Monday, March 07, 2005
Form over Function
The MacLeish quote offeredy by Judith helps me to fuse together two seperate thoughts I've had percolating for a while now. I'll try to present them as a single coherent thought.
In both music and literature, it seems to me that we make three seperate aesthetic judgements at the same time: the surface of the work (in literature the beauty of the prose; in music the beauty of the melody, harmony, texture, etc); the underlying structure of the work (in literature the structure of the plot; in music the "form"); and the Meaning.
The vast majority of literature has all three. I would argue that the vast majority of music doesn't "mean" anything, and that the works that do only convey any meaning through the context in which the music is presented -- but we are obsessed with using the language of "meaning" in evaluating great musical works. (Think, for example, of the bogus but widely accepted suggestion that the opening motif of Beethoven 5 is "fate knocking at the door.")
So where's the literature that has no meaning or structure? Some of James Joyce sounds like it has no meaning or plot, but actually the point of his style is to have meaning but bury it. And why can't composers and critics get comfortable with the idea that music need not have meaning?
Or, to be fair, am I full of it? Couldn't we argue that the meaning is literature is also always contingent on context, so it's unreasonable to use the argument I've used? Or that literature has no meaning either? What the heck do we mean by "meaning" anyway?
posted by Galen H. Brown
12:00 PM
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