Then when do you call something heard music? Maybe you already have a paradigm for music in your mind, a formal map, that is enlivend when something from the outside seems to match it, even partly. Now where does that paradigm come from? How did you acquire it? How flexible is it? Did you discover it or learn it?
It's worth examining that paradigm, its formal elements, some of which must be language based, some visually and aurally based, all memory based, and each and all entangling feelings and emotions. I know it's old-fashioned nowadays to claim a formal basis for art and aesthetics but given that the names of things and events are untrustworthy then the abstract form of something, like a pattern, and the absence of utility, is the best and most stable thing left. Form still counts. Names don't count big until they are inverted as subordinate to form instead of superior to it (as with so much crummy neo-conceptual art today where naming or utility is crucial to irony). We have a scraggly little fake Christmas tree decoration on our mantle. We put it up every year because it's so puny and funny, so trivial and totally kitschy. It is strung with a few lights and the path of the lighting wire winding among the stick-like branches form a great struggle, a wiggling outline, in force much like the Laocoon itself, producing almost the same emotion in me as the famous sculpture itself (having seen it in Rome) and even with a little extra punch, a lifting surprise, that this kitschy decoration could raise up the echo-feeling of the deep human angst of the Laocoon, and then of all the similar artworks I recall that purposely imitated the form of the Laocoon. But it requires me to forget the little tree on the mantle as a decorative Christmas trinket and see its form only as if it were the outline, the weaving, moving outline of the fullest do-or-die human spirit. A major work of art I discovered-invented right there on my mantle, as good as the Laocoon! wc ________________________________ From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Sunday, December 22, 2013 1:48 PM Subject: Re: Aesthetic experience In a message dated 12/22/13 2:24:02 PM, [email protected] writes: > And when do you recognize that what u hear is music > The right answer is: never. All you can do is "recognize" that this is something you CALL "music". 'Music', the term, does not label a mind-independent ontic status.
