Re: music to my ears

Jay Lemke (JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Thu, 19 Oct 95 23:40:09 EDT

I love the idea of a 'listen along', Mike! There are also some
very interesting cd-roms that including not only the music, but
the scores, and the social-historical context, etc.

I am going away for 10 days and will miss following these
discussions. When I get back I may brave the mysteries of
archive access once again, or maybe even try to go through
the hundred of messages the university computer will be
impatiently holding on to for me!

Someone in the discussion did make another interesting point about
being able to enjoy the music without understanding 'musical
language' i.e. its semiotic conventions, unlike literature, where
one must know the language. I am not sure, however, that this is
quite the right way to make the comparison. There is certainly
music, from other cultures, say, that many people cannot enjoy,
in large part because they do not know the conventions, and have
not acquired the habitus that links emotional and bodily responses
to these perceptual patterns. One does not need to know English
the way a _linguist_ does to enjoy literature (at least not a
lot of it!), and one does not need to know musical idioms the
way a musicologist (or semiotician) does to enjoy musical works
within one's own 'native musical language'. I think this example
may bear deeply on an old question in this group: the relationship
between the uses of so-called 'scientific' ways of knowing and
the 'everyday' ones. JAY.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU