What Is Music?
I woke with the answer to this in the middle of the night last night. Well, not the complete answer, but a brainwave of sorts that I'll likely pursue in my research. The actual wording of the answer is still sketchy, but it goes something like this.
Beethoven apparently once answered this question by saying, "Music is a metaphor - life provides its analogies". I think it's more true to say life is its analogy. The origins of the question of 'what is' anything can be traced back to antiquity and it remains a cornerstone of philosophical thought. 'What is music?' is a question that boggled the minds of the ancients and its answer continues to remain ellusive. Throughout the history of Western knowledge, music has at various times been placed on a singular polarity with science at one end and the Divine or supernatural at the other.
Pythagoras certainly did much to create an empirical scientific basis for music, although his findings related more to the acoustic properties of musical sounds than to the art of creating music. Aristoxenus (a pupil of Aristotle) advanced a theory that the acoustic properties of musical sounds (the ratios of the harmonic overtone series) were at the heart of musical rhythms. In effect, Aristoxenus took a step closer to defining music composition as a natural phenomena that could be explained by science. This relationship between pitch and rhythm theorized by Aristoxenus was confirmed by the experiments of Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century. (See his book On the Sensations of Tone as a Psychological Basis for the Theory of Music first published in 1863.)
Before leaping forward in history from Aristoxenus, it's important to note how philosophy in general has slowly disolved into a multitude of 'sciences'. Put very simply, as philosophers arrived at answers to the questions they asked, branches of science were founded. These branches themselves subsequently, through questions of problems that arose within them, formed branches of their own leaving philosophers with less and less to ponder beyond 'does any of this really exist at all (and what does it matter anyway)?'
If Beethoven's statement above is true, let's look at some of the common analogies people have used to describe music. The two most common are 'music is like mathematics' and 'music is like language'. While it's true that music embodies many of the characteristics of both of these, neither in itself seems able to fully describe music nor explain what it actually is. I'm of the opinion that music is most like mathematical theories that posit the idea that numbers exist a priori. In other words, music already exists and composers (as creators of music) simply 'discover' things about it and these discoveries are called music. Following on from this, the variety of musical styles across cultures and epochs is analogous to arithmetic, algebra, geometry and a raft of other things that could be classed under the umbrella term of mathematics.
That said, music shares a lot of the attributes of language. Theories of the origins of human speech and language point to the possibility it evolved from involuntary verbal expressions of basic emotions (fear, fright, joy, etc.) This sounds entirely plausible though it's worth noting that the evolution of language - meaning, its development into a variety of sophisticated verbal and written forms - occured much more rapidly than the evolution of music. For example, if Indigenous Australians are taken as the earliest evidence of human civilization, we can assume language has its origins somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago. Similarly, the origins of music can be said to have the same time frame.
Indigenous Australian music, recent research has shown, is not only closely intertwined with its language; songs contain all the knowledge know of the world to its people. This is interesting in itself, though outside the scope of the point I want to make. My point is twofold: that music's origins were born in rhythm and that it then took thousands of millenia for the 'unison' (two people or instruments performing the same pitch together) to evolve. Language by this time was likely much more advanced from its involuntary vocalizations.
After the development of the concept of the unison, it then took several more millenia before basic harmony was conceived and developed. In the parallel world of language, the printing press had already been invented by the time triadic harmony (as well as matters of tuning and temperaments) started to be refined. Put simply, language has evolved in slow and subtle ways over the past 300 or so years while music has evolved more in the same number of years than in the past 70 millenia.
Of course, all of this hinges on the notion that 'music' is an evolutionary process. Charles Darwin didn't believe this (specifically that 'knowledge' and 'ideas' weren't subject to evolutionary principles) and more recently, Thomas S. Kuhn in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' (1962) agreed. On the other hand, the music theorist Joseph Schillinger was of the opinion that music was an evolutionary process and thus bound by the same kind of laws that govern the evolution of biological organisms. His explanations of this can be found in his book 'The Mathematical Basis of the Arts' and these essentially expand on the language evolution idea written about above.
In Schillinger's time (1895 - 1943) modernists (and ultra-modernists as Schillinger and many of his contemporaries in New York called themselves) were strongly attracted to the idea of music being an empirical science and that it could be composed to 'scientific' principles. He, probably even moreso than other theorists he mixed with (Henry Cowell, Joseph Yasser, Henry Cowell in particular), was strong in his conviction about the existence of a 'unifying theory' for music. Unfortunately his theories were presented in a mathematical language of his own invention and thus were rejected by many mathematicians as being 'pseudo-science' and by many composers in the academic tradition who, by the time Schillinger's theories were published (1947 - 1948), were strongly under the influence of John Cage's aleatoric compositional methods or the strict serialism of composers such as Schoenberg.
I say 'unfortunate' because I believe Schillinger was on the right track. It must be remembered that in his time, the 'hard sciences' such as mathematics and physics were the only ones deemed worthy of academic study. 'Soft sciences' such as psychology and sociology were in their infancy - in other words - a sharp divide between science and the humanities. Music didn't properly enter the American academic world until 1915 and even then, its focus was primarily toward performance practices. Schillinger was in the vangard of early 20th century thinkers that introduced 'musicology' to the American academic world.
Musicology - a broad discipline that encompasses performance as well as history, composition, pedagogy, analysis, cultural, sociological and psychological aspects, ethnomusicology and more recently, bio-musicology and the neuro-sciences - first started in Europe in the late 19th century but didn't take root in America until the 1920s. Even so, it took another 40 or so years before musicology gained any real acceptance in academia and another 20 before the fruits of its labors started to be taken seriously. It's worth nothing at this point that there were only four 'new' theories of music written and published in America between 1900 and 1950: Henry Cowell's 'New Musical Resources', Joseph Yasser's 'An Evolving Theory of Tonality', Harry Partch's 'Genesis of a Music', and Joseph Schillinger's "The Mathematical Basis of the Arts' (and by extension, 'The Schillinger System of Composition'). All four theories spoke to a mathematical basis for the creation of music. All four men were among the founding members of the New York Musicology Society in 1932 (later to become the American Musicology Society - the name by which is it still known to this day).
Terms such as 'musico-scientific experiments' were much in vogue as well, undoubtedly due to two factors: the invention of electricity in the late 19th century (and the creation of new musical instruments that resulted from this invention) and Albert (not to be confused with Alfred, the musicologist) Einstein's 'Special Theory of Relativity' in 1905. Schillinger frequently draws on Einstein's terminology where he writes of 'Special Theory of Harmony' etc. in his books. It's also quite possibly the case that Einstein's theories toward a 'General Theory of Relativity' (and the quest it created in the physics world) were at the heart of Schillinger's quest for a 'General Theory of Music' that would explain all music (in his words) 'from any culture or epoch, past, present and future.'
There is precedence for such a quest going right back to Pythagoras that science could conclusively prove a general and unifying theory of music. Composer-theorists such as Jean-Philippe Rameau had similar ideas - ideas considered radical in 1722 when they were published in his 'Treatise on Harmony'. Rameau was later dismissed as a crackpot by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who firmly held the view of Plato that the creation of music is something Divine. Rousseau coincidentally was possibly the first writer to use the word 'genius' in its modern meaning. Doing so created the backdrop for the romantic-era notion of the 'musical genius' as 'madman inspired by God'. It was a notion staunchly rejected by the modernists and ultra-modernists, particularly Schillinger who was himself declared to be a crackpot by the academic establishment in his time (and for some years after his death).
Schillinger, Cowell, and other modernists/ultra-modernists were considered radical in their time for attempting to subvert the 19th century thinking that still held sway in the academic world well into the 20th century. While some intellectual ground was surrendered by traditionalist thinkers, it was only in matters of harmonic progressions (as something that can be reduced to formulas) and acceptance of Schenkerian analysis as a legitimate tool for understanding (retrospectively) the basic details underlying compositions of the pre-twentieth century European classical canon. However, to this day, the romantic notion of melody creation as being something exclusively the preserve of intuitive genius remains as strong now (ask most rock guitarists if they think music 'theory' is of any value to them, for example) as it was in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Until very recently (with the advent of computers and their applications in the composition of music) music and 'science' were uneasy bedfellows.
So, where is all this going? As mentioned at the outset, my theory is still in its infancy and there is a lot of reading yet to be done. At the core of my theory is an idea that Schillinger limited his 'scientific' scope to mathematics (simple arithmetic mostly) and projective geometry. As already mentioned, the academic zietgeist of his time held the view that humanities were 'inferior' as a science discipline. Through the adoption of qualitative (as opposed to traditional quantitative) research methodologies, 'soft sciences' such as psychology and sociology have grown in academic stature. My theory - the one that woke me last night - is Schillinger's theories might have a better chance to be proved correct if studied from a variety of modern scientific perspectives. It should be acknowledged that Schillinger theorized about the psychological dimension of music but such thinking was so radical at the time he couldn't prove anything using existing scientific tools and methods. Much more is known now, but it's still a relatively new field of enquiry.
If we step back for a moment and again look at the question, 'what is music?'
Let's assume that music, whatever it is, exists a priori. This philosophical viewpoint could be compared to John Cage's view of 'music' existing in all the sounds we hear around us, whether organized by a composer or not. From a practical viewpoint, we now have, in the 21st century, the musical composition tools available to create, analyze and synthesize any imaginable musical structure. These tools enable us to perform the 'hard science' of answering our question through describing its physical properties, but the answer isn't complete. Neuro-science tools enable us to map the effects of music in the human brain. Thus we're able to describe more music properties through the physiological dimension. These two descriptions may even be synthesized to generate a more complete understanding of the properties inherent in music, but it still doesn't necessarily answer things fully. In fact, it may even point to a case of there being more than one answer and not any 'universal principle' at play.
So, perhaps a better question to ask is not only what properties music possesses, but how does it behave? In other words, if we're to assume that music is an evolutionary system governed by the same rules as biological systems as suggested by Schillinger, then as well as the microscopic (measurable) levels in music - where sound frequencies are analogous with atoms; harmonic and rhythmic combinations (patterns) are analogous with cells - we need to take into account the macroscopic (also measurable using qualitative methodologies) levels. Schillinger believed projective geometry could be adapted to suit the task of measuring, analysing and synthesizing the macroscopic dimentions of music - macroscopic here meaning the whole aesthetic experience of music.
Projective geometry goes some of the way to describing the emotional effect as it provides a scientific explanation of how perception works. However, if we extend Schillinger's original concept of music as a biological entity and fully anthropomorphize it, it can be assigned a 'personality' that may be analysed using traditional psychological tools. Through understanding how it (music) behaves, a set of rules may be devised that don't govern what it should be but simply what music is.
That's all for now. My brain hurts...
Beethoven apparently once answered this question by saying, "Music is a metaphor - life provides its analogies". I think it's more true to say life is its analogy. The origins of the question of 'what is' anything can be traced back to antiquity and it remains a cornerstone of philosophical thought. 'What is music?' is a question that boggled the minds of the ancients and its answer continues to remain ellusive. Throughout the history of Western knowledge, music has at various times been placed on a singular polarity with science at one end and the Divine or supernatural at the other.
Pythagoras certainly did much to create an empirical scientific basis for music, although his findings related more to the acoustic properties of musical sounds than to the art of creating music. Aristoxenus (a pupil of Aristotle) advanced a theory that the acoustic properties of musical sounds (the ratios of the harmonic overtone series) were at the heart of musical rhythms. In effect, Aristoxenus took a step closer to defining music composition as a natural phenomena that could be explained by science. This relationship between pitch and rhythm theorized by Aristoxenus was confirmed by the experiments of Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century. (See his book On the Sensations of Tone as a Psychological Basis for the Theory of Music first published in 1863.)
Before leaping forward in history from Aristoxenus, it's important to note how philosophy in general has slowly disolved into a multitude of 'sciences'. Put very simply, as philosophers arrived at answers to the questions they asked, branches of science were founded. These branches themselves subsequently, through questions of problems that arose within them, formed branches of their own leaving philosophers with less and less to ponder beyond 'does any of this really exist at all (and what does it matter anyway)?'
If Beethoven's statement above is true, let's look at some of the common analogies people have used to describe music. The two most common are 'music is like mathematics' and 'music is like language'. While it's true that music embodies many of the characteristics of both of these, neither in itself seems able to fully describe music nor explain what it actually is. I'm of the opinion that music is most like mathematical theories that posit the idea that numbers exist a priori. In other words, music already exists and composers (as creators of music) simply 'discover' things about it and these discoveries are called music. Following on from this, the variety of musical styles across cultures and epochs is analogous to arithmetic, algebra, geometry and a raft of other things that could be classed under the umbrella term of mathematics.
That said, music shares a lot of the attributes of language. Theories of the origins of human speech and language point to the possibility it evolved from involuntary verbal expressions of basic emotions (fear, fright, joy, etc.) This sounds entirely plausible though it's worth noting that the evolution of language - meaning, its development into a variety of sophisticated verbal and written forms - occured much more rapidly than the evolution of music. For example, if Indigenous Australians are taken as the earliest evidence of human civilization, we can assume language has its origins somewhere between 40,000 and 70,000 years ago. Similarly, the origins of music can be said to have the same time frame.
Indigenous Australian music, recent research has shown, is not only closely intertwined with its language; songs contain all the knowledge know of the world to its people. This is interesting in itself, though outside the scope of the point I want to make. My point is twofold: that music's origins were born in rhythm and that it then took thousands of millenia for the 'unison' (two people or instruments performing the same pitch together) to evolve. Language by this time was likely much more advanced from its involuntary vocalizations.
After the development of the concept of the unison, it then took several more millenia before basic harmony was conceived and developed. In the parallel world of language, the printing press had already been invented by the time triadic harmony (as well as matters of tuning and temperaments) started to be refined. Put simply, language has evolved in slow and subtle ways over the past 300 or so years while music has evolved more in the same number of years than in the past 70 millenia.
Of course, all of this hinges on the notion that 'music' is an evolutionary process. Charles Darwin didn't believe this (specifically that 'knowledge' and 'ideas' weren't subject to evolutionary principles) and more recently, Thomas S. Kuhn in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' (1962) agreed. On the other hand, the music theorist Joseph Schillinger was of the opinion that music was an evolutionary process and thus bound by the same kind of laws that govern the evolution of biological organisms. His explanations of this can be found in his book 'The Mathematical Basis of the Arts' and these essentially expand on the language evolution idea written about above.
In Schillinger's time (1895 - 1943) modernists (and ultra-modernists as Schillinger and many of his contemporaries in New York called themselves) were strongly attracted to the idea of music being an empirical science and that it could be composed to 'scientific' principles. He, probably even moreso than other theorists he mixed with (Henry Cowell, Joseph Yasser, Henry Cowell in particular), was strong in his conviction about the existence of a 'unifying theory' for music. Unfortunately his theories were presented in a mathematical language of his own invention and thus were rejected by many mathematicians as being 'pseudo-science' and by many composers in the academic tradition who, by the time Schillinger's theories were published (1947 - 1948), were strongly under the influence of John Cage's aleatoric compositional methods or the strict serialism of composers such as Schoenberg.
I say 'unfortunate' because I believe Schillinger was on the right track. It must be remembered that in his time, the 'hard sciences' such as mathematics and physics were the only ones deemed worthy of academic study. 'Soft sciences' such as psychology and sociology were in their infancy - in other words - a sharp divide between science and the humanities. Music didn't properly enter the American academic world until 1915 and even then, its focus was primarily toward performance practices. Schillinger was in the vangard of early 20th century thinkers that introduced 'musicology' to the American academic world.
Musicology - a broad discipline that encompasses performance as well as history, composition, pedagogy, analysis, cultural, sociological and psychological aspects, ethnomusicology and more recently, bio-musicology and the neuro-sciences - first started in Europe in the late 19th century but didn't take root in America until the 1920s. Even so, it took another 40 or so years before musicology gained any real acceptance in academia and another 20 before the fruits of its labors started to be taken seriously. It's worth nothing at this point that there were only four 'new' theories of music written and published in America between 1900 and 1950: Henry Cowell's 'New Musical Resources', Joseph Yasser's 'An Evolving Theory of Tonality', Harry Partch's 'Genesis of a Music', and Joseph Schillinger's "The Mathematical Basis of the Arts' (and by extension, 'The Schillinger System of Composition'). All four theories spoke to a mathematical basis for the creation of music. All four men were among the founding members of the New York Musicology Society in 1932 (later to become the American Musicology Society - the name by which is it still known to this day).
Terms such as 'musico-scientific experiments' were much in vogue as well, undoubtedly due to two factors: the invention of electricity in the late 19th century (and the creation of new musical instruments that resulted from this invention) and Albert (not to be confused with Alfred, the musicologist) Einstein's 'Special Theory of Relativity' in 1905. Schillinger frequently draws on Einstein's terminology where he writes of 'Special Theory of Harmony' etc. in his books. It's also quite possibly the case that Einstein's theories toward a 'General Theory of Relativity' (and the quest it created in the physics world) were at the heart of Schillinger's quest for a 'General Theory of Music' that would explain all music (in his words) 'from any culture or epoch, past, present and future.'
There is precedence for such a quest going right back to Pythagoras that science could conclusively prove a general and unifying theory of music. Composer-theorists such as Jean-Philippe Rameau had similar ideas - ideas considered radical in 1722 when they were published in his 'Treatise on Harmony'. Rameau was later dismissed as a crackpot by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who firmly held the view of Plato that the creation of music is something Divine. Rousseau coincidentally was possibly the first writer to use the word 'genius' in its modern meaning. Doing so created the backdrop for the romantic-era notion of the 'musical genius' as 'madman inspired by God'. It was a notion staunchly rejected by the modernists and ultra-modernists, particularly Schillinger who was himself declared to be a crackpot by the academic establishment in his time (and for some years after his death).
Schillinger, Cowell, and other modernists/ultra-modernists were considered radical in their time for attempting to subvert the 19th century thinking that still held sway in the academic world well into the 20th century. While some intellectual ground was surrendered by traditionalist thinkers, it was only in matters of harmonic progressions (as something that can be reduced to formulas) and acceptance of Schenkerian analysis as a legitimate tool for understanding (retrospectively) the basic details underlying compositions of the pre-twentieth century European classical canon. However, to this day, the romantic notion of melody creation as being something exclusively the preserve of intuitive genius remains as strong now (ask most rock guitarists if they think music 'theory' is of any value to them, for example) as it was in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Until very recently (with the advent of computers and their applications in the composition of music) music and 'science' were uneasy bedfellows.
So, where is all this going? As mentioned at the outset, my theory is still in its infancy and there is a lot of reading yet to be done. At the core of my theory is an idea that Schillinger limited his 'scientific' scope to mathematics (simple arithmetic mostly) and projective geometry. As already mentioned, the academic zietgeist of his time held the view that humanities were 'inferior' as a science discipline. Through the adoption of qualitative (as opposed to traditional quantitative) research methodologies, 'soft sciences' such as psychology and sociology have grown in academic stature. My theory - the one that woke me last night - is Schillinger's theories might have a better chance to be proved correct if studied from a variety of modern scientific perspectives. It should be acknowledged that Schillinger theorized about the psychological dimension of music but such thinking was so radical at the time he couldn't prove anything using existing scientific tools and methods. Much more is known now, but it's still a relatively new field of enquiry.
If we step back for a moment and again look at the question, 'what is music?'
Let's assume that music, whatever it is, exists a priori. This philosophical viewpoint could be compared to John Cage's view of 'music' existing in all the sounds we hear around us, whether organized by a composer or not. From a practical viewpoint, we now have, in the 21st century, the musical composition tools available to create, analyze and synthesize any imaginable musical structure. These tools enable us to perform the 'hard science' of answering our question through describing its physical properties, but the answer isn't complete. Neuro-science tools enable us to map the effects of music in the human brain. Thus we're able to describe more music properties through the physiological dimension. These two descriptions may even be synthesized to generate a more complete understanding of the properties inherent in music, but it still doesn't necessarily answer things fully. In fact, it may even point to a case of there being more than one answer and not any 'universal principle' at play.
So, perhaps a better question to ask is not only what properties music possesses, but how does it behave? In other words, if we're to assume that music is an evolutionary system governed by the same rules as biological systems as suggested by Schillinger, then as well as the microscopic (measurable) levels in music - where sound frequencies are analogous with atoms; harmonic and rhythmic combinations (patterns) are analogous with cells - we need to take into account the macroscopic (also measurable using qualitative methodologies) levels. Schillinger believed projective geometry could be adapted to suit the task of measuring, analysing and synthesizing the macroscopic dimentions of music - macroscopic here meaning the whole aesthetic experience of music.
Projective geometry goes some of the way to describing the emotional effect as it provides a scientific explanation of how perception works. However, if we extend Schillinger's original concept of music as a biological entity and fully anthropomorphize it, it can be assigned a 'personality' that may be analysed using traditional psychological tools. Through understanding how it (music) behaves, a set of rules may be devised that don't govern what it should be but simply what music is.
That's all for now. My brain hurts...
Labels: Music Essay
posted by Mister Pervert at 7:07 AM
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