Ian Crisp writes (among much else considerably thought provoking):

>If we allow that random, unorganised sounds can constitute music, then
>...  Music would equal sound, all sound would be music.

Precisely.  As I wrote some time ago, there is a perfectly good word for
this concept, namely "sound", and to hijack a word that is for most people
a refinement of that concept to mean the same thing is pointless.  As I
said at that time, while the idea that all sound is music may have an
appealingly Zen flavor, it is also uselessly indiscriminate.

>My "definition" of music ... requires ... (3) some communication of an
>idea or an emotional state or experience or sense of "this is what it's
>like to be inside someone else's head" from C or P or a combination of
>them to L, the audience.

This further qualification (I have no quarrel with requirements 1 and 2)
seems to me to disqualify much "abstract" music, and raises the contentious
issue of what C "meant".  Consider for example Don Satz's recent collection
of vignettes he "experienced" while listening to the Bach Well Tempered
Klavier.  Was this the kind of "communication" you require? Is this what
Bach "intended" Don to hear? If not, did the required "communication"
actually take place? If not, was this sublime creation not "music" for Don?

>So we can say that it is a necessary condition of "music" that L is
>actively engaged in experiencing the output of C and P.

So, if there is no L *currently* experiencing the "output of C and P",
there is no music? Where did it go? What is whatever C transmits to P
called, if it is not music?

If L directly "experiences" that whatever, for example by reading the score
and "hearing" something in her head, is that music? Can L play the role of
P without actually creating sound waves that impinge upon an eardrum?

By analogy, if no one is looking at a painting, is it no longer art? If I
am not reading a book, do the words cease to be literature or poetry? There
seems to me to be some important abstract mainfestation of music (or any
other form or art or expression) that exists independent of performance or
observation or experience that is not as ephemeral as these, but that
captures their essence.

>This is also why my trinity of C, P & L cannot be absorbed into one single
>individual - because then there would be no possibility of communication
>between one human being and another.

I have a real problem with this, as I have tried to elaborate above, your
architect analogy notwithstanding (flawed I suspect because architecture is
not a "performing art").  Are my photographs not art when *I* look at them,
despite the powerful experiences they evoke? Am I unable or forbidden to
communicate with myself?

len.