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.  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.

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.

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

len.