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Thank you for your interesting comment and the links.

I still wonder if you could elaborate a little bit more. It seems to me that we speak about different things.

I am glad you brought up the Bob Dylan's music as an example. I agree that for him the music was an effective tool to pass his emotions and experiences to a listener. However his main tool is his lyrics and we cannot separate it from his music.

A good argument for that is that Bob Dylan isn't popular or well-known in the non-english speaking countries. I would say it is because his music isn't expressive without the lyrics. He wasn't a musician in the sense Beethoven was, he was rather a modernized poet.

This is the difference between Bob Dylan and "classical music" we discuss in this thread. My point is about where we need to place Beethoven music as an intellectual activity. I say it is different from written art, science or discussion. These are methods for creative people to transfer their experience and understanding to other people.

Music (pure music) doesn't involve it literary, only indirectly. It involves finding sound patterns that are known to bring pleasure to a listener. Nobel but different.

There is no question that music brings pleasure to people's and specifically yours and mine life and it is an important part of the culture and I am certainly not arguing that people should stop listening to music.

Music definitely tells us a lot about the cultural evolution with time just as you argue. But cuisine and drugs consumption habits of the epoch (alcohol, cigarrette, opium) tells us a lot too.

I say classical music has more to do with wines culture than with, say, literature. It's chemistry in one case and the humans sharing ideas in the other.

Wines are fine but I think conscious decision to spend time to learn the good wines and then spend time indulging elaborately fine tastes is a little bit twisted one. Maybe just a personal attitude.

Feynman might illustrate my point more succintly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKTSaezB4p8&feature=playe...




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