Kevin Hoover wrote:
> ----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
> Erreygers Guido wrote:
> > ----------------- HES POSTING -----------------
> > In response to Carlos Rodriguez Braun's query about Borges, Mill and
> > music:
> >
> > "And it is very characteristic both of my then state, and of the general
> > tone of my mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously
> > tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations.
> > The octave consists only of five tones and two semitones, which can be
> > put together in only a limited number of ways, of which but a small
> > proportion are beautiful: most of these, it seemed to me, must have been
> > already discovered, and there could not be room for a long succession of
> > Mozarts and Webers, to strike out as these had done, entirely new and
> > surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty."
> >
> > John Stuart Mill, *Autobiography*, Chapter V [The Collected Works of
> > John Stuart Mill, Vol. I, p. 149]
> >
> > Guido Erreygers
>
>
>
> The tone of the Mill quotation suggests that he may have thought better
> of this idea later.  But what an odd idea.  We have only 26 letters in
> English, so by Mill's reasoning we should be running out of "entirely
> new and surprisingly rich veins" of things to write . . . on the HES
> list (among other places).
>
> Kevin Hoover


Since we have wandered so refreshingly far from the boring old subject of
history of economic thought, two further observatiions may be in order.

1.  JSM's father, James, had a puritannical hatred of the Arts, possibly
acquired in Scotch, Presbyterian childhood, and which flavoured the
Westminster Review from the outset. One possible explanation for what
Toynbee later called 'the bitter quarrel between economists and human
beings' was the vicious hostility of that (Radical, Benthamite) periodical
towards the Lake poets. The young JSM grew up in Bentham's circle, and would
have imbibed from early childhood the utilitarian doctrine that poetry and
pushpin are pretty much on a level. It is unlikely that Bentham and James
Mill would have had any more time for music: hence the young JSM probably
didn't know very much about it at the time of his reported 'then state'.

2.  Richard Strauss once illustrated the absurdity of the idea that musical
creativity is limited by the fact that there are only 12 tones in our
Western system by sitting down at the piano and playing a sequence of
A-major chords in different registers. His listeners immediately recognized
it, of course, as a transcription of Wagner's strikingly original prelude to
Lohengrin.

Anthony Waterman