On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 12:15 AM, ailo ailo.at@gmail.com wrote:
On 03/21/2011 11:47 PM, Matt Barber wrote:
My apologies for that remark -- it's not quite how I meant it. I did not mean this particular discussion or anything anyone here said. What I mean is that the broad "what is music" discussion overall tends to annoy me and make me sad, sick at heart, etc. In fact it's one that I quite enjoy when the parties are discussing responsibly and in good faith. I suppose I feel the same way about the "is there a god" or "what is god" question -- it can be a fun and sometimes even fruitful discussion, but most often there is astonishingly little new territory to cover, many reasons for nasty partisan disputes and so forth. I guess I've had too many "potentially distasteful" conversations turn to actually distasteful ones, so "the discussion" (in the broad sense) feels distasteful to me. Nothing any of you have said have made me sad yet.
Matt
That makes me feel better. I suppose this is a subject that doesn't necessarily belong on this list and most answers on this thread give away the reluctance to discuss it. I don't know if that is a good or a bad thing.
Anyway, starts to feel like swimming upstream :).
I suppose I don't want to be the "what is music" police. =o)
In my experience, the discussion appears in every musical community I've ever been a part of, especially if that community has some technical interests. And it happens with enough frequency (there was one on the csound list just last month), that it can start to become an "ohhh.... not THIS again" kind of discussion, because (again) there is just so little new territory.
Recently there have been a number of claims about the evolutionary advantage (if any) of music (Musicians are HOTT! Music is a low-cost drug!) which try to answer what music IS by way of "explaining" what it is for (note the scare quotes around "explaining"). This is maybe a little bit new, but in some ways a little more infuriating than normal, because like all evolutionary explanations of behavior it suffers from the is/ought problem. I keep thinking about religion as an analogy -- I can find it very interesting if there is some evolutionary reason for religious belief among our species, but such a fact would say absolutely nothing about whether I should practice a given religion or any at all in 2011.
Matt