How Music Works

How Music Works

The way in which music affects the human organism is complex. Attempts to explain the relationship between the organized sound which we call music and our responses to it fall into two broad classes, heteronomist theories and autonomist theories, although the boundaries between the two may be by no means watertight. That music causes a response in humans is undeniable, but does it do so by some form of direct appeal to our inner selves, our emotional sides, as the proponents of heteronomist theories argue, or, does it do so, as the autonomist argues, by virtue of some intrinsic property that it has within itself that is peculiar to music? Music cannot convey meaning or express emotion in the way that language conveys meaning or expresses emotion.

Language employs signs which, to use Saussure's terms, are arbitrary and differential, but signs which nevertheless enable us to identify their referent. Music, like language, consists of organized sounds, but unlike language, those sounds have no referent. Eduard Hanslick wrote The Beautiful in Music in 1854 and any explanation and evaluation of his claim that 'the essence of music is sound and motion' must have regard to historical context in determining the author's meaning. For Hanslick 'music' meant principally the instrumental and orchestral works of the 18th Century and first half of the 19th Century, the period we might loosely call 'classical'- music whose 'primordial element' was 'euphony' (The beautiful in music, TAB, p.421). Hanslick's views cannot easily be extrapolated to the late 2Oth Century where even a period of silence (4'33" by John Cage) can claim to be 'music'1, a 'composition' which underlined, albeit provocatively, that silence, as well as s...

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...cohol and grape juice and its mysteries are not revealed by distillation. The essence of music, certainly of great music, is more than

its ingredients, it requires the passion of the soul and the logic of the intellect - a combination of nature's gifts and skilled human endeavour, an endeavour both of composer and of performer.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Footnotes and other reference material

1. John Cage 4' 33'' (Probably his most provocative piece is

4' 33'' in which the performer, seated in front of the piano,

plays nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds) Groliers.

2. Tess Knighton, Decca Notes 1989 to Ashkenazy & Royal

Philharmonic Orchestra.

The Oxford Companion to the Mind. OUP 1987.

The Oxford Companion to music OUP 1980 reprint.

Groliers Academic American Encyclopedia.

Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. Yolton, Blackwell

1991.