The Myth of Greatness
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at the risk of being banned, I just want to point out that evolution and religion are not mutually exclusive. I'm Catholic and I dont believe God put the dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith.
just sayin...please go on with your debate
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In that case, who DID put the dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith???
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As I’ve gotten older, I’ve come to worry less about what is or isn’t “great.” Yes, you can point out, in a reasonably objective way, the cultural context and specific features of a given work, making a compelling argument for why you find it admirable and/or moving—but that still doesn’t guarantee you’ll convert someone else to your opinion. And why should it?
As for the word “great,” I suppose it does get tossed around too readily. But that’s pretty far down on the list of things that bother me.
As for the word “great,” I suppose it does get tossed around too readily. But that’s pretty far down on the list of things that bother me.
"Greatness is objectively overrated. Michael Haydn"
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the DINOUSAURS did, you silly goose!
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I won't be debating, as you said I'll get told off!
All people need to do is think about it a little and be open.
I don't know any Christian who believes "God put the dinosaur bones in the ground to test our faith"
A Catholic is not a Christian
private message me if you liked to argue
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no, I'll just pray for you
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That is an old but misguided argument that confuses cultural values with natural hierarchies. A society may need commonly-held cultural values to help bind it together, but those values are not hard-wired, permanent, inevitable and universal. That is why they differ so greatly in different societies and change over time. In modern society, there are profound differences in musical values and tastes, imo largely due to modern technology that allows easy immediate access to music from almost anywhere on Earth.
Beethoven's music is great indeed, but great in a specific cultural context, in which a sophisticated and highly developed style of music flourished. Even though most of us still live in a fundamentally European cultural context, nearly two centuries have now passed since Beethoven's time, and some immersion in his culture and sound world is usually needed to fully appreciate his work. That doesn't make it any less great.
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In China, Japan and South Korea apparently not.
Greatness doesn't actually mean much to anyone. What it does is to act as a better recommendation than something not-great, but try going up to most experienced audiophiles and tell them Bach is great. They will say "congratulations." The recommendation power of greatness is not that perfect or certain, and that's the truly objective part of this. The reason this is, is we're used to such a small circle informing us, but preferences in a field like music are so much more varied than we're used to experiencing here. Even if I hear something in classical is great, based on me studying it I won't necessarily agree with that comprehension. A harmonic tone sounds better than a dissonant tone, mostly, but applying standards to other aspects can become more problematic.
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Tonal music (which has been adopted in the vast majority of music as standard across the entire world) is based on natural hierarchies of pitch stability. A perfect cadence is as pleasant to the ear as sugar is sweet to the tongue. This is not a "cultural value", but a reality of physics and biological wiring. Music is a science! Compositions are not invented, they are discovered.
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As I've mentioned in several earlier posts, researchers have been trying to demonstrate your thesis using a variety of methods for centuries, to no avail. No surprise there, as the contrary view is quite convincing. See, Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XV (1956), 27-35; Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religion (1938). As Wittgenstein famously put it, "You might think that Aesthetics is a science telling us what’s beautiful — almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well."
Recently, researchers have tried to demonstrate the proposition that all music is based on universal principles using statistical studies. But that research has been inconclusive, if not supportive of the opposite conclusion. See Maris Fessenden, Why Music Is Not a Universal Language, Smithsonian, February 18, 2018: Why Music Is Not a Universal Language
More generally, many writers on the subject of aesthetics continue to try to chip away at the ideas of Weitz and Wittgenstein in this context various ways, and that is fair enough. But as far as I know they have yet to succeed.
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Nonsense. Ethical behavior and systems are to a significant extent products of evolution. They are adaptations with survival value for social species, including some non-human species.
Musicians in and from Asia have been immersing themselves in Beethoven's culture and sound world for many decades. I met and taught many who had been immersed since birth and were fluent speakers and writers of that musical language.
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What does my post have to do with universal aesthetics? Nothing. You do not prove the validity of scientific principles by looking around and into the past and seeing if those principles were universally agreed upon by all cultures! Nonsense. Quite the opposite. Historically, cultures have been dramatically wrong about practically everything. The principles of science are universal regardless of the nonsense the many cultures of the world coughed up to attempt to explain reality. It is wrong to think Beethoven didn't touch on the universal because other cultures produced a large quantity of music unlike (and worse than) Beethoven's. Those cultures were ignorant, less mature... less sophisticated.
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In THIS case it is the Canon in D that has mass appeal because it's great.
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My wife and I used to be the regular accompanist and song leader at a liberal church. This often meant we were also the soloists, and one time we sang the song Charlie (about Charles Darwin) by Chumbawumba. My wife wrote an additional very clever verse to bring the song 'round full circle:
So long we wondered just how God
The Universe created
Thank you, Charlie, for showing us
Exactly how God made it
Charlie’s theory and faith in God
Both are in alliance
God created both you and me
And God created science
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From everything I’ve read and heard from Asian musicians themselves, something comparable to ‘immersion in his (Beethoven’s) culture’ is not necessary ‘to fully understand his work’. The music itself resonated without some kind of need for familiarity with the western European culture. The seeds of classical music in China were to some extent ‘planted’ by Jewish violin-playing refugees (apparently starting in Shanghai) and people were slowly drawn to for a few decades after WW2. However, that was stalled during the years of the Cultural Revolution until the mid seventies. Thereafter, classical music, over the years, became surprisingly popular to this day.
Of course, given that that was a half century ago, there are Chinese children brought up in an environment where there is exposure to classical music. My main point is that IMO, there is something universal about classical music that transcends cultures. No indoctrination is necessary (not that you were inferring ‘indoctrination’).
(Fwiw, some of my experience came from working for years in the city in the Los Angeles area that became the main destination for Chinese in the mid 80s (just 10 years after the end of the Cultural Revolution). It started mainly with Hong Kong residents anticipating the return of Hong Kong to China in 1996. It was followed not long after by mainland Chinese. I actually had to learn a little Mandarin to get by in my work. Anyway, the children took to classical violin and piano like bees to honey.
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