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. . . There’s a
quotation, which I’m almost going to
end with, from Nelson Goodman. This is the kind of quotation that you’re
not likely to encounter very often from almost anybody in any field, and
since this was buried away in a small magazine article, I’d like to read
it to you. He says, “My argument that the arts must be taken
no less seriously
than the sciences is not that the arts “enrich” or
contribute something
warmer or more human, but that the sciences, as distinguished from technology,
and the arts, as distinguished from fun, have as their common function
the advancement of understanding.” Now that coming from a musician would
seem absolutely unwarrantedly pretentious. I can assure you that the understanding
of which he was talking here was not that kind of understanding which reduces
the rich manifestations, the rich ramifications, of musical relationships
to some mundane banalities, not some sort of many-one mapping of all those
wonderfully rich ramifications of musical relations to some sort of representation
of the world out there. What he meant was understanding, understanding
of music and understanding of a great many other things by a fairly obvious
process.
Milton Babbitt
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