This post is public-facing note taking on Music Matters by David Elliott and Marissa Silverman for my Philosophy of Music Education class.
This chapter goes after the big questions: What is music and why does it exist? I love chewing over this stuff.
The ancient Greek word mousikê encompasses singing, dancing, poetry, rhythm, melody, and theater. Intriguing that it’s one of several world cultures that doesn’t distinguish between between music and dance. Are people in Western culture so unhappy because we do too much sitting in chairs and not enough dancing?
Shona, like English, uses the same word for playing music and playing generally. Ancient Chinese uses the same word for music and joy. Other cultures have no single, general term for music, instead using a variety of terms for specific activities and practices.
Common Western definitions of music:
- “Music is in the ear of the beholder.” Too often employed by snobs to dismiss music they don’t like, e.g. “rap isn’t music.” Which, I guess is the same thing I do when I dismiss John Cage. I know that 4’33” is a normative critique of Western tradition, a musical version of Duchamp’s urinal. So, highbrow trolling? I’m told that Cage was more about processes, rituals and event than actual sound per se. So 4’33” is music because it occurs in the conventional context of music. I get that, but it still feels more like a commentary on music than music itself.
- “Music is organized sounds and silences.” Organized how? Do ticking clocks count?
- “Music is humanly organized sounds.” Do we count bird and whale songs?
- “Music is humanly structured patterns of melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, and textures.” Too narrow.
- Music is humanly organized sounds and silences that can arouse or express human emotions and are intended to do so.” Now we’re getting somewhere. But non-musical sounds can arouse emotions (babies crying) and music can fail to arouse emotions (ice cream truck jingle.) Also, not every culture subscribes to the “emotion” idea. The Navajo tradition holds that music is medicinal, more like Tylenol than poetry. They’re not wrong.
Musics, not music. There is no unitary definition. More like a collection of practices with fuzzy boundaries.
My preferred definition of music is: sounds given meaning through repetition. That definition includes rhythmic music, as well as all pitched sounds, because those are really just fast rhythms. It excludes 4’33” and various other canonical works of twentieth century modernism, which is fine with me. (I consider 4’33” to be a form of sound art, or performance art.) (But Cage intended it to be music. This is tricky territory.)
Elliott and Silverman try to manage all of the complexity by gathering the various concepts of music under two big categories: the work-concept and the contextual/social/praxial-concept. The work-concept of music considers music to be a collection of context-free objects: composed works, discrete improvisations (66). It locates the value and meaning of the music within the music itself: melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre and so on. This is a natural fit for the definition of music as organized sound. It also implies the existence of “extramusical” factors like social context. And it implies the existence of an aesthetic experience of the music, attainable by closing your eyes and concentrating deeply on the music and nothing else. It’s like a microbiologist mounting a sample on a slide, or a museum curator putting a sculpture in a glass case.
Elliott and Silverman, as you might expect, think that the work-concept is totally inadequate to make sense of the diversity of musics in the world. The work-concept is the product of a particular time and place: Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. It emerged at the same time that notated scores became commercial objects. Music Matters is, among other things, a book-length critique of the aesthetic approach to music. I always thought that an aesthetic experience is an intrinsically emotional one. But no! Sophisticated musical aesthetes are supposed to see past immediate bodily responses to the supposedly deeper, truer intellectual meaning and structure of the music. If you’re me, and you think that the intellectual structure of the music exists for the specific purpose of having an animal-level emotional response, the aesthetic mindset is a hard one to understand. And I’m not alone. The further you get from Enlightenment-era Western European classical music, the less sense the work-concept and its aesthetic contemplation make.
That leaves us with the social-contextual concept of music. Rather than seeing music as a thing, Elliott and Silverman want us to see it as a practice, an activity, a process. As Christopher Small puts it, musics are culturally situated acts of interpretation (73). You see that most clearly in participatory cultures. There especially, music is inseparable from the social context of its making. But even the “pure” contemplation of a Beethoven score is going to be a product as much of the contemplator’s mind as the contents of that score, and the contemplator’s mind is built substantially out of its reactions to the world around it.
You would think that recorded music would reinforce the work-concept, since recordings are even more thing-like than scores. Until recently, that was indeed the case. But digital audio editing and remix culture have turned recordings into a body of raw material as fluid and protean as any participatory folk music.
I am totally convinced by the theory that music is the evolutionary precursor to language, the bridge between the cries and gestures of other primates and our own more abstract communication. I’m happy to accept that all of our culture and technology is an entailed outgrowth of our biology, just like beaver dams and bird nests. The idea that humans are somehow separate from and profoundly different from the rest of the animals is every bit a product of the European Enlightenment as the work-concept of music. Looking at you, Rene Descartes. Maybe we would have an easier time seeing the smooth gradation from humans to the rest of our fellow apes if the intermediate species (Neanderthals, Australopithecenes et al) weren’t all extinct. Probably at our hands.
I felt the strength of evolutionary explanations of music as soon as I encountered them. My experience having kids has borne them out even further. Singing to my kids is the most consistently effective way to get them to sleep, especially if I dance while I do it. Reading them stories is more like ritual chanting or singing than like delivering a narrative, especially when it’s a nonsensical Dr Seuss book, and especially especially when it’s our thousandth time reading it.
I have also felt how good music is for creating and strengthening social bonds among adults, for making a tribe feel like a tribe. I see it in schools and churches, at sports events, in every TV show and movie, in every form of fandom. A few decades of close listening to hip-hop made me conscious of how all rap is a form of singing, and how all speech is a form of rap. [I can hear in their speech cadences why Barack Obama is so much more widely loved than Hillary Clinton in spite of their similar policies.]
I have had times in my life when music was my primary activity, and times when I’ve barely participated in it at all, and the corresponding effect on my mood. It gives me the same animal level of centeredness and flow that I get from playing with my kids, or cooking, or hanging out with my wife, or exercising.
I’ve also felt how powerful an evolutionary framework can be for understanding the content of the music itself. Sampling and remixing feels like literal gene sequencing. All the musicians I admire talk about feeling more like receivers of musical ideas than creators of them. At my best, I can feel the music using me as a tool to assemble itself. I was relieved to find the concept of the meme so I could stop thinking about music having a life of its own in goofy mystical terms.
The meme theory also helped me understand how so many of the best musicians can be so miserable. If the memes evolve semi-independently of their human hosts, then it makes sense that musical success doesn’t necessarily correlate with life success. The music isn’t a special power; it’s a symbiote or parasite, like the mites on our skin or the bacteria in our guts. Sometimes musical memes reward their human hosts with wealth, fame and personal happiness. Sometimes the human host ends up broke, despised and alone. The memes don’t “care” one way or the other; they are as mindless as viruses.
Susan Blackmore and Daniel Dennett [who hold opposing views on consciousness – he doesn’t think it exists] [see Gary Marcus] [memes are just in your brain? But musical experience involves body from the neck down too] helped me to take the “meme’s eye view.” From the memes’ viewpoint, humans don’t write music at all. Musical memes self-replicate, mutate and hybridize in our heads. They spread via performances, scores, recordings, teachers, television, movies, web sites and countless other cultural vectors. Biologists create cladistic tree diagrams showing the descent and spread of a particular gene, bifurcating at each mutation point, and we can do the same for memes. Digital sampling in particular makes the heredity networks neatly unambiguous and easy to parse out. It’s harder to trace the spread of a certain melodic motif or chord progression or rhythmic pattern, but such hereditary histories most assuredly exist.
John Dewey wants us to “recover the continuity” between the arts and our everyday lives (103). Seemingly the only people who have trouble doing that are music scholars. Everyone else whistles while they work, drums their fingers on tables when they’re bored, memorizes addresses and phone numbers by making up little singsong melodies for them.