Marsha wrote (Dec.17):
Am I the only one impressed by Tittivulus changing the perspective? So why not
explore:allowing yourself to use for a while the notion of a distinct 's/o
experience' as a working hypothesis; then you could proceed to explore the
various components of such experience (components, not parts). Is this
possible? It seems a more MOQ way to get at it from an Experience (Quality)
point-of-view.
As Marsha says "Why not explore?". I, for one, am all for exploring. If I
may, I'd start the exploration with a quote from Lila:
" The culture in which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to
interpret experience with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and
objects is built right into these glasses."
That's quite true; but one notable exception to that is Music. The culture in
which we live-in, fails utterly when trying to interpret Music through that set
of intellectual glasses. That's one of the reasons why I picked a
(hypothetical) 'music experience' in my previous Post. True, professional music
critics earn their living by using artfully those said intellectual glasses,
but any music lover with the least bit of common sense would acknowledge that
subject/object distinctions don't hold water here. Not only S/O but all its
derivatives that Bo.listed in another thread, quote:
There are surely more S/O derivatives, Mind/body, mental/ corporeal,
abstract/concrete and the said symbol/what's symbolized are obvious.
So, how can we proceed to 'interpret an experience' ignoring S/O
distinctions? Depends, first, on what we may intend or mean by 'to interpret'.
The OED says it comes from the Latin 'interpretari' : "explain, expound,
understand" . From these I'd choose 'expound' because it's the most modest of
the three(knowing so little abot the subject, I'd better be modest) To expound
in its sense of: "to give a detailed statement of" . A synonym of expound is
"set forth" which is also "depart", "set-off" (for a journey) which ties up
nicely with Marsha's " Why not explore?"
An experience as complex as the one we are (provisionally) calling 'music
experience' may be interpreted, expounded on, by considering its various
components and the possible ways they interrelate to 'conform' the whole.
Easier said than done because we are conditioned by education to analyze and
the moment we start analyzing, dissecting, we are out of the track.
Perhaps it'd be convenient to expound on a concrete example. The so-called
connoisseurship (Cs. for short) may be a component of the music experience. If
one is listening to, say, Sibelius 5th Symphony would the quality of the
experience be altered by us 'knowing' it is Sibelius and not Mahler or Elgar?
Plus all that it entails: knowledge about style, forms of expression, position
in the western culture timeline, etc. etc. Now,the trick is not to consider Cs.
as a separate compartment so that, together with other separate compartments,
we can build a model of said music experience, but to consider how does Cs. fit
in the overall picture.
The analogy with a jigsaw puzzle may help us here. Only that, instead of
assembling a puzzle from of its separate parts, we start with the jigsaw puzzle
already assembled and consider how the overall picture is altered if a piece,
or a number of close-neighbor pieces, is removed. (see however Kuhn's Ch.IV,
Normal Science as Puzzle Solving). In the above example, it may be that the
knowledge that it is his Fifth and not Sixth, may have a negligible influence,
and the same for whether is Opus 82 or 73. But the date might be a bit more
important, because it was composed in his troubled years, during WWI. (
Incidentally, while composing this Symphony, Sibelius wrote in his diary: " As
if God had thrown down pieces of a mosaic from the floor of heaven and asked me
to work out the pattern.") (more about patterns later on)
You see? It's a different sort of game altogether. Perhaps akin to
selective brain surgery, where the surgeon removes a certain section of a brain
and examines which functions are impaired; only that if he is a surgeon and a
scientist he'd be well aware that the brain is a whole, "greater than the sum
of its parts".
J.K. Hart in "Inside experience" writes:
"Experience seems to be more than the sum of our experiencings, at times it
even seems to be something quite different." As long as we keep this in mind
we'd be playing the right game.
Going back to this (hypothetical) music experience. What about the
question of 'pedantry', for instance?. It arises frequently because many people
are hostile to the idea that' in order to appreciate Music (or anything else
for that matter) the more one knows about the subject, the better. To address
the question: Someone may have an exquisitely detailed knowledge of data about
Sibelius and of musical theory., but is lacking in 'emotional' components. She
or he goes through the experience with no belly contractions, no holding of the
breath, no feeling of being left in mid air, and all the rest. In short, an
intellectual pedant. Is this still a music experience? Take away all the
pieces of the puzzle pertaining to 'emotion' and closest neighbors; could one
still discern anything like the original picture?
I realize that it is bad manners here to write Posts that are far too long;
I'd better leave it at that, for the time being.
_________________________________________________________________
Express yourself instantly with MSN Messenger! Download today it's FREE!
http://messenger.msn.click-url.com/go/onm00200471ave/direct/01/
Moq_Discuss mailing list
Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc.
http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org
Archives:
http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/
http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
