Stirling S Newberry argues elegantly:

>...The form guides ideas and actions even before there is concrete
>expression - and hence the form is operative and predictive of the results
>of actions - but we engage in those actions to produce the result. One may
>be a very musical and poetical soul without producing a great performance,
>but one is not a virtuoso unless one can - because >the definition is that
>the technique applied to the inner life yields >the transmission to
>others...

The form-idea way of underpinning cognition goes back (at least) to
Aristotle's teacher, Plato (to whom form = idea).  And this philosophical
idealism is with us still today, though in a variety of forms, some owing
more to Kant or Berkeley than to Aristotle and Plato; indeed, today's
cognitional science is still affected by it.  One form of modern idealism
is more crisply identified if called anti-rationalism, and it is that, I
think, which animates Stirling's pitch.  Trouble is, anti-rationalism must,
perforce, make do without routines of verification.  It offers no way of
proving what is good--indeed eschews it.  So, when in music the score is
transcended one follows the practice of idealist philosophy, which posits
that concept is a product of mind, and not of matter.  What am I driving
at? This: a performance that hies closely to the score is rationalist,
and one that deliberately trascends the score is idealist.  We may now
all choose sides...

Denis Fodor                     Internet:[log in to unmask]