Re: The Three Greastest Symphonic Works

On Jul 4, 10:19 pm, "Lookingglass" wrote:

You and I are *speaking* the same language, but I do not understand
everything you are stating.

Two of my room-mates in grad school were physicists. I was rarely
able to follow their conversations about physics, although they were
both speaking English. It's not simply that they feel one way about
reality and I feel another. Rather, the sum total of my experience
was different from the sum total of theirs. Nevertheless, at least in
principle, I could learn to understand what they were talking about.
(In some of the respects that equipped them for being physicists, they
may have been smarter than I am, too. That's not a result of the
capriciousness of their feelings or mine either.)

Originally, needless to say, the term "subjectivity" didn't refer to
the radical differences in temperament and feeling characteristic of
human beings that it refers to in common parlance today, radical
differences in temperament and feeling that supposedly lead us to
radically different reactions to everything under the sun. It
referred to the fact that "objects" are perceived by perceiving
"subjects." We can only see what we see from the vantage of where we
stand, and somebody observing the same object from a different vantage
will perceive something different. It does not follow from this
statement that two people observing the same object from the exact
same vantage will perceive something different.

The concepts embodied in this sentence are now often used
metaphorically. Perception originally referred to sensory perception,
but we are metaphorically said to "perceive" reality differently
because of our different "vantage points," and it is even sometimes
suggested that we are entirely locked in by such distinct
"subjectivities," that our experiences are fundamentally
incomparable. Personally, I don't buy it, although I do realize that
we're all the sum totals of different sets of experiences and that
some people like chocolate and others don't.

You are far more knowledgeable about Music than
I am...and yet we can both listen to the Eroica Symphony. I hear the same
performance that you do, though you may *understand* it better than I do.

There's understanding and there's understanding. Long before there
were grammars for languages, people understood the languages they
spoke. In that sense of understanding, I don't necessarily understand
music any better than you do. Eventually, of course, grammarians and
linguists came along and they developed vocabularies for discussing
the mechanics of the languages that people spoke. I probably only
rarely succeed, but, when I attempt to offer a technical explanation
for some aspect of music at rmcr, I strive to be as clear as
possible. Unfortunately, there are some things that simply cannot be
demonstrated without the benefit of actual examples in real sound in
real time. For example, it's very easy to take the Preludio from
Bach's E major Violin Sonata and demonstrate the difference between a
dissonance and a consonance to the students in a Music Appreciation
class, most of whom are far less interested in "classical music" than
anybody posting here. You can even get them to see that the
experience of the resolution of a dissonance in real time is palpable,
that their bodies react to it viscerally. This experience is not the
arbitrary consequence of their subjective feelings: it's a result of
Bach's manipulation of a musical language.

-david gable

.

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