> Music, like all art,
> comes to have a language of its own and an internal logic that may not be very closely connected to whatever social
> forms are dominant at the time.
I will want to quibble some with this formulation, but I think Michael is substantially right. The more I think of Joanna's claim the more bizarre it seems on a number of grounds. To begin with it embodies and in a radical form wht has been called the "genetic fallacy," that an entity nature is explained by its origins, which is both absurd and potentially vicious. It is as though someone were to say that dance originataed in celebration of the slaughter of an enemy and the further it gets away from slaughter the worse it is. Vegetable life originated in bacteria and the further it gets away from bacteria the worse it is: who wouldn't rather have a germ for a companion than a redwood tree? The fallacy moreover sets up an infinite regress. What did dance originate from? It originated from X and the further it gets away from X the weaker it is. What did X originate in? It originated in Y and the furhter it gets away from Y the waker it is. And so on.
_All_ the arts MAY have originated in some commn germ, but as Michael says, so what. Paradise Lost or Gravity's Rainbow might throw light on that common germ (if we knew it, which we don't), but it in itself could not tell us anything about those works.
Now my quibble with Michael. "Music, like all art, comes to have a language of its own and an internal logic. . ." Languagehere is a metaphor when applied to music - a common one and useful in its way, but it is a metaphor and there are limits to its validity, which show up whenone refers to its "logic." That is iffy, and among other things raises the question of whether music or painting or literature has a history. Each has a chronology, of course, but is there any internal logic to that chronology? That is debatable. Literary critics (especially Rene Wellek and Northrop Frye) at mid-century tried to establish that "literature" had an essence and a history, but they failed pretty completely.
And that is what Joanna is, if effect, claiming now about music. It has an essence which she is privileged to grasp and it is not really music when it strays from that essence: hence her ability to predict with such confidence what music will be 200 years from now.
And it simply isn't true. Music does not have an essence, and it is really arrogant to claim that it doesd.
Man [i.e., humanity] originates in the Kill and we lose our manhood [i.e. our humanity] when we cease to kill and be killed.
Carrol