What is Music? Part 1

I can't answer that one. Not that that bothers me; people have been asking that question for centuries, if not millennia . So, as you can imagine, that takes the pressure off of you and me to try to come up with an answer on an idle afternoon.

Still...

If you love music you probably can't help but think about this question once in a while. What IS this stuff? This sound stuff. For music is made of sound, yet not all sounds are musical. Certainly a car backfiring produces sound, but not music. And a new student sitting at a piano may make a lot of sound, but whether it can be called music or not is questionable (Not to attack students: I've been playing for close to 20 years and I'm not sure if a lot of what I do can be considered music either...).

Yet, at the same time, certain sounds in nature have been described as "musical": The wind in the leaves or across the planes, Birds chirping, the falling (or landing rather) of rain, even the sound of a young child's laughter. All of these (and more) have been described as musical. Indeed, musicians have taken nature as inspiration for musical compositions throughout history. Vivaldi's Four Seasons is one of the best examples of this, combining beautiful stand alone melodies with those based on birdsong, thunder, wind and rain.

So if not all sounds are musical, then what makes those we do consider music to actually be music?

Some have suggested that perhaps it's intent: That the purposeful structure and arrangement that composers use to impose some kind of order on the sound moves it into the realm of music. In this case, even the beginning student is making music of some kind, wrong notes and all, because they are attempting to turn the sound into something more, where a virtuoso player pounding a fist or blowing into an instrument randomly would not be.

The problem with this criteria seems to come into relief when we consider so call "chance music", such as that created by John Cage? Wouldn't the definition of implying order rule that kind of thing out? And if so, how do we judge it? How can we guess the composer's intent? Cage may tell us it's random; then we can make a values, (though not aesthetic) judgement on those grounds, yet if the composer does not tell us his or her intent, how can we judge it? Just as in the murky realm of most moral judgements, guessing someones intent is all but impossible on the results of what actually gets created.

So if intent, or imposed order, alone will not help us define music, what else might?

Your thoughts and comments are welcome.

More later,

JG