Enjoy reading? Consider buying the framework as an e-book on Gumroad:
https://sonatasecrets.gumroad.com/l/howmusicworks

 1. Introduction

I have always been fascinated by the power of music. As a classical pianist, I fell in love with making music myself from an early age and have spent thousands of hours practicing and exploring the musical worlds of the classical repertoire. With that scale of investment of time and energy a kind of musical intuition and understanding gets developed throughout the years, under proper guidance by teachers and peers. Musicians in general rely on this intuition to communicate musical ideas and work and play together, and it doesn’t need to be explicit in order to be effective as a musical force. Musicians can create beautiful music without being able to explain exactly what makes it beautiful and, more commonly, audiences can be moved in the same way. In a way it’s part of the magic of musical experiences, that it involves so many variables and easily eludes being pinned down in words.

However, another side of me is curious about the world in a scientific sense. I want to know why things behave as they do in order to make sense of the world, and here music presents a real challenge for the reasons above. There are so many layers that it can be tiring only to think about it. The division of different areas of specialty and expertise speaks to this: in order to perform a symphonic work in a concert hall you need a composer, a conductor, musicians for all different symphonic instruments, builders and technicians of those instruments, acoustic and sound technicians for the hall, a concert producer and stage technicians to put the program together and a musicologist to write the program notes (not to speak of recording technicians and producers for recording it). They are all essential roles to generate one piece of music performance in the classical tradition, and they each require extremely long and specialized educations, general spanning several decades before only the most talented people reach such a professional standard. And all those roles each has an essential part to play in how the music works when it finally meets the listener in the audience. Luckily, one doesn’t have to possess the actual expertise for all roles in order to explain how the parts work together, but it’s still a very demanding project. Again, as a pianist you often develop a better sense of how several voices work together in polyphony and harmony than most other instrumentalists, because you constantly need to produce more than one melody note at a time. Grounded in this practical knowledge I have also conquered the area of music theory by learning consciously how it all fits together and how it has evolved through music history, especially in my years of higher music education in the academy. This combined knowledge is in turn the basis for my media channel Sonata Secrets where I have provided video analyses of works in the classical piano repertoire since 2019. But even when I started to work with that, I wanted to reach a firmer understanding of where my analytical tools really came from. Why is it that we experience a major chord as happy, really? How is it that composers can produce great effects through the unfolding of structure of a piece, really? Sonata Secrets deals with these types of issues “applied” in reality by me explaining that for example in this piece the harmonic progression works toward this goal, or in that piece the structure provides that sense of exploration and then return. This framework is instead my attempt at answering the questions in a basic, philosophical sense that holds true for the whole system.

It has been a long road that has included wading through books by music philosophers, psychologists and musicologists. Often the writings of one figure would point me to another that I previously didn’t know about or hadn’t considered properly. In my years of academic study I started with the more “applied” musicologists and historians of Charles Rosen, Carl Dahlhaus and Nicholas Cook, especially in the one-year Erasmus exchange study program I as part of at Newcastle University, UK. Then in the master’s program at Gothenburg University, Sweden, I was introduced to important contributions by Christopher Small, Lydia Goehr, Peter Kivy and Henk Borgdorff, most of whom figured in my master’s thesis about drama in music (Kilhamn 2014). But the most important pieces of the puzzle came later, outside the academy, when I followed only my interest of understanding without the pressures of assignments or thesis production. I read and evaluated the central theses in turn by leading music philosophers in our time: Stephen Davies, Jerrold Levinson, Roger Scruton, Jenefer Robinson, Leonard Meyer, Julian Johnson and Patrik Juslin, with the ambition of finding the tools to be able to explain my own experience of music. That is what I have attempted to consolidate in this framework, and to some extent I am only referencing these important philosophers who have produced legitimate and useful models. But somehow, I also felt that no existing framework was enough by itself, because they all consider only part of the whole. Music psychologist Patrik Juslin’s recent expose on music and emotion (2019) is one of the most illuminating books I have ever read, but it does only scratch the surface of the philosophical side of why we appreciate music for things that are not emotional, which is like the other side of the Yin and Jang of an over-all music appreciation. Most philosophers’ theories are quite locally limited to certain perspectives or phenomena (for example Davies 1994 on emotional expression; Meyer 1956 on musical expectations; Johnson 2002 on the virtues of classical music). Roger Scruton is probably the most ambitious author who tries to create a united account (1997) and I share many of his premises and conclusions but not all of them.

So, my contribution here is to compile models that resonate with my own experience, and what I understand of other people’s experiences, into one coherent framework. The core for this is a model of four levels of emergence that I present in chapter 5 and go through properly in chapters 6-12. Taken together they cover all sides of music, from the vibrations it can be reduced to, to the emotions we feel while listening, to the social situation of where we listen to it. It all comes together with the two key mechanisms of Emergence and Valence. When elements come together on one level and form units, those units attain a new set of properties on a secondary, emergent level. One such emergent property is the valence of meaning something to us as humans other than it is. A melody has a direction and wants to go somewhere. A harmonic progression has an emotional charge by the way it’s positioned within the system of tonality. The return of structural material means something, both in reference to itself only, and by way of convention. The intuitive understanding of all this valence is the very thing that is developed when we train to be musicians, or when we just play music.

With this framework, hopefully it can also be understood consciously and rationally, which in turn, I believe, will make any path towards further music involvement clearer.

Henrik Kilhamn