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15. The Meaning of Musical Experience

In chapter 2 we removed all Situational and Listener-specific aspects of a musical experience, and we are now ready to look at them again with this framework in place. Because in real life, musical experiences come just as much from specific situations as from specific musical features. A strong argument for this is the role of music at important ceremonies in life such as weddings, funerals and baptisms. Music for those types of occasion is typically of a certain sort to match them, and using this framework we know that this is partly done on the level of iconic coding (marches and tender love songs for weddings, slow music for funerals). But specific songs played can vary a lot, and the experience of those attending will also be somewhat alike independent of which musical pieces were featured. We are talking about extreme forms of situational pressure here, but the point is that even for more every-day musical experiences, the situation is very important.

Popular Music

Most Popular music has a strong connection to dance with a clear beat enforced by drums. It’s meant to be listened to while moving your body, if not explicitly then at least implicitly and probably “leaked out” of the body by a subtle nodding of the head. The element of song is another essential feature in popular music, which also adds the fundamental human activity of telling stories to the equation. This is done by the voice, which we are disposed to perceive with an even greater immediacy than instrumental notes, due to both nature and culture. If we lift out those two dimensions of dance and storytelling, the “music” that is left has probably lost most of its attraction. I re-member when I worked on a cruise ship with an instrumental trio consisting of piano, violin and clarinet. We played basically background music at the restaurants onboard, and we wanted to add some more popular songs to our repertoire to mix up our classical repertoire. Some songs worked better than others, but the worst one was “I will survive” by Gloria Gaynor. The melody, meant to by sung with different words and vowel variation, does not move far and repeats on the same note for long periods of time. The violin or the clarinet does not possess the possibility of variation like the human vocal cords and mouth does, so the result is a very dull repetition of only a few notes for long stretches of time! My point is that only looking at the musical aspects does not generally do justice to popular music. As soon as we add the voice into consideration, we have this amazing dimension of expression that comes from singing the poetry of the lines. Both the expression through different vowels and their underlying meaning of the words put together in sentences are core features of the whole genre of popular music (although done differently in combination with different musical features in various styles). A musical experience of that is intrinsically bound together with those aspects too.

Classical Music

The strength of non-voice instruments on the other hand lies elsewhere, namely the ability to play clear, distinct notes and move effortlessly between them, in registers that lies outside the range of the human voice as well. Juslin calls this a “super-expressive” voice (Juslin 2019: 166). So when it comes to Classical music, it’s the capacity to do this, often with many instruments simultaneously in polyphony and harmony, that is of primary consideration: A complex weave of voices (in the compositional meaning) that work on all different levels presented in this framework at once. It’s really a remarkable and incredible achievement by humanity to create beautiful and expressive artworks in such a sophisticated realm. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that a greater experience of this demands greater knowledge of all relevant features in operation. But the point here is primarily that classical music demands by its very nature complete concentration in listening. Maybe even with eyes closed. That is why silence is prescribed in concert halls, even between movements, and classical musicians have such high demands on the quality of their acoustic instruments as well as their own technical mastery of them. As classical music has survived and lives on in modern day, so has a culture grown around it. The musicologist Christopher Small is very critical of this culture and the way it makes listeners into passive spectators rather than active participants:

“The silence that will greet tonight’s performance while it is in progress suggests a different attitude. Those who wish perfect communion with the composer through the performance can have it, uninterrupted by any noise that may signal the presence of other spectators. On the other hand, while our attention is without doubt active, it is detached; we no longer feel ourselves to be part of the performance but listen to it as it were from the outside.” (Small 1998: 44)

He further describes concert halls as “temples” (190) and the performed works in the classical canon “bedtime stories told to adults” (187). While I do think his criticism of the “ceremony of the symphony concert” (187) and the values it propagates has some merit, I have throughout this framework put forward reasons for its elevated position. I believe the ultimate reason is its discursive nature discussed in chapter 11 (Johnson 2002), and the issues of a culture around it must then only be secondary.

Value and Preference

The initial proposition in the framework was that people do enjoy and appreciate music, in different forms, and find value and meaning in having it in their lives. The task to explain why that is has consequently fundamentally been of a descriptive nature. However, aesthetics also includes a prescriptive part of investigating if and why some music should be considered better than others. I have tried to stay away from this as much as possible, but it needs to be mentioned here, towards the end. Is there better and worse music, and in that case, what are the aesthetic criteria? Some of the emergent features described in the framework stand as prospective candidates, for example emergent complexity in itself, emotional expression or innovation. And what’s more, do aesthetic choices have moral consequences? Is the preference of “worse” music something that mirrors a worse way of living in general? These are contentious questions. I am myself convinced of the virtues of classical music, but I also take a very permitting position with regards to other genres and styles. I think because music is such a widely loved activity and art in all its different forms, it must be a general good for humanity regardless of form. Consequently I don’t view a range of personal preferences or tastes in regard to these forms as a problematic issue – it only mirrors how the world is made up of different people. I would however like to mention a view that does consider it an issue to some extent, because we have a general, fundamental inclination to regard our own aesthetic judgements as more true than others. Roger Scruton argues for the view:

 “…that taste in music matters as much as taste in other things, that the education of taste is of primary moral significance, and that the decline in musical taste is just the catastrophe that it seems to be.” (1997: 386)

“… [T]aste is not simply a set of arbitrary preferences. It is a complex exercise of sympathy, in which we respond to human life, enhanced and idealized in artistic form. Good taste is not reducible to rules; but we can define it instead through a concept of virtue: it is the sum of those preferences that would emerge in a well-ordered soul, in which human passions are accorded their true significance, and sympathy is the act of a healthy conscience.” (379)

Musical Experience

Regardless of any moral dimension, popular and classical music are two broad genres of music alive and well in modern times, because people enjoy the experiences they derive from engaging with them. They are different types of experiences with common ground only as far as whatever intrinsic musical features they have in common. Looking further we have the genres of Jazz and Folk music that provide unique classes of experiences in addition to classical and popular music. Jazz for its emphasis on improvisation and dialogue but founded on the origins of popular music in Blues and Bebop. Folk music for its contextual relations to local tradition, originating when there was no other form of music at all and surviving into modern times with a fair bit of nostalgia. And beneath these four main broad genres there are endless subgenres, styles, schools, strands and factions. Some live longer, some shorter, and the overall evolution progress is similar to that of species. Each style presents a unique composite of musical and contextual elements, which gives it its identity. Too little new elements and it’s only a type of an already defined style. Too much novelty and it has a hard time resonating with listeners at all. Whatever elements, they are exactly what people like about a particular style of music, and what gives meaning to the experience:

Rock music for its firm and groovy beats;

Pop music for its danceability and catchiness;

Disco for its fast pace and synth sounds;

Reggae for its backbeat and laidback attitude;  

Heavy metal for its raw power;

Punk for its provocation and violent tendencies;

Techno, House and Trance for their immersiveness;

Country for its ease and storytelling;

Classical music for its spectacular ability to integrate a collective of individuals to work together to express the full range of human emotion and ambition;

Baroque music for its focus on unity above all else;

Classical-era music for its perfect balance;

Romantic music for its emphasis on subjectivity and the sublime;

Impressionist music for its musical coloring;

Minimalism for its repetitiveness;

Modern music for its curiosity and provocation;

Contemporary music for its deconstruction and relativism.

These features are often present both in the music and in the context. Or put like this: A style is taking certain musical features and putting up the appropriate culture around them. People who engage with the music use cultural markers in order to attain and share that identity (Small 1998). It can be bright hair colors and piercings at a punk festival or jackets in a concert hall. Dancing to techno at a nightclub or dancing folk dance on the lawn. Having a drink and conversing at a jazz club or listening reverently to a choir in a church. We move here to completely other domains of human life – those of identity, social norms and culture at large. There is so much to unpack in all these examples I have mentioned and doing so would result in a different type of framework. As long as we keep music at the core as a timeless human expression, there will be various musical experiences emanating from different musical styles, but the experience will always make people feel happier, more alive and connected to each other and to the beauty in the world. It would make their life seem a little bit more meaning-ful, because there is music in it.