[lbo-talk] medieval/renaissance music and middle eastern music

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Sat Sep 17 15:22:18 PDT 2011


On Sat, 17 Sep 2011 16:48:55 -0500 Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> Somewhere in the Cantos Pound quotes a
> German officer saying, "Here, none of that mathematical music." It was a
> comment on Mozart. So that officer (a) rejected "rational" music, (b)
> thought the rational was the mathematical, and thought Mozart's music
> was mathematical.It is thus irrelevant to Michael's argument whether or
> not there is such a thing as rational music.

I'm not sure which Michael Carrol is referring to here, or what the argument is, exactly. The other Michael seemed to be saying that some kinds of music were more rational than others, a claim which piqued my curiosity.

For what it's worth, nearly all music seems pretty 'rational' to me. Every style of composition I know has its own logic -- or maybe 'grammar' is a better term.

Oddly enough I was just ruminating on a closely-related topic on an Early Music mailing list I haunt. Excerpt, for those interested in pursuing this rather recondite conversation:


> It's fascinating how we use notions referring to
> *discourse* to talk about music. I do it myself, so this
> is not a cavil; I'm constantly referring
> to the logic or argument of a piece of music. But why do
> we do that? In what way does music resemble discourse?
> Discourse is usually about something (except in the
> case of Presidential debates and other manifestations
> of mass or individual psychosis)....
>
> But what is music talking about? When a composer is
> 'saying something', what *kind of thing* is he saying? ...
>
> If we're going to compare music to discourse, it seems
> to me that the resemblance lies more in the syntactic
> and morphological elements of language than in the semantic
> ones. Perhaps part of the pleasure of music lies in the
> fact that it allows us to exercise our syntax bump without
> having any semantics involved. As a horse might occasionally
> enjoy taking a gallop without a rider.

--

Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net

http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com



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