What is music?

[mosc]

We have a very interesting thread about what is a musician here: http://electro-music.com/forum/topic-3468.html

What is music?

I'm thinking of music as a spritual experience, something that is transendental. At its best, music is love.

Some people are very sensitive to music. Its effect on them is powerful and intense. Music can "take them away" - they see images - they get other phyiscal sensations - feel emotions - get excited - fall assleep.

Music can inspire and be intellectually satisfying.

Music can be used to manipulate human behavior.

Music can be a sublime artistic expression or a mindless doodle, or it can be a commercial commodity.

Music can be beautiful or ugly.

At its best, music is love.

What is this? What else is so powerful? So irresistable?

[elektro80]

I was working on a theory about this once. The reasoning might be amusing.
Our hearing must have been one of the important senses we had way back in the evolution of our species. Several features probably evolved because it helped us survive. Imagine one of our forefathers walking in a forest. He would have used his hearing in order NOT being ambushed by some animal. If his hearing was bad, he would probably end up being served as lunch in some cave somewhere. I reckon hearing at one time was so important tto Homo Sapiens that out brains can be said to be wired in order to use acoustic information ASAP in order to survive. such a brain would also probably be wired for recognizing patterns, systems, clues and whatnot and we are talking realtime processing here. One interesting feature would be that our brains would always looking for correlation between audio input and factual physical danger.
I reckon the same wiring of the brain made us capable of making some sort of distinction between selfmade noises but at the same applying a systemic pattern recognition circuitry. I guess we in some learned to use selfmade noises for a sort of relaxation or drug.
Well, there you have music.. It is a part of what makes us human.
An interesting feature of music is that we in some weird way are able to intuitively decide wether some noise is music or not.

[paul e.]

now this is a toughie....

it is like asking 'what is water'

mhhh...

[elektro80]

Well, using my line of reasoning a lot IS music, but there are some interesting distinctions. Because the brain probably already is programmed for analyzing realtime enviromental noises, and the enviromental noises can and will change.. music is about learning to aknowledge music when recognized as music. This is an interesting idea, isn´t it?

[paul e.]

i have heard music defined as something like 'organized sound'

this is pretty open as it could be a composer who intends to order the sounds in such and so way. or a listener hears environmental sounds and organizes them in his/her own brain as music

i thikn the 'organized' part is key..even if the music is chaotic , someone has to arrange for this chaos to happen ...

i have also heard that nusrat fateh ali khan http://nusrat.com/ described music as the 'spiritual organization of sound'

[mosc]

The evocative power of music profound. What other things are evocative?

I'd say the sound of the voice. Vocal music can be very evocative. The sounds of people - screaming, moaing, crying, laughing, sighing, yelling, cheering, singing, etc. - these are primal sounds and very much near the essense of music today. There is a natural tendency for us to sing along with music we hear. Many composers wouldn't write parts for instruments if they weren't singable.

Sounds and music can touch the deepest levels of consiousness.

I don't know if I can define music, nor do I really want to. But I think one's concept of music is the controlling force on the music one creates.

The definition of something can be by what it does as much as what it is.

[elektro80]

In the line of my previous discursion on the subject I guess we just as well might define music by its components and its effects rather than saying something like: "you gotta have at least three violins". I guess it is also valid to suggest that the notion of music is a concept that has evolved and will evolve further. That said, I don´t think evolve in this context has anything to do with evolution from a lesser stage of purity and complexity to a more advanced stage.

[mosc]

[elektro80]

I am not sure.. but I doubt that such terms really are valid if we are to explore what music is. There must be "better" terms to use.
Music seems to be interconnected with communities and social systems... culture..
Well, that does of course mean that we are taking music somewhere else right now.

[mosc]

Yes, it is undenyably cultural, like speach. It's really connected with the internals of consciousness. I'm always amazed when people sing the first 4 notes of the Twilight Zone theme to indicate that something wierd is happening. Do they do that in Europe too? E - F - E - C#

[Dovdimus Prime]

[mosc]

The Dragnet 4 note theme comes to mind.

[jksuperstar]

[egw]

Music is any sound, created by a human, that is intended to be music.

[blue hell]

[mosc]

Sometimes, when you are really missing someone, like if they are missing or have been away for a very long time or unconscious, the the sound of their voice when the return can be "music to my ears".

There is a powerful pleasure sensation that is sometimes enabled by music. Jan said a great performance brings tears to his eyes. Same here.

I'm amazed at the power of the communication that can take place. I love electronic sounds, lots of wacky harmonics and all that. It's physically pleasurable.

[jbenzola]

If a man plays for a certain amount of time...eventually a kind of order asserts itself,
whether he chooses to notate that personal order or engage in polemics about it,
it's there. That is, if he is saying anything in his music. There is no music without
order if music comes from a mans innards.

-Cecil Taylor-

It is conceivable that what is unified in form to the author or composer may of
necessity be formless to his audience.

-Charles Ives-

My music is as varied as my feelings are, or the world is, and one composition
or one kind of composition expresses only one part of the total world of music...
I decided to memorize the compositions and then phrase them on the piano
and play them for the musicians. I wanted them to learn the music so it would
be in their ears, rather than on paper...

-Charles Mingus-

A genius uses music as a language to express fully without the help of words
whatever he may wish to to be known, for music can express feeling more
comprehensively than any tongue...Music looses its freedom by being subject
to the laws of technique.

-Sufi Inayat Khan-

Being musical has to do with intuitive intelligence, not just communicating intelligence...
Musical training has nothing to do with musicality. You can train someone for years
in a conservatory of music and develop the ability to recognize pitch constructions,
harmonies, chords, melodies, intervals-all intellectually.

-Karlheinz Stockhausen-

We discover here probably the most important of all functions of music: a
persons constant search or desire for communication with the unknown,
supernatural, or supreme being.

-Ashenafi Kebede-

A piece of improvisation is done and after it's done, there's nothing to be
said about it because it affects your life whether you like it or not.

-Leo Smith-






Music is edifying, for from time to time it sets the soul in operation. The soul
is the gatherer-together of the disparate elements and its work fills one with
peace and love.

The material of music is sound and silence. Integrating these is composing.

-John Cage-

I'm actually painting pictures of infinity with my music and that's why a lot
of people can't understand it. And when I say so, a lot of people don't believe
me. But if they'd listen to this and to the other types of music, they'll find
that this has something else in it, something from another world.

-Sun Ra-

Well, that is one of the main causes of this arrogance-the idea of power. Then
you loose your true power, which is to be part of all, and the only way you can
be part of all is to understand it. And when you don't understand, you have to
go humbly to it. You don't go to school and say, "I know what you're going
to teach me".

-John Coltrane-

In my hours of gloom, when I am suddenly aware of my own futility, when every
musical idiom-classical, oriental, ancient, modern, and ultra modern appears
to me as no more than admirable ,painstaking, experimentation, without ultimate
justification, what is left for me but to seek out the true, lost face of music
somewhere off in the forest, in the fields, in the mountains, or on the seashore
among the birds.

-Oliver Messian-

I don't consider improvisation only to play different notes within a piece. I also
consider improvisation to actually change the weight of a piece of music from
one place to another...I mean you might play roughly the same piece and yet
because you are feeling quite different, you are producing a completely different
piece of music.

-Paco Pena-

If you listen you will notice I'm always trying to make my sound stronger and
more brutal than ever. I shake the walls of the joints I play in. I'm always
trying to sound brutal without loosing the beauty, in order to impress people
and wake them up.

-Don Byas-









To be able to play the things I heard in Africa, the drummer has to hear the
drums as a singing instrument.

-Ed Blackwell-

Very little immediate tradition lies behind Le Sacre du Printemps however, and
no theory. I had only my ears to help me; I heard and I wrote what I heard. I
am the vessel through which Le Sacre passed.

-Igor Stravinsky-

The concept of the expanded time structure composed of long sustained tones
and the unique tonal palette of those works came to me not by theoretical
deduction, but by inspired intuition.

This new approach to composition and hearing evolved not from my great
appreciation of Anton Webern, but from environmental influences as well:
the sound of the wind; the sounds of crickets & Cicadas, the sounds of
telephone poles & motors; sounds produced by steam escaping such as
my mothers teakettle and to the sounds of whistles and signals from trains;
and resonance's set off by the natural characteristics of particular geographic
areas such s canyons, valleys, lakes, and plains.

-LaMonte Young-

Song For is made of sound & silences from
musical
instruments, controlled by seven men; it's music that
lasts 13 1/2 minutes, it is for itself,
for love, for hate, & for the God within
us
all-it has no "meaning" outside of itself,
the MUSIC

-Joseph Jarman

...Try moving your imagination to the sound. It's a matter of following the sound.
You have to relate sound to sound inside sound it. You have to try to listen
to everything together. Follow the sound; the pitches, the colors, you have
to watch them move.

-Albert & Donald Ayler-

One of the problems my music has had is that it's an abstract music, and
people are not being educated to deal with abstract music or abstract thought.
The abstract plane involves many levels, the first being self-realization or
having some fundamental understanding of what you think about things.
Abstract Consciousness is not necessarily relevant to being a great Republican
or Democrat.
-Anthony Braxton-





I wouldn't care if he came up on the bandstand in his BVD's and with one arm,
and shouting his head off, just so long as he was there. He's got the fire I
want. There's nothing more terrible than playing with a dull rhythm section.
Jazz has got to have that thing. You have to be born with it. You can't
learn it, you can't buy it. You have it or you don't. And no critic can put it
into any words. It speaks in the music. It speaks for itself.

-Miles Davis-

All of the kinds of music that appear in my string quartets are the kinds of
music that I personally love, and I don't necessarily keep them in separate
cabinets. One of the challenges in fact, is to bring things you love together
to live harmoniously. It also creates an understanding of how notes work.
These styles all have particular flavors and expressions but they can be
united. Notes all work under certain universal laws, they observe laws
just like everything else in the universe does.

-Terry Riley-

The male-female concept illustrates an important stage in the history of
instrumental music. While on an archaic level instruments basically serve
to mark rhythm or to utter mere sounds without vying with voices to produce
melodies, we watch in the stage of sex contrast an enrichment of the
instrumental language by opposing high and lows. The "father and the "mother"
of a pair of stomping tubes might produce them; or the two lips of a slit drum;
or the two sections that a stopping finger creates on the string of a musical bow.

-Curt Sachs-

Music plays an integral role in Tantric Buddhism; it is seen as a means for
transforming the whole stream of being into illumined awareness. In Tibetan
music theory, the primordial sound A is recognized as the source of all sound
and speech as well as the substratum of silence.

-Lobsang Lhalwngpa-

You know, I've been making records with Max Roach, Eric Dolphy, and them
cats lately. They hit this chord and all the time they got this other thing goin'
down there. Then they say, "Go, you got it Bean." Got what? What the hell
can you get? What can you play between these two things? But it's interesting.
That's what music is all about anyway. Finding those things, the adventure.

-Coleman Hawkins-

At home I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would
stop what I was working on and play with the birds. Birds have notes in between
our notes, maybe it's between an F & F sharp, and you'll have to go up or down
on the pitch.

-Eric Dolphy-




I think of myself as a messenger boy, one who tries to bring messages to the
people, not the people who have never heard of God, but those who were more
or less raised with the guidance of the Church. Now and then, we encounter people
who say they do not believe. I hate to say that they are out and out liars, but I
think they think it is fashionable to speak like that, having been brainwashed
by someone beneath them, by someone with a complex who enjoys bringing
them down to their knees in the worship of the nonexistence of God. They
snicker in the dark as they tremble in fright.

-Duke Ellington-

This album is a humble offering to Him. An attempt to say "Thank you God",
through our work, even as we do in our hearts and our tongues. May He help
and strengthen all men in every good endeavor.

-John Coltrane-

I saw thirty of them (The Master Musicians of Jojouka) playing non-tempered
instruments in their own intonation, in unison. They would change together,
as if they all had the same idea, yet they hadn't played what they were playing
before they played it! To me, that's known as a Jazz concept...Originally,
Jazz must have been about that; individuals don't have to worry about the
written note in order to blend with it.

Ornette Coleman-

Creating Music as sound within
the whole body; which must be brought
to level of total depersonalized
realization. exciting various limbs, etc
parts in co-operative (struct) strut
Music does not exist within notation
which proceeds from heretical
cultural aggrandizement, association
Abstraction...

To play whatone hears
is our objective

-Cecil Taylor-

The present day musician grows up in a half world between "good" music and
"not so good" music. Even when he has definitely made his choice between the
two, he is still affected by the other, and to that extent he is dichotomous and
disoriented. His head is bathed in an ancient light through a Gothic window
while his other end swings like a miniature suspension bridge in a cool right
angle gale. The perception of displaced musicians may germinate, evolve,
and mature in concert, through a developing at -one-ness, through their beat.

-Harry Partch-




Well it seems to me that the subtext for stamping out the arts...In the realm
of the arts, you always have the possibility for creative thinking, which means
deviation from the norm, the prescribed political norm that everyone is trying
to jam down your throat. If they can stop creative thinking, then they have
got a better stranglehold of stupidity on the entire population. And creative
can, and often does start at an early age. So if they can nip it in the bud,
while the little beggars are in school, then it's good for them.


Spotted owls are nice, but nobody gives a fuck about composers.


Everything is happening all of the time, and the only reason why we think of
time linearly is because we are conditioned to do it. That's because the human
idea of stuff is: it has a beginning and it has an end. I don't think that's
necessarily true. You think of time as a constant, a spherical constant...
in which everything's happening all at once.


I can't do counterpoint. I can't write traditional harmonies, which would mean
I would be virtually unemployable. Without me employing myself, I wouldn't
have a job.


The contemporary message-the subtext of contemporary life-is keep your
fucking mouth shut and be a drone. And government is set up in such a
way now with its complete disregard for the value of education that they're
going to perpetuate a type of stupidity that makes it possible to have an
entire nation of people watching late-night infomercials on TV with their
phone in credit cards.


I don't think that the guitar superhero mentality is an evil unto itself. We
have to go back to the real evil, the MBA mentality, because this
phenomenon could not proliferate if it weren't manufactured, widely distributed,
and supported by enormous industrial forces. otherwise, it would be just
laughable.

-Frank Zappa-

[mosc]

Thank you for that. There a great deal of wisdom there.

Funny, so far in the thread, no mention of the word entertainment.

Many people would probably agree that music is a from of entertainment.

Some of the themes in the previous post include the illusion of time, God, the unity of creation, other worlds, intuition, super-naturalness, the soul and other sublime concepts. Seems like joy and love should be in there too.

[zynthetix]

Its kind of hard to follow up those quotes. There are a lot of gems in there.

I really don't know what to add, but I at least want to mention that I like the general direction of this thread : What music may entail, accompany, or reflect in the human experience as opposed to "What is music?". The nature of the question itself is why I may have never seen an answer I've totally agreed with. "What is music?" is best put to rest for me by concluding "Music is."

Music also seems to be an invoker or an expression of every human emotion in the spectrum, both for listeners and makers.

[jksuperstar]

[gsga]

[paul e.]

actually i was having a chat with elektro 80 going back a few years regarding this subject and this is what he said

i thought it was very cool so i saved it

[elektro80]

those typos..


Well, yes...

It sounds better in norwegian ( sans typos ), but I guess it is understandable. Our built-in ability to do patttern/structure recognition will kick in and let us see the music. The cultural aspect of this is possible not evident in this version of the definition, but given that we actually learn out surroundings and the natural sounds, what will be acceptable as music is a variable. We have to take into account that a major part of what we call music today is a cultural phenomenon that the avant garde around 1890-1930 explored. Those wonderful artists and madmen recognized the sounds of machines, crowds and whatever to be possible components of music... and they were proved to be right. As such, experimental music can therefore just as well be called "an education of the audience" given that this definition already tells us that this music is music. If we look to art history with an open mind, this is what we will see. For instance, pick any modernist painting that in its day was deemed as garbage. When did this painting suddenly become art? It happened at the time the internal structures and ideas had been assimilated by the audience.
My take on what experimental music is, might be controversial. To me, experimental music is music that apart from being music in its own right also explores new concepts and methods not yet "accepted" or even heard by our society/culture. This makes extremely little of what these days is called experimental music to be truly experimental. I don´t really see this as a problem, apart from me very often being tricked into expecting something mindblowing when I find an mp3 claimed to be experimental music.
In itself, experimental music is neither good or bad, it is just what it claims to be. What it really is, is a way to add more tools and methods to what we can use in order to create our music. Structure in music is of course a part of this. Randomness is already a part of music, but i still see that randomness is in interesting concept in itself when applied to music. We are far from done there yet.
This definition and its implications pretty much sums up what I find interesting about this community. We are all different, but we share the same tools and culture.

[Oskar]

It is alleged that when Louis Armstrong was asked "What is Jazz?" his response was "If you have to ask, you'll never know!" Glib, I know, but succinct.

[zynthetix]