On Thu, 6 Jul 2000, Len Fehskens wrote:

>Karl Miller writes:
>
>>Consider historically, say in the time of Palestrina, when much of the art
>>music was written for the church, and the church had such control over the
>>very harmony and intervals considered appropriate.  Not using those rules
>>could be considered "sinful."
>
>This argument from historical precedent bothers me.  It assumes that a
>transformation can be applied indefinitely and remain valid.  It seems
>to me to assume something like "progress" or "evolution" of music from a
>primitive to a more "advanced" state.  But if this "progress" is toward
>ever less constraint ("rules") on expression, the inevitable "final state"
>must be noise, where entropy is maximized and structure ("rules") is
>nonexistent.  And if this is indeed the case, as music approaches this
>ideal, most advanced form, it will sound more and more like noise.

I would offer that the notion of "rules" derives from practice and not the
other way around.  It is my own perspective that Schoenberg devised his 12
tone technique to explain what he was doing intuitively.

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.

>Now, I'm not one to dismiss all noise as uninteresting; some forms
>of noise I rather enjoy (e.g., rain, wind, thunder, birdsong, cricket
>chirping, waterfalls, i.e., most "natural" sounds), but most noise is
>in fact unenjoyable and not expressive of anything other than chaos.

While I don't understand how you get to noise from the evolution of musical
rhetoric, what relevance does the notion of "enjoyable" have to do with art
on the objective level?

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

>Alternatively, one can argue that there is no notion of progress, there
>are just "new rules", that are different from the old rules, and perhaps in
>some way more "appropriate" to our time.  Are there an unbounded number of
>artistically valid rules? I suspect not, but I can imagine that one could
>argue that "artistically valid" is defined by the rules, not vice versa, in
>which case anything goes and art becomes an intellectual exercise divorced
>from human sensibility.

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."
However I believe that art defines the rules.

How can the intellect be divorced from human sensibility?

>Or perhaps we are just doomed to cycle around some sequence of rules as
>time passes and we forget the past?

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

Karl