Dead Composers, Living Audiences: The Situation of Classical Musi ...

When asked to perform this task, most people become frustrated. It may be that they are presently in a room (as I presently am) with thousands of books, CDs, papers, and so forth. But the problem is not that there are just too many things to count. The problem is that it is impossible, not just in practice, but in principle to count the “objects” in a room without making some kinds of evaluations as to what counts. The first problem is answering the following questions: What is a thing? What counts? How small should one go? What is “in” the room—at what point in the door jamb does “inside the room” end and “outside the room” begin? Did you count yourself? Each piece of clothing? What about your eyes? Are they countable things in this context? Kidneys? Should they be counted? Dust mites? Your platelets? Molecules? Do parts of things “count”? If not, or if so, how does one determine just what is a thing and what is part of a thing? Take a CD in its case. Is that one thing or many? The case has two independent elements snapped together, do we count them as one thing or two things? The CD may have many tracks. Are they individual things? Are they “things” at all—being merely digital tracings utterly unavailable to us except as numbers on an LED screen, or transformed into sound by a laser? The printed insert—do we count the pages, the double pages folded over and stapled, the staples, letters, the words, sentences, paragraphs, headings, chapters, sections, and each punctuation mark and diacritical marking?

If you are sitting there thinking, “This is ridiculous, what you call countable is way too detailed!” Consider this: That statement itself is a decision, an evaluation about what counts! The point is that counting everything in a room without making these kinds of decisions about what counts is impossible. The world does not neatly divide itself up into convenient categories. Teachers of singing know this from experience with voices—we have many vocal categories, but we find that our students often do not fall into them very neatly. We have to decide, for the moment, what category, if any, is best suited to them. For some, vocal categorization may be a concern throughout their careers. In such cases, the question might be, Is the determination based on the “category” of the voice, or is it a decision based on the most useful, marketable aspects of the instrument? If it is the latter, what aspects are marketable?