Philosophy of Music

If you had to summarize your philosophy of music, what would your thesis be?
• What is your definition of music?
• What do you think is the purpose of music?
• What do you think makes a work or artist good?

At its broadest level, I think the all art is an act of communication. Let’s clear up the semantics of that though. One might say that you don't have to share art with others for it to constitute art, which would be true, but I'm using the word communicate a little differently than that. I'd define it more as expression with intent, and the communication can be you communicating an idea with yourself through your articulation of it, or with the universe at large. If you sneeze randomly in the middle of the day, and nobody sees this happen, and you forget about it two seconds after it happens, I do not think that constitutes art. However, if you decide to put a sneeze in the middle of a play, or film, or piece of music, or book, then it becomes art. Even if you sneeze in the middle of a take in the middle of a scene of a film, the decision to keep it as part of the work is an artistic choice, qualifying it as art.

The difference is intent. And music is simply the art of sound. So John Cage is as much an artist as Beethoven, and a conversation is as much art as a melody. I should add that when you add things like lyrics, it remains music, but becomes a multimedia, so it's art that spans multiple mediums, so everything I state hereafter will apply to any individual medium, as well as all overlapping mediums.

The purpose of art is something you'll see most people disagreeing about. When one person talks about a great song, it's great to them because of the technical skill of the person performing it, like a challenging piano piece. Another person might be talking about how complex the song is when viewed mathematically, like the tonal or rhythmic complexity of an intricate jazz or classical piece. Another person will be talking about the emotional expression behind the performance, like the tortured wails of a punk singer. All of these are valid in my eyes. So if art is an act of communication, the purpose is to communicate ideas and emotions.

When isolated moment to moment, no sliver of music can be "bad"(The only caveat I have to this is music that damages your ears physically, so if I handed my friend my headphones and then blasted it so loud that it damaged his hearing, that would be bad, but that’s more a statement on ethics than artistry).

You might think a twenty minute song that consists of a simple melodic phrase is bad because it's redundant and static, but any music phrase in and of itself can't be bad, because what does that even mean? That it is too simple? Is a major third somehow bad because it's common and simple? Is 4/4 time intrinsically worse than 15/16? To me, ideas like that seem much more like biases than actual judgments of quality. Any isolated instant of art can't be bad. But does that then mean than Taylor Swift is exactly equal to Debussy? And if not, then why? To me, it’s all rooted in context; how these isolated incidents change when viewed from a broader vantage point.

That is, if all art is expression of ideas and emotions, and all expression is good (or at least not bad), then it is better to express a broader range of ideas and emotions than it is to express a narrower range.

A sad song is good. A happy song is good. But an artist that writes both a sad and a happy song is better than an artist that sequesters themselves to one or the other (in a world where these are the only variables, that is). And this notion of broadness over narrowness applies to all dichotomies (real or false) of art. To be complex as well as simple is better than only one or only the other, or dissonant as well as consonant, or violent as well as gentle, dynamically. The fundamental nature of life itself is oscillatory, and the broadest possible artist is one that encompasses all ideas, and all emotions; the best artist is one that oscillates between all poles, simultaneously, in a state of constant change, always emerging into new frontiers, exploring new ideas and new combinations of ideas! This is not to say that all repetition is necessarily bad, because repetition and discontinuity are themselves a dichotomy between which a spectrum lies! I digress.

Anyways, what do you guys think about this? What is music, and what do you like about it, and why?

Bumpin with related quotes.


“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

>what is your definition of music?
The art of dividing time.

>what do you think is the purpose of music?
To perform.

>what do you think makes a work or artist good?
A unique and sublime synthesis with the creative imagination of the listener. The right key for the right lock.

Music is probably the most simply defined and yet universal of all the arts. Really doesn't need three huge posts to explain it dude

>Really doesn't need three huge posts to explain it dude
Clearly we disagree. What do you mean when you say the art of dividing time? I can see how that applies to rhythm, but if you think that tonality and timbre and dynamics all constitute divisions of time I think you're being too liberal with your language. Not that time has nothing to do with tonality specifically, but I think it sidesteps the actual important qualities that define it.

forgot the quote

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
― Albert Einstein

>I can see how that applies to rhythm, but if you think that tonality and timbre and dynamics all constitute divisions of time
I didn't mean rhythm. The whole point of Cage's 3'33" is that audible time has been divided into the musical and the non-musical by the stopwatch. Everything that happens within is part of the piece, everything that happens from without is not. The fact that there is no audible difference between the two demonstrates how concerns of tonality, timbre, dynamics, etc. are all secondary concerns and can be done away with entirely and the music still persists. It's just a simple process of elimination– Write a song with literally nothing in it, and the only thing that makes it "music" is the beginning, the end, and the time which bridges the two.

to me music is the audio medium of art. just like the visual medium of art it can be very grounded and formal in its approach or it can be totally abstract and wild or anywhere inbetween, it can create whatever mood the artist wants to capture or it just be beautiful to the senses.

Ok, I get what you mean, but if that's your definition of music how would you distinguish it from other mediums in which time is a factor? You could use pretty much the same definition for film or plays. I think it's an interesting idea, but not adequate to actually parse out what is unique to music, and disregards the other qualities of it.

>• What is your definition of music?

Any sound that is recorded, composed or performed with the person(s) recording, composing and/or performing intending it to be experienced as music. The intent of whatever created the sound itself is irrelevant, of course, so field recordings and noise can be music as well.

>• What do you think is the purpose of music?

Emotion.

>• What do you think makes a work or artist good?

Originality, creative ideas, pushing boundaries, thinking outside the box.

I don't see making music or whatever as anything more than a compulsion and all the talk about music as anything more than a rationalization of that compulsion, to me it's all mental gymnastics for trying to intellectually understand a natural urge

>Any sound ... to be experienced as music.
So music is music? Concise.

Should've been more specific in my original post, I suppose I meant that music is the art of dividing audible time into the musical and non-musical, just as film is the art of dividing visual time into the cinematic and non-cinematic, and so on. The correspondence between film and music is probably the closest out of all the art forms, I know David Lynch likes to think of himself as a composer as much as a director or artist.

It is interesting though– what I've found is that when you abstract so much in order to separate what is inessential from the kernel of what is true to that particular art, you reach a solipsistic point at which almost all art forms are indistinguishable from one another. It's almost like approaching them in a sensory deprivation tank. Does art still exist even if you are incapable of experiencing it? Or perhaps synaesthesia is in fact the truest form of aesthetic appreciation, the point at which art has reached its peak refinement and converges on a transcendental or universal reality? To these questions, I have no answers– But I think I may need a lie down.

>trying to intellectually understand a natural urge
You say that like it's a bad thing. Do you think some art is better than other art? And if so, don't you think trying to understand it expands what an artist is capable of making, or what the audience is capable of appreciating?

>the art of dividing audible time into the musical and non-musical
I grant you that, and I think it overlaps my definition of it being expression through the medium of sound with intent. This is just a thought experiment, but I just wrote a song called Ad Infinitum, and it started an infiniti ago and extends through time infinitely. In a piece with no division of time, does your definition still hold up?

>What is your definition of music?
The organization of sounds and silences.
>What do you think is the purpose of music?
Same as the purpose of art more generally, to make meaning in a meaningless world. Art for art's sake.
>What do you think makes a work or artist good?
If it contributes to the medium in a new or interesting way.

it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't add anything of significance to my experience of listening to music. i don't think about that artist or audience stuff at all, to me it's all about finding what is worth paying attention to. i could try to explain the criteria upon which i choose what is worthy of my attention and what is not, but it's almost like an uncontrollable process and i feel there's more profit in just feeling it, not trying to explain it

I definitely think there's virtue in processing music without intellectualizing it, but I don't think one excludes the other. You can both feel a song, as well as observe its qualities.

>i could try to explain the criteria upon which i choose what is worthy of my attention and what is not

Please do.

• What is your definition of music?
"Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time" There, the Wikipedia thing works me, music is sounds organized in time (by humans, of course)

• What do you think is the purpose of music?
Communicate feelings. Not ideas or anything like that, only feelings.

• What do you think makes a work or artist good?
When I rate a work of art, there's three parameters I consider: level of ambition, pretension level, and limitation spectrum.

I still haven't perfected the way I rate music though.

It's a neat question, but so long as some infinities are bigger than others I'd like to think my definition still stands. Also, if this song did technically "exist", it would mean the onus would be on us to determine whether or not it was music simply by choosing to hear it, as a song which lasts forever would effectively be nothing more than background noise. So for argument's sake I'm going to say it does indeed exist, and its a beautiful piece user, thank you :)

Speech is sound organised by time. Wikipedia is the worst place to look for definitions of anything.

>Speech is sound organised by time.
What do you mean?

Ha, I'm copywriting it.

well this is sort of weird. at first, whatever i'm hearing has to resonate with me in some way, not necessarily immediately. like when i heard john fahey the first time, it sparked my interest for whatever reason, then i slowly started focusing on details: playing style, chord changes etc. but that picking apart comes from that initial oomph that just happens for whatever reason, maybe i'll know why some day, but certainly not by making some analytical effort. or at least not rushing that effort

>Emotion.
>Communicate feelings. Not ideas or anything like that, only feelings.

So if there was a song whose lyrics made a poignant political statement, the idea expressed wouldn't be a virtue of the song? Or even a song that specifically explored a method of composition? Both of these things can be felt, by their very nature, but shouldn't the ideas explored as distinct from the emotions be granted some appreciation?

About the political statement, yeah, it wouldn't be. If anything, it can make this worse.

A song that explores a method of composition gives a feeling, if it doesn't, I couldn't consider it good. You must do something else with what you have.

It's not even that I think this is sort of a stubborn dismissal, I think that it's simply not possible to make music or art that doesn't have both emotions and ideas; they're inherent in all music, and insofar as you can recognize and appreciate something in music that is distinct from an emotional quality, well that added layer can only make something better if handled well. Haven't you ever heard something in music or in art in general that imparted an idea about what is possible in the medium? I think you're being too dogmatic to be honest.