[Lyta_Underhill]

Science is the business of predicting and describing data. Art is the business of producing certain desired responses from the human mind (I would say it is the business of producing aesthetic pleasure).

Certainly that is a good argument for their differences, but, call me super-old-fashioned, I tend to believe in the basic aims being very similar if not the same. The art in science to me lies in the description, the elucidation, the mathematics, if you will. Certainly it behaves according to strict laws, but these laws are ever changing, ever being refined. That, to me, is an art, even though its roots are strictly governed by mathematics (in itself an exercise in aesthetics, as I myself have experienced upon finding an elegant solution to a bothersome infinite series equation once upon a time or seeing an even numbered solution to a stoichometric equation, or a neat row of final derivations of the Schrodinger equation (or when I managed to get all the signs right in a circuit diagram, which was RARE!). Anyway, I suppose my point is that there is aesthetic value in science and always room for expansion into the unknown by careful steps. The aim may be different from the fine arts, but I believe the pleasure is essentially the same.

Certainly one could call such a sequence of sounds "music". But if one did this, one would also have to be willing to call a book containing the equations for superstrings "literature".

One could make this claim, although it would be out of the mainstream. But, if one's tastes ran to an evening's contemplation of elegant equations rather than a good story, then one could call it literature.

I don't think the Ainur were supposed to be encoding equations, based on some post-modernist idea about how to construct music. That is, within the context of Tolkien's legendarium, putting the cart before the horse. They were simply creating music - art - and the world formed thereby is thus fundamentally an artistic one.

Perhaps the main problem here is that our definitions of the functions of the Ainur seem to be different. I do not mean to say that they are literally scientists of different disciplines and they are translating equations, but that each one's part in the Music is analogous
to the specialist in a particular overreaching field, such as physics as a whole is. It is not a literal comparison but an analogy. Each has specialized in a particular theme of the overall Music; none has full knowledge of it except Eru Iluvatar. Who is to say HOW they made the Music, though? Indeed how can one assume that this music is literally related to our own understanding of what is traditionally known as music? I wonder if it is more related to the abstract "Music of the Spheres?" (I'm not too familiar with this concept, however, if someone else would like to take that up.)

Instead of the natural world creating humans, who develop art, Eru created the Ainur, who developed art, which created the natural world.

So perhaps our world is completely opposite to that drawn by Tolkien through the Ainulindale and forward? Interesting idea, if you posit that humans are the ones who develop art. In my own (admittedly crackpot!) view, much of art is already there and is simply uncovered by Man, just as physics is the uncovering of the ever-present nature of the Universe, which was there long before anyone arose to attempt its description. I've also been known to espouse the view that the very behavior of the Universe is influenced by our attempts to view it, keeping a complete explanation, in effect, just out of reach in some cases.

Thanks for a lively discussion, Aiwendil! Always a pleasure! Forgive my admitted shortcomings in certain areas!

Cheers,
Lyta

EDIT: I missed your post Amarie, while prattling on with my own! But your point is a good one:

how it is possible to sing without time? Music, at least, the kind of music we can understand, needs time to be produced.

Perhaps this would speak to the Music being fundamentally different from music as we understand it then? Or perhaps we simply cannot imagine music without meter. In a way, I believe it would be so overwhelming, with the themes rising and falling and interweaving all together, that a mere mortal such as myself could not bear to 'hear' it in its fullness.

[ November 19, 2003: Message edited by: Lyta_Underhill ]