From the wikipedia entry on Fugue: "Bach had sufficient expertise that he could tell exactly what entrances could occur simply by hearing the first playing of a theme."
Interesting language: "what entraces could occur." I.e. some entrances can occur and others not. How were these determined? By the rules of counterpoint presumably. But are the rules of counterpoint complete, and exact? Nope. They arose organically from experience, but they still have the strange scent of universal truth; when you deviate from them, Bach winces, but so does everyone else in the room. Whether we were conditioned to wince is a question for another time.
So you have this set of near-truths that grew out of experience, and they're grab bag, but so what, maybe the fabric of reality is a bunch of grab-bag rules. Maybe god is a coder. I'm sure he had some switch statements in there before he was satisfied and typed "build world."
Or maybe god is a bridge player, and the rules he uses to get the job done are grab bag and drawn organically from his experience. The things that seem so arbitrary to us seem just as arbitrary to him too. When he makes a preemptive opening, and his god partner passes. he still pauses to consider how weird and special case this one little rule is, but how it works so damn well.
Or maybe god is a contrapuntist, and we're just a minor countersubject in the grand scheme of things.
Posted by Alan at September 17, 2006 07:09 PMFunny you say that music's sound ideal isn't conditioned. Just had a convo yesterday with my voice teacher in which she told me about a conductor that specialized in early music. His children were used to hearing the "straight" tone on strings. When the conductor held an impromtu reheasal with a modern work (maybe something Brahms?) his children ran down the stairs holding their ears. They weren't used to hearing vibrato on strings (something we take for granted now) and thought it sounded hideous.
I guess the logical extension of this is that if you grew up listening to Henry Cowell and late Shoenberg, you would think the tonal Bach was a monstosity.
PS-Bernac=great interpretation. I hate his voice. Gerard Souzay (a student of Bernac, and by proxy a good interpreter of Poulenc) is one fabulous baritone. Hint, hint.
As always, lahve.
Posted by: Eddy G at September 19, 2006 12:16 AMftp://ftp.cogsci.ed.ac.uk/pub/steedman/music/batat.ps.gz
Posted by: shellgame at September 19, 2006 11:45 AMAre you saying the universe operates on Worse Is Better principles?
Posted by: brennen at September 19, 2006 05:55 PMgod can grab my bag anytime he wants to
Posted by: jake at September 20, 2006 08:26 PMed: not so sure. i think vibrato might be an acquired taste. i remember disliking it. i see your point but do you think there are brains that dislike perfect 3rds and 5ths? discounting roderick usher of course. also i am going to agree, bernac sounds like a stuck irish pig. except, he is french.
shellgame: you do have a name. and it is not a long URN.
brennen: no, just that god maybe also tried and failed to find a Grand Unified Theory. or realized the beauty of imperfection.
jake: can, and does..."he's got the whole world, in his hands"
Posted by: alan at September 21, 2006 10:59 AMyou didn't like the new layout?
Posted by: asdf at September 22, 2006 01:09 AMthat was a denial of layout attack
Posted by: alan at September 22, 2006 09:13 PM