literature and music

I just read David Abram's THE SPELL OF THE SENSUOUS. I nibbled at it over the
course of many months, so by now I've forgotten how it started! But a major
theme, at least at the end, is how the evolution of writing, from
pictographic to phonetic, is coupled to changes in how people perceive the
world and even the nature of their own existence. An earlier book that covers
similar territory is Walter Ong's ORALITY AND LITERACY.

Abram's book pushes me to think beyond its limits, to: how does the language
of mathematics, even more disconnected from sound, play a role in shaping the
scientific tradition and its objective, abstract, isolated stance with
respect to the world it studies?

The rise of science and mathematics and technology all seem coupled to
printing. I suspect mathematical notation would not suffer repeated copying
by uncomprehending hands.

Anyway, I suspect that improvisational or spontaneously composed music has
a relationship to written or pre-composed music which is analogous to the
relationship of oral to written language. The structure of much improvised
music does seem to resemble the structure of oral poetry such as Homer's
great epics, where there are a lot of short figures of speech that can be
assembled in various ways to fit both the poetic meter and the story line.

I don't know much about music, never mind the history of the writing of
music, but I suspect that the rise of printing had a large influence on what
music was written, how it was written, etc.

Another analogy - maybe changing from figured bass to explicitly written out
bass is a bit like the addition of explicit vowel marks to Hebrew?

Just now I'm listening to Sun Ra's OTHER PLANES OF THERE. Pre-composed?
Spontaneous? Awesome!

Jim


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