Music as tiers of concepts
A tangent to my reading in Rand’s ITOE, applied to music:
I played piano for my best friend when she was here just before Christmas. Her comment was, "I have no idea how you remember all those notes." Truth is, I don’t remember them. If you plunked the music down in front of me and told me to sight read it cold, I’d be screwed. Sure, I read the notes and memorized them initially, but now it’s to where I remember the shape of the chords, the position on the keyboard, the required movement from one to the next, and the associated sounds (before, during, and after), which together ensure I play the correct notes. They are totally subsumed under this umbrella of integration by experience.
Now I think, pairing these observations with a re-reading of her theory of concepts, that there’s a parallel between run-of-the-mill concepts, and music. If concept formation requires a collection of percepts from which you abstract the commonalities, yet discard the variations in those commonalities (what she calls measurement omission, generally speaking), that’s a lot like learning a chord by figuring out all the separate notes, and then integrating them into a whole, where all you have to do is remember the whole in order to remember the many. (This way you don’t "blow your crow"). And you do this iteratively - you take these integrated, conceptualized chords, and link them together into phrases, establishing the transition from one chord to the next, till you remember the phrase as a whole, and picking out a single chord requires mentally disassembling the phrase. And on and on, abstractions on abstractions, conceptions of conceptions, till the whole piece becomes folded within a few key concepts that act as starting points, all within your crow.
Because there’s no way I could ever remember all those notes, even though I can play them no problem. Problem solved :o)
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