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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Categories of Musicological Analysis
Message-ID: <14638@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 21 Aug 90 18:02:19 GMT
References: <9931@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> <1918@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <9956@life.ai.mit.edu>
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In article <9956@life.ai.mit.edu> mrsmith@rice-chex.UUCP (Mr. P. H. Smith)
writes:
>
>Do you think that "rhythm, melody, harmony, and lyrics" are "Western
>musical procedures?"  I don't, and I don't think any non-western
>musician would agree with you, if you arrogantly claim that rhythm,
>melody, harmony, and lyrics are Western musical procedures.

Let me try to come to Linda's defense here.  I do not think her intent was to
be quite as arrogant as you are assuming.  The way I interpreted her original
claim was as an assertion that TERMS such as "rhythm," "melody," "harmony,"
and "lyrics" need not necessarily have clean maps to concepts in all
non-Western civilizations.  You are probably too young to remember McLuhan's
old saw about there being no word for "art" in Bali because "we do everything
the best we can."

There are a variety of schools of thought (some of which are even consistent
with current research in artificial intelligence) based on the premise that
concept formation is a highly idiosyncratic process.  It is unclear that you
and I deal with a concept like "melody" the same way, let alone whether or not
your concept is consistent with one of McLuhan's Balinese (to choose a random
example about which, I confess, I know precious little).  The odds are better
in our case because we probably have a lot of cultural similarities, but my
guess is that I could come up with at least one critical aspect in which we
differ.

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