Category
Music & literature
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Mozi was wrong about music, but his question about it still stings
I play cello in a chamber ensemble in Seoul and teach children. I recently read the Mohist chapter "Against Music" and I can't stop arguing with it in my head. Mozi's argument, as I understand it: ordinary people have three great worries,…
Started by Moon Ha-eun0 replies83 views -
How can a piece of music be sad when it has no feelings to have?
I design puzzle games, and we have just finished the soundtrack for our new one. In the final level the player has to leave a companion character behind, and our composer wrote a slow piece for it. Playtesters keep telling us the…
Started by Huang Wei-ting4 replies160 views -
Reading group: Wimsatt and Beardsley, then Barthes, then Hirsch on who owns a text’s meaning
My after-school reading circle keeps asking whether a story means what the writer meant, so I am going to read the three classic essays properly, and I would love company here. Week 1. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy"…
Started by Keisha Monroe6 replies216 views -
Playing at a funeral: han, Schopenhauer, and why sad music helps the grieving
Last month I played the sarabande from Bach's fifth cello suite at the funeral of a student's grandmother. I have played it many times, but never for people in the first days of grief. Afterwards the family thanked me in a way…
Started by Moon Ha-eun4 replies166 views -
What is music for? Xunzi, Plato and my parish choir
I play the organ at a parish church in Kraków and teach music theory at a secondary school. Every Sunday I see music do something to a congregation that a sermon can't, and I want to know what philosophers have thought that…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies183 views -
A translator cannot afford to be an anti-intentionalist
I translate novels from German and English into French, and I want to defend a thesis that my academic friends find naive: translation makes anti-intentionalism impossible in practice, whatever its merits in theory. Here is why. Every page forces choices the source…
Started by Claire Dubois5 replies181 views -
Should a struggling state pay for music? Mozi and Xunzi’s quarrel
More than two thousand years before modern arts-funding debates, the Mohists argued that music wastes what the poor need, and Xunzi replied that a society without music cannot hold together. Both were partly right.
Started by Chen Yuting0 replies56 views -
Reading group: Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful, chapter by chapter
Eduard Hanslick's Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854) is short, polemical and still the book every philosopher of music has to answer. I teach music theory and play the organ, and I have argued with it for twenty years without reading it straight through with…
Started by Agnieszka Malinowska5 replies273 views -
My lecturer says the poet’s own explanation doesn’t count. Where does that idea come from?
In a seminar last week we were reading a Malayalam poem by a living poet, and I brought in an interview where she explains what one of the images means. My lecturer listened politely and then said that what the poet says…
Started by Kavya Menon4 replies202 views -
Ji Kang argued that music holds neither sorrow nor joy, sixteen centuries before Hanslick
My taiji group practises to recordings of the guqin, and one morning someone asked whether the music was sad. I said what my father would have said: sound has no sorrow or joy. It turns out that is not just my father's…
Started by Liu Jianguo4 replies122 views -
Reading group: Mozi’s “Against Music” and Xunzi’s reply, with the Analects as prelude
The oldest sustained argument I know about whether art is morally good for us took place in warring-states China, and it deserves to be read in full rather than in a footnote. I propose three weeks. Week 1. The Analects on music.…
Started by Chen Yuting5 replies190 views -
Novels give us moral knowledge that no argument can deliver
I teach eleventh-grade English, and every year I watch the same thing happen. Students who have heard every argument about slavery, its cruelty, its injustice, its economics, read Toni Morrison's Beloved and come out changed in a way the arguments never managed.…
Started by Keisha Monroe5 replies225 views