source file: mills2.txt Date: Sun, 12 Jan 1997 12:23:33 -0800 Subject: literature and music From: James Kukula I just read David Abram's THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS. I nibbled at it over the course of many months, so by now I've forgotten how it started! But a major theme, at least at the end, is how the evolution of writing, from pictographic to phonetic, is coupled to changes in how people perceive the world and even the nature of their own existence. An earlier book that covers similar territory is Walter Ong's ORALITY AND LITERACY. Abram's book pushes me to think beyond its limits, to: how does the language of mathematics, even more disconnected from sound, play a role in shaping the scientific tradition and its objective, abstract, isolated stance with respect to the world it studies? The rise of science and mathematics and technology all seem coupled to printing. I suspect mathematical notation would not suffer repeated copying by uncomprehending hands. Anyway, I suspect that improvisational or spontaneously composed music has a relationship to written or pre-composed music which is analogous to the relationship of oral to written language. The structure of much improvised music does seem to resemble the structure of oral poetry such as Homer's great epics, where there are a lot of short figures of speech that can be assembled in various ways to fit both the poetic meter and the story line. I don't know much about music, never mind the history of the writing of music, but I suspect that the rise of printing had a large influence on what music was written, how it was written, etc. Another analogy - maybe changing from figured bass to explicitly written out bass is a bit like the addition of explicit vowel marks to Hebrew? Just now I'm listening to Sun Ra's OTHER PLANES OF THERE. Pre-composed? Spontaneous? Awesome! Jim Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Mon, 13 Jan 1997 16:15 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA05499; Mon, 13 Jan 1997 16:18:22 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA05496 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id HAA01235; Mon, 13 Jan 1997 07:18:06 -0800 Date: Mon, 13 Jan 1997 07:18:06 -0800 Message-Id: <32DA5162.1EBE@ix.netcom.com> Errors-To: madole@mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu