Karl Miller challenges my disputation of the "music as language" metaphor:

>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.

They are different, but not in the same sense that French differs
from English.  They are stylistically different.  They are not different
phonemic representations of the same thing.  They are not different in the
same sense that the words "wine" and "vin" are different.  Both words mean
essentially the same thing.  I challenge you to find an analogous state of
affairs with respect to distinct musical styles.  To do so you will first
have to wrestle with the question of the "meaning" of music, a question
about which much has been written but precious little ascertained.

>>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.

I wasn't arguing with your perception of reality, I was arguing with what
appeared to me to be implicit in someone else's argument.  If you don't
agree with their argument, then argue with them rather than me.

>>>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.

Not me.  I long ago gave up on the notion that there is anything more
objective to music than notes on paper.

>There are notions of proportion and such that have often be applied to
>both music and the visual arts.

If you can come up with an objective definition of musical proportion that
most everyone can agree with, I'll concede you this point.  Then I will
challenge you to continue this objectification of aesthetics.

>My dictionary says: entropy: a mathematical factor which is a measure
>of the unavailable energy in a thermodynamic system.

Dictionary definitions of concepts are almost always worthless.  Yes, this
is a thermodynamic definition of entropy, at least in the sense that this
is one way one can attempt to compute its value.  But since the available
energy in a thermodynamic system depends on differences in potential, i.e.,
order and distinction, it turns out to be another way of saying the more
disorder in a system (i.e., the less possible it is to take advantage of
differences), the more entropy.

>Anyway, you can change my sentence to read, the more one organizes,
>the more one moves towards chaos...

No, again, exactly bakwards.  Chaos is statistical homogeneity.  Everything
is the "same" because things are so random that nothing is distinguishable
from anything else.  The moment you impose order (i.e., "organize"), you
start making distinctions, which decreases chaos/entropy.  And doing so
requires the expenditure of energy, which you can only borrow from
somewhere else, at the cost of destroying structure in that somewhere else;
when you take that energy out (which was "stored" in the form of
"distinctions" or structure or organization), what you leave behind is more
chaos.  The bummer is that the 3rd law of thermodynamics says that every
time you go around this cycle, you lose a little more energy to randomness
that you can't recover, until eventually there is no structure, and hence
no available energy, anywhere -- "the heat death of the universe".

>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.

Sensibility is not the same as sensitivity.  By human sensibility I
meant relevance to our internal, emotional lives.  While I often respond
emotionally to "purely intellectual" concepts, it is a qualitatively
different kind of response than I get from looking at my cats or listening
to Mahler.  Tensors are not part of the "human condition", at least the way
I think of it.  They are a beautiful and powerful concept, but my life
would not be significantly impoverished if I didn't know of their
(abstract) existence.

>So how does that [reinventing or rediscovering the past] move one towards
>noise?..at least that seemed to me to me that was a point of yours.

It doesn't, for that was not my point.  This was a third alternative I was
offering; to reiterate, the three alternatives were

1) evolution (i.e., directed change, often confused with progress)
2) random (i.e., undirected) change
3) repetition

Noise was the inevitable consequence of one kind of directed evolution,
i.e., preferential selection of systems of ever fewer formal constraints,
which was the driving force someone proposed.

len.