Stirling Newberry:

>Just because you won't change your mind in the face of overwhelming facts
>does not mean you are right.

Certainly not.  I change my mind frequently about many things, only rarely
if ever about others.  I never use the unchanging nature of my beliefs or
anyone else's as an argument for or against the rightness of those beliefs.
That would fly in the face of the entire history of ideas.

>The counter examples to "music is sound" still remain - that is people
>conceive music before it is sounded out, and often it is a very long time
>before a composition is actually heard.  The B Minor mass was music long
>before it was ever played.

No problem here.  Sound in the imagination is good enough for me, and
the evidence of organisation of sound in written form is as good as the
physical realisation of it.  I did try to keep my definition short, hence
the absence of the numerous volumes of commentaries required to expand
every aspect of it.  Sorry about that.

>It is the organisation part of the proposition which determines music,
>because we can remember a work without hearing it, create a work before it
>can be heard.  It is also essential to have a physical understanding of a
>work in order to actually play it - the gestural ability to play.

A little research in the archives will show that I have argued precisely
the first of these points on this list before, and that the other points
are covered by my posts that described the way I think of the
composer-performer-listener trinity in some detail.

>Yes, yes, yes, I live in the consumer age, and therefore the overwhelming
>belief is that everything is what we consume - in the case of music,
>recordings and sound.

Possibly so, but that is not my position.

Ian Crisp
[log in to unmask]