At 12:39 PM 12/19/99 -0500, Arnie Cox wrote:
>A couple of points to go with Bill Benzon's.
[snip]
>
>2. Susan McClary's work is very helpful in understanding meaning
>construction in music, but one aspect that I don't think her work addresses
>are the more basic motivations and constraints prior to, or at the original
>moments of, the explicit association of words and music. As Bill suggested
>with Disney's _Fantasia_ (if I'm not taking it too much farther than he
>meant), we are not free to make any old associations we fancy (or we are not
>really free to fancy any and all associations)
This is fine with me.
> - and this is not just
>because of the codes that already exist. We have to look at the beginnings
>of opera, when composers were deciding which kind of music to write for
>which characters, in order to account for the logic of assigning certain
>sounds to certain events and characters (and of course we'll probably have
>to look earlier than opera).
Nor should we limit ourselves to explanations that ground this in nothing
but cultural convention. Manfred Clynes (_Sentics_, 1977) has done work on
the expression of emotion and on emotion in music that suggests there is a
biological substrate for gestures expressive of hate, love, anger, awe,
joy, sex, grief and others. These gestures are given in our biology though,
of course, subject to conventional overlay. This suggests that, in
assigning certain sounds to certain characters (and their actions), opera
composers were subject, not only to prior cultural conventions, but also to
biological constraints.
William L. Benzon 201.217.1010
708 Jersey Ave. Apt. 2A bbenzon@mindspring.com
Jersey City, NJ 07302 USA http://www.newsavanna.com/wlb/
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