So beautifully put. And yes I think the answer is in this emergent relational phenomenon. It's not that there's a basic truth to what constitutes "sad harmonies", it's that there are patterns that have become encoded in the way that sound has happened to flock together with our emotional and cultural and social behaviour within a specific culture. Then when those patterns are repeated we experience an internal resonance with these experiences, and that can produce transcendence - something to do with an experience of deep connectivity. It's not an accident that music has always been seen as one of the ways in which people can be close to God within religious traditions, or that people going to raves talk about it as a spiritual experience... :)
This resonates deeply. I'm in a class right now, going through The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander and the way you're expressing this generative process with music reminds me strongly of the generative process by which buildings that are alive are created. He believes the process is specifically the thing that creates the aliveness and explains the parallels to these processes in nature. Music must work in the same way.
The relationship between between music and emotion is fascinating, and to some degree baffling. Suzanne Langer said that music not only has the power to recall emotions we are familiar with, but to evoke ‘emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before. ' Music seems, in other words, to expand the range of possible emotions limitlessly because the emotion experienced is so bound up with the particularity of the work that mediates it, yet the lexicon with which we are obliged to describe the feelings remains frustratingly limited. Thus the 'sadness' of a piece of Bach will be quite different from the 'sadness' of a piece of Mozart, and ‘sadness' in the Matthew Passion will be different from the sort of ‘sadness' we might discern in The Musical Offering, and the 'sadness' we experience in one movement of the Matthew Passion - the wonderful alto aria Erbarme dich, for example - will be of a quite different kind from the ‘sadness' of, say, its final chorus, Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder. This must be what Mendelssohn meant by his otherwise paradoxical pronouncement that 'the thoughts that are expressed to me by music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.' Language returns us inevitably to the worn currency of re-presentation, in which the unique qualities of everything that exists are reduced to the same set of terms. As Nietzsche put it: 'Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.' - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary
I have always thought of music as a language that speaks directly to emotions. To ask "why music" is to me like asking "why (spoken) language"?
Words lack the means to reach the place within us that music can reach. Think of the best musicians: a performance is not just about hitting the notes, but the musician has to feel the music in order to channel its emotional content effectively to the audience. Would noises completely devoid of emotion be called music? I think not. Or we might intuitively feel that something is missing (thinking of AI-generated music, for example). Disguised as music, but not the real thing.
When I really listen to music instead of just having it playing on the background, I do it to amplify emotions and help me reach a feeling that might otherwise be difficult to get to. If that's not a sign that it's the language of emotions, I don't know what is.
To think of music as a language also neatly explains how come different cultures experience the same music differently.
I've spent a lifetime listening and thinking about music and asking myself why?
I can only say that it seems to have a direct access to emotion. It's like trying to explain what consciousness is. I particularly like the analogy of the infinite shades of colour available on the palette – and then only using three or four of them. Someone once said, a pop guitarist plays three chords to thousands of people. A jazz guitarist plays thousands of chords to 3 people.
So beautifully put. And yes I think the answer is in this emergent relational phenomenon. It's not that there's a basic truth to what constitutes "sad harmonies", it's that there are patterns that have become encoded in the way that sound has happened to flock together with our emotional and cultural and social behaviour within a specific culture. Then when those patterns are repeated we experience an internal resonance with these experiences, and that can produce transcendence - something to do with an experience of deep connectivity. It's not an accident that music has always been seen as one of the ways in which people can be close to God within religious traditions, or that people going to raves talk about it as a spiritual experience... :)
This resonates deeply. I'm in a class right now, going through The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander and the way you're expressing this generative process with music reminds me strongly of the generative process by which buildings that are alive are created. He believes the process is specifically the thing that creates the aliveness and explains the parallels to these processes in nature. Music must work in the same way.
The relationship between between music and emotion is fascinating, and to some degree baffling. Suzanne Langer said that music not only has the power to recall emotions we are familiar with, but to evoke ‘emotions and moods we have not felt, passions we did not know before. ' Music seems, in other words, to expand the range of possible emotions limitlessly because the emotion experienced is so bound up with the particularity of the work that mediates it, yet the lexicon with which we are obliged to describe the feelings remains frustratingly limited. Thus the 'sadness' of a piece of Bach will be quite different from the 'sadness' of a piece of Mozart, and ‘sadness' in the Matthew Passion will be different from the sort of ‘sadness' we might discern in The Musical Offering, and the 'sadness' we experience in one movement of the Matthew Passion - the wonderful alto aria Erbarme dich, for example - will be of a quite different kind from the ‘sadness' of, say, its final chorus, Wir setzen uns mit Tränen nieder. This must be what Mendelssohn meant by his otherwise paradoxical pronouncement that 'the thoughts that are expressed to me by music I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary too definite.' Language returns us inevitably to the worn currency of re-presentation, in which the unique qualities of everything that exists are reduced to the same set of terms. As Nietzsche put it: 'Compared with music all communication by words is shameless; words dilute and brutalise; words depersonalise; words make the uncommon common.' - Iain McGilchrist, The Master And His Emissary
next essay on dancing? Or maybe we’ve already explored that marginally here or can be summed up with “movement is important in quantifiable ways”
Very thought provoking and interesting essay. Thank you.
I have always thought of music as a language that speaks directly to emotions. To ask "why music" is to me like asking "why (spoken) language"?
Words lack the means to reach the place within us that music can reach. Think of the best musicians: a performance is not just about hitting the notes, but the musician has to feel the music in order to channel its emotional content effectively to the audience. Would noises completely devoid of emotion be called music? I think not. Or we might intuitively feel that something is missing (thinking of AI-generated music, for example). Disguised as music, but not the real thing.
When I really listen to music instead of just having it playing on the background, I do it to amplify emotions and help me reach a feeling that might otherwise be difficult to get to. If that's not a sign that it's the language of emotions, I don't know what is.
To think of music as a language also neatly explains how come different cultures experience the same music differently.
Such a great piece Henrik! We truly are creatures of rythm, and music is our oldest language
I've spent a lifetime listening and thinking about music and asking myself why?
I can only say that it seems to have a direct access to emotion. It's like trying to explain what consciousness is. I particularly like the analogy of the infinite shades of colour available on the palette – and then only using three or four of them. Someone once said, a pop guitarist plays three chords to thousands of people. A jazz guitarist plays thousands of chords to 3 people.