Re: [Fis] music and genetic code

Dear Pedro and Sergei (sorry for this long mail!)

I do not see very clearly which way(s) we should/could go further in this
discussion on music and... the genetic
code. Obviously we have a pre-understanding about what "is" music when we
deal with this question. Let me try
to put this pre-understanding as a question: when do we perceive something
(a sound) AS music? or, in more classical
terms: what is the "essence" of music? what does it a difference to
understand a sound as music instead of
'just' as a sound or as noise or...? Of course the answer to this question
depends on the horizon within which we
ask it. The genetic code may be such a horizon.

As you know in Greek mythology (Apollon/Orphic/Pythagoras) this horizon
was the idea that music has a power
not only on human beings but also on animals, plants as well as on the
whole of nature.
For Plato the 'techne mousik�' is a mathematical science (which included
poetry and dance as well as
reading and writing, the "artes liberales"). The idea that music can govern
over human, natural and divine forces
situates music as a metaphysic discipline related to cosmology and politics:
music as a therapeutic mean
in order to educate humans to be good citizens, for instance. Pythagoras
indeed was convinced that
there is a kind of universal/cosmic harmony. Music was a mean to take us
from the world of becoming into
the world of being also a Platonic thought, although Plato was less mythical
and more ethical in this regard).

Aristotle (I follow very shortly the article "Musik" in the Historisches
Woerterbuch der Philosophie, Vol. 6), was
more modern as he separates music from movement (dance) and language
(poetry), but he thinks music
within an ethic horizon i.e. within the horizon of "practical philosophy",
contrary to Pythagoras: music
intends to "produce" (poiesis) something which is related to 'ethical
character' and has a 'cathartic'
(or "cleaning") effect on the soul. Similarly thinks Aristoxenos of Tarent
who conceives music more
as an ethic and less as a pure mathematic activity. This is also the
conception of cynic, skeptic and epicureic
schools (as different from new pyhagoreic and new platonic schools.

I make now a big leap into modernity (18th century) when music was conceived
as an aesthetic phenomenon and
as an 'imitation' (mimesis) of (ideal) nature or of the absolute in the
conception of the Romantic: music opens a completely different
world (as the world of the senses), it is an expression of human freedom
etc.
In the 20th century (Ch. von Ehrenfels, N. Hartmann, Ingarden) music is
seen within the horizon of Gestalt
and time (Husserl) as a separte phenomenon, something critized by Marxist
schools: Lukacs) but again re-thought
by Bloch and Adorno (following Hegel).

One way to structure our discussion would be to think music not only as a
cosmological or a biological
than as an 'ethical' discipline and from this perspective to reflect on its
connections for instance to
genetics. In this case we operate with an anthropological concept of music
that we may analogical
apply to other living beings, but not originally, i.e. we operate with music
in a narrow sense. Of course
we can broader this meaning (following the mathematic-pythagoreic-platonic)
tradition and think of music
as a correspondece (in time) of forms or "Gestalt" and thus look at the
anthropological level "from the
bottom" and more specifically from the genetic perspective which is probably
what Pedro is suggesting,
while Sergei would probably like to broaden this basis.

cheers

Rafael

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Received on Mon May 19 10:07:43 2003