Sunday, June 28, 2015

Continuity

Indeed there is an element of continuity with the past in every single aspect of modern life even if we don't noticed. In many cases, this can be tracked clearly way back, in many others, the actual connection is usually forgotten by most of us, generating the idea that something is supposedly new or random. Let's talk about something supposely random... anyone knows what is the standard train gauge? It happens to be exactly four feet and eight inches! It is also a perfectly reasonable width in its context, back from the time of the train development: in the begining carriages began to be made by.... horse carriage builders! The natural width to then use was the width of the standard horse carriage... rounded within the imperial units (which they have a lot of continuity stories on their own, beyond the scope of this argument anyway). How about language? I am not going to go in much detail here as we all (I hope) know about this etymology bussines, which helps to have good spelling and so on; for example, it turns that romans soldiers were paid with bags of salt hence the word "salary"... lots of this stuff can certainly fill an enjoyable trivia evening! A subtle language I am going to explore in a bit more detail here is the one of music, in particular, the way occidental music works. The main questions here: why a piece of music sounds "good" and another not quite good or bad? What is the foundation for modern music and how it is assessed as "good" or "bad"? It turns that this continuity bussiness has lots to do with it and reasons can be track easily at least to the Gregorian chant. This ancient form of music was originally designed to be sang by a human voice based on a written text. Melodies were in fact an extension on the inflections in the text and phrasing, pitches well defined by a singing voice. As a matter of fact, many centuries later, these simple constrains evolved into rules of good melody creation, and still we divide any melody (even those that are not to be sang but played by an instrument) in phrases and motives. In a nutshell, effective melodies are of course those easier to sing! So it turns that continuity somehow develops what is good or bad; godness what is been laid out by tradition, badness what wonders out too far from it. Having said that, little by little, things change; after all we don't compose Gregorian chants anymore! This is usually done in little unnoticeable steps since bigger steps wouldn't be allowed easily as Stravinsky's Rite of Spring proved at the beginning of 20th century. And the most important idea of this post, backed up by modern musicians: nothing really sounds bad! It is all a matter of getting used to new sounds, providing that there is an structure of a kind under (I give credit to the intention of making music! Long life to the structuralism!). In summary, I am pointing out something broader than music or languages here, as the concept of good or bad are linked with continuity. in that context, moral not just has the breadth of the struggle between subject and society (as claimed in a previous post), it has also the problem of context or continuity related to how a moral idea has evolved in a particular society.

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