From: Bill Spight (bspight@pacbell.net)
Date: Thu 07 Nov 2002 - 14:48:33 GMT
Dear Jeremy,
Bill B:
> >Think also of music. Plainsong (Gregorian Chant) has been important in the
> >Catholic liturgy for centuries. It was first written down in the 9th
> >century C.E. (thus beginning Western musical notation, albeit quite crude),
> >but had been around for awhile before that. Some scholars estimate that
> >perhaps as many as a third of the chants were taken over from Hebrew
> >liturgical music. These are old memes.
> >
Jeremy:
> I've been away for a week, sorry to take you back on this.
> Old memes they certainly are. For a start they are outcome based linear
> narratives.
What is an outcome based narrative? Thanks. :-)
> Then they contain culturally specific base notions of the great
> dualities, good/evil etc., and over the top of all that lies the great
> 'might-is-right meme'.
Was the Church militant at that point? In any event, I think that for
plainsong the relevant meme is "Not by might, nor by power, but by My
Spirit, saith the Lord of hosts" (Isaiah).
> I think that music may contain codified memes and have been vaguely
> interested in the memetic content of music since a friend, who was doing a
> Masters in music at the same time as I was studying narratives in
> traditional prose, observed that forest conservation protestors, in this
> country at least, favoured Celtic based music.
> As is well known, the Celtic Druids held trees to be sacred and my friend
> speculated that there may have been some underlying code in the music that
> 'called' to the modern forest conservationist.
Interesting idea! :-)
Best,
Bill S.
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