Originally Posted by jadis

Having a perfect pitch has very little to do with one's musical ability or taste. Wagner, Schumann and Leonard Bernstein didn't have it, you and I do have it. Nuff said.

Identifying the notes helps you a lot in basic solfege, which is why it's so highly prized by music teachers who work with beginners, and it allows proud moms to fantasize that their precious darlings are musical geniuses. Being able to identify individual notes has nothing to do with the way in which these notes go together, which is where music comes in. Nothing to do with being able to compose or perform, no more than winning a spelling bee has any relation to being a talented writer.

Your preference for euphonious, bland, non-offending sonorities has to do with many factors, i.e. cultural, temperamental, generational etc. The absolute pitch is an acoustic factor, not even a musical one.



He's a snob alright in the sense that he tries to ape the tastes of those he perceive as his superiors in the hope of passing himself off as one of them. I agree that he has atrocious taste though.




In my experience it only hindered me in those things. I had a cheat code when it came to solfege/music theory, unlike those who actually had to memorize and understand chord sequences. There were kids who were so much better than me at both improvising and sight reading on the piano despite me having both the perfect pitch and higher technical facility due to starting early and studying with Soviet teachers.

Originally Posted by jadis

As you have such a devastatingly low opinion of deconstruction, I expect you can tell us what it is, beyond how bad it is. We all know and agree that it arose from the so-called “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the social sciences, specifically from the preeminence of Saussurian linguistics in the 1960s as the general theoretical model for the study of social phenomena. Why don’t you explain to us in general terms what was the big thing about Saussure and what were Derrida’s points of departure from that model, what were his major critiques of Saussure and Levi-Strauss.