Dear Byron,
Thanks for sending this link. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Stockhausen
I am continually struck that “one man’s sauce is another man’s poison.”
Although my reaction may be entirely emotional/visceral, I tend to side with Aristotelian aesthetics that there are objective “criteria for beauty,” and that if all these criteria are thrown to the wind, what remains is ugly. (The building that houses Cal Berkeley’s Architecture faculty is a case in point.)
What I’m trying to describe is rather like the dog-eared definition of pornography as “difficult to define, but you’ll know it when you see it.”
In this “mix,” it is perhaps instructive to contemplate the fact that absolute zero exists, but there seems to be no upper limit for heat.
Something similar seems to apply to chile peppers, and the limit - “waaayyyyy out there,” beyond which chiles are no longer gustatorially “beautiful.”
Indeed, it appears that “The Chile Pepper Limit” delineates the border between “the conceivably tasty,” and the humanly unbearable, if not the pathological.
It can be argued that, beyond a certain limit every substance is intrinsically toxic; and consequently, “Drowning is death by an overdose of water.” (Less mischievously put, human beings die when they drink enough water to lethally “scramble” their electrolyte balance.)
Having said all this, I marvel at the instructiveness of John Cage, who came on stage one evening, pushed back his tuxedo coat tails, sat down at the grand piano bench, struck one key… and after 38 minutes (?), stood up and left.
Does music only arise from the interval between notes?
Or, might “perfect” music be the adept utterance of “Om”?
“Not only is the universe queerer than we suspect, it is queerer than we can suspect.” 20th century British astrophysicist, J.B.S. Haldane
PS I forget what I was going to say, but trust me, it was the pièce de résistance!
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