Edward Moore at [log in to unmask] wrote:

>Why not say that Stockhausen's piano pieces are the waltz of the soul?

Because it would be to perpetuate one of the oldest errors in Western
philosophy, that is, that matter cannot have a soul.  As errors go, it is
attractive, and arguments about freedom in art resulting from subverting
the physical have a powerful resonance.  This resonance comes because they
analogise the body to all of the drudgery of the world.  What intelligent
person has not felt that if only they were freed from the mundane that they
could soar with their imagination.  Thus the analogy is
matter:animus::drudgery:imagination.  The world is an imperfect ball of
mud, and the stars are perfect circles in a perfect space.

But the truth is that our soul is not imprisoned in a body, but arises out
of its complex interworkings.  The soul of matter is that its mechanisms
are complex and that complexity ends not in a lumpen greyness, but a
crinkled complexity which grows ever more textured as one peers out into
the vastness of space, and ever more potential, not less, as one peers
downward to the infinitesimal.

Thus abhoring the body is not the response of the soul, but mere delicacy
and error - and it ignores the beauty of the xaotic strands which at their
focal point produce the miracle of consciousness.

A dancer engaged in the dance is not merely a rutting pig, trapped, but is,
in fact, engaging in the most appropriate response, by producing another
level of self-similar potential, which arises out of the previous one.
The dance is similar to the music, and comes from it, and this is the
reflection of the fundemental soul of matter.

Thus the music of the future must embrace, and not abhor, the presence of
the body.

Stirling S Newberry
http://www.mp3.com/ssn