Enjoy reading? Consider buying the framework as an e-book on Gumroad:

https://sonatasecrets.gumroad.com/l/howmusicworks

 2. Music and Meaning

People around the world find great value and meaning in music. A good place to start for understanding the why and how, is to define what it is we are talking about when we talk about music, and about meaning.

Definition

“What is music?” is a popular question for the every-day philosopher. Generally people are in agreement about when they are hearing sounds that are music and when they are not, even universally across cultures (although one might not understand another culture’s music fully). But to pin down exactly what makes it music is trickier. Our intuition is that music is about organized sounds, and so the definition should include formal properties like melody, rhythm and harmony. But as soon as we try to formalize these dimensions, the definition seems elusive. Is a piece for solo snare drum music, even without any melody or harmony? If yes, then melody and harmony are not essential. Is liturgic cantillation without formal rhythmic organization music? If yes, then rhythm isn’t essential. A simple either/or definition doesn’t suffice either because the rhythmic sounds from a steam-engine train is not considered music by itself, and neither is birdsong, which has both rhythmic and melodic features.

We can then try a different strategy and make the definition very open and include all sounds that have a claim to being music: it’s music as long as the composer says it is. This intentional stance is never more clearly demonstrated as in John Cage’s “4’33”, a “piece” in which a pianist sits at the piano for 4 minutes and 33 seconds without playing, and where the “music” consists of all sounds created in the concert hall by whatever accidental sound source. But then what about sounds that are not intended as music by a human but still contains melody and rhythm, like wind chimes or randomized notes by a computer? They certainly sound musical, but the intentional definition does not include them. A safer option would then be to give the intention to the listener, like Andrew Kania’s disjunctive proposition that combines formal and intentional properties:

Music is (1) any event intentionally produced or organized (2) to be heard, and (3) either (a) to have some basic musical feature, such as pitch or rhythm, or (b) to be listened to for such features. (Kania 2011: 12)

The formulation of “event … to be heard” is substituted for sounds in order to include silence as part of music as well. In any case, since people generally are in agreement of what music is when they hear it, further exploration of this topic is not that relevant. The real question is rather why we care so much about it.

Musical Meaning

What is the meaning of music, and why do we find pleasure and value in listening to it? These questions are more interesting because it connects music to all other aspects of culture and human life. We can leave the definitional boundary examples above where they are – they are not instances of music that people listen to actively and find musical meaning in, as we do in a symphony or a pop song. Here is our intuition that music (1) somehow speaks to our emotions and we like that; (2) is beautiful in itself through features like symmetry, balance and elegance and we enjoy partaking in beautiful things; and finally since music, as part of human culture is a collective endeavor, (3) connects us to others who shares the culture that the music is part of. Intuitions (1) and (2) corresponds to the age-old dichotomy of form versus content in music that has resulted in various aesthetic doctrines. Content is everything that has to do with expression and emotions in music and its immediacy, and includes even broader claims of communication through music (see chapter 2). Form on the other hand is the way it’s put together in a beautiful or artistically interesting way, and its primacy advocated most famously by Eduard Hanslick (1856). This framework will essentially examine the intuitions above, connect them to the actual sounding musical material and try to reconcile the form/content dichotomy by accepting that both are valid and important. In order to do that we need to dwell on the material to see what it consists of and what valence it has on different levels.

With regards to emotions it is typically easy for most people to differentiate between “happy” and “sad” music, so there must be an explanation for how it correlates with those emotions, which we will see in chapter 8 (although the reasons for enjoying listening to them may be different). But if we move to a higher degree of complexity, we can feel music leaving the basic emotions of happy and sad on the ground to soar in the sky high above them. It then displays a wide range of complex properties including emotional character but also features like patterns, contrast, symmetry, development, transformation, originality, organicism etc. It resembles contours of emotion progressions, and it follows a specific line of action where all potential future lines are collapsed onto the actual, present line. This sense of agency, a resemblance to human life in general, is a feature reserved for the temporal arts (music, theater, film, literature and poetry in some sense), and stripping away most or all explicit reference to actual human life is what makes music unique among them. In the words of Stephen Davies (1997):

“…[M]usical movement invites attention to expressiveness because, like human action and behavior (and unlike random process), it displays order and purposiveness. Musical movement is invested with humanity not merely because music is created and performed by humans but because it provides a sense of unity and purpose. We recognize in the progress of music a logic such that what follows arises naturally from, without being determined by what preceded…” (229)

At this high altitude, the bearings of fixed objects like “happy” and “sad” are so far away that our experiences also start to differ between our personal perspectives, which provides the grounds for personal preference and taste. Before we look closer at the musical material, we will in the next chapter briefly consider intuition no. 3 above, about the social values of music, mainly to separate which parts of an experience emanates from the actual music and which parts come from other domains.