Religious music does weird things to me

[Jonathan]

I stated in my last post that my view is that there is an objective moral standard.

There is no objective basis on which to conclude that a listener is right to interpret a work of music "as a manifestation of evil" versus an inspiration of "their personal power."

Here are two contradictory statements in your own words. Reconcile them if you can.

Greg

They're not contradictory statements.

Of course they are not contradictory to secular relativists...

...and that defines the difference between each of our views.

Greg

I really do love that. I recognize that the laws of logic/non-contradictory identification apply equally to everyone, where you have your own special little notion of logic in which you constantly affirm the consequent, but in which you believe that your assertions are nevertheless valid because of how you have morally chosen to live your life, and somehow your "mind" tallies this comparison of our views and concludes that I am the relativist!!!

J

[Jonathan]

It sounds to me as if you're saying that you need access to lyrics in order to identify the music's alleged meaning.

Or you need to use the Shazam app so as to access lots of what Rand called "outside information."

J

[Ellen Stuttle]

Jonathan,

I haven't time for detailed reply now, so I'm just going to select a few statements from your post #148 and then list (in a separate post) major differences I have with your interpretation of Rand on music (on art generally in some of the list).

[Rand] was about art being a "simulation" of reality, and that simulation could include mental visualizations in addition to the "perceptual level" notion that she was obsessed with.

That differs from your earlier - several - statements that she had a mimetic theory of art. See my list. (Edit: Or maybe it doesn't differ, depending on what you mean by "simulation.")

And I don't think that her fixation of "the perceptual level" came from visual art, but from her falling in love with her own theory of epistemology. That's what she was imposing on her theory of art. Entities. There must be entities, because that's what her epistemology focuses on. You can't have actions without entities in reality, therefore you can't have them in art. Bullshit.

Would you explain to me how you can have actions without something acting in art? (Apparently you agree with Rand that you can't have actions without something acting in reality.)

Where there aren't entities depicted, there can't be representation.

Are you asserting the position that there can't be representation where there aren't entities depicted, or are you just speaking for Rand here? Either way, it is not a true statement that "Where there aren't entities depicted, there can't be representation."

The quote you used from Rand comes from a context pertaining to visual art. I understand her as meaning "representational" versus "nonrepresentational" as those terms are used pertaining to visual art.

You seem to be using "representation" with some different meaning, which I don't understand. See my list. I doubt you're talking about "representationalism" as a theory of perception - a bad theory, which Objectivism (supposedly) opposed.

In the quotes that you provided above, Rand is identifying her criteria of art -- of all art. She is explaining what is required in order for something to qualify as art. She is using the decorative arts as an example of something that does not qualify, and why.

Rand classified music as a legitimate art form. Therefore music must meet her criteria of re-creating reality, of being representational, and of being objectively intelligible. The fact that she recognized that music does not do those things is the reason that she asserted that in the future music would have a "conceptual vocabulary." It was nothing but a bad attempt at sleight of hand to keep music classified as a legitimate art form. It was a way to claim that the yet-to-be-discovered true nature of music will meet her criteria of re-creation, representation and intelligibility.

If Rand believed, as you are suggesting, that music's very nature was not representational (that it would never be representational even after the discovery of a "conceptual vocabulary"), then she would have had to identify it as not qualifying as art by her criteria, or she would have had to change her definition and criteria of "art." Those are the only two rational, logical things for her to have done: Reject music, or change her criteria so as to eliminate the requirements of re-creation, representation and intelligibility.

I don't agree with your including "being representational" in Rand's criteria that all art has to meet. Nor that music doesn't, by her view of "re-creating reality," meet that criterion. She considered the problem of objective intelligibility of music a temporary result of lack of knowledge of the physiology of music, as she stated in a quote I gave previously.

The only relevant thing is that Rand believed/asserted that the second step, "to emotion," was universal -- that all men experienced the same "depersonalized emotion" in the same piece of music. That is what I am taking issue with. It is bullshit.

I don't think it is bullshit, although I don't think "depersonalized emotion" is a precise description. I'll have to reserve for a later time the differences between my and Rand's views on how music is processed.

If you read her suggested requirements of analysis, she wasn't talking about some set of chords having some sort of specific evoking power.

Yes, she was. She was stating that a piece of music would convey the same "depersonalized emotion" to everyone.

She was saying the second but not the first (the part pertaining to some specific set of chords). Again, I'll have to wait to cite the details of her analysis.

I think she didn't believe that music can tell a story - or that it ever would become able to tell a story. And "'defiance' and 'victory' and such" aren't stories.

I agree that "defiance" alone is not a story, nor is "victory" alone. But combining several such emotion-concepts does create a story.

I think you have a weird idea of a story.

You need events for a story.

Yes. A great example of events would be "sorrow -> tranquility -> hopefulness stirring -> resolve -> striving -> joy of victory." That's a story made up of events.

What events?

She vilified in some contexts regarding some forms of response but by no means in all cases.`

Please give an example of Rand not vilifying someone who claimed to experience in art what she did not.

Do you have the implicit premise that Rand thought that people have different meaning experiences about art?

Take the cold sore example. She assumes that everyone would see it a particular way, but that some people would respond negatively and some would respond positively. What she vilifies in the example is those who would respond positively.

There were cases with personal acquaintances where she recognized or sort of recognized that she and the acquaintance weren't seeing or hearing the same thing. But I think that mostly she presumed that people did see or hear the same thing but differed in evaluation of what was seen or heard.

If all you mean is vilifying someone simply on the basis of a taste difference, the only examples in her writing pertain to cases where she thought the ethical import was very clear. That leaves a whole range of latitude which she didn't address. For instance, is it your belief that if another Chopin fan rank-ordered favorites among Chopin's compositions differently from her, she'd vilify that person?

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Jonathan,

Both because of lack of time for detail-by-detail response, and because I think that it might help in tracking our discussion, I want to list my major disagreements with your views about Rand's views on music specifically and art more generally. I have other, lesser disagreements as well, some of which I mentioned in the post next above.

- Foundationally, Rand's theory of art wasn't of the mimetic type, although she used "reality" in her definition. She didn't say that art is an imitation of reality. She said that it's a re-creation of reality, an imaginative re-doing of reality according to an artist's evaluations.

- Rand didn't mean what you mean by "subjective."

- Artistic tastes, including musical tastes, aren't of the same ilk as preferences in ice cream flavors. Artistic tastes, in the nature of the case, involve complicated psychological and cognitive factors, not simply physiological responses. (Food preferences can become intertwined with symbolic importations, but then, again, the preference determiners are more complicated than in your oft-used example of a preference for vanilla or chocolate ice cream.)

- Rand wasn't trying to turn music into a language.

- Nor was she trying to turn music into something "representational." (How could that term, as used in regard to art, ever apply to music anyway? Music isn't visual. People might experience Images while listening to music, but this isn't the same thing as being provided with a depiction that one can look at.)

- Your two claims as to what Rand was trying to turn music into contradict each other. A language isn't representational. It's denotational.

Ellen

[Jonathan]

Jonathan, on 17 Nov 2014 - 3:36 PM, said:

[Rand] was about art being a "simulation" of reality, and that simulation could include mental visualizations in addition to the "perceptual level" notion that she was obsessed with.

That differs from your earlier - several - statements that she had a mimetic theory of art. See my list.

No, it doesn't differ from my earlier statements. A simulation theory of art is a mimetic theory of art. Mental conceptualizations/visualizations of people and other things are visualizations of likenesses of things in reality. John Galt and Howard Roark resemble real men in their described appearance and in their desires and actions. Rand was into "showing" rather than "telling" in her writing. She was dedicated to conveying conceptually the "reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc." That's mimesis, and simulation.

Would you explain to me how you can have actions without something acting in art? (Apparently you agree with Rand that you can't have actions without something acting in reality.)

The "something" doesn't have to be directly depicted. It can be implied. For example, an artist doesn't have to show a human walking in order to represent a human walking. He could show arcs of the motion path that a human's walk would take if each point of his walk were plotted in space-time, and some people would be able to see quite a lot of human personality in such a path.

Rand, seemingly unknowingly, did the same type of thing in her descriptions of the effects of Howard Roark's architecture. She described human traits in abstract forms:

"The building stood on the shore of the East River, a structure rapt as raised arms. The rock crystal forms mounted in such eloquent steps that the building did not seem stationary, but moving upward in a continuous flow -- until one realized that it was only the movement of one's glance and that one's glance was forced to move in that particular rhythm. The walls of pale gray limestone looked silver against the sky, with the clean, dulled luster of metal, but a metal that had become a warm, living substance, carved by the most cutting of all instruments -- a purposeful human will. It made the house alive in a strange, personal way of its own, so that in the minds of spectators five words ran dimly, without object or clear connection: '...in His image and likeness...' "

"Its lines were horizontal, not the lines reaching to heaven, but the lines of the earth. It seemed to spread over the ground like arms outstretched at shoulder height. Palms down, in great silent acceptance. It did not cling to the soil and it did not crouch under the sky. It seemed to lift the earth, and its few vertical shafts pulled the sky down."

It's really too bad that she didn't go back and review those descriptions later on when she was trying to be an aesthetics guru. I think that she didn't remember what she had done, probably because, at the time that she was writing The Fountainhead, she wasn't thinking about any philosophical rules of art, and she wasn't aware that she was doing something that her future self would hatefully rant about others doing. She described human traits, and even virtues, as being represented in abstract attributes divorced from human entities.

The quote you used from Rand comes from a context pertaining to visual art. I understand her as meaning "representational" versus "nonrepresentational" as those terms are used pertaining to visual art.

I've already explained why her comments were not only in reference to visual art. She was talking about ALL art, not just visual art. In the quote that I provided (from her discussion on the decorative arts not qualifying as art by her criteria), she specifically cited the genus of her definition of art -- a "re-creation of reality" -- and stated that re-creations of reality must be representational. She was stating what was required in order for anything to qualify as art by her criteria.

Now, you appear to be saying that that definition of art, and those criteria, were meant to apply only to visual art. If so, then what is Rand's definition of all of the other arts? Is it "art is a selective, non-representational, non-re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments"? If so, where did she say that, or anything like it?

I don't agree with your including "being representational" in Rand's criteria that all art has to meet

Do you agree that Rand defined art as "a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments"? Do you agree that in the quote that I provided, Rand states that "as a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational"?!!! How do you not understand that she is stating that her view is that all works of art, by definition, re-create reality and therefore must be representational?

Here's Rand on literature:

"But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man’s awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc."

That is what she meant by "re-create reality." A work of art must either directly present likenesses of actual sensory-perceptual level entities and events, or it must conceptually convey them. That was her rule of all art, and music was expected to comply, and therefore music needed the fix of one day being discovered to be a language which objectively communicated the same meaning to all listeners.

Nor that music doesn't, by her view of "re-creating reality," meet that criterion. She considered the problem of objective intelligibility of music a temporary result of lack of knowledge of the physiology of music, as she stated in a quote I gave previously.

What I'm saying is that her tactic of claiming that there is a "temporary lack of knowledge" in regard to music is not a rational tactic. Philosophically, it's a cheap trick. Rather than being based on adhering to reality, the trick is motivated by Rand's wanting to adhere to her inadequate definition and criteria of art at all costs. She wanted music to comply with her definition and criteria, and therefore she tried to invent a way to force it to comply. It is just as irrational and ineffective as putting architecture into a "special class by itself" and believing that that was going to solve anything. She didn't want to accept the reality that the nature of music is that it necessarily includes content contributed by each individual listener's consciousness.

As I said earlier, we could apply the same trick of "temporary lack of knowledge" to abstract visual art, or to anything else. I could assert, just as baldly as Rand did in regard to music, that everyone identifies the same "depersonalized emotions" when viewing a work of abstract art, and that in the future someone will discover a "conceptual vocabulary" of abstract art, and therefore abstract art is a legitimate art form today, and the temporary lack of knowledge is just a minor technical issue that shouldn't distract us from accepting abstract art as a legitimate art form by Rand's explicitly stated Objectivist criteria.

What do you think Rand would have said in response? Do you think that she might have been a wee bit critical of her tactic if someone else tried to use it in support of something that she hated? Heh.

I don't think it is bullshit, although I don't think "depersonalized emotion" is a precise description. I'll have to reserve for a later time the differences between my and Rand's views on how music is processed.

If it's not bullshit, then prove it to be true. Show where anyone has done any research on the issue beyond merely introspecting like Rand did. I'd be especially interested in seeing scientific research which compares people's abilities to identify the same "depersonalized emotions" in music versus in abstract paintings, since Rand established abstract paintings as one example/standard of what cannot, must not, qualify as art.

"Yes. A great example of events would be "sorrow -> tranquility -> hopefulness stirring -> resolve -> striving -> joy of victory." That's a story made up of events."

What events?

What events? The implied events that caused sorrow, then tranquility, then hopefulness stirring, etc. The implied entities and events that we the listeners bring to art when exposed to attributes rather than whole entities. Just like the entities that Rand brought when interpreting the abstract forms of Roark's architecture.

Do you have the implicit premise that Rand thought that people have different meaning experiences about art?

No! I think that she thought that any single work of art had one true meaning, and that all (sane) people agreed that it had the same meaning. She thought that people then varied in their evaluations of the meaning based on how good or evil they were. If the one true meaning of a work of art was that, say, existence is great and man is heroic, then virtuous people like Rand would judge the meaning to be good, where icky, nasty, evil people would judge it to be bad.

Take the cold sore example. She assumes that everyone would see it a particular way, but that some people would respond negatively and some would respond positively. What she vilifies in the example is those who would respond positively.

Yes, and the issue that I'm focused on in this thread is rejecting her false opinion that any work of art (including music) would have one objectively true meaning and that everyone would see it that way. I'm rejecting her arbitrarily promoting her personal, subjective interpretations to the status of objective and universal. Her interpretations were sometimes quite shallow, silly, petty, and highly emotional. So, then the problem is that she refused to consider the existence or validity of others' differing interpretations, and therefore falsely accused them of having a positive evaluation of a negative meaning. She ignored the possibility that they did not come to the same meaning that she did. It was a clusterfuck of misidentifications and psychologizing on her part.

Rand's followers practice the same illogical presumptuousness.

Examples:

Joe Rowlands, and other similar twits, absolutely refused to listen to my explanation of finding positive meaning in Marc Quinn's Alison Lapper. I still laugh at what a snarky little twat he was about my interpreting the sculpture as having a positive meaning. In his Rand-poisoned mind, the only possible explanation was that I was lying about what I took to be the sculpture's meaning, and that I valued what he interpreted the sculpture to mean -- deformity, neediness, failure, etc.

Likewise, Roger Bissell thinks that anyone who disagrees with his identification of an artwork's one true meaning is "rationalizing" and "in denial." Others' differing interpretations don't even count! They're just to be denied, rejected, cancelled out, and forgotten about. They are not to be taken as evidence that people come to different interpretations!

Stephen Hicks refuses to consider the historic fact of reality that abstract painters were very passionate about portraying beauty in their work, because he personally finds their work to be ugly, and therefore his Rand-twisted brain leads him to the moronic position that the painters were trying to destroy beauty and that they valued ugliness! It is not possible to him that someone would find a work of abstract art to be beautiful. He finds it ugly, and therefore everyone must find it ugly!

There were cases with personal acquaintances where she recognized or sort of recognized that she and the acquaintance weren't seeing or hearing the same thing. But I think that mostly she presumed that people did see or hear the same thing but differed in evaluation of what was seen or heard.

Yes, that is what she presumed. Her presumptions were wrong. And revealing. The vast history of art is full of people interpreting artworks' meanings differently. It's actually pretty rare to find two people agreeing on the meaning of a work of art. How little exposure to art, aesthetics and art history must one have to be unaware of that reality?! How little exposure to other people in general and to other art enthusiasts in particular must one have to have never encountered or recognized the ubiquity of clashing interpretations? Or how pigheadedly must one refuse to recognize those realities when faced with them?

If all you mean is vilifying someone simply on the basis of a taste difference, the only examples in her writing pertain to cases where she thought the ethical import was very clear. That leaves a whole range of latitude which she didn't address. For instance, is it your belief that if another Chopin fan rank-ordered favorites among Chopin's compositions differently from her, she'd vilify that person?

Actually, yes. I think she was raring to go. In the realm of artistic tastes, she was eager to vilify and denounce. I think she loved doing it.

As do her followers. Posing as aesthetically superior is very important to a lot of Objectivishisticalistics. Hell, it's Pigero's entire existence! That's all that he is. It's all that he has in life.

- Foundationally, Rand's theory of art wasn't of the mimetic type, although she used "reality" in her definition. She didn't say that art is an imitation of reality. She said that it's a re-creation of reality, an imaginative re-doing of reality according to an artist's evaluations.

A re-creation of reality -- an imaginative re-doing of it -- is an imitation, likeness or semblance of reality. It's mimetic. Mimesis doesn't mean only copying reality. It also means imaginatively re-doing it.

Rand said this about literature:

"But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man’s awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc."

That is a mimetic, representational view of literature.

- Rand didn't mean what you mean by "subjective."

Rand had multiple, conflicting meanings of "subjective," but, in this case, she did mean what I mean. She meant that until a "conceptual vocabulary" of music is discovered, musical tastes must be treated as if we can't separate which aspects of our musical experiences are actually contained in the music and which are contributed by our own consciousnesses -- we must recognize that our individual consciousnesses may be contributing content, and therefore that some content that we interpret the music as having may not actually be contained in it.

I'm saying the same thing, except for the "conceptual vocabulary" part. Music's nature is, and has always been, that of including content contributed by individual listeners' consciousnesses, and therefore of being interpreted differently by different individuals. There will not be a future discovery which makes each piece of music have one universally true interpretation of meaning. Rand's irrational desire to be objective and right about her tastes in music, and to be objectively superior, will not be validated by any future discoveries. Subjectivity cannot be eliminated from music.

- Artistic tastes, including musical tastes, aren't of the same ilk as preferences in ice cream flavors. Artistic tastes, in the nature of the case, involve complicated psychological and cognitive factors, not simply physiological responses. (Food preferences can become intertwined with symbolic importations, but then, again, the preference determiners are more complicated than in your oft-used example of a preference for vanilla or chocolate ice cream.)

They are the same ilk. A person's disliking, say, a certain timbre will taint his entire experience of a piece of music. Just like giving a liver and onion sandwich to someone who hates liver and onions. It all comes down to simple little tastes and preferences like that. Our personal, subjective likes and dislikes in tastes affect our interpretations of a work of music's meaning.

- Rand wasn't trying to turn music into a language.

Yes, she was. In order to qualify as art by her definition and criteria, music needed to become an objective language of emotions: It needed to universally and objectively communicate the same meaning to all listeners.

- Nor was she trying to turn music into something "representational." (How could that term, as used in regard to art, ever apply to music anyway? Music isn't visual. People might experience Images while listening to music, but this isn't the same thing as being provided with a depiction that one can look at.)

- Your two claims as to what Rand was trying to turn music into contradict each other. A language isn't representational. It's denotational.

So, are you saying that you believe that literature cannot be representational?!!!

A language can be used to tell a story. In the story, characters' behaviors can resemble those of beings in reality. That's what Rand meant by "representational." Earlier I quoted her as saying, "But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man’s awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc."

J

[Brant Gaede]

Music is a creation. It is a recreation of created or imitated sounds through a desired even if not entirely new structured juxtaposition.

You can say the same about architecture substituting building materials for sounds.

And anything else you could call "art" (I think).

There are only two problems I see for me personally: where does what we call "art" start and/or stop and where in all this is any "metaphysical value judgement," whatever the hell that is?

Objectification is a matter for esthetics but there is no morality in esthetics. Or chemistry.

The artists objectifies what he wants by creating it, but the artist does not create an esthetics unless it's an esthetic tradition.

Morality in art comes from what is represented such as Picasso did with "Guernica." If the victims in the painting were Nazis we could call the painting "immoral," I suppose, and if you disliked Nazis getting theirs there then we might say you were an immoral, even an evil person, and the same for the artist. The implicit assumption in "Guernica" is the victims are not communists but innocents, so the painting universalizes basic human decency under attack by inhuman forces. That the intellectual, political and moral left loves communism and communists as long as no one is named "Stalin" and those two "c" words are not used, is a separate issue from any esthetic one.

--Brant

[moralist]

So, you don't get anything out of the music sample that I posted?

And what do you mean by the complete song as played by the composer or performer?

Music is hearing the actual sounds made by the composer or performer. That is what communicates their intent.

Greg

[Jonathan]

Okay, thanks, Greg. Your input is noted: you can identify no meaning or emotional content in the section of music that I posted.

J

[moralist]

Okay, thanks, Greg. Your input is noted: you can identify no meaning or emotional content in the section of music that I posted.

J

That's because it's not music. Music is the objective reality of sound.

There's obviously a reason you're being so evasive about not disclosing the composer or posting an artist actually performing the song. Your own behavior reveals the kind of person you are.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Greg

Your own behavior reveals the kind of person you are.

A low-down dirty dog!

--Brant

I knew it!

(Greg wins the fur-lined bathtub!)

[Jonathan]

There's obviously a reason you're being so evasive about not disclosing the composer or posting an artist actually performing the song.

The reason is truth, reality, and science. You really hate those things, don't you?

I'm taking a scientific approach to testing people's ability to identify meaning in music. I'm simply denying them access to what Rand called "outside considerations," such as the composer's name, the title of the piece, lyrics, the composer's intentions, influences and inspirations, etc.

See, in everyday life, people are exposed to music which is accompanied by layers and layers of "outside considerations." Basically, people are informed over and over again by multiple different means outside of the music about what the music is supposed to mean, or what the majority of society interprets it to mean after the majority was informed by outside considerations what the music is supposed to mean.

Certain people -- gullible and easily confused ones -- then go around claiming that the music itself communicated the specific emotions and meanings to them. When challenged on it and reminded of all of the outside considerations that they were exposed to, sometimes they'll say that they were able to isolate and ignore all of the outside considerations, but, what do you know, they just happened to interpret the music as meaning exactly what the outside considerations told them that it meant!!!

Strangely, though, it's quite a different story when they are exposed to music that they've likely never heard before, and when they are not allowed access to those layers and layers of outside considerations. Suddenly they can't identify anything.

And then some of them get really pissed off, and they attack the person who tested them, just as you're doing now. They like to believe what they want to believe, and they don't want any truth, reality and science interfering with what they believe.

Your own behavior reveals the kind of person you are.

Yes, it reveals that I'm scientific, and that I don't care how upset people get about having their beliefs challenged and tested.

J

[Brant Gaede]

Greg uses Aikido.

Jonathan uses Karate.

Nobody wrestles.

--Brant

get yer popcorn here! get yer popcorn here!

[moralist]

There's obviously a reason you're being so evasive about not disclosing the composer or posting an artist actually performing the song.

The reason is truth, reality, and science. You really hate those things, don't you?

It makes sense that you would falsely attribute hatred to others considering your own attitude. It will not take you far in life.

I'm taking a scientific approach to testing people's ability to identify meaning in music.

Identifying the meaning in music is always contingent upon the objective reality of actually hearing it performed by the composer or performer. While every reaction to music is subjective... the act of hearing it is not.

Choosing to subjectively agree with objective reality

is pretty good protection against falling

for the devious trickery of the deceitful.

Greg

[Peter]

Greg wrote:

While reactions to music are always subjective... the act of hearing it is not.

end quote

This is certainly not my field but I think a critic (as Rand sometimes was) can poison the well of sensory/perception. Input about a work of art by what is a believable (or beloved) critic can affect what you are hearing. How that occurs I know not know. But it is akin to jumping in fright when you think you see something (say a pair of predator eyes) and then you realize it is just two shiny objects in the dark. From past experience or perhaps even from an innate evolutionary response you can instantly be affected by what you sense.

So when a person has learned that excess salt can hurt you, do you taste danger when the fries are excessively salted? Specifically I am thinking of Wagner the composer, certain fiction writers, and some philosophers too, not to mention psychologists like Fromm, who Ayn Rand scorned. This is different from hearing a discordant screech, or an unbearable sound level which is an even more automatic response. Am I wrong? Perhaps. Is the time from experience to reaction a factor? I am interested in what everyone has to say on the subject.

Peter

[moralist]

From past experience or perhaps even from an innate evolutionary response you can instantly be affected by what you sense.

Indeed we can. And that innate response to music is wholly subjective... but the act of hearing it is not.

Greg

[Ellen Stuttle]

Jonathan,

Your post is long, and I haven't time to read all the details now. Just a couple things I noticed in skimming - these touch on a point I'd intended to make.

The quote you used from Rand comes from a context pertaining to visual art. I understand her as meaning "representational" versus "nonrepresentational" as those terms are used pertaining to visual art.

I've already explained why her comments were not only in reference to visual art. She was talking about ALL art, not just visual art. In the quote that I provided (from her discussion on the decorative arts not qualifying as art by her criteria), she specifically cited the genus of her definition of art -- a "re-creation of reality" -- and stated that re-creations of reality must be representational. She was stating what was required in order for anything to qualify as art by her criteria.

The definition pertains to all art, which doesn't necessitate that the whole statement does. Do you think that when she called Vermeer "the greatest artist" earlier in the article, in a context where she was talking about painting, that she meant greater than any other artist of any type?

I don't agree with your including "being representational" in Rand's criteria that all art has to meet

Do you agree that Rand defined art as "a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments"? Do you agree that in the quote that I provided, Rand states that "as a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational"?!!! How do you not understand that she is stating that her view is that all works of art, by definition, re-create reality and therefore must be representational?

Here's Rand on literature:

"But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of mans awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc."

That is what she meant by "re-create reality." A work of art must either directly present likenesses of actual sensory-perceptual level entities and events, or it must conceptually convey them. That was her rule of all art, and music was expected to comply, and therefore music needed the fix of one day being discovered to be a language which objectively communicated the same meaning to all listeners

Conceptually convey isn't "representational," as that term is used in regard to visual art and as I think she was using the term in the context of the quote you take as referring to all art.

- Nor was she trying to turn music into something "representational." (How could that term, as used in regard to art, ever apply to music anyway? Music isn't visual. People might experience Images while listening to music, but this isn't the same thing as being provided with a depiction that one can look at.)

- Your two claims as to what Rand was trying to turn music into contradict each other. A language isn't representational. It's denotational.

So, are you saying that you believe that literature cannot be representational?!!!

A language can be used to tell a story. In the story, characters' behaviors can resemble those of beings in reality. That's what Rand meant by "representational." Earlier I quoted her as saying, "But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of mans awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc."

Yes, I'm saying that literature - aural or written, no pictures - cannot be "representational."

- Rand wasn't trying to turn music into a language.

Yes, she was. In order to qualify as art by her definition and criteria, music needed to become an objective language of emotions: It needed to universally and objectively communicate the same meaning to all listeners.

An "objective vocabulary," she said. Not language. We discussed before that "vocabulary" isn't limited to "language." She specifically said "a mathematical one."

Ellen

I'll respond further after the annual "Thanksgiving Seminar."

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone to whom that wish is relevant.

[Brant Gaede]

I think Rand used "recreation of reality" in a broader sense than you are, Ellen, as in another, artificial reality. She was all about artificial and realer than real, but you must use the materials of this reality for those are all there are to be used. In literature words are merely a bridge between what's in the author's head to what's in the reader's who sees--experiences--the author would hope, what the author intended. The object of art is consumption. Both by the creator and the reader, looker, feeler, thinker, hearer. Rand after all, would go back and read parts of Atlas. For a play it gets more complicated but vastly more powerful for all concerned. The actors and the audience interact and that epistemological energy goes back and forth. Only music matches up, especially live and even more, opera. When one hears music, especially classical--harder to do with opera for you are looking at a story there--one puts pictures into one's own head and in that way you create what the composer knows not. Is not one thus "recreating reality . . . ."? Or, doing that to the composer's own "recreation"?

Rand needed more emphasis on the art consumer's experience in writing about esthetics, for qua literary artist she was too consumed by her own creator orientation to objectify an esthetics. She didn't begin to have an objective POV about art; it was all her, her and more her.

--Brant

[moralist]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone to whom that wish is relevant.

The only ones to whom Thanksgiving is irrelevant are entitled ingrates... and there are none of those here.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone to whom that wish is relevant.

The only ones to whom Thanksgiving is irrelevant are entitled ingrates... and there are none of those here.

Greg

Duck and cover--I'm good at that. At night I come out to ingrate.

--Brant (title trademark pending)

catch me if you can!

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone to whom that wish is relevant.

What she means is if you are not a turkey.

Michael

[Jonathan]

The definition pertains to all art, which doesn't necessitate that the whole statement does.

Seriously? You actually believe that when Rand said, "As a re-creation of reality, a work of art has to be representational; its freedom of stylization is limited by the requirement of intelligibility; if it does not present an intelligible subject, it ceases to be art," she was speaking only of visual art?

Are you saying that you think that her view was that literature did not have to be intelligible? The requirement of intelligibility applied only to visual art, since that was the "context" in which she made the statement about what re-creations of reality must do?!!! All of the other arts could be completely unintelligible yet qualify as art by her standards?

Do you think that when she called Vermeer "the greatest artist" earlier in the article, in a context where she was talking about painting, that she meant greater than any other artist of any type?

No, I don't think that. Do you think that when Rand advocated the idea that, say, banking should not be regulated, she was speaking of only the field of banking? Do you think that any profession that she didn't list while rejecting imposed government regulations shouldn't be classified as a profession that she thought shouldn't be regulated? Is your theory that she didn't think in principles, but instead compartmentalized everything? Is it your view that if she didn't specifically name each of the individual art forms while discussing her criteria of art, then her statement applied only to the individual art form that she gave as an example?

Conceptually convey isn't "representational," as that term is used in regard to visual art and as I think she was using the term in the context of the quote you take as referring to all art.

We're not talking about your opinion of what "representational" means, or how people other than Rand often use it. We're talking about Rand's meaning of the term. Keep in mind that Rand was not an aesthetics scholar or historian. She wasn't a serious student of the subject. She wasn't familiar with how others generally used the terms of their philosophical profession. She quite often had her own peculiar usages (and usually insisted that her use of a term was the only right one, regardless of history or the unanimity of everyone but her).

Rand wrote, "But in order to re-create reality, it is the sensory-perceptual level of man's awareness that literature has to convey conceptually: the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, tectures, etc."

She meant that literature is conceptually representational. It creates imagined entities and events which one experienced as if they were percepts. Not as percepts, but as if they were percepts. That is her meaning of "representational."

Yes, I'm saying that literature - aural or written, no pictures - cannot be "representational."

Okay, then apparently that's the problem. You seem to be confusing your views with Rand's. You're imposing your meaning of the term onto her. She did see literature as being representational. She thought that its nature was to conceptually represent "the reality of concrete, individual men and events, of specific sights, sounds, textures, etc." And also to "represent man's fundamental view of himself and of existence."

She wrote:

"What are the valid forms of artand why these?...The proper forms of art present a selective re-creation of reality in terms needed by mans cognitive faculty, which includes his entity-perceiving senses, and thus assist the integration of the various elements of a conceptual consciousness. Literature deals with concepts, the visual arts with sight and touch, music with hearing. Each art fulfills the function of bringing mans concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allowing him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts."

She is not saying that art must re-create reality by presenting actual perceptual entities and/or events, but rather that art must re-create reality by conveying concepts or likenesses of entities and/or events "as if they were percepts."

The "as if" part is what you seem to have missed or misunderstood.

Rand wasn't trying to turn music into a language.

Yes, she was. In order to qualify as art by her definition and criteria, music needed to become an objective language of emotions which told a story. A mere mood or single emotion wasn't enough. It needed to be a coherent chain of emotion-events: a story.

Here's Rand:

"The subconscious material has to flow because no single image can capture the meaning of the musical experience, the mind needs a succession of images..."

In other words, it needs a story.

She then gives examples of the types of images that music evokes, such as climbing mountains and fighting on barricades, and ending by making those events into stories which result in success.

An additional quote that is interesting to me (though not necessarily relevant to this discussion):

"It is induced by deliberately suspending one's conscious thoughts and surrendering to the guidance of one's emotions."

Wow. Isn't it extra super nasty evil to suspend one's conscious thoughts? Heh. Didn't Rand throw red-faced, steam-coming-out-ears tantrums over others' saying the same thing about other art forms? Didn't she portray such statements as monstrously vicious attacks on man's proper method of cognition and such?!!!

An "objective vocabulary," she said. Not language. We discussed before that "vocabulary" isn't limited to "language." She specifically said "a mathematical one."

She believed that the mathematical proportions of music somehow added up to an emotional language. The series of emotions in succession created a story of events which presented an intelligible subject and meaning.

J

[Brant Gaede]

Thoughts are for conclusions and possible actions. Suspending thoughts to experience art is self-contained and does not arrive at any conclusion.

If literature is not "representational" then what is it?

--Brant

[Jonathan]

Here's what Rand got right about music:

"...man knows that he cannot experience an actual causeless and objectless emotion. When music induces an emotional state without external object, his consciousness suggests one."

That is indeed the subjective nature of music. Individual listeners each bring their own content to the art. The same is true of dance, architecture, and the other abstract arts (the ones that do not re-create or describe concrete semblances of entities in reality).

What she got wrong:

"Music conveys the same categories of emotions to listeners who hold widely divergent views of life. As a rule, men agree on whether a given piece of music is gay or sad or violent or solemn."

That statement is pure confirmation bias. There are some few examples of music which would be almost unanimously classified as gay or sad or violent or solemn, but they are not representative of music in general or of our ability to agree on emotional content. They are a very small minority. Earlier I mentioned that Rand's assertion about music can be applied to abstract arrangements of colors. There are a few specific palettes which would almost universally be classified as gay or solemn etc., but it would be illogical to jump to the conclusion that any and all combinations of colors are as universally "read," just as it would be illogical to conclude that emotional content in most music is universally "read."

"As a rule," men do not agree on whether a given piece of music, or a given palette of colors, is gay or sad or violent or solemn. Rand wanted music to be objective, and therefore based her "hypothesis" on anecdotal observations of responses to music samples which were selected to confirm the hypothesis.

J

[Jonathan]

Thoughts are for conclusions and possible actions. Suspending thoughts to experience art is self-contained and does not arrive at any conclusion.

--Brant

The thing is, when Rand says it, it's just a simple, true observation, but when someone like Greenberg or Pollock or Kandinsky says it, it's the most evil fucking thing ever said.

J

[Michael Stuart Kelly]

That statement is pure confirmation bias. There are some few examples of music which would be almost unanimously classified as gay or sad or violent or solemn, but they are not representative of music in general or of our ability to agree on emotional content. They are a very small minority.

Jonathan,

This is a premise I think you should check. I worked in composing music for films for a time. And most recently, I have been studying how to make videos. Obviously, the idea of including music in on my radar.

There are many, many places to get music where it is categorized according to emotion. In fact, mapping music to emotions is big business for companies like Muzak because it works.

Check this out for a quick example that is easily accessible:

Google Audio Library

Notice that each song is described as bright, calm, happy, dramatic, inspirational, angry and so on.

Here's a program for composing canned music for films.

Sonicfire

Notice the section called "mood mapping."

I agree with several of your criticisms of Rand's understanding of music, but disagree with others, like your statement above, for instance. (In college, I even tried to go through that clunky On The Sensations of Tone by Hemholtz that Rand recommended, but I didn't understand a damn thing back then .)

I am going to do an in-depth mulling over the nature of art, though, before I write a lot about this.

Also human nature.

At the present, I think Rand's view of art is really good for a small spectrum of human experience, but her notion that art solely models values is not the only reason humans engage in art. For example, in my current understanding, living itself is experienced in stories. We think in stories. I believe a lot of art exists to put us in a trance that prompts our minds to free-float about stories, even when the stories are nothing but random daydreaming. Music fits this view perfectly. It doesn't provide the stories, but it provides the trance to unlock them.

So I think the nature of stories is epistemologically just as important as the nature of concepts. That's just one thing that I want to explore.

Michael