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From: edhall@rand.org (Ed Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: WHY NO ONE CARES WHAT S. PAGE DOES
Message-ID: <1991Jun20.194837.19912@rand.org>
Date: 20 Jun 91 19:48:37 GMT
References: <9106190528.AA17412@lilac.berkeley.edu>
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In article <9106190528.AA17412@lilac.berkeley.edu> ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
>In article <10856@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
>Handelman) writes:
>>
>>Musical thinking tends therefore not to be thinking, but rather
>>a sort of nostalgizing.
>>
>>You see: I'm trying to come up with an answer to what seems to me the
>>most basic of all music-theoretical questions: "Why are all music
>>theorists so dumb?" I mean Laske, Balaban, the rest of them ---
>>can this be a coincidence? I assert that it cannot.
>>
>I am glad to see you get to the heart of the matter so quickly (and, at the
>same time, challenging Page as to whether or not such subject matter is the
>sort of thing he really wanted to see)!  Of course, I tend to be skeptical
>about sweeping generalizations, even when they are formulated as questions.
>I do not think that ALL music theorists are so dumb.  Rather, I would argue
>that music theory is as susceptible to Sturgeon's Law as is any other domain,
>meaning that I tend to dismiss about 90% of what I read in music theory to have
>been a waste of my time.  FINDING that other 10% is often a neat trick, but a
>little bit of persistence helps.

Hmmm...  One might as well ask where that 10% of un-dumb palm-readers
are, or the 10% of un-dumb tea-leaf readers.  Sometimes the paradigm
(to use a well-warn word) is the problem, not just the practicioner.
It seems that music theory itself might be suspect.  I'm sure the
thoretician is just as likely to be kind to children and small animals
as the rest of us.  But the practice of music theory often seems to me
much like nuclear physics limited to particles whose names contain the
letter "e".

		-Ed Hall
		edhall@rand.org