Understanding Music: Philosophy and Interpretation
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Last annotated on March 14, 2017
by Interactive Sciences Ltd, Gloucester Printed and bound by ??? Contents Read more at location 5
argued that music, like the other arts, derives its significance and its appeal from the imitation of nature.Read more at location 19
By the end of the century a contest was being fought on behalf of absolute music (absolute Tonkunst) by those who thought that music's significance as an abstract art was being diluted by ballet, opera and song.Read more at location 21
The dispute is between those who affirm, and those who deny, that music has a meaning other than itself.Read more at location 24
`imitation', `representation', `expression', `content'Read more at location 25
the true subjects of musical aesthetics: sound and how we perceive it,Read more at location 26
Yet even Hanslick-with Edmund Gurney the most competent of the nineteenth-century writers in this field-failed to see that he had not given such an explanation and that, without it, his theory of music as an `absolute' art was as unwarranted as the romantic idea of music as `the language of the emotions'. Read more at location 28
a refutation of the theory-increasingly popular in the wake of E. T. A. Hoffman's music criticism and Schopenhauer's `Metaphysics of Music"-that music is an expressive medium, whose purpose is to give voice to the inner life.Read more at location 31
It is fairly widely recognized that, at some level, the reference to musical movement is inescapable,Read more at location 33
reference to movement is in some sense figurative. For nothing in the world of sounds (nothing that we hear) moves,Read more at location 35
a theory which tries to explain music in terms of musical movement is not a theory of music at all:Read more at location 36
If we allow Hanslick to get away with assuming the existence of musical motion, why not allow his opponent to assume the existence of musical emotion?Read more at location 37
in The Aesthetics of Music I set out to develop an account of metaphorical perception that would be a basis for a theory of musical understanding.Read more at location 43
The first step towards understanding music, therefore, is to understand sounds as objects of perception.Read more at location 48
Sounds, I argue, are secondary objects, which is to say objects whose nature and properties are determined by how they appear to the person of normal hearing.Read more at location 49
can be understood without reference to their physical causes.Read more at location 50
Because sounds are pure events we can detach them, in thought and experience, from their causes, and impose upon them an order that is quite independent of any physical order in the world.Read more at location 53
What they then hear is not a succession of sounds, but a movement between tones, governed by a virtual causality that resides in the musical line.Read more at location 55
Only a rational being-one with self-consciousness, intention, and the ability to represent the world-can experience sounds in this way; hence, although we can hear music in the songs of birds, whales and bonobos, they themselves are deaf to it.Read more at location 56
The particular musical syntax that children learn may be the product of their culture; but the disposition towards music is a transcultural constant. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that music, like language, is a human universal.Read more at location 59
Comparisons with bird-song, conceived as an element in sexual display, give rise to the suggestion that music might have emerged through the process of sexual selection.'Read more at location 61
Take any feature of music, boil it down until it is all but indistinguishable from a feature of animal noise, rewrite both in Darwinese and-hey presto-you have a perfectly formed functional explanation of the musical life.'Read more at location 64
The evolutionary psychology of music invariably describes music as pitched and metrically arranged sound, of the kind that might be produced by a bonobo or a gorilla.Read more at location 68
even if it is true that music, as we know it, emerged over time from such sounds, it is not in fact reducible to them,Read more at location 69
Music exists when rhythmic, melodic or harmonic order is deliberately created, and consciously listened to, and it is only language-using, self-conscious creatures, I argue, who are capable of organizing sounds in this way, either when uttering them or when perceiving them. We can hear music in the song of the nightingale, but it is a music that no nightingale has heard. Read more at location 74
Hence, although music may have emerged from an evolutionary adaptation, it cannot be understood by referring it to its supposed genetic function.Read more at location 76
I claim that sounds heard as music are heard in abstraction from their physical causesRead more at location 79
When a violinist strains to produce Bach's great D minor Chaconne, it is not the strain in producing sounds that we appreciate,Read more at location 83
Certain commentators-notably Andy Hamilton?-have objected that the account does not give sufficient emphasis to the way in which the physical reality of sounds enters into the experience of them, when we hear them as music.Read more at location 84
The acousmatic experience does not, it is suggested, account for timbre. It does not give sufficient weight to the performers and their physical actions or to the ways in which we must attend to the physical location of sounds if we are to hear their full musical potential.Read more at location 85
It has been said in this connection that the emphasis on what we hear imports a cultural context, and that this context is by no means the universal conditionRead more at location 98
there was a point in history when audiences fell silent. Thereafter music took on a new meaning, as an act of solemn communication, occurring in another space from the space of everyday life. Instead of being a background, something that was never more prominent than when being danced to or sung, music became an object of attention for its own sake, a `real presence' before its own hushed congregation.Read more at location 101
we give undue prominence to our own tradition-or to that part of our tradition which is contemporary with the Romantic movement and its aftermath-misleading ourselves into thinking that a transient application of music is really the essence of music in all its forms.Read more at location 107
That kind of argument might be levelled by the defender of popular music against the classical tradition; by the advocate of `mechanical reproduction' against the traditions of musical performance; by the ethnomusicologist against the defender of `Western art music'; by the believer in song, dance and improvisation against the denizen of the concert hall.Read more at location 112
Adorno's radical defence of atonal music against the `ideological' products of the tonal system. Read more at location 115
In giving a theory of music we are accounting for a certain human experience and the interests that have grown from it. This experience is an aspect of our rationality.Read more at location 115
there are traditions like the Indian, in which melodies and their elaborations are memorized, but in which notation is schematic and incomplete. This does not mean that there are no `works' of Indian classical music. There are plenty of them: but they are not identified through scores.Read more at location 120
Nevertheless, even though imperfectly notated, the ragas have existed, some of them for centuries,Read more at location 125
And although many of these works are anonymous, not a few are attributed to specific composers like Tyagaraja (1767-1847), whose works, memorized by his pupils and disciples, have been passed on and revered not merely as interesting musical objects, but as the creations of an interesting soul.'° Read more at location 126
the All-India Musical Conferences were established in 1916 in order to rescue and perpetuate the classical repertoire.Read more at location 128
Jazz too makes room for the work concept, even if the work is often used as the starting point for a series of improvisations.Read more at location 134
We should therefore respond with a certain measure of scepticism to those who dismiss the work concept as a fleeting and in some way accidental imposition on the endless flux of musical inspiration."Read more at location 136
There is a peculiar experience of `same again' which is fundamental to musical organization.Read more at location 139
Of course, when improvisation by the performer is a fundamental component in what the audience enjoys, the work takes on another character-less the music itself than a template for producing it. And since the invention of recording, and the mass reproduction of the result, individual performances can acquire a kind of eternal and transcendent character comparable to that of the classical masterpieces. There then arises a new kind of work-the work composed as a template for improvisation, of which perhaps only a few recordings achieve the status of classics. An obvious example is Thelonious Monk's 'Round Midnight, rightly esteemed for its authoritative harmonic sequence and soulful melody, but existing in countless performances, some by Monk at the piano, some by the Monk Quartet, some by other musicians using other forces, all differing in every respect that the tradition of jazz improvisation allows and encourages.Read more at location 147
Nevertheless there really is a musical work which is 'Round Midnight, and the work concept is as usefully applied in such a case as in the case of a Mozart symphony.Read more at location 152
Indeed, even if there are sound ethnological reasons for believing that music originated in dance and song, listening, I maintain, is the heart of all musical cultures. You cannot sing or dance if you do not listenRead more at location 159
if atonal music is addressed to the same interest as tonal music, then it must be heard as moving forward in a similar way, unfolding an audible argumentRead more at location 166
successful experiments in atonality recreate, often in defiance of the theory which allegedly inspires them, quasi-tonal melody and harmony,Read more at location 167
There is a way of arguing for the primacy of tonality which I think arrives too easily at its foregone conclusion. This is the argument from `natural'Read more at location 170
resounding endorsement from Helmholtz's researches into the overtone series.Read more at location 171
There is no musical culture that I know of that does not recognize the octave as equivalent to its fundamental, and most traditions acknowledge the fifth as a metastable position on the scale, and the drone on the fifth as a stabilizing harmonic accompaniment. Read more at location 177
as soon as people begin to sing creatively, convention displaces nature, and shapes what we hear according to laws of its own. The `natural' relations among tones are at best raw material, from which scales, modes and harmonic devices emerge by habit and experiment.Read more at location 192
it does not imply that there are no limits to musical conventions. There are a priori constraints on musical syntax that derive from the very nature of musical movement.Read more at location 196
We cannot hear musical movement without seeking for points of stability and closure-points towards which the movement is tending or from which it is diverging, and to which it might at some point `come home'.Read more at location 198
this search for a permutational order in place of the elaborational order of the familiar tonal syntax is profoundly anti-musical.Read more at location 202
Schoenberg's music, whose merits I would be the first to acknowledge, is almost invariably heard against the serial organization, by listeners who search for closure, repetition, imitation and elaboration, and who strive to hear harmonic progressions rather than sequences of `simultaneities'.16Read more at location 203
Tonality is an evolving tradition, arising from the modes of medieval music and evolving through medieval and Renaissance polyphony to the contrapuntal idiom of the Baroque and thence to the four-square triadic syntax of the classical style.Read more at location 205
tonality should not be regarded as a fleeting, arbitrary or merely stylistic episode in the history of music. It tells us something essential about music-in particular about the nature of musical movement, about the dimensions in which movement operates, and about the way in which vectors combine, so as to change music from a monologue to a conversation.Read more at location 212
At the very moment when Schoenberg was dismissing tonality as an `exhausted' idiom, a wholly new form of it was breaking forth on the musical horizon-one influenced not only by the principles of classical harmony, but also by the modes and rhythms of Negro music,Read more at location 215
Adorno, as is well known, hated this new tonal idiom,Read more at location 217
Much contemporary pop music is modal-using the various church modes as melodic devices, supported by stacked chords, such as the so-called `phrygian' chord (a minor ninth on the tonic) which incorporates a flattened supertonic into the melodic minor scale. This device is familiar from Heavy Metal, and can be heard at its most exhilarating in Metallica's `Master of Puppets'.Read more at location 230
Perhaps the greatest mistake involved in the marginalizing of tonality, however, has been the failure to perceive that tonality is also a rhythmic system.Read more at location 234
folk songs and pop songs make the point sufficiently clearly. All such music is strophic in organization, and strophes can be understood only in terms of the experience of closure, which divides the music into repeatable sections.Read more at location 235
I tried to say something about the difference between musical culture and musical kitsch.Read more at location 243
Even if nothing else in Adorno deserves our sympathy, we must surely admire his courage in pouring scorn on mass culture.Read more at location 245
The strange thing is that he believed American popular music to be the enemy of the people, when it is was the people who had produced it,Read more at location 246
