Ground Thoughts on the Philosophy of Music

It is safe to say that everyone has some point in their life, created music or listened to music and this is why many people can relate to the philosophies of music and the questions that arise within it.

Music is seen as an art form in the medium of sound utilizing elements of melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre and texture. There is program music which is music that evokes extra-musical ideas, images in the mind of the listener by musically representing a scene, image or mood. The antithesis would be absolute music where it is non-representational or non-objective. Some argue that absolute music cannot exist, but I am not going to get into that for this post.

In music, unlike most art or literature, the instances of a work are performances, which offer interpretations of the work, yet the work can also be interpreted independently of any performance, and performances themselves can be interpreted. We can also do this with any other art form and perhaps it has been done before, lets take 'painting' for example. The initial artist can produce a score or general instructions on how a work should be painted and then there is the painter who interprets the score and creates the painting. Finally the audience can then interpret the painting. Essentially this is the same as what always happens in music. There is the composer who produces the musical score, the performer, and then the audience. This leaves music very dependent on human interaction.

What is perceived to be good music has changed greatly over time. During the “classical” (Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic) periods, the sophistication and complexity of compositions were one of the determinants. However music was always and still is judged on how pleasurable it is to listen to or in other words the quality of entertainment it provides.

This is the quality that many musicians are looking for and I believe that science can help them. Heck. Music may even become a science in the future, if it isn’t already. The rationale behind this is that we can study how sound is interpreted and its effect on the individual. Deducing from scientific methods we can utilize the findings to serve the entertainment purpose of music.

Western music theory resembles musical science in many ways as it had attempts to create laws that govern how music should be created and these rules varied from musical period to musical period as there were social, cultural, and other factors that affected people’s taste in music during different times. Music theory tries to act as a guideline to what is correct and what is wrong for the listener’s ear. An example would be the ‘tritone’, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, and was regarded as strong dissonance and to be avoided before 20th century music as many disliked the sound. However it played a strong role in the development of jazz and is regarded as an appealing sound to many listeners.

In the future we may be able to assess the exact state of individual at a given time and determine which sounds would be most enjoyable to them or create any other desired effect. Perhaps alter their emotion; make them happy, sad, afraid, disgusted, confused, lonely, hungry, compassionate, depressed, embarrassed, affectionate, grateful, interested or frustrated. How about angry, aggressive and violent?

Although it is theoretically possible to do all that, music is still an art as it is an expression with aesthetic principles regardless of methods utilized to create music.