A lovely, and somewhat convoluted, essay by Charles Rosen in the current New York Review of Books about language, music, art, and freedom: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/may/10/freedom-and-art/.
After pithily observing how confining language can be:
"Of all the constraints imposed on us that restrict our
freedom—constraints of morality and decorum, constraints of class and
finance—one of the earliest that is forced upon us is the constraint of a
language that we are forced to learn so that others can talk to us and
tell us things we do not wish to know."
Rosen argues that the the meaning-indeterminacy of the arts, and in particular music, give us latitude for innovation and play:
"The partial freedom of, and from, meaning that is the natural result of
aesthetic form is made possible by the exploitation of an inherent
fluidity, or looseness of significance, naturally present in both
language and social organization. This is a freedom often repressed, and
attempts at repression and conformity are an inevitable part of
experience. That is why aesthetic form—in poetry, music, and the visual
arts—has so often been considered subversive and corrupting from Plato
to the present day."
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2 comments:
Rosen's remarks about infant language acquisition are pretty stupid, or perhaps I mean tendentious, from a developmental/cognitive science POV.
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