e la Mancha rides again! Meanwhile, your quiet and unassuming Scienda hostess, Cat de la Hobbes, has rarely had quite so much fun ever. Our faithful and true-hearted Quixote de la Mancha’s follow-up post is as eloquent as it is humourous; it deserves to be read, and read thoughtfully.

This week, we are housecleaning, so I am informed. Accordingly, let me dispense with my major contribution to the joke-a-thon.

The Explanation of Everything

CD’s come to our hapless engineer’s defense…you remember, the one that said everything could be explained by mathematics. Now, CD’s a clever person, intelligent, and one the very best writers around. No kidding…Unfortunately, we haven’t explained anything with this formula. It’s really no different than saying X=X. We’ve designated a symbol, a mathematical symbol no doubt, to represent everything and then simply claimed that it equals itself. If I were to state in English  everything equals everything, you would no doubt agree, but still want to know what everything means or is. You would want an explanation, in other words.

To which I can only reply, thanks a million, man, and Ex. 3:14a. The expression ∞ = ∞ was admittedly slapstick, however there is an underlying point: For some things, the nearest available expression is forced to avail for the inexpressible — a theme which I expect to see recurring in this counterpoint we’re improvising.

Moving forward, I have more half-formed general musings than contributions to the case this week. I expect TA will fill in the shading and erase the rough lines in due time.

The Meaning of Cool

…the idea that coolness is a property of music was utilized to make and have fun, not to be a formal part of the argument…Nevertheless, I’m not certain it’s not an interesting argument. There’s certainly an objective correlation in the real world. Consider the following: the term cool is generally thought to have arisen in the 1930’s in conjunction with the American jazz scene…This would tend to argue against the relativity of coolness…

Here we encounter an interesting point: linguistic and cultural shift. I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that these shifts, in entropic fashion, tend to erode the information content and the specificity involved in areas such as language, and yes, music. Jazz, in my opinion, would be one notable exception to the entropic slide, as it constituted a renaissance and melding of existing forms into something entirely new.

Now, here are some interesting questions: At the time of the word’s origination, to whom was jazz “cool”? To whom was it not? To what degree was the word changed as it was absorbed into the greater culture and repurposed over time? What renders the informational alterations of such shifts acceptable in some instances, and less so in others?

One other thing on the “cool” note…

Fact is, classical music simply never engendered coolness as a movement.

Fact is, the fanatical devotion to which one culture refers as “the cool factor” simply has other terms and expressions in other times and groups. I mean, how cool — er, I mean, “virtuosic” — was Liszt? He was like The Beatles of the mid-1800s.

Culture and Objective Perception

And in the absence of any good reason to think there might exist a sane, rational, and sober human culture that would dance and frolic to morose, slow dirges and become saddened by upbeat, bright tunes played in major scales, option two does not seem plausible. [EDITOR'S NOTE: lawyers never ask questions they don't know the answer to, and arguers never assert things they don't know or believe strongly to be true. If I know CD, she's got some weird culture socked away that does this very thing. Well, so be it...just some advice in case you're engaged in a non-genteel, non-mannerly argument.]

Socked away? Hardly. Feel free to blink; you won’t miss it.

At this point, I’m forced to acquiesce that Quixote’s culture and time must certainly be cooler than mine. Perhaps it’s due to greater proximity to the golden era of jazz. At any rate, I ran into this very thing constantly among peers in school. What I would naturally have considered “happy” and uplifting, satisfying music was apparently cheesy, weird, and most importantly, boring. I even had a relative a couple of years younger than me who asserted that “sad” music made her happy.

Ah, youth culture. I suppose Quixote did ask for a sane, rational and sober culture, and perhaps we’ve uncovered one more way in which the idealism of youth is eliminated from those parameters. At any rate, we are talking about a culture in which Nine Inch Nails put out an alleged song whose title described horrifically graphic sexual torture, and were featured in a popular movie playing the alleged song while people danced.

It’s the sort of thing we might attribute to devils…which brings up another interesting point referenced by Shema in TA’s comments, that being the connection of cultural moral presuppositions to the perception of truth, beauty and music. Whether Beethoven or The Beatles, every generation has had its reviled musicians who faced accusations of “wrecking music” at the time, and later became…well, tame and passé. How, then, do these perceptions relate to the properties of music?

Emotion in Song

While I won’t appeal to Quixote to give a range of experience, since he professedly has two left feet, I have indeed been known to dance joyfully to what might be called sad music. I generally take delight in minor keys, finding them wild and introspective rather than sad. I studied ballet as a child, and I still dance when no one’s looking. I would suggest that there’s no sadness required at all in either seeing or creating a graceful flow of movement which reflects the rhythm and cadence of such a melody.

As a toddler, I regularly requested the stormy, uplifting, energizing “Numbah Nine” from my mother’s shelf of classical records. (Let it run till at least 2:55.)

It was my bedtime lullaby. You see what a quiet and unassuming wallflower I have always been since birth.

Between our posts, we’ve now refined it down to Quixote’s claim that “There is an inherent property of music that is the best explanation for the phenomenon of mood. There is designed into the intervals, chords, scales, and I’d argue the rhythms, a property that affects us in certain ways, not much differently than the manner in which the wavelength of red strikes our perception.”

How does red strike you? Some hate it. I usually love it. Depends on whether it occurs next to flamingo pink (cringe).

Property and Perception

Now, where the delightfully innovative Ratbert might simply code-punk me, Quixote has in fact semi-Easter-egged his post. (Sweet.) I offer the fruits of link-following:

But does that property affect us all in the same way? One of our roommates in university did this very thing with a Bach piece in a lesson with his classical teacher, transforming a keyboard study into something Gershwinesque. As Quixote’s clips so aptly illustrated last week, classical teachers may have a somewhat different reaction to this sort of thing than fun-loving gentlemen like The Canadian Brass, well-known for their stage humour and performance panache. Now, our (actual musical and mathematical genius) ex-roomate’s argument in the face of his teacher’s protests was, “But this is how Bach really meant it.”

An assertion no more clinically demonstrable than to suggest we could collect the data to verify that music’s intervals, chords, scales and rhythms — its mathematically describable elements — affect most people in similar ways across time and culture. In fact, one begins to suspect that The Areopagus is deeply and easily moved by music, whereas Scienda is not necessarily, at least perhaps not by the same internal mechanisms.

Is the perception of beauty any less presuppositional than the perception of truth? And yet, we know truth exists independent of perception. If a soul in all its particular beauty goes entirely unobserved by the world, mistaken for insane or awkward or unfitting, do these designations measure anything but that soul’s degree of (non)reliance on surrounding cultural presuppositions? Likewise, if Beethoven’s Ninth were labelled better silent than aloud, to what should we attach ourselves — the voice of the critic, or the Ode to Joy?

Meandering Half-Conclusion: The Insufficiency of Mood

Whether a soul or a truth or a song, is it possible that some things transcend not due to properties or perception, but due to their referencing a self-existent source of transcendence? (∞ = ∞, Ex. 3:14) Again, I think of my mother’s math professor, who found an emotional beauty, a mood, in mathematics. He allocated his response somewhere between a minority of basic properties and a majority of perception, but what if the dilemma between properties and perceptions is at worst false, and at sheer best, ragingly incomplete?

Here, I think you’ll find Quixote and I are agreed.

What if truth were silent and invisible? And yet, it’s not. Truth functions according to rules, many of which have a mathematical quality in their logic structures. It’s when we lose touch with the structure of truth that it loses its voice to our ear. And, I would suggest, it’s for this reason that mood can be no reliable arbiter of music’s properties:

The heart is more deceitful than all else
And is desperately sick;
Who can understand it?

~Jer. 17:9