>At 05:32 PM 4/30/02, Theresa Muir wrote:
>
>>Well, simply from observation, I'd say that most people seem to do just
>>that. It's not inappropriate or unreasonable, however, to expect people
>>who feel called upon to do more than that--- i.e. musicologists, etc.--
>>to dig a bit deeper.
>
>This matches my experience. I work on music of the sixteenth century
>because it speaks to me on an emotional level -- I don't think that is is
>possible for there to be a bit of music more beautifully wrenching than
>the last phrase of Monteverdi's "Hor che'l ciel" -- but once I've
>acknowledged that emotional response, what more is there to say on that level?
There are, to be sure, many kinds of attention we can pay to music, many
ways of interacting and listening. Furthermore, some of these are doubtless
more generally acute than others, or do greater justice to the
possibilities the music presents. (Lichtenberg: ein Buch ist wie ein
Spiegel; wenn ein Affe hineinguckt, da guckt freilich keinen Apostel wieder
hinaus.) Alas, all our common sense to the contrary, nothing suggests that
these differences truly merit the appellation levels -- because, more
important still, there is no prima facie case to be made for
differentiating emotion from thought. In fact, apart from a few (entirely
trivial) physiological technicalities, there is no difference between
thought and feeling as forms of experience.
MWM
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Apr 30 2002 - 21:23:06 PDT