I find it disappointing that your clearly written argument was met with downvotes and ad hominem attacks. I expected more of HN.
I listen to music a lot. I might even be described as an audiophile. But I recognize music for what it is: a source of pleasure, relaxation and comfort, and a social glue. I don't feel the need to make pretentious claims -- that by listening to music, I'm learning about the history of humanity, human nature, mathematics, etc. Someone on a carousel might as well claim to be studying physics.
I would never in a million years claim that music is as valuable as philosophy or science. Music simply conveys no truths, except the most trivial truths: about itself, the composer, or (in a limited way) the times he lived in. Whatever Einstein might have said, Mozart is not his equal.
It's all good and well if you use music as a tool for achieving certain beneficial mental states, akin to wine or physical exercise. But spending a large chunk of your time studying classical works, composers, etc. is a horrendous waste of time, unless you are a composer yourself. It's like studying 17-century Russian iconography or the cuisine of medieval France. Pure intellectual masturbation. There are so many unsolved problems in this world that spending your mental energy on things with no practical significance is a criminal waste of intellectual resources.
tszyn, you have a LONG way to go before your claim that philosophy or science is "more valuable" than music to our culture. How would you go about proving that, anyway, given that nearly every colossus in 19th and 20th century science, mathematics, and business was/is an avid consumer or enthusiast of good music? Would you be willing to impart an experimental design, for example, in which you surveyed the careers of the top achievers and found a negative correlation between scientific or philosophical achievement and musical devotion? And with respect to Einstein, I'm not sure on what grounds you could gainsay Einstein's own assertion that Mozart's music informed his mental heuristics for describing the cosmos. And I would challenge you to make a well reasoned separation of Wittgenstein (the most important figure in 20th century philosophy) from his music. Music informed Wittgenstein's highly influential philosophy of language: "Understanding a sentence is more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think. What I mean is that understanding a sentence lies nearer that one thinks to what is ordinarily called understanding a musical theme" (Philosophical Investigations remark 527). Again, on what grounds can you gainsay Wittgenstein? It's a matter of FACT (we like facts here on HN, don't we?) that music, by the mouths of these geniuses and creators played a critical role in the formation of these thinkers' aesthetic values and motivations.
"Einstein's own assertion that Mozart's music informed his mental heuristics for describing the cosmos"
Sounds like Star Wars :)
Could you please refer me to the origin of this citation? Google gave no immediate results. I am asking not for the sake of the argument, I am genuinely interested.
Here's an article imparting Einstein's obsession with Mozart, along with the similarities between what Einstein said about Mozart's music and his own idea of the cosmos.
More can be found in the Issacson biography of Einstein, which I don't presently have on hand. Mozart's music seems to have convinced Einstein that whatever theory ultimately successfully described the cosmos would have to have a grace, succinctness, and beauty that corresponded to the grace, succinctness, and beauty of Mozart. In the case of Einstein, as I am sure you are aware, this worked to his advantage and against it; for it when he discarded superfluous ad hoc physical constructions such as the luminiferous ether in favor of c's constancy, and of course against it when he constructed the cosmological constant to satisfy his intuition that the universe was eternally static. You can say that his interpretation of Mozart's music as perfect, succinct, and eternal could have simply been a matter of his subjective feelings on the matter, and of course I would agree with you. However, I'm not sure that music's subjective nature necessarily negates its usefulness as a model for mathematical aesthetics. If Beethoven pleases me, I'll look for solutions that satisfy me in a similar fashion. If those solutions work, they work, and nobody has grounds to gainsay my assertion that musical aesthetics informed my judgment.
I listen to music a lot. I might even be described as an audiophile. But I recognize music for what it is: a source of pleasure, relaxation and comfort, and a social glue. I don't feel the need to make pretentious claims -- that by listening to music, I'm learning about the history of humanity, human nature, mathematics, etc. Someone on a carousel might as well claim to be studying physics.
I would never in a million years claim that music is as valuable as philosophy or science. Music simply conveys no truths, except the most trivial truths: about itself, the composer, or (in a limited way) the times he lived in. Whatever Einstein might have said, Mozart is not his equal.
It's all good and well if you use music as a tool for achieving certain beneficial mental states, akin to wine or physical exercise. But spending a large chunk of your time studying classical works, composers, etc. is a horrendous waste of time, unless you are a composer yourself. It's like studying 17-century Russian iconography or the cuisine of medieval France. Pure intellectual masturbation. There are so many unsolved problems in this world that spending your mental energy on things with no practical significance is a criminal waste of intellectual resources.