Yeah, I seem to be doing that a lot, lately :-( Sorry about that.
and indeed, different musical traditions around the world have different tone scales, different ideas about what constitute good lyrics, rhythm, et cetera...
Is this actually true ? I was under the impression that there were a handful (maybe as few as two, IIRC) tonal scales that persist across cultures, but I could be wrong. Lyrics are another matter entirely, and are probably out of scope for this discussion, as they are closer to literature than to music.
...but that doesn’t make any instance of the symbols or tokens of trade-balance valuable unto themselves.
No, but it does mean that there’s something else besides social consensus that governs the value that people place on these currency tokens.
...you should taboo the word “arbitrary” here.
Fair enough.
My point is that, if the measure of quality that we assign to a piece of music is completely independent on any properties of that piece of music, as the original commenter seemed to be suggesting, then it makes no sense to even recognize music as a discipline. And I argue that the reverse is also true: if we are willing to claim that music is a thing, and that some pieces of music are better than others in some way, then these pieces of music must possess some properties which are relevant to their quality. It would therefore be possible—just as an example—to identify these properties, and to predict whether a given piece of music will be successful or not.
Note that such properties need not be completely objective, in a way that mass and length are objective. They just need to be relatively stable within our current culture.
Yeah, I seem to be doing that a lot, lately :-( Sorry about that.
Is this actually true ? I was under the impression that there were a handful (maybe as few as two, IIRC) tonal scales that persist across cultures, but I could be wrong. Lyrics are another matter entirely, and are probably out of scope for this discussion, as they are closer to literature than to music.
No, but it does mean that there’s something else besides social consensus that governs the value that people place on these currency tokens.
Fair enough.
My point is that, if the measure of quality that we assign to a piece of music is completely independent on any properties of that piece of music, as the original commenter seemed to be suggesting, then it makes no sense to even recognize music as a discipline. And I argue that the reverse is also true: if we are willing to claim that music is a thing, and that some pieces of music are better than others in some way, then these pieces of music must possess some properties which are relevant to their quality. It would therefore be possible—just as an example—to identify these properties, and to predict whether a given piece of music will be successful or not.
Note that such properties need not be completely objective, in a way that mass and length are objective. They just need to be relatively stable within our current culture.