This is great.  There's a thesis in here somewhere...

Noboru Inoue writes:

>2) No listeners means No music.  If all human being close their eye at
>a time, UNIVERSE ends!(Though a Cartesian says Still I am!) I await
>this theory long time!  Unfortunately, of fortunately, ears open still.
>Ears, at least my ears, are great since it senses a bit of vibration of
>molecules, unless the temperature is absolute zero degree and I am
>frozen.

then later:

>ps By the way, Chasan san, are you a Berkeleian? Or a fun of Berkeley?
>I am.  He will revive next Century, I believe.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Bob K., waxing philosophic and thirsty