>
> Concerning music. One of the delights of being a professor of
communication
> is that it is legitimate to teach about things like music
and film, which
> means opportunities to experience and reflect on these
topics as well.
> > My frustration in dealing with this topic on xmca is
that words seriously
> fail us when we switch media to the visual and
non-language aural media.
These remarks made me to offer my two ( or one) cents'
worth:
i think that language isn't any 'picture of the world'. This means that
there are many things we absolutely cannot 'describe by using a language'.
Words can 'point to the moon', however, without reaching at it... at least
sometimes. If there is some kind of commonly agreeded language of
communication?
> Peter's post reinforces an idea I got while listening to a presentation
> on NPR yesterday afternoon where bach, beethoven and mozart were
>discussed/analyzed in a CD book. If we each had a common CD so we could
>listen to the same music and in this (limited) sense, share the same
>object, we might be able to communicate more effectively. Anyone out
>there interested in organized a "listen along"?
This 'sharing the same object'-remark was the remark which rang a bell in
my ears: Once long ago i had an argument with my friends about, if there
is some kind of generally agreeded 'language of music' in that sense, that
we could in general 'know' about instrumental music, what it 'means'.
For some reason, even if most of the us were some kind of
theoretical-minded people (philosophers) we decided to make an experiment.
Someone had a recording of J. S. Bach's famous 'Matteus Passio'. We
listened a part of it (which no-one knew so well) and tried to guess,
which part of the Story ('of Jesus going to Golgata and dying on the
Cross') it was about. Most of the people said, it was the the occasion
when Jesus just dies (and says: Eli, Eli; lama sab... or how it goes).
Only one, i remember, guessed that Jesus had already died long ago and had
gone to the Heaven, and the music was glorifying the God and telling about
the greatest joy in the world (the settled issue of man's eternal life or
death). It happened to be about Jesus already being in the Heaven.
This isn't of course any kind of 'proof' that there isn't a commonly
understood 'language of music'. Instead i started to think that a 'shared
object' isn't at all important in the sense that we would have a 'similar
experience'... What is actually the main point of 'the experience' while
listening music? Maybe there is so many 'ways to listen music' that a
shared object doesn't mean at all that we are 'listening the same music'?
Maybe our personal or cultural background (or the state of the mind) is
a more important 'factor' to decide what we 'hear' than 'the piece of
music we actually are hearing (in physical sense)?
What does it mean to say: he understands that music? Does that
'understanding' have something in common with 'understanding a language'?
What does it actually mean 'to understand a language'? To have some kind
of co-operation with some other people using 'the same language'?
> mike
virtanen