Chris Bonds:

>3.  How music makes you feel has nothing to do with its value.  Astrology
>makes some people feel better.  That doesn't mean it's doing them any good.

The analogy doesn't hold because astrology makes (spurious) truth claims
and music doesn't.  If people actually believe astrological predictions,
this may be harmful to them, aside from the affront to truth.  I suspect,
though, that for a lot of folks, looking at horoscopes is a harmless idle
amusement, taken no more seriously than Chinese fortune cooky messages.
So let's just look at the main assertion:

>How music makes you feel has nothing to do with its value.

This is a very strong claim, and I am going to say it is false.  How you
feel matters a lot to the quality of your life, and how music makes you
feel thus has a lot to do with its value to you.  Not only that, beyond
the purely subjective response of a single listener, the value of a piece
of music--in general--is a matter of how actual or potential listeners may
happen to respond to it, and some appropriate responses to music are very
much in terms of feelings; thus how you feel about a piece does offer one
measure of its worth, even looking at the work from a more detached, if not
wholly objective way.

I think what you really want to say, Chris, is that how an individual
listener feels about a piece of music--or how it makes one feel--is not a
sufficient measure of its musical value for (other) listeners.  At least,
that is something I would agree is clearly true.

Jim Tobin