Walter Pater said "all art constantly aspires to the condition of music". What is the condition of music?

Music has the ability to convey an aesthetic message in purely abstract terms, through the manipulation of tonality, without recourse to words or other representational symbols. In the visual arts over the last 200 years, one can see a gradual shift towards the elevation of colour, line and structure over purely pictorial elements, culminating in full abstraction. This is the aspiration of art towards the condition of music.

Roger Musson, Edinburgh

Supposedly pure abstraction, purged of everything other than itself – of literal meaning as in poetry, of narrative meaning as in painting, or of usefulness as in architecture.

Ralph Blumenau, London W11

Other arts are representational – using other media to evoke or recreate the real-world experiences of, say, seeing a lady with an ermine or listening to a nightingale. But music so unifies form and content that it needs no such external references: what you hear is all there is.

The subsequent development of abstract art shifted painting closer to music: a Mondriaan is about the colours and shapes you see, as a symphony is about the sounds you hear.

jno50

What is the condition of music? Pretty bad since Simon Cowell got his hands on it.

Darrochmore

What is the most unflattering description of a town in literature?

I don't think Jane Austen had anything against Birmingham. Remember that Mrs Elton is characterised by her desire to appear to be of a better family background than she actually is – though Emma may be slightly below the mark in describing her father as "the drudge of some attorney, and too stupid to rise".

I believe that Austen was being her usual accurate self in describing Mrs Elton and her social pretensions. Austen had nothing against Birmingham – but Mrs Elton has.

havantaclu

Not literature perhaps, but I came across this reference in a guide book to the town in Derbyshire where I grew up: "New Mills has three roads out of it, all of them good ones." A damnation beautiful in its brevity.

Stephen Bailey, Leyburn, N Yorks

Coleridge really seems to have had it in for Cologne:

In Köln, a town of monks and bones,

And pavement fang'd with murderous stones,

And rags and hags, and hideous wenches,

I counted two-and-seventy stenches,

All well defined, and several stinks!

David Gibbs, Alfreton, Derbys

I don't know where John Snow (N&Q, 21 December) got his information about Stoke-on-Trent but I would suggest that in any aerial photographs taken by the Luftwaffe, most of Stoke would have been obscured by smoke from the bottle ovens and that is presumably why one of the bombs they dropped on this city landed on the orthopaedic hospital.

Sarah Akhtar, Stoke-on-Trent

"Coketown", in Charles Dickens's Hard Times, is heavily based on Preston and is described in the following terms:

"It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness …"

smashits

Which poses the greater danger, snakes or ladders? I understand both cause many injuries and deaths each year.

Snakes, definitely. I was bitten by a sea snake while paddling off the beach at Penang island, Malaysia as a youngster. Happily the bite was on my left ankle so no poison reached my bloodstream, hence I'm still here. Two weeks earlier a child had died from a bite of the same type of snake, but didn't get the antidote in time. A bad fall from a ladder once led only to a broken finger – though it did end my career as a concert pianist!

exraf64

Any answers?

Never mind all the fuss about Dickens – where would the English language be without Shakespeare?

Sandra Wright, Sheffield

What constitutes the perfect full English breakfast? Everyone seems to have a different idea …

Geoff Young, London SE21

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