in music. The modern concept of religion is another example. Once upon a time, people believed that supernatural agents such as gods were needed to explain the natural world; then along comes science and what do people do? Instead of simply biting the bullet and admitting that the whole God theory was just plain wrong, they invent the concept of non-overlapping magesteria and assign new purposes to religion (“it gives us morality” or “provides meaning and purpose”, etc.).
My comment has to do with that last paragraph. You sound like someone who doesn’t subscribe to religion; is that a safe assumption? I get the impression that you believe that science can sufficiently take the place of God – that “God” was simply an ignorant human’s substitute for something he didn’t understand. It also seems that you believe that now science can explain those unknowns, and therefore the concept of God is not rational or necessary.
How do you account for the IRrationalities in science? For example, science can THEORIZE that everything we currently see originated in a miniscule particle that exploded and gave us all the building blocks of our universe that have, by chance over billions of years, come together in an infinitely precise way to give us the amazing functions of complexity in a single cell of the human body (let alone in the trillions of cells that all work together in the body as a whole).
BUT YET, where did that miniscule particle that exploded in the Big Bang come from?
Science can’t explain that. I believe it would take just as much faith to look to science – which is based on the discoveries of human beings – for the answers to our existence and the wonders of our universe as it does to believe that there is an all-powerful God who created everything. Actually, it’s more comforting to believe in God because there is a terminus in that: anything that we can’t reason out (such as where did God come from, or why did he create everything) can be attributed to the almighty power of God that is beyond us to understand and there it stops, whereas with science there are certain things that it will NEVER be able to answer.
Just my two cents worth!