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Vanguard Boojum, v. 1, issue 1
9
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Vanguard Boojum page seven (... continued) rationalism. I would appreciate any further demonstration of the sophistry involved in this reasoning; it is a rare pleasure to encounter this kind of criticism. ... The argument as to whether or not EP is guilty has not been settled; he has been declared insane and unfit for trial, and no verdict as to his guilt can be rendered until he can be tried. I grant that he either is or is not guilty in a legal sense, and that this is a matter of jurists to judge; but I must continue to insist that my question -- "Do you think Ezra Pound should be imprisoned or otherwise punished for his wartime activities?' -- does not permit of so Aristotelean a a treatment. The law either may or may not be just in the great majority of cases, but I propose an ethical question with supporting extra-legal circumstances which simply does not permit of a lawyer's answer. I think you have come to a similar conclusion, if I interpret your "not a satisfactory answer for the purpose of your survey" correctly and that you may feel yourself unable to make an ethical judgment in the matter. If this is the case a refusal to answer the question is entirely in order; if not, a reference to the legal aspects of the business is simply an avoidance. Perhaps it will curlily the argument if I rephrase my question: In your personal system of ethics, was EP right or wrong in sticking to his political course regardless of patriotic allegiances? This is a loaded question I have tried hard to avoid, which may be the reason why we have become involved in the present argument, but I see no other way to ask for the essentially moral judgment which my poll was designed to elicit. ... The word "technical" in my phrase about judging music is inexcusably inaccurate, as the rest of the "Wilderness of Mirrors" should make evident; this is what I get for spluttering. The standards to which I referred have almost nothing to do with technique per se. The really unfortunate thing is that there is no way to answer your objection without outlining the standards themselves, which is too long a job for me to undertake now. I hope the following may serve as a partial sunstitute! Probably you saw -- twice -- my answer to the question Chan Davis raised in Blitherings about the nature of meaning in music. I published in Afterthought a summary of some very familiar musical symbols, which by a process I described in the same excerpt, have now come to have objective meaning for the experienced listener. My list was skeletal; the number of such symbols reaches into the five hundreds as closely as I can estimate them. For solid composition our age, it is no longer satisfactory or aesthetically sound that a composer should simply rearrange these familiar, even banal, devices in a new order; if he is to hold the attention of the musically literate he must justify his use of them by providing for the listener some new connotation for them, some implication not implicit in the works of other men. Simple rearrangement theoretically should be one way of providing this new slant, but works which depend upon this method and no other -- works such as those by Elgar, Hanson, Damorsch, Taylor, Siegfried Wagner, etc. -- have not proven strong after the effects of this one device have become familiar, and apparently a more thorough exploration of the symbology is necessary to make a really solid piece of music. In other words, the ocmposer of stature is constantly "breaking away from previous standards" in that he is using proven materials fo this own purposes; the standards of which I spoke do not involve the rigid rules which apparently are your referents for the term "standards", but the very expectation that the serious composer will contribute some new insight to these rules, and, indeed, break them wherever the breakage contributes to communication. If you consult
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Vanguard Boojum page seven (... continued) rationalism. I would appreciate any further demonstration of the sophistry involved in this reasoning; it is a rare pleasure to encounter this kind of criticism. ... The argument as to whether or not EP is guilty has not been settled; he has been declared insane and unfit for trial, and no verdict as to his guilt can be rendered until he can be tried. I grant that he either is or is not guilty in a legal sense, and that this is a matter of jurists to judge; but I must continue to insist that my question -- "Do you think Ezra Pound should be imprisoned or otherwise punished for his wartime activities?' -- does not permit of so Aristotelean a a treatment. The law either may or may not be just in the great majority of cases, but I propose an ethical question with supporting extra-legal circumstances which simply does not permit of a lawyer's answer. I think you have come to a similar conclusion, if I interpret your "not a satisfactory answer for the purpose of your survey" correctly and that you may feel yourself unable to make an ethical judgment in the matter. If this is the case a refusal to answer the question is entirely in order; if not, a reference to the legal aspects of the business is simply an avoidance. Perhaps it will curlily the argument if I rephrase my question: In your personal system of ethics, was EP right or wrong in sticking to his political course regardless of patriotic allegiances? This is a loaded question I have tried hard to avoid, which may be the reason why we have become involved in the present argument, but I see no other way to ask for the essentially moral judgment which my poll was designed to elicit. ... The word "technical" in my phrase about judging music is inexcusably inaccurate, as the rest of the "Wilderness of Mirrors" should make evident; this is what I get for spluttering. The standards to which I referred have almost nothing to do with technique per se. The really unfortunate thing is that there is no way to answer your objection without outlining the standards themselves, which is too long a job for me to undertake now. I hope the following may serve as a partial sunstitute! Probably you saw -- twice -- my answer to the question Chan Davis raised in Blitherings about the nature of meaning in music. I published in Afterthought a summary of some very familiar musical symbols, which by a process I described in the same excerpt, have now come to have objective meaning for the experienced listener. My list was skeletal; the number of such symbols reaches into the five hundreds as closely as I can estimate them. For solid composition our age, it is no longer satisfactory or aesthetically sound that a composer should simply rearrange these familiar, even banal, devices in a new order; if he is to hold the attention of the musically literate he must justify his use of them by providing for the listener some new connotation for them, some implication not implicit in the works of other men. Simple rearrangement theoretically should be one way of providing this new slant, but works which depend upon this method and no other -- works such as those by Elgar, Hanson, Damorsch, Taylor, Siegfried Wagner, etc. -- have not proven strong after the effects of this one device have become familiar, and apparently a more thorough exploration of the symbology is necessary to make a really solid piece of music. In other words, the ocmposer of stature is constantly "breaking away from previous standards" in that he is using proven materials fo this own purposes; the standards of which I spoke do not involve the rigid rules which apparently are your referents for the term "standards", but the very expectation that the serious composer will contribute some new insight to these rules, and, indeed, break them wherever the breakage contributes to communication. If you consult
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