[lit-ideas] Re: Persuasion Redux and Merry Christmas

>>I remain a crass emotivist: what is good is what makes me feel
good. Hence, the intelligibility and cogency of the metaphoric applications of logical concepts to that realm escape me.
Take F-minor. Listen to Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata 23 played by Glenn Gould, Artur Rubinstein, Walter Gieseking, the Vladimirs Pletnev, Horowitz, and Ashkenazy, Josef Hofmann, and Lazar Berman. Also listen to Sviatoslav Richter's RCA recording of the same piece from 1960.
One will persuade you to prefer it above the rest. Its persuasion will be convincing. The persuasion, that is the interpretation, will convince you. The method of the persuasion is not mere rhetorical sophistry, not a rallying cry, but an appeal to "universal and necessary 
principles and concepts individuating" that sonata.
Maybe you won't be persuaded by Richter. Maybe someone I haven't named will convince you, maybe Alfred Brendel or Eileen Joyce. Yet the interpretation that persuades you will offer the most convincing interpretation of the sonata for you. If, after this experiment, you listen to other versions of the piece, you will find yourself comparing it, almost involuntarily, to the version you are convinced is best.
The results can be verified empirically, but only by you, and hence cannot necessarily be replicated. It is a form of knowledge outside of empiricism or axioms. It resides in the subject, and depends, inter alia, upon what you value in sound, and how you understand the score.
Nevertheless, it is a form of knowledge, musical semantics, where persuasion is convincing. 

Vesyeloye Rozhdestvo,
Muzilkalnaya Vanta


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