Q&A: Qualities and Music
Qualities and Music
Question
Hello!
How does a new quality like a melody emerge from a collection of arbitrary notes, when each note by itself does not contain the melody? Is this similar to the property of “liquidity” that emerges from molecules (where, seemingly, one would have to say that they possess the property of liquidity, unlike, for example, a soul, which is an essential quality different from a collection of material particles)?
Thank you very much!
Answer
That is an interesting connection. I would relate it more to the relation between frames and dynamics, which I discussed in my last three columns. Each note on its own is a frame, and their combination one after another creates something dynamic that has a quality of its own. This is an excellent example of the phenomenon I dealt with there. On further thought, it is not really similar to liquidity, because here I myself construct the music from the individual notes (I decide on the order and the relations between them, and on the rhythm and tone, etc.). With liquidity, there is a collection of identical molecules that accumulate together without my arranging them, and the accumulation itself creates something with properties of its own. Music is more similar to an organism (as discussed, for example, in my column on the labor of building on the Sabbath) than to a liquid.
I would connect this to something more precise, in my opinion.
Zeno’s paradox about the point and the line.
A line, according to the geometric definition, is made up of points.
But:
A point has no length — it has no size, no dimension.
If so, how can it be that if we take several points that have no size, we create something that does have size (a line)?