Steve Schwartz writes:

>I don't know about "all art aspires," but the distinctions among music
>and other arts seems to me true enough.  In other words, music is usually
>non-representational, abstract, its "ideas" not paraphrasable into words
>or pictures.  Describing a poem, one can refer to the plot or ideas

Musical notation is susceptible to semiological study.  Musical criticism,
or appreciation, is a problem of aesthetics.  From the time of, say,
Pythagoras to the end of 17 c., music was thought to be essential to the
harmony of the world, indeed of the cosmos.  Pythagoras saw the worlds
controlled by sirens singing in harmony.  Milton in his time was still
writing about precisely this "sirens' harmony".  On St Cecilia's Day in
1695 Charles Hickman sermonized that music represents the entrance to
the divine and serves to "elevate the soul of man into a higher region."

But as time passed and art itself began to supersede the role of religion
the spiritual tone changed, as exemplified by that of the pre-Raphaelite
Walter Pater.  And before the onset of post-modernity, the tone had
changed to one of ponderous socialologese whereunder Theodor Adorno
reasoned that music remained in the mainstream of the social process,
representing, as he claimed, one of the mediated thrusts that "created
tendencies of society."

Common-or-garden listeners mostly continue to remain attuned to a
harmonious music.  To the contrary, an intellectual vanguard, led by
such as Adorno, plumped for as much atonality in music as the music could
bear.  Why?  Because this was in accord with modern aesthetics.

After that came Part and Reich and Williams, so that harmony is sorta
OK again but one really doesn't know about aesthetics.

Denis Fodor