Definition of music

Last updated

A definition of music endeavors to give an accurate and concise explanation of music's basic attributes or essential nature and it involves a process of defining what is meant by the term music . Many authorities have suggested definitions, but defining music turns out to be more difficult than might first be imagined, and there is ongoing debate. A number of explanations start with the notion of music as organized sound, but they also highlight that this is perhaps too broad a definition and cite examples of organized sound that are not defined as music, such as human speech and sounds found in both natural and industrial environments . [1] The problem of defining music is further complicated by the influence of culture in music cognition.

Contents

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines music as "the art of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion". [2] However, some music genres, such as noise music and musique concrète, challenge these ideas by using sounds not widely considered as musical, beautiful or harmonious, like randomly produced electronic distortion, feedback, static, cacophony, and sounds produced using compositional processes which utilize indeterminacy. [3] [4]

An often-cited example of the dilemma in defining music is the work 4′33″ (1952) by the American composer John Cage (1912–1992). The written score has three movements and directs the performer(s) to appear on stage, indicate by gesture or other means when the piece begins, then make no sound throughout the duration of the piece, marking sections and the end by gesture. The audience hears only whatever ambient sounds may occur in the room. Some argue that 4′33″ is not music because, among other reasons, it contains no sounds that are conventionally considered "musical" and the composer and performer(s) exert no control over the organization of the sounds heard. [5] Others argue it is music because the conventional definitions of musical sounds are unnecessarily and arbitrarily limited, and control over the organization of the sounds is achieved by the composer and performer(s) through their gestures that divide what is heard into specific sections and a comprehensible form. [6]

Concepts of music

Because of differing fundamental concepts of music, the languages of many cultures do not contain a word that can be accurately translated as "music" as that word is generally understood by Western cultures. [7] Inuit and most North American Indian languages do not have a general term for music. Among the Aztecs, the ancient Mexican theory of rhetoric, poetry, dance, and instrumental music used the Nahuatl term In xochitl-in kwikatl to refer to a complex mix of music and other poetic verbal and non-verbal elements, and reserved the word Kwikakayotl (or cuicacayotl) only for the sung expressions. [8] There is no term for music in Nigerian languages Tiv, Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Birom, Hausa, Idoma, Eggon or Jarawa. Many other languages have terms which only partly cover what Western culture typically means by the term music.( [9] ) The Mapuche of Argentina do not have a word for music, but they do have words for instrumental versus improvised forms (kantun), European and non-Mapuche music (kantun winka), ceremonial songs (öl), and tayil. [10]

While some languages in West Africa have no term for music, some West African languages accept the general concepts of music.( [11] ) Musiqi is the Persian word for the science and art of music, muzik being the sound and performance of music,( [12] ) though some things European-influenced listeners would include, such as Quran chanting, are excluded.

Music vs. noise

Ben Watson points out that Ludwig van Beethoven's Große Fuge (1825) "sounded like noise" to his audience at the time. Indeed, Beethoven's publishers persuaded him to remove it from its original setting as the last movement of a string quartet. He did so, replacing it with a sparkling Allegro. They subsequently published it separately. [13] [ clarification needed ] Musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez considers the difference between noise and music nebulous, explaining that "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be". [14]

Definitions

Organized sound

An often-cited definition of music is that it is "organized sound", a term originally coined by modernist composer Edgard Varèse [15] in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's concept of music as "organized sound" fits into his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". [16] He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. [17] Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?" [18]

The fifteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica states that "while there are no sounds that can be described as inherently unmusical, musicians in each culture have tended to restrict the range of sounds they will admit." A human organizing element is often felt to be implicit in music (sounds produced by non-human agents, such as waterfalls or birds, are often described as "musical", but perhaps less often as "music"). The composer R. Murray [19] states that the sound of classical music "has decays; it is granular; it has attacks; it fluctuates, swollen with impurities—and all this creates a musicality that comes before any 'cultural' musicality." However, in the view of semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, "just as music is whatever people choose to recognize as such, noise is whatever is recognized as disturbing, unpleasant, or both". [20] (See "music as social construct" below.)

Language

Levi R. Bryant defines music not as a language, but as a marked-based, problem-solving method, comparable to mathematics. [21]

Musical universals

Most definitions of music include a reference to sound and a list of universals of music can be generated by stating the elements (or aspects) of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, duration, spatial location and texture. [22] ). However, in terms more specifically relating to music: following Wittgenstein, cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch proposes that categories are not clean cut but that something may be more or less a member of a category. [23] As such the search for musical universals would fail and would not provide one with a valid definition. [24] This is primarily because other cultures have different understandings in relation to the sounds that English-language writers refer to as music.

Social construct

Many people do, however, share a general idea of music. The Websters definition of music is a typical example: "the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity" (Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, online edition).

Subjective experience

This approach to the definition focuses not on the construction but on the experience of music. An extreme statement of the position has been articulated by the Italian composer Luciano Berio: "Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music". [25] This approach permits the boundary between music and noise to change over time as the conventions of musical interpretation evolve within a culture, to be different in different cultures at any given moment, and to vary from person to person according to their experience and proclivities. It is further consistent with the subjective reality that even what would commonly be considered music is experienced as non-music if the mind is concentrating on other matters and thus not perceiving the sound's essenceas music. [26]

Specific definitions

Clifton

In his 1983 book, Music as Heard, which sets out from the phenomenological position of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Ricœur, Thomas Clifton defines music as "an ordered arrangement of sounds and silences whose meaning is presentative rather than denotative ... This definition distinguishes music, as an end in itself, from compositional technique, and from sounds as purely physical objects." More precisely, "music is the actualization of the possibility of any sound whatever to present to some human being a meaning which he experiences with his body—that is to say, with his mind, his feelings, his senses, his will, and his metabolism". [27] It is therefore "a certain reciprocal relation established between a person, his behavior, and a sounding object". [28]

Clifton accordingly differentiates music from non-music on the basis of the human behavior involved, rather than on either the nature of compositional technique or of sounds as purely physical objects. Consequently, the distinction becomes a question of what is meant by musical behavior: "a musically behaving person is one whose very being is absorbed in the significance of the sounds being experienced." However, "It is not altogether accurate to say that this person is listening to the sounds. First, the person is doing more than listening: he is perceiving, interpreting, judging, and feeling. Second, the preposition 'to' puts too much stress on the sounds as such. Thus, the musically behaving person experiences musical significance by means of, or through, the sounds". [29]

In this framework, Clifton finds that there are two things that separate music from non-music: (1) musical meaning is presentative, and (2) music and non-music are distinguished in the idea of personal involvement. "It is the notion of personal involvement which lends significance to the word ordered in this definition of music". [30] This is not to be understood, however, as a sanctification of extreme relativism, since "it is precisely the 'subjective' aspect of experience which lured many writers earlier in this century down the path of sheer opinion-mongering. Later on this trend was reversed by a renewed interest in 'objective,' scientific, or otherwise non-introspective musical analysis. But we have good reason to believe that a musical experience is not a purely private thing, like seeing pink elephants, and that reporting about such an experience need not be subjective in the sense of it being a mere matter of opinion". [31]

Clifton's task, then, is to describe musical experience and the objects of this experience which, together, are called "phenomena", and the activity of describing phenomena is called "phenomenology". [26] It is important to stress that this definition of music says nothing about aesthetic standards.

Music is not a fact or a thing in the world, but a meaning constituted by human beings. ... To talk about such experience in a meaningful way demands several things. First, we have to be willing to let the composition speak to us, to let it reveal its own order and significance. ... Second, we have to be willing to question our assumptions about the nature and role of musical materials. ... Last, and perhaps most important, we have to be ready to admit that describing a meaningful experience is itself meaningful. [32]

Nattiez

"Music, often an art/entertainment, is a total social fact whose definitions vary according to era and culture", according to Jean. [33] It is often contrasted with noise. According to musicologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez: "The border between music and noise is always culturally defined—which implies that, even within a single society, this border does not always pass through the same place; in short, there is rarely a consensus ... By all accounts there is no single and intercultural universal concept defining what music might be". [34] Given the above demonstration that "there is no limit to the number or the genre of variables that might intervene in a definition of the musical", [35] an organization of definitions and elements is necessary.

Nattiez (1990, 17) describes definitions according to a tripartite semiological scheme similar to the following:

Poietic ProcessEsthesic Process
Composer (Producer)Sound (Trace)Listener (Receiver)

There are three levels of description, the poietic, the neutral, and the esthesic:

Table describing types of definitions of music: [37]

poietic level
(choice of the composer)
neutral level
(physical definition)
esthesic level
(perceptive judgment)
musicmusical soundsound of the
harmonic
spectrum
agreeable sound
non-musicnoise
(nonmusical)
noise
(complex sound)
disagreeable
noise

Because of this range of definitions, the study of music comes in a wide variety of forms. There is the study of sound and vibration or acoustics, the cognitive study of music, the study of music theory and performance practice or music theory and ethnomusicology and the study of the reception and history of music, generally called musicology.

Xenakis

Composer Iannis Xenakis in "Towards a Metamusic" (chapter 7 of Formalized Music) defined music in the following way: [38]

  1. It is a sort of comportment necessary for whoever thinks it and makes it.
  2. It is an individual pleroma, a realization.
  3. It is a fixing in sound of imagined virtualities (cosmological, philosophical, ..., arguments)
  4. It is normative, that is, unconsciously it is a model for being or for doing by sympathetic drive.
  5. It is catalytic: its mere presence permits internal psychic or mental transformations in the same way as the crystal ball of the hypnotist.
  6. It is the gratuitous play of a child.
  7. It is a mystical (but atheistic) asceticism. Consequently, expressions of sadness, joy, love and dramatic situations are only very limited particular instances.

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music</span> Form of art using sound

In the most general of terms, music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise expressive content. Definitions of music vary depending on culture, though it is an aspect of all human societies and a cultural universal. While scholars agree that music is defined by a few specific elements, there is no consensus on their precise definitions. The creation of music is commonly divided into musical composition, musical improvisation, and musical performance, though the topic itself extends into academic disciplines, criticism, philosophy, psychology, and therapeutic contexts. Music may be performed using a vast range of instruments, including the human voice to sing, and thus is often credited for its extreme versatility and opportunity for creativity.

Musique concrète is a type of music composition that utilizes recorded sounds as raw material. Sounds are often modified through the application of audio signal processing and tape music techniques, and may be assembled into a form of sound collage. It can feature sounds derived from recordings of musical instruments, the human voice, and the natural environment as well as those created using sound synthesis and computer-based digital signal processing. Compositions in this idiom are not restricted to the normal musical rules of melody, harmony, rhythm, and metre. The technique exploits acousmatic sound, such that sound identities can often be intentionally obscured or appear unconnected to their source cause.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Music theory</span> Study of the practices and possibilities of music

Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. The Oxford Companion to Music describes three interrelated uses of the term "music theory": The first is the "rudiments", that are needed to understand music notation ; the second is learning scholars' views on music from antiquity to the present; the third is a sub-topic of musicology that "seeks to define processes and general principles in music". The musicological approach to theory differs from music analysis "in that it takes as its starting-point not the individual work or performance but the fundamental materials from which it is built."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ethnomusicology</span> Study of the cultural aspects of music

Ethnomusicology is the multidisciplinary study of music in its cultural context, investigating social, cognitive, biological, comparative, and other dimensions involved other than sound. Ethnomusicologists study music as a reflection of culture and investigate the act of musicking through various immersive, observational, and analytical approaches drawn from other disciplines such as anthropology to understand a culture’s music. This discipline emerged from comparative musicology, initially focusing on non-Western music, but later expanded to embrace the study of any and all different kinds of music of the world.

Noise music is a genre of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Composer</span> Person who writes music

A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Musical analysis</span>

Musical analysis is the study of musical structure in either compositions or performances. According to music theorist Ian Bent, music analysis "is the means of answering directly the question 'How does it work?'". The method employed to answer this question, and indeed exactly what is meant by the question, differs from analyst to analyst, and according to the purpose of the analysis. According to Bent, "its emergence as an approach and method can be traced back to the 1750s. However it existed as a scholarly tool, albeit an auxiliary one, from the Middle Ages onwards."

<i>4′33″</i> 1952 modernist composition by John Cage

4′33″ is a modernist composition by American experimental composer John Cage. It was composed in 1952 for any instrument or combination of instruments; the score instructs performers not to play their instruments throughout the three movements. It is divided into three movements, lasting 30 seconds, two minutes and 23 seconds, and one minute and 40 seconds, respectively, although Cage later stated that the movements' durations can be determined by the musician. As indicated by the title, the composition lasts four minutes and 33 seconds and is marked by a period of silence, although ambient sounds contribute to the performance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Silence</span> Lack of audible sound or presence of sounds of very low intensity

Silence is the absence of ambient audible sound, the emission of sounds of such low intensity that they do not draw attention to themselves, or the state of having ceased to produce sounds; this latter sense can be extended to apply to the cessation or absence of any form of communication, whether through speech or other medium.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elements of music</span> Ingredients that form music

Music can be analysed by considering a variety of its elements, or parts, individually or together. A commonly used list of the main elements includes pitch, timbre, texture, volume, duration, and form. The elements of music may be compared to the elements of art or design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Modernism (music)</span> Changes in musical form during the early 20th Century

In music, modernism is an aesthetic stance underlying the period of change and development in musical language that occurred around the turn of the 20th century, a period of diverse reactions in challenging and reinterpreting older categories of music, innovations that led to new ways of organizing and approaching harmonic, melodic, sonic, and rhythmic aspects of music, and changes in aesthetic worldviews in close relation to the larger identifiable period of modernism in the arts of the time. The operative word most associated with it is "innovation". Its leading feature is a "linguistic plurality", which is to say that no one music genre ever assumed a dominant position.

Inherent within musical modernism is the conviction that music is not a static phenomenon defined by timeless truths and classical principles, but rather something which is intrinsically historical and developmental. While belief in musical progress or in the principle of innovation is not new or unique to modernism, such values are particularly important within modernist aesthetic stances.

<i>Ionisation</i> (Varèse) Musical composition by Edgard Varèse

Ionisation (1929–1931) is a musical composition by Edgard Varèse written for thirteen percussionists. It was among the first concert hall compositions for percussion ensemble alone, although Alexander Tcherepnin had composed an entire movement for percussion alone in his Symphony No. 1 from 1927. In the journal Tempo, percussionist Brian Holder writes, "The work presented the important notion that unpitched percussion could stand alone as a serious form of concert music – a relatively unexplored concept at the time."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chou Wen-chung</span> Chinese American composer (1923–2019)

Chou Wen-chung was a Chinese American composer of contemporary classical music. He emigrated in 1946 to the United States and received his music training at the New England Conservatory and Columbia University. Chou is credited by Nicolas Slonimsky as one of the first Chinese composers who attempted to translate authentic East Asian melo-rhythms into the terms of modern Western music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan P. Merriam</span> American ethnomusicologist

Alan Parkhurst Merriam was an American ethnomusicologist known for his studies of music in Native America and Africa. In his book The Anthropology of Music (1964), he outlined and develops a theory and method for studying music from an anthropological perspective with anthropological methods. Although he taught at Northwestern University and University of Wisconsin, the majority of his academic career was spent at Indiana University where he was named a professor in 1962 and then chairman of the anthropology department from 1966 to 1969, which became a leading center of ethnomusicology research under his guidance. He was a co-founder of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1952 and held the elected post of president of that society from 1963 to 1965. He edited the Newsletter of the Society for Ethnomusicology from 1952 to 1957, and he edited the journal Ethnomusicology from 1957 to 1958.

Philosophy of music is the study of "fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it". The philosophical study of music has many connections with philosophical questions in metaphysics and aesthetics. The expression was born in the 19th century and has been used especially as the name of a discipline since the 1980s.

Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, institutionalized compositional, performing, and aesthetic conventions in music. Elements of experimental music include indeterminacy, in which the composer introduces the elements of chance or unpredictability with regard to either the composition or its performance. Artists may approach a hybrid of disparate styles or incorporate unorthodox and unique elements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The arts</span> Creative human and cultural expression

The arts are a wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling, and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing, and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both dynamic and a characteristically constant feature of human life, they have developed into innovative, stylized, and sometimes intricate forms. This is often achieved through sustained and deliberate study, training, and/or theorizing within a particular tradition, across generations, and even between civilizations. The arts are a vehicle through which human beings cultivate distinct social, cultural, and individual identities while transmitting values, impressions, judgements, ideas, visions, spiritual meanings, patterns of life, and experiences across time and space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Noise in music</span> Unpitched, indeterminate, uncontrolled, loud, unmusical, or unwanted sound

In music, "noise" has been variously described as unpitched, indeterminate, uncontrolled, convoluted, unmelodic, loud, otherwise unmusical, or unwanted sound, or simply as sound in general. The exact definition is often a matter of both cultural norms and personal tastes. Noise is an important component of the sound of the human voice and all musical instruments, particularly in unpitched percussion instruments and electric guitars. Electronic instruments create various colours of noise. Traditional uses of noise are unrestricted, using all the frequencies associated with pitch and timbre, such as the white noise component of a drum roll on a snare drum, or the transients present in the prefix of the sounds of some organ pipes.

Intégrales is a work for eleven wind and brass instruments and four percussionists by Edgard Varèse, written in 1923 and published in New York in 1925. It was first performed on 1 March 1925, at the Aeolian Hall, New York City, at a concert organised by the International Composers' Guild (ICG). It was also the last piece played at the final concert ICG on 17 April 1927, also at the Aeolian Hall. This was contrary to the ICG policy of only performing a work once, a policy of which Varèse himself was the foremost proponent.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edgard Varèse</span> French American composer

Edgard Victor Achille Charles Varèse was a French composer who spent the greater part of his career in the United States. Varèse's music emphasizes timbre and rhythm; he coined the term "organized sound" in reference to his own musical aesthetic. Varèse's conception of music reflected his vision of "sound as living matter" and of "musical space as open rather than bounded". He conceived the elements of his music in terms of "sound-masses", likening their organization to the natural phenomenon of crystallization. Varèse thought that "to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise", and he posed the question, "what is music but organized noises?"

References

  1. Kania 2014.
  2. Concise Oxford Dictionary 1992.
  3. Priest 2013, 132.
  4. Hagerty 2007.
  5. Dodd 2013.
  6. Gann 2010.
  7. Nettl 2005.
  8. Leon-Portilla 2007, 11.
  9. Schafer 1996, 222-223.
  10. Robertson–de Carbo 1976, 39.
  11. Nettl 1989, 48.
  12. Sakata 1983, 39.
  13. Watson n.d., 109–110.
  14. Nattiez 1990, 48, 55.
  15. Goldman 1961, 133.
  16. Chou 1966a, 14.
  17. Chou 1966b, 157.
  18. Varèse and Chou 1966, 18.
  19. Schafer 1996, 284.
  20. Nattiez 1990, 4748.
  21. Ashby 2004, 4.
  22. Burton 2015, 22–28.
  23. Rosch 1973, 328.
  24. Levitin 2006, 136–139.
  25. Berio, Dalmonte, & Varga 1985, 19.
  26. 1 2 Clifton 1983, 9.
  27. Clifton 1983, 1.
  28. Clifton 1983, 10.
  29. Clifton 1983, 2.
  30. Clifton 1983, 3–4.
  31. Clifton 1983, 8–9.
  32. Clifton 1983, 5–6.
  33. Molino 1975, 37.
  34. Nattiez 1990, 47–48, 55.
  35. Molino 1975, 42.
  36. Nattiez 1990, 90.
  37. Nattiez 1990, 46.
  38. Xenakis 1971, 181.

Sources

Further reading