{"id":1981,"date":"2010-03-07T09:47:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-07T16:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/07\/a-definition-of-music-with-due-regard-for-where-angels-fear-to-tread\/"},"modified":"2010-03-07T10:45:51","modified_gmt":"2010-03-07T17:45:51","slug":"a-definition-of-music-with-due-regard-for-where-angels-fear-to-tread","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.harmonicminer.com\/wordpress\/2010\/03\/07\/a-definition-of-music-with-due-regard-for-where-angels-fear-to-tread\/","title":{"rendered":"A definition of music (with due regard for where angels fear to tread)"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, I was plowing through some old disks, trying to locate a musical project that a client from years ago seems to want to remix.<\/p>\n

While I was at it, I ran across a definition of music that I’d written many years ago, when a professor essentially forced me to do it, even though I thought it was an impossible task.\u00a0 For the record, I still think it’s an impossible task.\u00a0 But, for your entertainment and derision, and because I can’t think of anything better to post today, here it is:
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Music is sound, created by a human being or surrogate (such as a computer programmed by a human), designed to be heard and understood at some level other than language. <\/span>It isn’t just explicitly referential sound effects (as in the work of a foley artist for film). <\/span>It isn’t a more or less accidental result of some other process, whose main purpose isn’t the creation of sound (as in the sweetly purring motor that is “music” to the mechanic’s ears). <\/span>It is sound created primarily to be experienced as sound, designed to he heard without a specific extra-musical meaning attached to its elements. <\/span>(This doesn’t mean that a given composition can’t have a program assigned by the composer to some element or other. <\/span>It does<\/em> mean that there is no automatic understanding of extra-musical meaning built into the “musical language” itself.) <\/span>Its closest linguistic analog is poetry, as opposed to prose. <\/span>Its closest physical motion analog is dance, as opposed to athletics of a team or solo nature. <\/span>Music itself is neither language nor dance, though it partakes of certain similarities, having to do with the ways that events are organized temporally.<\/span><\/big><\/p>\n

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If communication requires a shared language with clear definitions for terms, music is NOT communication. <\/span>It is possible to listen to a language that one does not know, recognize that it is<\/em> a language, and yet understand nothing that was said, not even emotional overtones or context. <\/span>In such cases, the only thing that is communicated is that no communication is taking place, beyond the fact that someone is trying unsuccessfully to communicate! <\/span>When we listen to a musical style whose basic precepts escape us, we usually still know it’s music, or at least that it was intended to be.<\/span><\/big><\/p>\n

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Different kinds of music depend on different kinds of listening on the part of a presumed audience. <\/span>Therefore, except in the most general of terms, no single kind of listening can be termed “musical listening”, without reference to the particular type of music being heard.<\/big><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If you enjoy this sort of philosophical wool-gathering, you can find more of it here<\/a>, on another site that I haven’t been maintaining much lately…\u00a0 probably because I have little that’s new to add to the topic, that I haven’t already written and posted there.<\/p>\n

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