Truth Beauty Goodness Mar 1

We listened to the noises made by lots of mammals from North America courtesy of
the Audubon North American Mammals disk. Maybe we had to guess at a few but it
was pretty clear at least how large the animals were. My attempt was to bridge
the gap between song and noise. Where do we draw the line? Family resemblance
tells us what is a song and what is not but once we realize that line is a
result of our preference can we interpret the noise a buffalo makes as music?
Music at least to the buffalo? This discussion led to song - the human variety
and we listened to "When you're alone, you're not really alone," Charlotte
Church doing "Pie Jesu" followed by an interesting comparison with Sarah
Brightman doing the same piece - noticing her relative maturity and so a
different nuance in the prayer for pity from the Divine. From this we went to a
selection from Leonard Bernstein's Judaica album - from the Kadesh - or funeral
for President Kennedy. I selected the piece where the tenor yells at God - "Your covenant is tin!" Is this song? How about rap? While this is usually as far as Iwould go for this session some naturally brought up the question about poetry and what difference there was between that and song. I played with the idea that, at least with Shakespeare in "Much Ado About Nothing" the song "Sigh no more ladies" is a poem until the directions say it should be sung. We should be clear that we know what is song and what is not, what is poetry and what not, but we also should be clear how dependent we are on a muddling consensus that enables us to have such a sense of what is what.