How is music a selective recreation of reality?

[jts]

From Ayn Rand Lexicon:

Art

is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value- judgments.

Questions:

1. What is the correct spelling of judg(e)ment? The OL spell checker says judgment is wrong and judgement is correct.

http://www.alphadict...l_judgment.html

I will assume ARL is correct.

2. What is the difference between a metaphysical value judgment and an ordinary value judgment?

3. I can understand a novel as a selective recreation of reality. Also a painting. But how is music a selective recreation of reality? ARL explains music but I still don't understand how music is a selective recreation of reality.

http://aynrandlexico...icon/music.html

[caroljane]

1.Judgment is the British and sometimes the Canadian spelling. Spellcheckers are American spelling.

3. I don't understand this either, and I don't think Ayn Rand did. I don't see music as a re creation of anything, but as pure creation.

[Jonathan]

...But how is music a selective recreation of reality? ARL explains music but I still don't understand how music is a selective recreation of reality.

It's not a re-creation of reality. I think that what happened is this: Rand was thinking primarily about literature when she came up with her definition of art, and she was also thinking that she wanted her definition to exclude art forms that she, personally, didn't like (or get any emotions or meaning from) such as abstract art. She apparently just didn't realize the very obvious fact that some of the art forms which she accepted as valid clearly don't qualify by her definition (and are perhaps less qualified than some of the art forms that she rejected), and she twisted herself into intellectual pretzels to try to make them fit, as do many of her followers.

J

[syrakusos]

Ayn Rand was exaclty right. Rather than bite-sized statements without context from the Ayn Rand Lexicon, read The Romantic Manifesto, if you really care to know what Ayn Rand's theory was. From that, you will have to find other statements of hers or based on hers. Entering ""objectivist aesthetics music" into Google brought me to two discussions and the Wiki here on OL.

First, the word "music" includes a very wide range of forms. Simple popular songs are easy to see as selective recreations of reality because each is about some finite experience. Symphonies are more complex and abstract. Some symphonic music tells an explicit story. Last night in the car, I heard a long portion of Tchaikovsky's "Sleeping Beauty." You do not need to see the dancers to hear the action.

I like "new age" and electronic music, and most of it is uplifting and positive, structured, and melodic. However, other works are dissonant, discordant, arhythmic. I do not listen to them. Either way, the composer expresses their view of some aspect of reality or "all of reality" in some form necessarily limited by time and space. What the composer delivers, what you receive, that is the selective recreation of reality.

[Roger Bissell]

From Ayn Rand Lexicon:

Art

is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value- judgments.

[.....]

I can understand a novel as a selective recreation of reality. Also a painting. But how is music a selective recreation of reality? ARL explains music but I still don't understand how music is a selective recreation of reality.

http://aynrandlexico...icon/music.html

I don't think Rand explains music at all, and in particular I don't see how anyone could understand how it is a selective re-creation of reality from her comments in "Art and Cognition." (In fact, I would go so far as to say that she had a truly bizarre attitude or perspective on music, as evidenced by the fact that she thought Mozart was "pre-music," and that "Here's That Rainy Day" had no melody.)

Music presents a sonic vista or "world" in which things are happening. In the vast majority of musical pieces, the events are coherent enough to be experienced as musical entities (melodies) engaging in progressions of musical action. Allan and Joan Blumenthal gave lectures (which Rand attended) in which they discussed this analogy to literary drama. I have written about it in various essays, including "Art as Microcosm," which is posted on the web site for The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, as well as elsewhere on this web site. I recommend one or both of these sources, if you want to get a handle on how music re-creates reality.

REB

[Jonathan]

What the composer delivers, what you receive, that is the selective recreation of reality.

You'd have to prove that scientifically.

When deprived of what Rand called "outside considerations," and when given a piece of music to listen to which they've never heard, Objectivists cannot identify the "artists' meanings" that works of music were intended to convey. They can't even identify a subject as Objectivism requires, let alone a meaning.

In fact, they can't even do so with most narrative-heavy realistic paintings let alone with something as abstract and subjective as music!

When Objectivist aesthetic theories are tested in reality, almost nothing qualifies as art.

J

[Jonathan]

I don't think Rand explains music at all, and in particular I don't see how anyone could understand how it is a selective re-creation of reality from her comments in "Art and Cognition."

I think the problem that you're having with Rand is that she meant something quite different than you do by "re-creation of reality." She meant that art must present objectively identifiable likenesses of things in reality, and that those likenesses must be specific enough so as to objectively communicate "artists' meanings" -- that they are not vague or open to wildly different interpretations.

Music presents a sonic vista or "world" in which things are happening.

No. To you, music evokes (not "presents") a "sonic vista." You haven't demonstrated that the alleged vista is actually in the music versus that it is contributed by your own consciousness. The fact that music inspires you to visualize certain entities and events is not enough for it to qualify as a re-creation of reality by Rand's standards.

J

[Roger Bissell]

I don't think Rand explains music at all, and in particular I don't see how anyone could understand how it is a selective re-creation of reality from her comments in "Art and Cognition."

I think the problem that you're having with Rand is that she meant something quite different than you do by "re-creation of reality." She meant that art must present objectively identifiable likenesses of things in reality, and that those likenesses must be specific enough so as to objectively communicate "artists' meanings" -- that they are not vague or open to wildly different interpretations.

I think she meant "re-creation" to apply to both ~things from reality~ and ~reality itself~, and that the latter was primary, and the former was the subject of the latter. She focused a lot on things from reality, but she occasionally blurted out something about the world of the artwork, and the Blumenthals and Peikoff have given a lot more clarity to that point over the years, both before and after her demise. I have argued this point, too, independently of them, since the early 1970s.

I'm ~not~ arguing for a musical "reality" as naively specific as the Island of Hawaii or the planet Mars -- nor for "things from reality" as naively specific as a party in Paris during World War 2 or Jesus walking on the water or the running of the John Galt Line. I'm talking, as Rand did, about ~musical~ entities (melodies) and their actions. Once you have the musical vocabulary to be able to specify and label the character of musical motifs and harmonic progressions, these musical entities and actions can be pointed to and discussed as objective things, on a par with objects in a painting or characters in a novel. You can ~point to~ striving, serenity, and the like -- and not just be limited to asserting that it is "in" the music, as Rand did.

Interestingly, Rand argued in one of her early essays that people with much different psychologies and philosophies could hear the same operetta and have a much different emotional response, even while hearing the same emotion "in" the music. Had she been musically trained and able to zero in on the themes and progressions in the music and to give a very general interpretation of its meaning, and then to point it out to the people she had listen to her litmus test music, she might have been even more insufferable than she was just arguing from sense of life. I don't know. But the very general emotions, actions, and entities at play in music ~are~ real -- i.e., are the real consequence of someone's engaging with the music as the opportunity to surrender to the experience of another, imaginary world -- even without indulging in a focus on the overly specific imagery the music may evoke.

Music presents a sonic vista or "world" in which things are happening.

No. To you, music evokes (not "presents") a "sonic vista." You haven't demonstrated that the alleged vista is actually in the music versus that it is contributed by your own consciousness. The fact that music inspires you to visualize certain entities and events is not enough for it to qualify as a re-creation of reality by Rand's standards.

I don't mean anything as specific as some particular view of the real world, or some visually imagined world. I just mean that music, like all art, gives us something to focus in on, mentally separable from the real world, and to treat ~as though~ it is another world, another realm, another dimension to experience.

I mean "vista" in the dictionary sense:

1

: a distant view through or along an avenue or opening : prospect

2

: an extensive mental view (as over a stretch of time or a series of events)

When we look at a painting, it is like looking through a portal into another world. When we view a drama on stage...same thing. When we hear a piece of music...same thing. It is a view of something other than the real world, something that we take to be free-standing and there for us to mentally and emotionally enter into and experience.

There are people who think that this or that piece of music is a depiction of some real or imagined visual scene. That's fine for them, but that's way too specific, and Rand made that point clear. Music is not about something as specific as peace or spring or someone walking down the street or a battle in a war. At most, it could convey the sense of struggle or defiance or serenity, etc. (See p. 52 of The Romantic Manifesto.) I agree with this, but I also agree with her students, the Blumenthals and Peikoff, that art presents an imaginary world (in the very broad, generic sense)--something apart from here-now reality that we can attend to and experience ~as though~ it were another world, in which there are things with attributes and/or engaging in actions.

No, this vista or world is not "in" the music. It's not intrinsic, but objective or "relational." It is constructed during the process of our perception of the music, as it unfolds in time and sound, just as the world of "Romeo and Juliet" is constructed by our perception of the process of the play's enactment. But whether it's specific and concrete (as in a play) or vague and abstract (as in much music), the world in a temporal art like drama or music is a vista. It is something different and distinct from the physical actions of the actors or musicians, and it is different and distinct from the light and sound they emit and that we perceive.

Our minds ~do~ construct a "world" or "vista" from our perceptions of the sight and/or sound of the actors or musicians. But just as it's not intrinsic to their actions, it's not arbitrary and subjective either. Those actions are so constructed, and our nervous systems are so built and conditioned from experience, that we can hardly escape interpreting what we are viewing as "the world" inside "Antigone" or "Beethoven's 5th Symphony" -- any more than we can escape interpreting the darkening of the sky outdoors in the evening as the setting of the sun.

So, while these experiences are not really, actually in the sounds created by the musicians on stage, neither is the experience of a musical vista (in the generic sense) "evoked" by the musical events, in the same sense that the much more specific image of a street fair might be "evoked" for someone who is listening to a certain lively piece of music. The music is so constructed and, yes, presented to us, that we really cannot escape hearing it as "another world" or a sonic vista -- into which we have a mental glimpse -- unless we deliberately force ourselves ~not~ to experience it that way (but instead, perhaps, studying the musicians on stage or obsessing on our stock portfolios while our mate reads the program notes, etc.).

This is not peculiar to music. I can look at a painting and deliberately (or cluelessly) avoid seeing the compositional objects in it, just as I can the themes and their development in a piece of music, or the characters and the course of their actions in a drama. I can think about something else entirely, or I can focus on the purely sensory elements, or whatever. But I'm not then entering into it as "another world." I'm not experiencing it as a re-creation of reality, in the sense that the Blumenthal's and Peikoff clarified a number of times over the years.

A world, whether real or imaginary, is a place where there are things that act (or could act). It's a mistake to take "re-creation" as literally meaning physical objects and people, to the exclusion of musical objects such as melodies and motifs. When we artists (or some of us, anyway) re-create reality, first and foremost, we provide the consumer a world to enter into imaginatively, and on a secondary, but also necessary, level, we populate that world with ~some~ kind of objects, with or without actions. Rand's discussions often got stuck on the secondary level, but there's no way you can "re-create" ~things from reality~ without situating them in a ~place~, a physical context, a ~reality~, in which they are seen to reside. This is true in painting, music, drama, all the branches of art. (Except maybe architecture. Rand may have been right that it is "in a category by itself" and she may have been right to tell Binswanger to leave it out of the Ayn Rand Lexicon. If she wasn't willing to defend its being included in a dictionary of her concepts, why should I? :-)

REB

[Jonathan]

Once you have the musical vocabulary to be able to specify and label the character of musical motifs and harmonic progressions, these musical entities and actions can be pointed to and discussed as objective things, on a par with objects in a painting or characters in a novel. You can ~point to~ striving, serenity, and the like -- and not just be limited to asserting that it is "in" the music, as Rand did.

One can do the same with the forms in abstact paintings and sculptures, as well as in works of architecture, as I've done countless times. I've done so in discussions with you in the past -- I've "pointed to" the striving, serenity, etc., in abstract paintings -- yet you've insisted that my doing so was ridiculous. So apparently you believe that you're aesthetically advanced for having developed what you believe is a "musical vocabulary" which allows you identify abstract musical "entities and actions," but it is not possible that others have developed visual vocabularies beyond your own (or Rand's), and that it is therefore impossible for them to identify visual entities, actions and attributes where you cannot. In effect, you appear to believe that your lifelong professional immersion in music qualifies you to "point to" meaning in music, but my lifelong professional immersion in the visual arts doesn't qualify me to "point to" meaning in abstract visual forms in exactly the same way! Somehow, your musical knowledge and experience makes you an authority on the subject, but the fact that my visual knowledge and experience massively exceeds yours somehow makes me an elitist fraud when I attempt to guide you (using your own method) toward seeing anything which you currently can't. Why is that?

Interestingly, Rand argued in one of her early essays that people with much different psychologies and philosophies could hear the same operetta and have a much different emotional response, even while hearing the same emotion "in" the music.

Sure, but I think that she was also making the implied snarky judgment that anyone who had a different take on a work of music than she did must have been morally and/or psychologically defective.

On the other hand, I've seen people with similar psychologies and identical philosophies listen to the same piece of music and have very different emotional responses to it, and find very different meanings. Others' similarity or dissimilarity to one's own interpretations or emotional responses to music isn't a very reliable method of divining others' psychology or philosophy.

But the very general emotions, actions, and entities at play in music ~are~ real -- i.e., are the real consequence of someone's engaging with the music as the opportunity to surrender to the experience of another, imaginary world -- even without indulging in a focus on the overly specific imagery the music may evoke.

Ditto abstract art. See, the problem is that Rand's views on abstract art not qualifying as art inform our understanding of her criteria. If people's responses to, and interpretations of, abstract art are vague and subjective enough so as to not allow it to qualify as art, then the same should be true of music. The Objectivist definition and criteria are not as loose as "someone's engaging with the music as the opportunity to surrender to the experience of another, imaginary world -- even without indulging in a focus on the overly specific imagery the music may evoke." No, Objectivism requires objectively-identified, specific meanings -- it requires objective "communication" and "intelligibility" of "artists' meanings."

I don't mean anything as specific as some particular view of the real world, or some visually imagined world. I just mean that music, like all art, gives us something to focus in on, mentally separable from the real world, and to treat ~as though~ it is another world, another realm, another dimension to experience.

Again, the same is true of abstract art.

When we look at a painting, it is like looking through a portal into another world. When we view a drama on stage...same thing. When we hear a piece of music...same thing. It is a view of something other than the real world, something that we take to be free-standing and there for us to mentally and emotionally enter into and experience.

A realistic painting and a drama on stage offer objectively identifiable simulations of reality. Music does not.

There are people who think that this or that piece of music is a depiction of some real or imagined visual scene. That's fine for them, but that's way too specific, and Rand made that point clear. Music is not about something as specific as peace or spring or someone walking down the street or a battle in a war.

Objectivism requires art to objectively communicate specific meanings.

At most, it could convey the sense of struggle or defiance or serenity, etc. (See p. 52 of The Romantic Manifesto.) I agree with this, but I also agree with her students, the Blumenthals and Peikoff, that art presents an imaginary world (in the very broad, generic sense)--something apart from here-now reality that we can attend to and experience ~as though~ it were another world, in which there are things with attributes and/or engaging in actions.

Yet when I "point to" the attributes and actions contained in abstract paintings, describe my experiencing them as though they were part of another world, and explain the meanings that they add up to, you (and your wife) claim that I'm being absurd!

Our minds ~do~ construct a "world" or "vista" from our perceptions of the sight and/or sound of the actors or musicians. But just as it's not intrinsic to their actions, it's not arbitrary and subjective either. Those actions are so constructed, and our nervous systems are so built and conditioned from experience, that we can hardly escape interpreting what we are viewing as "the world" inside "Antigone" or "Beethoven's 5th Symphony" -- any more than we can escape interpreting the darkening of the sky outdoors in the evening as the setting of the sun.

But yet you claim that I'm demonstrating the height of silliness when I say that the bright, saturated colors, angular forms and rough textures in one abstract painting are strong, energetic and rugged, and that the soft tones, curved forms and smooth textures of another abstract painting are serene, gentle and nurturing. When I describe the characteristics and personalities that I experience inside "the world" of an abstract painting based on the physical attributes of the forms, you assert that I'm talking nonsense and just making things up!

It's a mistake to take "re-creation" as literally meaning physical objects and people, to the exclusion of musical objects such as melodies and motifs.

No, it's not a mistake. It's what Rand meant. Her exclusion of abstract art from the realm of art can only be based on the requirement that art must present objectively identifiable likenesses of objects and people. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander -- what invalidates abstract art invalidates music (and dance, architecture, etc.)

(Except maybe architecture. Rand may have been right that it is "in a category by itself" and she may have been right to tell Binswanger to leave it out of the Ayn Rand Lexicon. If she wasn't willing to defend its being included in a dictionary of her concepts, why should I? :-)

Rand apparently forgot about the method that she used to find meaning in architecture as an art form. She employed exactly the method that I use in describing the physical characteristics of the forms in abstract paintings and sculptures. It's endlessly amusing to me that, when Rand saw rising, soaring, confidence, energy, conflict, serenity, etc., in the abstract forms and relationships of architecture, Objectivists see her as being powerfully Romantic and rational in her descriptions, but when I see exactly the same things in exactly the same forms and relationships in abstract paintings, the see me as being comically absurd. Heh.

J

[MrBenjamatic]

I wrote an essay on art for my case and I included music. I haven't yet read Ayn's Romantic Manifesto and only know that she held the romantic school of art to apply to art that can and ought to exist. I agree with that statement completely.

When the wind blows through the trees there is noise. When a drop of water hits the ground it makes noise. Such are natural instances occurring in reality. When things move there is sound, however slight. Man made alloys, man made instruments of those alloys, of woods and other materials which he shaped to be able to make specific sounds that such instruments can control. By virtue of such instruments created by man, musicians exercise the ability to create specific sounds. Specific instruments make specific sounds, and, with knowledge of this, musicians make metaphysical value judgements by choosing which instruments to use and they make metaphysical value judgements when using them. To press a specific piano key is a specific metaphysical value judgement. There is a reason Rachmaninoff picked the keys he did when he did in composing his music. Does this make sense? Note I haven't read anything above, merely the question: how is music a selective recreation of reality.

-PBH

I've also noticed people on this website claim that Rand's judgement of art, artists and others opinion of art was near to absolutely malicious. I find that hard to chew, obviously I won't swallow it on faith, but, has anyone heard her say you can recognize art as great without liking it? I did, however, read Barbara Branden say Rand held Beethoven to have a Byronic view of the universe, but I do think I remember Rand recognizing his work as great. I know ones work can be great even if ones not completely moral, that's self-evident.

[caroljane]

I wrote an essay on art for my case and I included music. I haven't yet read Ayn's Romantic Manifesto and only know that she held the romantic school of art to apply to art that can and ought to exist. I agree with that statement completely.

When the wind blows through the trees there is noise. When a drop of water hits the ground it makes noise. Such are natural instances occurring in reality. When things move there is sound, however slight. Man made alloys, man made instruments of those alloys, of woods and other materials which he shaped to be able to control that which causes sound. By virtue of such instruments created by man, musicians exercise the ability to create specific sounds. Specific instruments make specific sounds, and, with knowledge of this, musicians make metaphysical value judgements by choosing which instruments to use and they make metaphysical value judgements when using them. To press a specific piano key is a specific metaphysical value judgement. There is a reason Rachmaninoff picked the keys he did when he did in composing his music. Does this make sense? Note I haven't read anything above, merely the question: how is music a selective recreation of reality.

-PBH

Roger Bissell , Jonathan and others have discussed this extensively on many threads here on OL. Browse a little,

[MrBenjamatic]

I know I'm right. Sound exists in reality and so does that which is used to create instruments and the purpose of music is to control sound (which is a part of reality). It is clear to me how and why music is a selective recreation of reality and how any composition are recordings of the creators metaphysical value judgements (pertaining to the sounds that instruments make). I'll browse if I ever find the time

[caroljane]

"He Knew He Was Right" was one of Trollope's finest novels.

[MrBenjamatic]

Your point, I assume, is that no one can know one is right as concepts are not or are not absolutely grounded in reality? Dad thinks the same. He holds that things are not what they are because contradictions exist, that all mans senses are invalid except for his sixth sense (which is actually his emotional faculty which is not a sense). As for your mentioning Trollope, I thought you had a soft spot for the Victorians. You seem to be the type who reads Dorian Gray. Am I right? What do you think about George Bernard Shaw. Dad likes him, and, on the topic of Dorian, he says I'm wilder than Oscar. But then again he did offer "Amadeus" as evidence that Mozy is insane

[caroljane]

Your point, I assume, is that no one can know one is right as concepts are not or are not absolutely grounded in reality? Dad thinks the same. He holds that things are not what they are because contradictions exist, that all mans senses are invalid except for his sixth sense (which is actually his emotional faculty which is not a sense). As for your mentioning Trollope, I thought you had a soft spot for the Victorians. You seem to be the type who reads Dorian Gray. Am I right? What do you think about George Bernard Shaw. Dad likes him, and, on the topic of Dorian, he says I'm wilder than Oscar. But then again he did offer "Amadeus" as evidence that Mozy is insane

lol on your dad, he sounds like a witty guy.

No, I am not much on Wilde's fiction, I am an Eliot-Thackeray-Trollope person.I did read all of Shaw's plays and enjoyed them, though strangely I have never seen one on the stage. I liked Major Barbara.

Amadeus was pure fiction; Mozart was pretty sane, insofar as any greatest genius of his age can be considered sane.

[anthony]

I know I'm right. Sound exists in reality and so does that which is used to create instruments and the purpose of music is to control sound (which is a part of reality). It is clear to me how and why music is a selective recreation of reality and how any composition are recordings of the creators metaphysical value judgements (pertaining to the sounds that instruments make). I'll browse if I ever find the time

MrBen, I think that's well expressed and accurate. Do you think a composer ever/at all

relates back to concretes in reality (wind, birds - traffic noise, etc) while composing?

I'm not very knowledgable in this field by any means.

[BaalChatzaf]

I know I'm right. Sound exists in reality and so does that which is used to create instruments and the purpose of music is to control sound (which is a part of reality). It is clear to me how and why music is a selective recreation of reality and how any composition are recordings of the creators metaphysical value judgements (pertaining to the sounds that instruments make). I'll browse if I ever find the time

MrBen, I think that's well expressed and accurate. Do you think a composer ever/at all

relates back to concretes in reality (wind, birds - traffic noise, etc) while composing?

I'm not very knowledgable in this field by any means.

Some music is imitative.

Some music is very suggestive and paradigmatic. There are some passages in Bethoven's Seventh that are suggestive of horses galloping.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[caroljane]

It can be deliberately suggestive -- look at Strauss's Hero's Life eg. But consider the Mozart aria "batti, batti". In the opera a girl is soothing down her jealous boyfriend and inviting him to hit her if it makes him feel better. The words to it we learned at school were about hearing a robin and knowing that spring is coming. The music itself suggests neither of those aspects of reality to me at all. It is just beautiful music.

[MrBenjamatic]

I know I'm right. Sound exists in reality and so does that which is used to create instruments and the purpose of music is to control sound (which is a part of reality). It is clear to me how and why music is a selective recreation of reality and how any composition are recordings of the creators metaphysical value judgements (pertaining to the sounds that instruments make). I'll browse if I ever find the time

MrBen, I think that's well expressed and accurate. Do you think a composer ever/at all

relates back to concretes in reality (wind, birds - traffic noise, etc) while composing?

I'm not very knowledgable in this field by any means.

Yes. My favorite example of this is the canons at the end of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. Orgasmic! I don't know too much about music but I'm very interested as it has SOOO much in common with architecture. Architecture is frozen music. I'm friends with my favorite composer over the internet so I'll definently learn more as he's an aristocratic melodic genius.

[MrBenjamatic]

I know I'm right. Sound exists in reality and so does that which is used to create instruments and the purpose of music is to control sound (which is a part of reality). It is clear to me how and why music is a selective recreation of reality and how any composition are recordings of the creators metaphysical value judgements (pertaining to the sounds that instruments make). I'll browse if I ever find the time

MrBen, I think that's well expressed and accurate. Do you think a composer ever/at all

relates back to concretes in reality (wind, birds - traffic noise, etc) while composing?

I'm not very knowledgable in this field by any means.

Some music is imitative.

Some music is very suggestive and paradigmatic. There are some passages in Bethoven's Seventh that are suggestive of horses galloping.

Ba'al Chatzaf

The imitative music you speak of is mediocrity. Mediocrities take metaphysical value judgements on faith, and, generally, I think, because those melodic metaphysical value judgements became prestigious. Look at Benny Goodman: he was most definently a creator and a melodic genius in the school of jazz and look how many mediocrities copied off him. Thats probably not a good example to use, but oh well.

[Dan Haggerty]

I see (OK hear) music as a recreation of reality, and a very unique one at that. The artist recreates emotional reactions in the listener, after which it back feeds to the values/attributes unique to that individual that inspires the emotional response in him.

For example, a novelist writes a heroic story and when you read it you experience heroism and triumph at the end of that story. A musician recreates heroism and triumph in audible form and when you hear it you experience that emotion but then fill in the story/values that invoked that heroism and triumph in you. This makes music a very personal art form since it allows you to experience your reaction first then fill in the cause that is unique to you.

[Dglgmut]

I've read The Romantic Manifesto, and loved it, but I can't remember whether abstract visual art was brought up...

Music is a recreation of reality to the extent that abstract visual art is a recreation of reality.

Dan, you're claim that a novel recreates the abstract sense of heroism and triumph is leaving out all of the literal recreations. Of course an emotional effect is the purpose of art, but the debate is whether that emotional effect is achieved by "selectively recreating reality".

Our senses are connected to memory anyway, so there is no objective way to measure the emotional impact of anything. Smell is the sense strongest associated with memory... some kind of smell art is probably the future... lol.

[caroljane]

I've read The Romantic Manifesto, and loved it, but I can't remember whether abstract visual art was brought up...

Music is a recreation of reality to the extent that abstract visual art is a recreation of reality.

Dan, you're claim that a novel recreates the abstract sense of heroism and triumph is leaving out all of the literal recreations. Of course an emotional effect is the purpose of art, but the debate is whether that emotional effect is achieved by "selectively recreating reality".

Our senses are connected to memory anyway, so there is no objective way to measure the emotional impact of anything. Smell is the sense strongest associated with memory... some kind of smell art is probably the future... lol.

Not so lol at all. Mr Benjematic is already on the case.

[Dglgmut]

I Googled "Mr. Benjematic" and got one result. I've never got one result for anything before...

Is there something I'm missing?

[caroljane]

My misspelling. Mr Benjamatic is right here on OL.