• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1040 0

we do not fully this did not happen. I have put it down to the inability of objects of disinterested plea sure. In actual experience, smells obliterate each other, while in memory they cannot be recalled in discrete as words or musical notes can. I’ve also pointed out that smells, despite their personal importance in creating moments of nostalgia, jogging memory, are not able to evoke or express strong emotions of we require from drama, music, literature, or painting. Despite obvious survival value, smell therefore never became the basis for high-art tradition—except that the “therefore” denotes no logical entailment but a series of contingent evolutionary events in human prehistory. our quirky prehistory had taken different paths, smell might have different place in modern human culture.

Pitched sounds, however, became the basis for a great art form having no survival implications whatsoever. While I am persuaded the plausibility of Darwin’s speculations about mating cries being somehow involved in the origins of music, to trace a continuous route from primordial calls to The Art of the Fugue will never be possible. Moreover, annexing music wholly to the procreative interests in the sexual selection suggests misses a great deal of the art itself as understand it today. Yes, music and dance have clear relevance courtship. Yes, lovers do sing for each other in some folk traditions, though today lovers sing mostly as characters in opera, musicals, Bollywood gush: the love song appears in dramatic perperformances rather more often than in direct, one-on-one acts of seduction. Much music-making is communal on a large scale (chorus or orchestra before a large audience), whereas love-making remains cross-culturally a private transaction. (In fact, today I’d guess that lovers are more likely to speak pseudo baby talk among themselves, or trade poems, than to sing each other.)

To further complicate matters, for many music minds, a major attraction of music today lies not in its communal dance potential or connections with love but in the emotionally staggering ways that it shifts harmonically. Admittedly, I speak here for myself and my own deepest experiences with music—beginning as a child listening over and over again to my parents’ Toscanini recording of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, especially the allegretto with its captivating key modulations. closing pages of Götterdämmerung or Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony sublime—are very late inventions in musical culture. How these acoustic phenomena came to so stir the mind—spontaneously, pleas urably, effortlessly—is another mystery of evolution.

Our aesthetic tastes and interests do not form a rational deductive system but look rather more like a haphazard concatenation of adaptations, extensions of adaptations, and vestigial attractions and preferences. They evolved to delight and captivate human eyes, ears, and minds—not form a logical system or make intellectual life easy for aesthetic theorists. Of course, many would prefer to believe that whatever we find beautiful is beautiful everywhere and for all time. In that spirit, the Louis Kentner once observed that if a Martian were ever to visit he ought to be presented with the Beethoven piano sonatas, as proof what our civilization is capable of. A lovely thought, but it does not survive a moment’s critical scrutiny. Had Kentner considered the density air on Mars and its effect on the evolution of ears? Would the Martians have any conception of arranging pitched tones into meaningful sequences? On the other hand, who can say that, given how they evolved, Martians might not be enraptured by the smells of Earth, succumbing to the charms of perfumers, the distinct odors of an insecticide factory, or a slaughterhouse? We may think that we made music for whole universe. In truth, we made music just for ourselves.

CHAPTER 10

Greatness in the Arts

I

The arts are not the only sources of plea sure in our lives, or even for majority the most important ones. People take joy in their hobbies, their families and pets, spectator sports,