Len Fehskens replies to me:

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

In music analysis, we often refer to the phrase, "harmonic vocabulary."
Why is it not possible to consider serialism, pantonality, polytonality,
quartal harmony, etc.  different in the same sense as French is different.

>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.

Yet in music since 1900(especially 1930-1970 or so, there have been two
very opposing approaches.  One hand there are things like Structures by
Boulez which strove for total serialization (even if he admitted that he
broke his own rules) and the use of chance, and aleatory, and for that
matter, works like the Xenakis Bohor III which is a long crescendo of
white noise.

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

I chose that since I sensed some reference on your part to a notion that
there could be objective criteria. Many seem to think so. There are
notions of proportion and such that have often be applied to both music
and the visual arts.

>>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 must be confused.  I didn't do well in physics.  My dictionary says:
entropy:  a mathematical factor which is a measure of the unavailable
energy in a thermodynamic system.  Anyway, you can change my sentence
to read, the more one organizes, the more one moves towards chaos...

>>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".

For me, there is a different set of rules for each composition.

>>How can the intellect be divorced from human sensibility?
>
>Easily.  What do tensors have to do with "human sensibility"?

Beats me?

I guess I don't understand your point.

My dictionary offers the notion:  sensitivity-The capacity of an organism
or of a sense organ to respond to stimulation...I find that I can respond
to stimulation emotionally, intellectually, both of which often can have
some physical manisfestation.

>>Is it not human nature to "reinvent" when most of us have forgotten the
>>past?
>
>Indeed, hence my rhetorical question.

So how does that move one towards noise?..at least that seemed to me to
me that was a point of yours.

Karl