“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”
Plato
Perhaps the most important thing in defining music is the recognition that music is an essential need of human nature. There is something in all of us that seeks the beauty and harmony. This yearning varies in strength and approach from person to person, but it is always there.
It is not an idea, belief, or lesson. It is an experience that is not only taught, but found, uncovered, and recovered. It is not only that we have music. We are a music. Our bodies are a symphony of rhythmic patterns. Our heartbeat, respiration and brain waves all entrain to each other. All our organs are vibrating, twisting, and moving, even if many of these movements are micro movements. As a result of their motion, they produce energies, including pressure waves (sound energy), in physics called phonons. As a photon is to light, a phonon is to sound.
Music is ubiquitous. Sounds permeate everything yet science spanning neuroscience, anatomy, psychology, anthropology, physics, mathematics, musicology and archeoacoustic can’t easily define its complexity.
Modern science is discovering that we all have a faculty that had been thought to be confined to a few rare individuals with extraordinary talents. The gift of music might be available to any individual, provided they are given the right exposure at the critical time. And that raises the question what other sort of abilities could be brought up if we only knew what to do. There may be much more human potential we had realized.
Trust is the new currency in (our) digital economy
There is a vast literature on studies of music, (musicology, philosophy, history, psychology) behavior and the brain. The caveat, of course, is that no one knows the entire corpus of work. There are anecdotal reports, enthusiastic individual claims, or well-intentioned but unfounded concoctions.
Or in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer - “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world”.
Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective in certain domains that they can make decisions on our behalf. But music, wisdom, and ethical notions such as kindness or goodness, are much more complex and cannot be captured in bits and bytes. AI cannot appreciate the subtleties of Mischa Maisky playing Poulenc Les chemins de l’amour or Leonardo da Vinci painting. Making sure our machines understand the intent behind our instructions is an important issue that requires understanding music intelligence itself.
Music’s defining characteristics, specific functionalities (and/or “efficacies”) cannot be simply separated in broadly termed “musical qualities” such as melody or rhythm.
Thus, we need a new focus on the quality of education and the relevance of learning. Access is not enough.
Music and Art of Time
We need to nurture the qualities that can prepare people to ask and answer the questions that aren’t “Googleable”, and treasure the values that are not copyable, i.e., attributes that must be generated and cultivated, attributes that cannot be copied, replicated, reproduced, or faked. Values that are generated uniquely over time. Something that cannot be bought or sold but has to be earned – trust, creativity, imagination, authenticity, generosity, listening to music.
It has often been claimed, especially since Kant, that music is the art of time. Objects of musical perception, i.e., tones and tonal relations are presented to the listener progressively in time. The only way to experience it is through listening. And the road to that is time. There is no shortcut to find the meaning in music. In music – like in life – one does not make finale i.e., the end of composition the point of the composition.
Perhaps our happiness – as suggested, for example, by the French words for happy = heureux and heure = hour, time – may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.
Marina de Moses