Music, aesthetics of

1. The concept of music

A fundamental question in the aesthetics of music is ‘What is music?’, understood as a request for a definition or delineation of the general concept of music. Theorists have adopted a number of different approaches to the question, often depending on their further purposes in asking it. Perhaps the only thing that all theorists agree on is that music is necessarily sound.

The most conservative approach seeks to define music in terms of the standard features of most music, to wit, melody, harmony, rhythm, metre, instruments, voices and tone production; but in addition to being inadequate to a number of modes of contemporary composition – serialism, minimalism, musique concrète, computer music, aleatory music – it ignores many practices remote from us in space or time that we acknowledge as musical. A more liberal approach to defining music – a structuralist one – issues in the formula of music as ‘organized sound’; though music so conceived need not exhibit the standard features of music noted above, for on this conception something is music in virtue of its intrinsic properties alone. On another approach, which may be termed ‘experiential’ (or ‘phenomenological’), music is any sounds that are heard as music, it then being incumbent on the theorist to say what makes such hearing musical; salient implications of this approach are, first, that natural and accidental sounds may be music, and second, that the status of an item as music is relative to the listener and the occasion of listening.

Attempts have been made to define music as a type of sound-involving activity distinguished by certain cultural or sociological traits, for example, a particular cultural function, such as the accompaniment of ritual or the enhancement of group memory, or particular social relationships, such as apprenticeship. Alternatively, music may be defined in an essentially historical manner as those sound-involving items, activities and practices that have evolved, historically and reflexively, from certain earlier such items, activities and practices, and so on, it being incumbent on the theorist to indicate some non-question-begging way of picking out the musical strand of human history from all others (for instance, the linguistic one) that are sound-involving.

Finally, one may attempt to characterize music intentionally, from the producer’s point of view, by appeal to distinctive aims or purposes on the part of makers of sound. One approach of long standing conceives music as sounds made in order to express, evoke or elicit emotions or feelings. Another conceives it as sound used as a vehicle of communicable but non-linguistic thought. But the most common approach of this kind proposes simply that music is sounds made or arranged for aesthetic appreciation.

If one is concerned to define music as an art, to preserve a measure of objectivity for the status of music, and yet to avoid making music’s import necessarily either emotional or intellectual, one could do worse than to accept this last suggestion. However, in order comfortably to cover a wide range of cross-cultural phenomena easily recognized by us as music, but in which we would be hard put to discern a norm of aesthetic appreciation in operation, a more inclusive notion of the aim with which sounds are made must be invoked. The following suggests itself: music is sounds humanly made or arranged for the purpose of enriching experience via active engagement (such as through performing, listening, dancing), with the sounds regarded primarily as sounds. Such a definition looks to be adequate to cover virtually everything intelligibly accounted music.

The proposal accommodates even John Cage’s notorious 4′33″, an ostensibly soundless musical composition. Designating a period of silence is (though a limiting case) an organization of sounds in a given span of time, presumably done here with a view to heightening consciousness. In addition, as the composer clearly envisaged, even a span of time specified as one to be left silent by the performer is inevitably filled with sounds of various sorts originating from the environment in which the piece is performed.