Re: Daniel Levitin

On Mar 31, 1:34 pm, "Don Phillipson" <e...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in messagenews:d7b195ee-3ca5-4fa6-9da0-4ddc52b65a26@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

What does that have to do with his competence as a psychologist?

Thanks to PTD for bringing this interchange to a graceful
close.   Daniel Levitin wrote a book promoted by Scientific
American as offering notable insight into why and how people
compose, perform, or enjoy music, by a man who, after 15 years
in the pop music industry, became an accredited psychologist, and
now is cross-appointed to his university's music school.

Since when is being "promoted by Scientific American" a mark, let
alone a guarantee, of quality?

So it's now your claim that he entered a Ph.D. program and did his
Ph.D. work in psychology _after_ his stint in the recording industry?
I.e., he made enough money not to have to worry about income for the
rest of his life, and turned to his real love, psychology, and
happened to apply it to a field he had some practical experience in?

The naive reader may suppose a psychologist writing about music
had to know something about music.   PTD reminds us of the tradition
in the social sciences that people investigating XYZ do not themselves
need to know much about XYZ .  I disagree personally but may not
professionally.

Are you a professional social scientist?

The question remains open whether the music content
of books about music is an appropriate topic for a newsgroup
called rec.classical.music, but I can furnish some strictly musical
information for this post:

Where is it claimed to be a book about music? From all you've said,
it's clearly a book about psychology that happens to deal with music.
Does it have cataloguing-in-publication data on the copyright page? Is
it listed among the ML's or among the B's (I think it is -- I've never
looked for a psychology book in my life)? That is, in the 780s or the
1- (philosophy) or 3- (social sciences) -somethings?

But when discussing metre Levitin cites for 5/4 time only Lalo
Schifrin, Paul Desmond (composer of Take Five) and Tchaikovsky . . .
Three examples (from three, I presume; no idea what "Take
Five" is, genres) is quite enough to make a point about 5/4 time --

Take Five is an extremely well-known jazz tune, composed by Desmond
and made famous by Dave Brubeck, and apparently uniquely popular
among classical instrumentalists who "never listen to jazz."   The
parenthetical remark seems to underline the point that, when writing
about XYZ, social scientists' confidence is not impaired by knowing
little about XYZ.
.

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