The following is less a friendly disagreement, with those who chimed in,
than a revery.  The question is also of deep and dream-like concern to
those who play.

"all art constantly aspires toward the condition of music."  Pater


Larry Blaine wrote:
>Seems like nonsense to me.

Steve Schwartz:
>Music inhabits a world pretty much closed off from the sensate world.
Its
>connections to our own are mainly conventional, culturally and
historically
>dependent.

and Walter Meyer:
Prefers Whitehead's hierarchy of preeminant human achievements,
mathematics and then perhaps music.

I don't know that our divergent contentions much matter since we may not
be too concerned with proving that one statement is true or more true
than another.  We occupy a changable position and frankly or songfully
relate what we see.  Pater's remark can be applied to almost any human
endeavor, for example politics, but I would amend it slightly.
"Politics, or sports or brain surgery constantly aspires toward the
condition of music."
How I would amend this is to say that all endeavor is already in the
condition of music, since musical theory and accomplishment can hardly
be said to be complete.  Music is perhaps the analogy of analogies, but
the question of priority isn't all that important to me.  As poetry came
before prose and mute gestures before poetry I'm content with thinking
that the harmony of the spheres trumps even these.  Proof?  I will not
mind being wrong or even called a lax thinker. I have always preferred
fantasy and pure abstraction to the results-driven logic of economics
and science.  But this is just one person's preference.  Differ, by all
means.


I'm writing in the hopes to mitigate any attempt to completely separate
music appreciation from all other forms of appreciation and production.
Pater, in the following quote (see below), had just been talking about
another adept of art-for-arts-sake, Gustave Flaubert and his perhaps
nagging obsession with finding the one word for the one thought, the
perfectly unequivocal expression.


>From "Appreciations," the last two paragraphs of the introductory
chapter "Style":

"I said, thinking of books like Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, that prose
literature was the characteristic art of the nineteenth century, as
others, thinking of its triumphs since the youth of Bach, have assigned
that place to music.  Music and prose literature are, in one sense, the
opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting to the
imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as free and
various as those which music presents to it through sense.  And
Certainly the tendency of what has been here said is to bring literature
too under those conditions, by conformity to which music takes rank as
the typically perfect art.  If music be the ideal of all art whatever,
precisely because in music it is impossible to distinguish the form from
the substance or matter, the subject from the expression, then,
literature, by finding its specific excellence in the absolute
correspondence of the term to its import, will be but fulfilling the
condition of all artistic quality in things everywhere, of all good
art."

"Good art, but not necessarily great art; the distinction between great
art and good art depending immediately, as regards literature at all
events, not on its form, but on the matter.  Thackeray's Esmond, surely,
is greater art than Vanity Fair, by the greater dignity of its
interests.  It is on the quality of the matter it informs or controls,
its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of
the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness
of literary art depends, as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Les
Miserables, The English Bible,  are great art.  Given the conditions I
have tried to explain as constituting good art;--then, if it be devoted
further to the increase of men's happiness, to the redemption of the
oppressed, or the enlargement of our sympathies with each other, or to
such presentment of new or old truths about ourselves and our relation
to the world as may ennoble and fortify us in our sojourn here, or
immediately, as with Dante, to the glory of God, it will be also great
art; if, over and above those qualities I summed up as mind and
soul-that colour and mystic perfume, and that reasonable structure, it
has something of the soul of humanity in it, and finds its logical, its
architectural place, in the great structure of human life.  1888."

The following fragment from above, ("Music and prose literature are, in
one sense, the opposite terms of art; the art of literature presenting
to the imagination, through the intelligence, a range of interests, as
free and various as those which music presents to it through sense."),
appears to contradict the original quotation from "Rennaissance."  One
can find sense in the opposite statement, "Music constantly aspires
toward the condition of poetry and prose."  Recall, Pater is qualifying
his contrast with the all important phrase "in one sense."  I'm simply
switching eyes and rereading the lines from the bottom up.  Usually
contentions or differences of opinion arise because someone perceives
that something is missing from a statement or position.  The following
two quotes by Pound, a poet, and Chopin, well, you know, address for me
what seems to be essentially missing from the discussion of "pure" art:


"Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the
dance;...poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music." --
Ezra Pound, _ABC of Reading_, "Warning"

"Every difficulty slurred over will be a ghost to disturb your repose
later on."
-- Frederic Chopin


When Steve Schwartz writes, "When one describes a piece of music
accurately, one uses a specialized musical vocabulary (highly
inadequate, by the way) that refers only to musical events.", and
expects controversy to be the result, it has to be because people hold
strong opinions about the strict separation of music from other
endeavor, as well as well guarded opinions about the adequacy of music
for the expression of the ineffable.  "Toledo in a storm" IS firmer
ground.  If we could get into the picture and "dance" in the rain then
we would have taken that peripatetic step Pound recommends, Flaubert
would feel more at ease with a second word, even a third, and Chopin's
ghost may return, not with the intent to throw your room into confusion,
but to indicate other realms to be explored.

The body in repose and the body in turmoil.  I sense that the audience
WANTS to get a lot more involved, not content to listen or evaluate
only, but to live the music.

Leslie