Karl Miller replies to me:

>Is any spoken language static...well the French try to keep it so, but for
>most, language evolves.  There are many who take the time to understand
>Latin.  Is English moving towards noise? Maybe so.

But not so rapidly that those who listen to it can no longer
comprehend it.  And yes, Engish is indeed degnerating toward "noise" (i.e.,
meaninglessness), as subtle differences between words are trampled (cf.,
infer and imply), but again, not so fast that it is rendered useless as a
form of communication.  The language is being simplified conceptually, and
"enriched" with respect to its vocabulary; we have more and more "colorful"
ways of expressing the fewer and fewer (finely distinguished) concepts.

I am very wary of the "music as language" metaphor.  Serialism is not
"another" language in the same sense that French is another language.

>While I don't understand how you get to noise from the evolution of
>musical rhetoric,

By the relaxation of formal constraints.  The implicit argument seemed to
me that music was "evolving" by relaxing formal contraints and allowing
more expressive freedom.

>what relevance does the notion of "enjoyable" have to do with art
>on the objective level?

In what sense is art objective?

>Yet, the more one organizes, the more one moves towards entropy, or so
>suggests the second law of thermodynamics.

That's exactly backwards.  Entropy is the measure of disorder.

>I suppose that one could argue that "artistically valid" is defined by
>"rules" but I wonder if one is talking about "rules" or "the rules."

Any given set of rules becomes "the rules".

>How can the intellect be divorced from human sensibility?

Easily.  What do tensors have to do with "human sensibility"?

>Is it not human nature to "reinvent" when most of us have forgotten the
>past?

Indeed, hence my rhetorical question.

len.