Comparing Artists

On Jul 8, 7:26 pm, Elektra <CharlesHandel....RemoveThis@cs.com> wrote:

>I could name at least TEN forums where we have used lists as points
>of departure for discussion.....

So instead of listing "most beautiful baritone voices" for the 26th
time, start discussing.

Bill

What you said was

"Another problem is that the subjectivity really limits discussion.
The only possible responses to a "most beautiful" thread is "yes, he
is", "no, he isn't", or "why did you omit so-and-so?". There are
obviously such different views of "beauty" with respect to voices,
that discussion is almost meaningless. For example, while I think
that JC Thomas, Stracciari, and Tibbett were extraordinary singers
with impressive voice and techniques, I would never describe their
sounds as inherently "beautiful" in the same way I would Lisitsian or
pre-1950 Merrill."

I don't understand this at all. I don't see anything less subjective about
saying something is beautiful and saying that a singer is 'extraordinary' or
has 'an impressive voice and technique'.

There is no discussion without subjectivity, and saying that it 'really
limits discussion' is funny to me, although you don't mean it and I'm not
mocking you. It just seems very naive.

There's an apothegm in psychology and psychological testing that
intelligence is correlated with the capacity to make discriminations, and it
goes back to Wundt and Fechner and pyschophysiology, of which you may be
aware a bit, and forwards into intelligence testing etc. But the key is that
the discriminations are appropriate to the situation. It may be helpful (and
helpful to me) for someone to break down voices by specific categories, and
the ability to do that may or may not reflect intelligence, but the
categories themselves are subjective, and certainly our judgments about who
we put in there, or not, are entirely subjective.

I think a list of 4 or 5 has the potential at least to have some meaning,
because maybe there is something you can get out of it - though I generally
don't. A long list means nothing to me.



"wkasimer" <wkasimer RemoveThis @comcast.net> wrote in message
news:1183985995.635570.258620@k79g2000hse.googlegroups.com...
> On Jul 9, 4:09 am, "REG" <Richer... RemoveThis @hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Whee I disageee on this and your previous comment is the role of
>> 'subjectivity'.- I think that you strongly underplay the limitations of
>> 'subjectivity' and make a very articificial and misleading (in a generic
>> sense) distinction between aspects of judgment which are 'subjective' and
>> 'objective'. It's too long a discussion for this thread or maybe for
>> email
>> generally, where sound-bites rule, but I think that you ignore the
>> subject
>> element underneath any so-called objective discussion....some things are
>> 'objective', for example the year in which something was recorded, or the
>> key in which it is sung, but these descriptors are really a very
>> low-level
>> (from a philosophical point of view) kind of empiricism, and not really
>> objects of discussion very much (or shouldn't be).
>
> I'm really not sure how you arrived at that impression, REG. I've
> said before, here and elsewhere, that there is no such thing as
> "objective" criticism or "objective" opinions. As you say, the only
> things that are objective are "who, what, where, and when".
> Everything else is subjective. There is, however, a difference
> between being "objective" and being "fair" or "even-handed".
>
> And I do think that the objective facts, the "who, what, where, when"
> material, does help answer some of the more subjective career
> questions, such as "who was the most important singer of role X during
> period Y". And as you say, knowing the facts about a particular
> recording does place it into context, in order to allow an even-handed
> discussion of its merits.
>
> Bill
>
>
>