%title More <em>Harmonielehre</em> quotes.
%date 2005-10-03 16:18:19
:diary:livejournal:fossils:

<lj user="senotay"></lj> might find these interesting, in regards to symbolism and crappy art classes.

For nature is also beautiful where we do not understand her and where she seems to us unordered.
[...]
[Order, clarity] are there by chance, not by law, not by necessity; and what we claim to perceive as laws [defining order and clarity] may perhaps only be laws governing our perception, without therefore being the laws a work of art must obey.  And that we think we see [laws, order] in the work of art can be analogous to our thinking we see ourselves in the mirror, although we are of course not there.  The work of art is capable of mirroring what we project into it.  The conditions our conceptual power imposes, a mirror image of our own nature (Beschaffenheit), may be observed in the work.  This mirror image does not, however, reveal the plan upon which the work itself is oriented, but rather the way we orient ourselves to the work.
[...]
Now even if one can assume with certainty that the observer will not see in the work of art something entirely different from what is actually in it - since object and subject do indeed interact - even so the possibility of misapprehension is still too great to allow us to say with absolute confidence that the presumed order is not just that of the subject.  All the same, the state of the observer can be ascertained from the order he sees.

- Arnold Schoenberg - <em>The Theory of Harmony</em> tr. Roy E. Carter

So I'm really digging this book, even if it is kind of a slow read (I'm only on page 30).  So many grand ideas are included that - unintentionally or no - tie music into philosophy and life, much the way I try to do myself.

Some sort of weird stuff going on with relationships (friends and otherwise).  I don't at all know what to do about them, so I'm going to wait a bit and see if things shift to a point where I can make a decision, however small.