Music

Today was my first day of my second year in college. Which is actually better considered my first year of college because my real first year of college was an absolute waste. Also my first day isn't over yet because I have another class at 5:00 pm. Still, today is my first day of school. Pretty exciting, considering how I'm actually planning on trying this time.

Anyway, I have an Introduction to Music class, and today we discussed the question "What is music?", which was very intriguing. The following is my attempt at conveying and reflecting on my own thoughts, the thoughts of my classmates, and my professors during that hour or so of class.

So, what is music?

Trying to define music from a logical scientific approach is pointless because you would have to say something like, "Music is using some kind of instrument; your hands, a computer, piano, etc. to create and manipulate vibrations that produce different ranges of frequencies." But the commonly held theory about matter, as we presently know it, is that it's all just vibrating atoms. So from that perspective, everything is music. Which is cool, and could be true, but not in the way that the scientific definition means it. Also, we know inherently that music is much deeper and more mysterious than just sound, or even the lack of sound. The experimental American composer John Cage created a piece titled 4'33", which quickly became, and remains as, one of the most controversial pieces of music ever. A performance of 4'33" would begin by the performer sitting at the piano bench, closing the keyboard lid, then setting his watch on it, which he would periodically check just to monitor the time. The performance consists of three movements, during which the performer sits at the piano, not playing a single note, for four minutes and thirty three seconds. What is then intended to become apparent to the viewers is that they in fact are the music. The subsequent mumbling of confusion and amusement that eventually emerges from the audience and reverberates off the walls and ceiling of the concert hall is the entire point of the piece.

A challenging notion indeed, that music is more than creating sound, and can actually be not only not sound but the candid reactions of people in an audience, who don't even realize that they are the ones performing.

There's this idea that music is defined as some kind of universal language. Which sounds nice, but when examined closely is actually untrue. In a literal sense, music does not always convey information the way a language does. (Louis XVI being one of the few exceptions :) ). But even a song that has lyrics containing facts about the life of a French king could only be understood by those who are familiar with the language that the lyrics are in in the first place. In a similar light, music is not a universal language because whatever the original creator of some piece of music meant when creating it (assuming he or she even meant anything in the first place) could be completely misinterpreted by the listeners. Which leads to another point, that music doesn't always have to be auditory. Ludwig van Beethoven, for example, gradually lost his hearing in his twenties and eventually became completely deaf. But he still continued to compose and conduct entire symphonies, adding his name to an ever growing list of countless deaf musicians.

So after exhausting a few more vague ideas of what music is, which really all ended up being more like definitions of what music has become to us today in our modern culture, our teacher eventually stopped the conversation and concluded with how he had been asking this question for nearly his entire life. He told us that the most satisfying answer to him so far has been that music is simply whatever you make it to be. Pure creation. Sometimes it's an expression, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it has motives, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it has melodies and harmonies and dynamics and can be listened to through headphones, and sometimes it's the sound of a confused audience. It's not a universal language, it's a universal phenomenon.

Which means that you can't say that one person is a "better" musician than someone else, or that any "type" of music is better than another, or that one song is "good" and another is "bad". For we are all musicians, but some have chosen to practice and have become more skilled in the way that they prefer to create. There are no different "types" of music, only differences and similarities that some music shares and does not share with other music. And what someone really means when they say that a particular song is "good" is not that it is objectively good, but just that it happens to appeal to their own personal preference. Which raises the question, where do our preferences come from and what influences and shapes them to become what they are?

But aside from that is a question even more intriguing: why are things this way? Why do we all have a desire to create? Why exactly is music a universal phenomenon? What do we find in merely creating that deeply satisfies us?

The Bible tells us that God created us in His image. I think that you can get a lot from this statement, but what presently interests me is that God created us. Maybe this is why music appeals to us. Maybe we were made to be creative in nature because He is creative in nature.

Maybe...um...I don't know...
Maybe I'm finally out of thoughts for now and will be late for class if I keep writing.