As promised, in this post, I'm going to go a little further into what music is. This is really my favorite stuff to talk about. And honestly, it's the most difficult stuff to talk about, because it's very hard to explain. See, I said before that music is technically just structured noise, and that is true. But I think we all know that music is so much more than just that. And whatever else it is is what this post is all about. But we'll get into that in a little bit. For now I'll start us off with something not so difficult.
You may never have thought about it before, but music is a language. Music is a written, read, and spoken language. It may not look exactly like other languages when written, and it doesn't really sound like any other language, but it is a language nonetheless. It's a language because it communicates ideas, and those ideas can be understood. One person can say something through music, and another person can understand him. The only thing is that, like any other language, you must practice your music if you want to become fluent. It's the same as anything else. The greater your exposure to music the better you are at it. So hopefully, this blog will help you to become a little more fluent in music, if you aren't already. Because once you can understand what a piece of music says, you will be greatly enriched.
Now when you're learning to speak and understand music, it's important to know that music does not communicate the same ideas that our everyday languages do. When I'm talking to you in English, I can say things like "I'm going to the store", or "My name is David." I can't say any of that in music. But what music (and technically any other art form) can do, is go much deeper than English in communicating emotions. For example, if I were just talking to you, I could say something like, "I am sad today." Now you'd obviously get the idea of what I was saying, but only so far. Your understanding of my feelings would go only as far as the word 'sad' can take you. But suppose then I picked up a violin and began to play you some music. Sad, haunting music, with desperate, reaching intervals that never quite attain a resolution. Now, you not only know that I am sad, you know exactly what my emotion sounds like, and if I played it well enough, you might even feel the same way yourself. That's what music communicates. The sound of an emotion, or even the actual emotion itself.
And it's here that we begin to see the very difficult-to-explain aspects of music. Go back a little to my last post, when music was just a bunch of structured noise, and go through each of the points I brought up, and try asking the questions "Why?" and "How?" about each of them.
We know that music stimulates the emotions through sound, but how? Why does the sound stimulate our emotions? I've already said that, physically, the same thing happens to you when you listen to music as when you listen to any other noise. So what is so different about music that it can communicate with people and regular noise cannot? What is missing from the construction site that is there in music?
Whatever it is, it's the other thing that music is, that I told you about. And I thought long and hard about this, and finally came to the conclusion that we'll probably never know just what it is. Maybe it's a part of us that we put into the sound along with the structure. I just don't know. It's music's greatest mystery. Why does Max Steiner's "Gone with the Wind" theme sound so stirring and hopeful? Why does the Moonlight Sonata sound so pensive? They're just structured sound waves! Nobody knows the answer.
Now if you're still not convinced that there's something more to music than just those structured sound waves, history has given us a very interesting insight into music, in the person of Ludwig van Beethoven.
Beethoven was so interesting because he was deaf for at least the last half of his life. To put this in perspective, think of a blind man who was a great painter. That's pretty amazing as it is, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to unearth what his deafness meant for music.
Beethoven was very ashamed of his handicap. He felt that a great composer like himself should have a perfect ear, and it was terribly difficult for him to see other people enjoying music while he couldn't hear a note of it. Well there was a time in Beethoven's life when he became very sick, and thought he was going to die. So he wrote a letter to his brothers, to be read after he died. It turned out he didn't die then, but when he eventually did die, the letter was found among his things. In it, he comes clean about his deafness, and explains why he was so hesitant to go out in public. And then he says the most interesting thing of all.
Beethoven talks about how his deafness almost drove him to suicide at one point, but then his life was spared because he realized how much he needed to write music. He couldn't end his life without creating all the art he was born to produce.
Think about that for a little bit. Here was a man who couldn't hear any sound, not even structured sound. And it almost killed him. But then he realized that, even in the absence of sound, he still had music. It's absolutely fascinating. What, from his perspective, was he writing when he sat down to compose? He couldn't even hear his own music. But he loved to write it. Maybe he just loved that chance to communicate his emotions where his pride wouldn't let him otherwise. I don't know. For whatever reason, this deaf man loved music. And not the structured sound part of music. The other thing that music is.
Look back at this post for a minute. All this has just been about the "emotion" circle of the diagram. Time doesn't allow me to discuss the other two circles, like why music is so beautiful to our sense of hearing, or why the sound of the moving lines is so interesting to our minds. Why do our human ears just love so much to hear pretty music? What about the sound waves makes one sound pleasant, and another almost painful? I just don't know. It's music, and it's just that way, whether we know the reason or not.
I think in the end, we have to say that music is noise, structured with a rhythm and key, but also with something deeply human about it. Did you know humans are the only creatures on earth capable of even perceiving a rhythm? Music is a part of us, it's a part of who we are as humans. It's cross-cultural. And it communicates. That's why the ability to understand music is so important. Music is a universal, beautiful, artistic language.
So hopefully this blog has already helped you appreciate what music and art are more than you might have already, and maybe as we go through the history of music, and you are exposed to it more, you'll begin to understand it as well. But I'll start into that in the next post. :)
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