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3. Identifying Music’s Intrinsic Properties

We need to set the boundaries for where this framework is valid and where other aesthetic and psychological models come into play instead or as complementary. We are here primarily concerned with the effects and workings of only musical aspects that are presented to us as listeners. However, we will return to look at different kinds of contextual elements again in chapters 13 and 15, when we finally have the framework in place and are able to see how it relates to them.

Any musical experience is formed within an interplay of the tripolarity Music – Listener – Situation, as conceptualized by Jørgensen (1988). Different experiences may have different emphasis, but all three are required to some extent for an actual musical experience by a human listener. The Situation includes many components other than the music: visual, architectural, temporal, social and cultural (even political) dimensions all provide a context in which the music is positioned. So when situational aspects are constant, for example when listening to a recording in one’s living room, different music will still give rise to different experiences. Correspondingly, the same music may be presented in different contexts with wildly different effects, and then we want to understand what features in the music can lend themselves to such potential different outcomes.

Listener Properties

When it comes to the Listener side, even if we try to consider the music by itself without any specific situational context, there are still many other factors that can and will affect our experience. Any mood or psychological state we are in will do that, as well as how we feel about the situation in which we listen to music. The problem arises that it is ultimately impossible for any scientific controlled experiment because we can never control for any psychological states of a listener in different experiments fully (without hypothetically controlling the listener fully). The best, imperfect solution is instead to consider a listening situation of as little extra psychological influence as possible, which is suitably presented by Kant as an ideal “disinterested state of mind.” He had other philosophical purposes in mind as well, but we can use the concept productively without them in this framework.

Following this, we need to exclude all every-day musical experiences that are not primarily concerned with the music itself, for example enjoying background music while socializing or dancing, or working out with fast-paced music at the gym. These are valuable experiences where music definitely plays a part, but they are not fully musical experiences to the extent that our minds are focused on other things (the music can still have an impact on our brains and bodies though, see chapter 9 on emotional responses). Even Film music falls into this category since the score is only a part of the overall artistic expression and correlated experience. A film viewer doesn’t normally listen to the music in a musical sense because of too much other sensory perceptions (visual as well as spoken dialogue and sound effects). But with that being said, it’s not uncommon to find a type of “musical oasis” in a film, where the music for a short time takes up a bigger “bandwidth” of the overall artistic expression and the viewer temporarily becomes a listener who listens musically. Various sorts of Game music are similar to film music, although they might have slightly more room for musical expression and listening at times.

Now, when we listen to music and only do that, to make things even more complicated, the Knowledge level of the listener is a crucial aspect of musical experience that also lies outside of the music itself. It operates at several degrees, going from the more general cultural musical paradigm, upwards through genre and style all the way to knowledge about specific composers, works, musicians and interpretation of works. We will consider all this in chapter 12 on musical context, when we have the framework for the actual music in place.

Program Properties

Even when considering music with no regard to knowledge level, there is still one more thing to initially exclude before we can start with the framework. It’s all kinds of program attached to music (again returning in chapter 13), including words in song. Song is obviously a very common and culturally important form of music, present in all cultures around the world with roots as far back as language itself. But it is also a combination of purely musical elements of notes in time and words that have a tangible explicit and cultural meaning. (A song without words that uses only the timbre of the voice, a Vocalise, would count as “absolute” music in this way.) Yet again, since we are primarily interested in only the purely musical aspects, we have to exclude this as a mixed art form and focus exclusively on music without the cultural elements of words or other programs. So in effect we are left with instrumental music, or the part of music with song that does not feature the words.

When we look at instrumental music sounding as the only and central subject of interest, with no regard for either the specific context or the listener’s state of mind or prior knowledge, we can start to identify music’s intrinsic properties. What are those properties that can give rise to musical experiences unaffected by either situation or listener specifics? It might be very hard if not impossible to realize this abstract isolation in practice, but for the sake of theoretical clarity and philosophical discourse it needs to be done. The next chapter will consider those musical properties and propose a division of several levels in order to understand them better.