What Music Is

The definition I heard when I was in beginning band, in 6th grade, was that music is anything meant to be music. Lately, though, I've considered removing "pop" from this category to some extent, because if we redefine "music", we can say that what something was meant to be is not "music". It's a rather circular definition, but it might be better to say that it's a recursive definition. Makes it sound more sophisticated.

But really, we know what music is. Music is organized sound (where the level of organization can be arbitrarily small). But what makes it go? My answer used to be a very nonhesitant "Why, tension and release, of course!" Some people, when asked about their favorite music, will answer (with a desire to be inclusive) that it is "anything with a beat". If you think about it, though, you'll realize that a beat works on a completely different principle from tension and release, and if you give a piece of music enough of a beat, it will overshadow any tension and release present. It feels like there is some sort of innate "beat" response that makes you want to move your body, and it is a completely different response from the exhileration you might get from a buildup in the music. "Pop" music uses this beat response rather than the tension response, and while there's nothing wrong with that, in an interesting way, that completely changes music.

So I would consider cutting that part out of the definition of music, by making the beat effect, like the lyrics, extramusical. And then I would quickly unconsider that, because while it makes some sense, it's also extremely silly to disqualify large swaths of music. Still, I consider the beat effect nonmusical, and rap "music", for instance, as poetry for the most part. For the most part only; there's some good music in there as well sometimes, rhythmic effects, and various other nice things.

The more interesting music, I find, is way on the other side of the "spectrum". I think of the effects of music as an asymptotic series of sorts, with the leading terms usually dominating the "higher-order" terms. I see beat as dominating, rhythm and tension following, then pitch and dynamics, then sound. This is fairly loose, of course. Any effects of the set of pitches chosen -- tonal effects -- are under the tension heading. As music becomes more abstract, higher and higher terms dominate, leading to new ways to listen to music.

In particular, once everything is stripped away except for the sound term, we can have music as an experience rather than as something to be listened to. I've heard that being high is similar to this. You can pay attention to the sounds around you as if they were music, and though they weren't created that way, you, the listener, have essentially created their musicality. If all it takes to create art is a frame, then one can simply carry an inside-out frame and frame in the entire world. Music as an experience, in this sense, is music made up of random sounds of nature and artifice like the hallway lights and fans, like the chirping of the traffic lights (this is Cambridge; they make actual chirps), like impromptu organization. Like people who fail at singing in tune and create beautiful grating microtones, like multiple trucks backing up, like the subway door beeps. It's an intense immersive experience that requires nothing more than the will to hear the world in that light.

This is why, no matter my disdain, I can't chop off the beat from the set of things that make music music: so many people will much more readily end music at tension and release, or possibly require that it be the dominant term. It would be a horrible double standard to restrict my definition so. As much as I am a fan and student of harmony, and harmony in all its forms is my chief concern on this blog, I cannot ever neglect the intense musical experience possibly by mentally willing to be music what was not originally intended so. In that case, the heater isn't music. But draw a metaphorical shell around you, and you now have an instrument that produces whatever sounds pass through the shell -- the heater's sound becomes music! It's a cheap mathematical trick, of course. (: If you have not experienced music this way, you may be skeptical, but I encourage you to think deeply about the sounds you hear when walking -- do not get distracted by speech or more conventional music. Music will never be the same again.