Plato my favorite playwright

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Platomy favorite playwright
Jeffs connections for this presentation
A Context for music???
(mechanical) fruit

• Apocalypse
• A (the) Revelation in (through) An (the) End?

Reveal
How is a musical work revealed? What is the
context of revelation for music?
Created or Discovered ????
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Kivy initiates his defense of musical Platonism
by suggesting that musical works are kinds,
something like the Platonic ideals or ideas.
Performances are instances or occurrences of
the kind/idea/ideal, but they are not copies of
an original.
Peter Kivy The Fine Art of Repetition Essays in
the Philosophy of Music. Cambridge University
Press, NY, 1993. (excerpts) Chapter II pp.
35-58 Platonism in music A kind of defense.
To talk about a performance of a work sounds
very much as if one were talking about two
things the performance and the work, one of
which is standing in for the other, as in a copy
of the original. But a lion is not a stand-in
for a kind he is an instance of it. The
performance is an instance of the work, not a
substitute for it and to make a statement about
the work is to make a statement about its
instances.
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Kivy continues Margolis says that a work of art
cannot be a universal because in part it is
created. work cited within Later on, with
specific reference to music he intimates that
music cannot be a kind because it is clear that
music is actually invented, and, clearly, one
cannot invent or create a kind. I now want to
spend a few minutes at the seemingly impossible
task of convincing you that it would not be
wildly counterintuitive to construe musical
composition as a kind of discovery rather than
as a kind of creating or inventing. The
Wright brothers invented the airplane But in
order to do that, they had, as we now know, to
discover certain aerodynamic principles.(They
were not, it turns out, merely a couple of lucky
tinkerers.) Every invention is part discovery.
Edison had to discover the right material for a
filament, and that it burned more properly in a
vacuum, in the process of inventing the thing we
turn on and off at night. The reason we call the
end product of the Wright brothers and Edison's
activities inventions, and the activities
inventing, is that the thing they are remembered
for is something we think of as not having
existed before they started to work, and existing
after.
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But just as invention is part discovery,
discovery is part invention. Michelson
discovered the speed of light. To do this,
however, he had to invent what is now called the
Michelson interferometer Gödel discovered the
theorem which bears his name. But he had to
invent Gödel numbering to do it. We think of
the speed of light, or Gödels theorem, or
permutation groups, or what have you, as
discovered rather than invented because, of
course, although inventions may have made their
discovery possible, they were there all along,
and were not brought into being.
More Kivy
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I mention this to make it clear that, first, if
Mozart discovered his music rather than invented
it there was just as much complexity to his
discovery, just as much give and take between
discovery and invention, as there was to the
discovery of the speed of light by Michelson, of
the incompleteness theorem by Gödel, or
permutation groups by Galois and Abel. So I am
not necessarily suggesting that Mozart was not,
in part, an inventor or creator as well as a
discoverer. What I am suggesting is that it
may be more plausible to think of his works as
Platonic objects of some sort and, therefore,
things that could not have been brought into
being. But just as inventing is not all making,
so discovery is not all finding A discovery, of
any great complexity or significance, is
invention, or creation, as well.
Kivy Reveals The Musical Connection
Mozartsmusical works were NOT created! Or were
they?
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Kivy closes in ...
But surely, you will insist, this is not enough
for wasnt Mozart a creator in the paradigmatic
sense of that word? Wasnt he a creative artist?
Isnt music one of the creative arts? In
calling Mozart a discoverer, am I not taking more
away from him that intuition will allow? Well, in
one sense of creator, there never has been one
at all except the Lord God Jehovah himself. For
even Platos demiurge, a very creative fellow
from all accounts, didnt create ex nihilo. So
if Mozart must have been a creator, he was a
demiurge and not the Deity. But what
distinguishes him from any other sort of maker?
The operative word here is not creator but
creative." Surely Mozart was creative if anyone
was. He was as creative as, well, Michelson,
Gödel or Edison. Would you deny that they were
creative? It takes nothing away from Mozarts
creativity, in the important sense (or senses) of
the word, to think of Mozart as a discoverer
rather than as an inventor or creator. His
luster remains untarnished. In the company of
Newton, after all, one is hardly slumming.
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An original, creative discovery is not, in
the literal sense, the bringing into being of
what has never before existed , for then, of
course, it would not be a discovery in the
literal sense. It is the revealing, needless
to say, of what has always been there, but which
no one has yet had the genius and creative
imagination to see and it is all one whether the
discovery is a scientific or a musical one.
Kivy strikes the connection
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Just Jeff thoughts to finish So, art is
creatively discovered, but it is not created. It
is revealed, revelatory, revelational
apocalyptic? Does this mean well know what
art is only at the end of days? Does this
mean, in connection to A Clockwork Orange, that
art -) occurs of/from an ending? Which
ending(s)? -) is found only through a violence?
Is discovery a violent act? More or less
so than creation? -) exists beyond the
individual, the artist, the artisan? -) is
controlled by the others? None of us are
creators. Were merely creative. Isnt this the
power of a context? Arent our perceptions of
our own experiences and settings revealed through
the limitations which control our creative
discoverings?