Sunday, January 27, 2008
Music/ Makes the people come together/ Music / Music makes the bourgeoisie and the rebel
A good weekend brings about an interesting discussion on music. As the discussion progressed I found myself forced to give more and more ground conceding the point that some Music could be objectively better than other music. I was all but convinced that music was an objective practice until I looked up the word objective in the dictionary and found that one definition is "not dependent on the mind for existence." I have held and continue to hold that the purpose of music was to express and communicate. Expression and communication are dependent on the mind for existence. Music is not objective.
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2 comments:
Let's quote the whole thing, eh?
"of, relating to, or being an object, phenomenon, or condition in the realm of sensible experience independent of individual thought and perceptible by all observers : having reality independent of the mind"
Item 1: We're talking about some music being objectively better or more developed than others. You're asking, "if I play Bach in the woods and there's no one there to hear it, is it still music?" Even though the answer to this is still, contra to you, "probably", you've yet to deal with whether or not some forms are more desirable than others.
People synthesize music very readily, with few real differences across cultures and peoples and histories. The similarities point out that our perception is based on physical, objective fact- not just the whims and personal tastes of dead Germans from 500 years ago. Let me give some examples of this.
First is just simple human biology. The human ear can only hear pitches in certain ranges. The human voice is capable of even smaller ranges. Also, we're capable of distinguishing between 10 and 20 pitches in between octaves. You have a synthesizer generate tones between octaves and have participants press a button when they hear a new note. You can train your ears to hear more, so you know when singers are out of tune, but there is a reason why we put 8 notes in a key, 12 to an octave.
Even which notes are in a key has a lot to do with physics. Major keys produce the least amount of dissonance between notes. Minor keys are related to major ones by lowering the third and the seventh, which creates both more dissonance and key ambiguity.
Because music has such a tie in to physical phenomena and mathematics, it is therefore objective. View it as a deliberate, planned manipulation of variations in air pressure. The ability to manipulate it more effectively-- to define major, minor, and mixolydian keys, to create fugues and rounds (like 'Row row row your boat') that introduce themes and reintroduce them later, to create leitmotifs, point-counterpoints, musical phrasing and resolving chords-- can't be done in all systems. Hence, objectively better.
Item 1: Its my blog so I think I am qualified to say exactly what we are talking about.
I find it a bit contradictory to concede that music is not independent of the mind, and definitely not independent of humans, hence not objective, while at the same time claiming that some music is objectively better.
I would be willing to bet that I could produce a deliberate manipulation of air pressure that "hangs together in a certain sort of way" with ties to physics and mathematics that would be heard as wholly undesirable. Case in point "Soulja Boy."
I understand that there are reasons why we have our current musical system. However, just because there are reasons does not mean that they are objective reasons. Your reasons based on human biology are clearly subjective as they are based upon the subject's, human being's, ability to distinguish tones.
The fact that Bach is playing in the woods is objective. It either is, or is not playing, independent if anyone is or is not there to hear it. That the deliberate manipulations of sound waves created by Bach is music is subjective. That the creations of Bach are superior to those of Soulja Boy is also subjective.
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