Hi Camden,
Yes I have to admit perhaps that to "agree on objective issues" is a bit of an oxymoron. Objective features are there regardless, whether one likes them or not. I believe that science produces objective knowledge - something that Nietzsche and Existentialists would most certainly dispute - but for now relegating THAT extremely interesting question to the domain of philosophy and science, and admitting that we CAN possess objective knowledge, I do think it is possible to extract an objective foundation for the most basic of musical elements. And I think this is a bit more than one can say, for instance, in literature. Art, Picasso once said, is a unification of the intellectual and the emotional. Emotional responses are pretty much completely subjective - and because emotion is half of the art no "neat categorization or ranking" as you put it, will ever be possible.
What I meant to say originally was that BECAUSE there are objective features to music - let's not talk even about such things as "form" or "harmony" for now, but for instance the fact that it is a sound propogating, people, like it or not, must "accept" such statements for they are objective truths. There can be no debate on them.
However, the question is how far can one push these objective statements. Clearly the statement that "music is a propogating sound wave" is not of much worth in determining "musical greatness", it is a statement with no teeth, for the characterization applies equally well to street traffic (which however, John Cage would extol as music) as it does to Beethoven's 9th. That is what I'm trying to figure out.
Yes I have to admit perhaps that to "agree on objective issues" is a bit of an oxymoron. Objective features are there regardless, whether one likes them or not. I believe that science produces objective knowledge - something that Nietzsche and Existentialists would most certainly dispute - but for now relegating THAT extremely interesting question to the domain of philosophy and science, and admitting that we CAN possess objective knowledge, I do think it is possible to extract an objective foundation for the most basic of musical elements. And I think this is a bit more than one can say, for instance, in literature. Art, Picasso once said, is a unification of the intellectual and the emotional. Emotional responses are pretty much completely subjective - and because emotion is half of the art no "neat categorization or ranking" as you put it, will ever be possible.
What I meant to say originally was that BECAUSE there are objective features to music - let's not talk even about such things as "form" or "harmony" for now, but for instance the fact that it is a sound propogating, people, like it or not, must "accept" such statements for they are objective truths. There can be no debate on them.
However, the question is how far can one push these objective statements. Clearly the statement that "music is a propogating sound wave" is not of much worth in determining "musical greatness", it is a statement with no teeth, for the characterization applies equally well to street traffic (which however, John Cage would extol as music) as it does to Beethoven's 9th. That is what I'm trying to figure out.
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