Friday 9 July 2010

Play, Activity and Benjamin Britten

This music is Brittenesque. Britten used music as a playful activity to involve amateurs - particularly children. Few have done it so well or beautifully..

I've been reading Gadamer on Aesthetics in 'Truth and Method' where the aesthetic experience is always playful. But if it's play, what's the game? As a way of addressing this, I've just finished a paper for the American Society of Cybernetics on Music, aesthetic experience and memory where I suggest a mechanism which brings out Gadamer's idea by relating memory to an ecological relationship between 'viable people' (represented by the viable system model) and social and material structures represented by an 'atmosphere of communication' (using Luhmann's communication theory). Things that we do to our environment may have a transforming effect on our cognition, memory and human experience. What's the politics of this?

If memory and aesthetic experience is related to the relationship between individuals and their environment as this model suggests, how should decisions which transform that environment be taken?

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