Frances to Derek and members... You mused in essence that music in the form of jazz and rock and pop and folk songs are a seriously impoverished musical form, and that you could no more convince yourself that any of these are a masterpiece of human creation than you could convince yourself that a toy aeroplane is a real one.
It might be useful in these kinds of artistic disputes to continue classifying the humanal arts or humanities as being of say the fine arts and the liberal arts and the applied arts. After all, some arts are formal or exact, while other arts are referential or descriptive, yet still other arts are instrumental or practical utilities. With regard to artifacts of music, it seems they may all be of humanal art to some degree by virtue of merely being identified by experts as music, but not all music clearly will be found or held or deemed as being fine art. Some aural objects of fine art may even be sonic and not music at all, while some music may be simply applied artistic craft. The thorn here persists as to how objects are even conferred with the status of art, whether all artworks have something in common as members that fall within a group called art, if that usual or normal type of class exists objectively, and what separates objects as art from those that are not art. It seems that the aesthetic or artistic "experience" might best be found as the sound differentia of what might be identified as art and also as music. If the experience however fails to be accepted as doing this, then the differentia of art from nonart must be found elsewhere, and there does not seem to be any good alternates as candidates to fill this need. The obvious alternates to the experience of art might be the material or form or content or context or function or intent of art, but these seem unlikely and unsuitable. Finding a fit differentia seems imperative, because ordinary objects found or made as extraordinary art and its music clearly do something unique that objects held or deemed as not being art or music do not do or do not do as well. The reasonable feelings of forms in artworks might indeed best rely on the iconic similarity that the structure of forms and feelings might be found to share, and on the relation that occurs between forms and feelings when these poles are brought together; but the form must be of value, and the feeling must be intense and worthwhile, both individually and communally. The further justifying and classifying of aesthetic or artistic experiences might also be a further task for experts to research. The early pragmatist inquiries of Peirce and Langer and Dewey and Morris and later of Sebeok and Arnheim and Quine and many others might for example be revived and blended with renewed profit. The human body and brain in life is too often now taken for granted as common and ordinary and dispensable, likely because of familiarity and similarity in its habits of conduct, such as the making of simple sounds that are found musical, but if a masterpiece of natural evolution and a miracle of neural creation were sought, then no better exemplar could be found than is substantively manifested by the mere presence of such an organism and its art. There is nothing trivial nor confused here. One point for experts to consider is the fact that only humans engage in acts of playing and gaming for no other reason than for these acts or for their own fun. humans can for example make toys and for the sheer joy of it, then play with the toys for the mere sake of the play alone. These primal acts of doing things, such as marking and sounding or dressing and grooming, for their own sake and for no other sake, are perhaps the very origins of aesthetic and artistic acts.
