Path: utzoo!attcan!lsuc!becker!bdb
From: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Meaning of music
Message-ID: <12542@becker.UUCP>
Date: 27 May 90 21:06:25 GMT
References: <1990May25.082956.27866@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Reply-To: bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce Becker)
Organization: G. T. S., Toronto, Ontario
Lines: 53

In article <1990May25.082956.27866@portia.Stanford.EDU> gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung) writes:
|Let see if I can make some sense out of my posting on 
|"A hypothetical experiment"
|
|I started with some statements on the process to reach the differentiation
|state, i.e. a certain sense of direction "towards" that state.  Then I
|backtrack "away" from that state, along the way, a digression on some
|remotely related matters, then backtrack again, finally ending on a
|kind of question.  Hm...
|
|If I can find a piece of music, with features "towards" and "away" from
|a certain state, and on the "away" path there is a digression, i.e.
|a sort remotely related features, then back again, and ends with a certain
|state; and also I regard the posting a discourse in the English language,
|can I transfer the notion that the posting carries some meaning to this
|piece of music?
|
|But wait, each English word carries some meaning (i.e. the usual way we
|use this word), but not the case in the piece of music!

	Of course it can! Specific pieces of music
	have very specific cultural referents, which
	most in some given cultural context agree to
	and share. This is not to say that all music
	has this character, any more than all uses
	of vocal sounds are "language".

|How about the word "walawala"?  It carries no meaning at all in the English
|language.  At its last appearance as "syntatic-grammatical-walawala", does
|it carry a meaning just because of its appearance in the context and the
|words that it attached to.  To a certain extent, I think yes.  

	The use of the word "wala" usually can be
	traced to French influence - it's a corruption
	of "voila". In English it becomes usually
	dialectal for  "aha", "taa-daa", or other
	expletives. Thus "walawala" is likely an
	emphatic form.

|But in the piece of music we don't even have words of meaning to attached to!

	The fact that "wala" has a history of
	linguistic association parallels the fact
	of musical association - a lot of musical
	"ideas" are not new at all, rather conscious
	or unconscious reworkings of older forms
	that are well understood.

-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ontario
a /i/	 Internet: bdb@becker.UUCP, bruce@gpu.utcs.toronto.edu
 `\o\-e	 UUCP: ...!uunet!mnetor!becker!bdb
 _< /_	 "I still have my phil-os-o-phy" - Meredith Monk