**Links to**: [[Song]], [[Wreading and riting]], [[Read-write]], [[Musical notation]], [[Music as permanent revolution]], [[Repetition]], [[Imitation and adaptation]], [[Collective intentionality]], [[Double articulation]], [[Semantic attractor]], [[Evolution]], [[Degeneracy]], [[Redundancy]], [[002.1 Modulations]], [[Social Dissonance]], [[Bucal polycomputing]]. # ꂵꀎꌗꀤꉓ As Ian Cross notes (citing A. Seeger’s work in _Why Suyá sing: a musical anthropology of an Amazonian people_, 1987) there are plenty of musicolinguistic phenomena “where it is not easy—nor even desirable—to draw a distinction between music and speech.” (year, #todo). As covered in [[Song]]: we all sing, all the time. The rampant commodification of things like music and text, has, in a lot of senses, produced reduced versions of these generatively ambiguous, group-dynamics-amplifying events. In order to recover some of that amplification and generativity, which led to music perhaps being “the best thing we ever did”[^1] (Cross, year #todo), we should modulate and reinterpret what it would mean to _sing our texts_ (like Nietzsche said). Continue reading: [[Song]] and [[Music as permanent revolution]]. %% https://www.syncsci.com/journal/IJAH/article/view/IJAH.2021.01.002 https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/03/15/writers-on-music/ _________ [[Schopenhauer]] "Music … stands quite apart from all the [other arts]. In it we do not recognize the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is such a great and exceedingly fine art, its effect on man’s innermost nature is so powerful, and it is so completely and profoundly understood by him in his innermost being as an entirely universal language, whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself, that in it we certainly have to look for more than that *exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi* [“an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting”] which Leibniz took it to be… We must attribute to music a far more serious and profound significance that refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self." [[World as Will and Representation]] https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/28/schopenhauer-on-the-power-of-music/ __________ [[Nietzsche]] Music and Words ______ [[Dionysus]], [[Rhythm]], [[Music]]: the privileged art, the musicality of tones of pleasure and pain is the "universal substratum" that gave rise to language. "Therefore written language is even more limited in its power of expression than language spoken aloud, where the 'intervals, the rhythms, the pace and the stress are symbolic of the emotional content which is to be expressed'. So music is a necessary 'supplement' to words, which are 'the most defective signs there are', allowing them to express feelings." (p. 7, [[Sarah Kofman]] in [[Nietzsche and Metaphor]] about Nietzsche's "Über Musik und Wort".) [[Intelligence]], [[Music]], [[Listening]], [[Bootstrapping]] "Far from making music 'intelligible', images can only obscure it. For the votary of Dionysus--for him and his peers--music is intelligible by itself: thus it is 'an essential feature of Dionysian art that it takes no account of the listener'." (p. 9 [[Sarah Kofman]] in [[Nietzsche and Metaphor]]) Kofman continues, on p. 10: "To bring about this inversion in the hierarchy between the different symbolic spheres, making the sound a metaphor for the image, is to make bad music, like in opera: it is a downright abuse of power, 'as if one were trying to raise oneself by one's own bootstraps' ... This is what [[Nietzsche]] will later condemn in the music of [[Wagner]]: as a musician he was a rhetorician, making the music serve the text and seeking above all to be 'expressive', to give commentary on an idea using a thousand symbols, to stimulate the senses like a veritable Circe. Whereas 'good' music--Dionysian music--must make one dance, Wagmer's music seeks to make one swim and hover, shattering all unity of time and force (cf. CW 8; NCW, 'Wagner as Danger', 1). This musical rhetoric is no more a caricature of Dionysianism, a counterfeit, a piece of play-acting." %% ### Footnotes [^1]: Very indebted to Inigo Wilkins for first having pointed me to this particular work by Ian Cross, and very indebted to Cross for having produced it.