1. L05-421-15-10-14-15 1.Time at the end for group updates and scores. On emails, please don’t copy me in on every exchange, but contact me if there is something you need from me, or something that it appears to you I ought to know. 2.Writing Logs: If you missed turning yours in, shift your group—i.e., turn it in this week as a member of group 2. 3.Preparing for the papers. General: *For the paper on poetry, the topics will focus on Williams’ Spring and All, and Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. The main point is that reading either book once will not suffice. *For the paper on music, you are to select either one of the two or three part inventions by Bach, or a coherent section from either Quartet 14 or Quartet 16. In each case, the general assignment will be to write about the selection you have made, with reference to the score. Plan on listening to the recording on line, following it exactly with reference to the score, at least 100 times. In neither case (poetry or music) is the point for you to affirm that or explain why you like it: choosing it already covers that. The point is to examine how it works. That, moreover, does not stipulate any specific analysis of the composition: how it works includes what it does. There is no expectation that you will bring yourself up to speed as a musicologist: the point is to learn to read a score with functional intelligence, and to write from what you have actually learned from doing so.

2. Mediation... The diagram from Monday focuses on a very general process of mediation: it presupposes that there are characteristic states of a system, with particular purposes and consequences. The topic-comment structure already implies an intent of intelligibility. That is, it is a pathway of understanding. In the case of natural language, the subsystems already identified—semantics, syntax, grammar, rhetoric (and exploration)—do not stand alone, but can be discerned as having particular mediating functions considered as terms of relation. These comprise an open set—i.e., the closure of the system arrives as an event or experience: intelligibility, but not as a separate product. Thus, when I say that words do not have meaning, but rather a structure, a history, and a range of uses, to search for a “meaning” as if it were a property of the element or expression in which it appears is always systematically misleading. The expression is meaningful if you actually understand and comprehend it as following from it’s structure. In that sense finding something meaningful is always functional. At the same time, it is also necessarily formal. It is NOT idiosyncratic—and it is never the case that one can say that composition X means whatever I think it means. The issue is not getting it absolutely right by reduction to another statement of its “meaning,” but to recognize where your own comprehension is insufficient. Getting it ‘right’ is not scoring a point: it is being on a pathway that actually leads somewhere.

3. And Music The first obvious difference with music is that it has no manifest semantic register. The elements all exist relationally. They cannot be seen, touched, tasted, or smelled, but they can be made manifest. It is, in this respect, one of the most abstract, most philosophical system of mediation we possess. It dwarfs mathematics—which arguably could be treated as a subset of music. As a system for mediation, therefore, it is complex—even as it is as primary as our ability to learn language. Indeed, musical mediation, depending on hearing sense, can be treated as foundational for learning an explicit verbal language. Music is the ground. It follows that precision in the ground is the condition for intelligibility itself. From the powerpoint for yesterday (which, typically, we did not get through in class time): Three HUGE problems: 1.‘Self’  ‘Selfhood’  Narcissism  Solipsism  the trivialization of the person. 2.Opinions and Rights. If we have consensus on either, it is historical. It is not grounded in any absolute freedom. If you think you are THE agent of history, you are dangerously deceived. ‘Everyone is entitled to their own opinion’ Yup. But only because there is no way to prevent any person from forming one. Does that entail that just because an opinion is yours that it is therefore valid? 3. Agreement, assent. Do you ‘like’ what you are reading? (what grounds that?) Do you agree with what the author says? (how would you know if you cannot read it accurately?) If you don’t understand it, what are you agreeing (or disagreeing) with?

4. Pythagoras & Plato The Timaeus –as close as Plato got to a cosmology: How, precisely, is the universe constructed (poesis). The problem of agency and purpose is matter for a longer discussion, but it is manifest in FORM. The ‘Five Platonic Solids’ (grnd: plane figures, starting with triangle & circle)

5. Division by Proportion See Dechand, on the website under TEXTS. Bear in mind that this procedure is a whole generation prior to Euclid. The basic strategy used by the Demiurge is to mark out proportional divisions of number (taking the initial range between 1 and 2, extending to 27 (powers of 2 and 3) Divisions alternate between arithmetic means ((a + b)/2 ) and harmonic means (2/(1/a + 1/b). In the first: The arithmetic mean of 1 and 2 is 3/2. 13/22 In the second: The harmonic mean of 1 and 2 is 4/3. 14/32

6. Combining the two kinds of means in a single diagram 14/3 3/22 (x 9/8) Filled out: 19/881/644/33/227/16243/128 2 (x 9/8) (x 9/8) (x 256/243) (x 9/8) (x 9/8) (x 9/8) (x 256/243) DIVIDES THE SPACE INTO 8 parts (Octave) The peculiar fraction identifies a SEMI TONE The result is two TETRA-CHORDS

7. TETRA CHORDS

8. Tonal systems Diatonic (Octave 8,plus semi tones) Whole, whole, half / whole /whole, whole, half Pentatonic (5) The system: order of tones Major result: harmonic relations can move up or down by pitch and remain the in the same proportion

9. Scale degrees and chords Each degree (note in a scale) designates a chord. Scoring: Pitch: from the first (TONIC), each step up follows the two tetrachords. A half step can be either sharp # or flat b Transposition: start in a different place, and rearrange for half steps: A KEY signature Time: A “time signature” identifies the number of beats and the duration of each beat