I believe I've mentioned that I currently am taking a philosopy-esque class. It is aesthetics. We haven't focused only on music, yet. That will come later in the semester. We're currently still defining art. or is it, Art. Ah, the Art of Semantics.
We had an interesting discussion about classificatory, evaluative and derivative terms. This is coming from an essay by George Dickie. In helping to clarify the difference between the said terms, we applied the three to Latter-day Saint.
Classification: your name is on the rolls of the church
Evaluative: You are abiding by the morals of the church
Derivative: You seem to be a Mormon
In my head, I began thinking of all the fun stereotypical mormon-isms that people feel that sufficient means to being member of the Latter-day Saint faith.
The one talked of in class was clean cut. My favorite head comment was saying things such as "fudge." Feel free to add your own.
I hope that I have understood the 'derivative' idea well enough. I suppose I should re/read the article again before Friday so all makes more sense.
Although, we did attempt to define music. Dickie also suggests that (showing his bias towards the visual arts. How typical. :) ) That true art is an artifact. This is the part that needs even more clarification. Yet, I wanted to get the idea out there for those faithful few. Is music the score, or the CD? (I think these questions apply to literature as well for those not so musically inclined.) Does something need to exist for it to be music?
Needless to say, I try not to dwell too long on the thoughts posed in class, or I'd be up late every night trying to answer the unanswerable.
1 comment:
Not that I'm a philosopher or studier of aesthetics, but even if we define music loosely as something that we listen to or even just hear, doesn't that mean that it exists?
Wait, is that John Cage I hear groaning?
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