Are your systems more Plato or Aristotle?

Shubertmaniac, I'm with ya, as I've been overdosing on playing a lot of Schumann on my piana lately, and do miss the "there" there of Schubert. But "historicity"? I'm afraid you let me down with that one....

Subaruguru: Historicity is not in the sense of sucessive events through time. But rather as a means in which within a specific tradition (ie Romanticism) an occurrence of the qualitatively new transpires; it is not a movement through time in which there is mere identity or reproduction of what has always been, but rather one in which the new occurs (ie chromaticism of Wagner or Mahler). Of course this is mediated by its opposite, the term "nature", which is being or "sein" as predetermined, in "essence" it is the "substance" within history. It is static, timeless and unchanging. However after reading the works of Adorno, the triple threat of musicologist, dialectical philosopher, and marxist sociologist, Nature or "natural" is not static or timeless as mediated through its opposite, history. If you take one of Adorno's pet topics: musical materials, and using his dialectical process you see that nature is nothing more than myth. If you take something that is "natural" within music say, tonality, one can dialectically say that it is myth, because historicity changed tonal systems because chromaticism changed it, serialism changed it, and atonality changed it, polystylism changed it. The tonal system is still here, it is used in the music culture industry(ie the inclusive term of popular music) but has lost its truth content, maybe 100 years ago. No contemporary classical composer worth his salt would ever use the tonal system other than as kitsch. As a pianist, you know one true and tried method of expression, is the use of the augmented or the diminished seventh as used by Beethoven. But by the middle of the century, no composer would ever dare use the seventh again because its truth content was musically nontruth. You could use this nontruth in a kitsch sort of way, like Schnittke, as a wink and a nod, or as satire or irony, but as an expressive musical material, as an "object in its self" it is relegated to the dust bin of music.

You seem to have incorporated both the relativeness/phenomenological of German Hegalians and the stringentness/empirical of British Hegalians in your description timelessness and (lack of) static nature. It is a bit confusing.

Viggen: It is the German philosophers like Kant, and Hegel in their Idealist philosophy who decribe nature as timeless. Adorno, who is not a true Hegelian dialectic philosopher, but a dialectical Marxist. It is Adorno, through Benjamin through Marx through Hegel, that the dialectical process produces nature as myth as history. Adorno states " the retransformation of the historical, as that which has been, into nature, then here is the other side of the phenomenon:nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history." Thus as seen through Adorno's analysis, nature and its form, its content, its objectivity are all socially conditioned. It is reified history. A way of understanding nature and history is through the dialectic process of art and artworks. Art acts as a cipher of the historical process within society mediated through the myths society has created. Art as cipher needs to be deciphered, and what art says about us individually and collectively is the key. Art is not conceptually utopian but a mimetic of the individual and the collective that needs to be deciphered. Adorno writes," there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibilty of what is better." Adorno, a Jew was expelled from his position at Frankfurt University in 1933 , asks can art say anything after Auschwitz? The Enlightenment, perhaps man's greatest achievement, brought us both Beethoven and Hitler.

I've not heard of Adorno, however, I get what you are saying in regards to art being the cipher between the person and the temporal. However, just a matter of semantics, I rather see the examination of how the person deciphers art rather than how art deciphers the person as the key to understanding "history." Cuz, as you said, nature/history is a myth. But, and here is my assertion, human nature remains static.