Bob Kasenchak, Thank you for your kind comment and rectification of my
narrow views...

>Now, now.  Berkeley says: if we close our eyes, everything goes away; but
>its OK because "God is always looking".  Admittedly this is a step forward
>from Descartes, who has to prove himself to himself.  But empiricism was
>debunked years ago IMHO by Kant and then Hegel.  (Or was it?) Can we take
>an empiricist approach to music? I think that if we do in the end we'll
>need God's eyes to save us.

First, I don't think Berkeley was debunked by Kant or others, and even
alive in current Artificial Intelligence technology...  Kant made some
experiment about reversed image on retina? Berkeley was a great
experimentalist I think.

Then "God is always looking".  This means in my word at least "None are
looking" of course.  and this phase in his Essay? was unimportant part now
or after.  He must have written this because he worked for Church, mustn't
he?

>I take a different approach: if Bach (or anyone) really saw and heard all
>the music in his head before ever notating it, is it less than music? Or
>rather is it more than music, not having been corrupted by extention in
>the clumsy imperfect physical world? If two people are remembering the
>same melody at the same time is it a shared musical experience?

Music is a word of brain, as all words and events are, I agree.  Music
as a final fruit is reproduced on brain and stays, if any, there whatever
media it comes through: visually(score e.g.) or audibly(e.g.  eardrum) or
skin(like final days of Beethoven), or with telepathy.

>Thusly I say that true music is in the head.  Although it is widely
>considered that the best way to get it in there is listening.

Listening is a way to input a musical signal as I said above for final
playback(decoding) on brain.  In this sense, ear does not hear.  Brain(or
man) hears(this somewhat strange though) it via ear.

>Perhaps the best-natured empiricist, Hume, had it right.  At the end of
>the first part of the "Treatise on Human Nature" Hume decides that thinking
>about this cause and effect, and things-as-themselves, is all too much, and
>unresolvable; and that therefore the thing to do is go to the pub and play
>backgammon over a pint.

Also...go to the Far East...finally, you almost to say...

Hume I know was a friend of Adam Smith.  I am very much confused when I
came to know Berkeley strongly opposed to Newton.  Interesting and skewed
history between science and religion, probably smartly explained by Bob
san...

Is An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, Berkeley available in paper
back?

N.Inoue, dreaming the book "Division of Labor and Its Affect On Musical
Industry" co-authored by A. Smith and D.Hume dedicated to G. Berkeley...