Len Fehskens pushes my arguments to their limits (and I thank you for it,
Len - it's what I enjoy most about this list):

>This further qualification (I have no quarrel with requirements 1 and 2)
>seems to me to disqualify much "abstract" music, and raises the contentious
>issue of what C "meant".

I've never been entirely happy with the idea of "abstract" music,
or music which is "about itself".  My wife Sue is a properly trained
and qualified Music Therapist (unlike some people who give themselves
that name with little justification), and she assures me that one of the
fundamental tenets of that profession is that any sound may and probably
will provoke an emotional response in very young children, the mentally
ill, the "handicapped" and the emotionally vulnerable.  The rest of us may
have learnt to repress those innocent responses, but that doesn't mean that
they are not still there under the surface.  Following the direction of
that thought, it seems to me that any "musical" sound is going to have a
number of emotional associations in any listener's mind and that it is
probably impossible to compose a piece of music that is genuinely, at all
levels, free of such content.

>Consider for example Don Satz's recent collection of vignettes he
>"experienced" while listening to the Bach Well Tempered Klavier.  Was
>this the kind of "communication" you require? Is this what Bach "intended"
>Don to hear? If not, did the required "communication" actually take place?
>If not, was this sublime creation not "music" for Don?

Where did "require" come into it? If that's a part of what Don experiences
from that music, or if it's a method he uses to explore his own responses,
then that's fine by me.  It's not how I relate to those pieces - for me
it's more a mood, an emotional "colour", a sense of being transported out
of myself into another mode of experience, a journey to another "plane" -
but, as I argued in my last post, Don and I bring different things to the
same music so it's not surprising that we interact with it in different
ways.

I don't know what Bach "intended" - if anything at all other than a
technical demonstration of all the things that I'm sure I don't need to
explain here and now.  But he put some of himself into the WTK, as into
everything he wrote, and Don and I, in our different ways, are making some
kind of contact with that.

>>So we can say that it is a necessary condition of "music" that L is
>>actively engaged in experiencing the output of C and P.
>
>So, if there is no L *currently* experiencing the "output of C and P",
>there is no music? Where did it go? What is whatever C transmits to P
>called, if it is not music?

There is always an L, as long as there is a P performing.  P can listen to
himself (i.e.  P and L would be two logical people in one physical person).
If P and L united is also C, then a special case arises which I'll come
back to a bit later on.  What C transmits to P (and of course they might be
the same person) is an incomplete set of instructions for making sounds.
It's usually physically manifest in the shape of a score - but if we're
talking about e.g.  an improvisation, the link between the idea-generating
aspect of the improvising composer/performer and the executive aspect of
him is very close and no physical medium exists as an intermediary.  But
they are still two separate entities, as I know to my embarrassment on many
occasions behind the drums, when my creative imagination has come up with
cross-rhythms and syncopations and polyrhythmic intricacies that exceeded
my capacity to deliver them unpractised, sometimes resulting in total
collapse of band.

>If L directly "experiences" that whatever, for example by reading the score
>and "hearing" something in her head, is that music? Can L play the role of
>P without actually creating sound waves that impinge upon an eardrum?

If we're talking about someone who genuinely has that ability, then he/she
would fulfil the role of P and of L.  The internal experience would be the
same as that of hearing the corresponding physical sound that would be
produced by that person acting as P, so there would be no problem.  As some
philosopher whose name temporarily escapes me once said, "a difference that
makes no difference is no difference".

>By analogy, if no one is looking at a painting, is it no longer art? If I
>am not reading a book, do the words cease to be literature or poetry? There
>seems to me to be some important abstract mainfestation of music (or any
>other form or art or expression) that exists independent of performance or
>observation or experience that is not as ephemeral as these, but that
>captures their essence.

In the quote I gave from an old posting to another list, I referred
to "communication or the possibility of it".  I'm not going to take
the position of arguing that a piece of music isn't music if no-one is
listening to it.  I recognise that I didn't emphasise the "possibility of
it" side enough elsewhere.  Of course the Mona Lisa is art when the lights
are out, Shakespeare plays are still great art when the actors have gone
home, and so on.  However, the artistic experience (the "communication",
the sense of contact with another mind) that underlies their status as art
only exists in the presence of an actively engaged audience.

>>This is also why my trinity of C, P & L cannot be absorbed into one single
>>individual - because then there would be no possibility of communication
>>between one human being and another.
>
>I have a real problem with this, as I have tried to elaborate above, your
>architect analogy notwithstanding (flawed I suspect because architecture is
>not a "performing art").  Are my photographs not art when *I* look at them,
>despite the powerful experiences they evoke?

I spent some time chewing over this question with myself yesterday, before
deciding to drop it from a post that was long enough without it.  If an
elderly composer alone in his studio plays a piece that he wrote forty
years earlier, is his youthful self in communication with his older one?
Is there enough distance between C and P/L that they could be regarded
as different people, or is he only "talking to himself"?

The best answer I can offer is that your photographs are not art when you
are the only person to have seen them, although they might have some sort
of ill-defined "potential art" status. It is possible that their content,
or their visual language, is such that they might have a powerful impact
on you, their creator, but not on anyone else. But once they produce a
response in a different person, who can then say "I never saw . . . .
quite that way before!" or "Now I understand how Len feel about . . ."
or something similar, then they would have justified their status as art.

>Am I unable or forbidden to communicate with myself?

Can you communicate with yourself? After all, what have you got to give
yourself that you don't already have? Perhaps we all have a variety of
different "parts of ourselves" that might benefit from closer contact with
each other.  Or perhaps that would lead to creative short-circuits that
would in the end be counter-productive.  I don't know and I suspect the
model is beginning to break down here.

I'm just trying to think, from as close to first principles as I can get,
about what music is and what all art really is.  Neither of these things
have objective physical reality, so all we can do is to throw models and
analogies around until they fall apart, then look closely at what went
wrong and what seemed to work OK, and try to build an improved version.
I don't claim to have any final answers, just some steps along the road
and, with luck, a couple of them pointing in a useful direction.

Ian Crisp
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