The Truth About Music

In fact, this is a very constrained view of music, and it is peculiar to our culture and recent history (say, 300 years). Music notation is in fact an artifact of Western religious history (it was instituted by the Roman Catholic Church in about 900 AD for the purpose of limiting the performance liberties that singers were taking with religious music at the time). No other civilization, so far as I know, has developed such a notation system. And, as a result, other musics have developed in remarkably different ways, although it is probably fairer and more accurate to say that notated Western music is the nut case.

Without notation, some basic Western musical ideas such as modulating harmony and tonality, imitative counterpoint, the orchestra, the large-scale multi-movement “opus,” and the opera, would never have happened in quite the way they have. Notation is extremely important, even essential, to our way of musical thinking and to our working concept of music. But it is useful to keep it in perspective. Such notation is nothing more than another control language, one that is used to coordinate groups of performers in time, so that a given musical experience can be repeated over and over again with reasonable consistency and reliability.

So, I make the point that notation isn’t really music. There are better ways to conceptualize music and some of them are essential to our artistic health. Without getting into some of the more arcane psychological aspects of aesthetics, we can make the common-sense observation that music is carried via sound and its entirely reasonable corollary that until you’re making sound you aren’t making music. We can go further and observe that music is some higher-level expression of human emotions, feelings and brainplay through music-as-speech and music-as-motion. In this view of music, the sounds themselves (i.e., the musical events) are carriers of music.

Thinking along these lines, I got brave at one point and said in a paper for the Audio Engineering Society, “Music is not a waveform, but a psychological and spiritual construct within our minds and hearts. The waveform and its physical dimensions are simply carriers of musical information, while music itself lies within higher realms of processing in the mind: the processing of patterns, the mindplay of neural templates and associations, and the mysteries underlying our emotional, spiritual and physical responses to physical stimuli.”

Although it’s a little pedantic, I’m proud of that. It speaks to a higher truth that we usually don’t take time to think about. Music is powerful medicine for the mind and soul, sent from human to human encoded on patterns of sound. Great musicians are the ones who give the most life and intensity to the patterns of sound they send: the Charlie Parkers, the Jimi Hendrixes, the Count Basies and Ray Charles’ of our lives. Music resides mainly in the soul of the performer, less in the dots on the page.