Thread: Objectivity in music

It is a curious tendency, when talking about music, to regard it as an object or 'thing'. But is this really true? Perhaps it is necessary, in order to have some meaningful discussion about music, to think / speak like this. It may be beneficial to examine this assumption in detail, to understand what music actually 'is', and how it may be understood.

For instance, we often assume that there is a prevailing emotional content in some music, and that this will be evident to most who listen to it. This may be stated in different ways, but the idea is the same: the composer has recorded his thoughts or feelings in those sounds, and then we come along and listen to them, and are able to perceive these. This analogy implies that music is an object with perceivable properties (very scientific).

This idea tends to come undone when we realise that different people will understand the music in entirely different ways, and this is especially evident when people from other cultures are listening, or when we are listening to music from other cultures. What then becomes apparent is that the extra-musical content (emotions, etc) of some music is perceived according to the context of the listener. So there now seems to be nothing objective or absolute in the music itself.

How is it, then, that we can understand music at all? It must rely on the shared perception of people in a similar context, or on some instinctive / intuitive side of ourselves which defies elucidation. One doesn't need all this analysis to comprehend a Beethoven symphony, because the flow of ideas or emotions seems clear enough to those who can perceive it.

In this light it seems that music can draw attention to our perceptive processes and how they are used for understanding. By not being an object or 'thing' to be apprehended by the mind, music can defy that analytical tendency which makes distinguishing or dualistic judgements (this is this and that is that). In this manner it may show us a different level of understanding.

Perhaps it is useful to give these ideas some thought, and try to understand how our perceptual capabilities are enhanced or modified by listening to music. However poorly I have sketched out this idea, please add your thoughts, so we may learn something.

Well, music does have objective properties, frequency, duration, layering.

But people react to those properties in all sorts of wild and extravagant ways, which seem, often as not, to have little or nothing to do with the actual sounds.

All pretty ordinary and understandable, so far. But with music, something seems to come unhinged when people are confronted with things that are either unfamiliar or that do not align with their notions of beauty, or both.

I think you'll find if you pay close attention to anyone's comments about music--on this forum, for instance--you will find that they're actually talking about themselves. About the music's effect on them, or its failure to effect them as they desire. Not about the music itself. One can see that in the kind of words used: beautiful, ugly, dissonant, sad, forceful, whatever. All words that reveal something (and not terribly much) about the effect on that listener OF the music; words that reveal little or nothing about the music itself. Even a so to speak technical term like "atonal" or even a real technical term like "serial" isn't used to describe the object itself but to identify an attitude. Many, perhaps most, who use those words, use them to identify a piece as being "what I don't like."

That's a big part of why new music is always such a hard sell. It doesn't make people feel the things they demand to feel when listening to music. Or not at first, anyway. And mostly, people don't want to get beyond "at first."

(By "people," you understand, I mean "people who listen to classical music but who hate composers like Carter and Cage and Corcoran."

Nice plug for Corcoran, there, too, eh?)

aren't the feelings generated in the listener, and the performance choices made by the performer are the subjective-expressive aspects, dependent upon those persons?
this happens regardless of how 'objective' the composer intended to be.

dj

Originally Posted by some guy

Well, music does have objective properties, frequency, duration, layering.

But people react to those properties in all sorts of wild and extravagant ways, which seem, often as not, to have little or nothing to do with the actual sounds.

All pretty ordinary and understandable, so far. But with music, something seems to come unhinged when people are confronted with things that are either unfamiliar or that do not align with their notions of beauty, or both.

Being what it is (or is not), music seems valuable in bringing these things to the surface. A shame, though, that most would simply conclude that "this music sucks" and dismiss it. The observation could be taken a step further, to say "Why don't I like this? What is the composer getting at here?" This kind of critical approach seems prevalent in academic institutions, however there it risks becoming as over-intellectualised as the other is emotionalised.

Originally Posted by some guy

I think you'll find if you pay close attention to anyone's comments about music--on this forum, for instance--you will find that they're actually talking about themselves. About the music's effect on them, or its failure to effect them as they desire. Not about the music itself. One can see that in the kind of words used: beautiful, ugly, dissonant, sad, forceful, whatever. All words that reveal something (and not terribly much) about the effect on that listener OF the music; words that reveal little or nothing about the music itself. Even a so to speak technical term like "atonal" or even a real technical term like "serial" isn't used to describe the object itself but to identify an attitude. Many, perhaps most, who use those words, use them to identify a piece as being "what I don't like."

That's a big part of why new music is always such a hard sell. It doesn't make people feel the things they demand to feel when listening to music. Or not at first, anyway. And mostly, people don't want to get beyond "at first."

That's all very true. I wonder if this is why there have been warnings about too much attachment to music, as it becomes a kind of limitation. Satisfaction of the listener's (often unperceived) desires may be useful at some point, but when a means becomes an end, then I doubt there would be much chance of any further insights until this tendency is broken.

Originally Posted by some guy

(By "people," you understand, I mean "people who listen to classical music but who hate composers like Carter and Cage and Corcoran."

Nice plug for Corcoran, there, too, eh?)

Couldn't find anything on this Corcoran - he wouldn't be a Canadian pop singer by any chance? Hehe.

Oneiros, this is a fantastic topic, one where aesthetics, semantics and socio-cultural anthropology all overlap.

Music is certainly a process through which performers and listeners express and experience emotions.

But this objectification of which you speak has very solid and justified roots in my opinion. Because I believe that when a composer wrote a work, that work exists in and of itself in the mind of that composer and by extension, in the collective consciousness of the listening public.

Beethoven's 5th simply IS, even when separated from the process of the performance, in the very same way that the Mona Lisa IS, even when separated from the process of looking at it.

Originally Posted by Kurkikohtaus

But this objectification of which you speak has very solid and justified roots in my opinion. Because I believe that when a composer wrote a work, that work exists in and of itself in the mind of that composer and by extension, in the collective consciousness of the listening public.

Beethoven's 5th simply IS, even when separated from the process of the performance, in the very same way that the Mona Lisa IS, even when separated from the process of looking at it.

This is an interesting idea. But the move from existing in the mind of the composer, to existing in the consciousness of the listener, seems to have several loopholes. Especially where notation is used, involving the notion that what is written down is only a proportion (half, etc) of the real idea. If this were not so, we could use computers to play music: this fails because there is a lot that isn't written down, that must be drawn out by a living performer. Think of the subtleties of interpretation that each performer brings to a certain work, changing the quality of it slightly.

Also there is something about each individual's creative process which could change the way one sees musical invention. Some composers invent ideas off the page, then battle to write them down (like Beethoven), whereas others improvise and then write down their improvisations, and others may even invent on paper. And there are more possibilities. The wide variety of these methods makes it problematic to talk about ideas as absolute entities, in the composer's mind then transferred into the listeners through a performance.

Another problem (very briefly, as it strays from music) is the nature of our senses. It has been shown that our senses are designed to perceive in ways according to our needs (survival, etc). Our senses create a 'picture' which satisfies us, and we can make sense out of it, but it isn't the whole truth. Think of our ears: we can only hear within certain frequencies, and according to the design of our ears. As we can only perceive through the means available to us, most of us cannot know what lies beyond our senses, and thus it becomes a matter of speculation as to what might be out there in the absolute or objective world. Even something like a painting may have properties which are unknown to us because our senses cannot perceive them. This does not refute your claim, but draws attention to a certain point: that what we see as objective may only be part of the whole picture.

Perhaps the solution lies in seeing a shade of grey. Composers do put something into their music, and we can more often than not (in the case of decent composers anyway) perceive this, or some not so distant derivative of it. To name it goes too far, since it can change slightly according to each performance and each listener. But it is always there, hiding between the lines of the page, waiting to be drawn out and given fresh life. In my view performers should be seen as creative artists with no less value or importance than composers, because they are just as integral to the process of realising music as the composer is.

Well, if you haven't fallen asleep yet, criticism of the above is welcomed. I'd be interested to hear, Kurk, if you could clarify your idea for further discussion.

Oneiros,

Frank Corcoran. Irish composer. Instrumental and electroacoustic.

Amazon has a couple of his CDs. As does Arkiv.

Not that there's anything WRONG with Canadian pop singers, of course.

(Or IS there?)

If you mean the French Canadian Jim Corcoran, yes, there's something wrong!

Originally Posted by Morigan

If you mean the French Canadian Jim Corcoran, yes, there's something wrong!

lol, yes, that's the one.

Well, it looks like this topic is petering out so I may as well stick my penny’s worth in before it dies.

It’s one of those subjects that encompasses so many fields that themselves are poorly founded, in conflict or objective only in limited ways: philosophy, psychophysiology, semiotics, communication theory and a few others. The first definition of ‘objective’ that came up in Google is “undistorted by emotion or personal bias; based on observable phenomena.”

Seems a reasonable definition. And on that basis the overall process of music does not conform. It resolves into “something experienced”, which cannot be classed as objective; there's no experiential commonality for the purpose of ‘observation’. Whether two people can have exactly the same experience when listening (or doing anything for that matter) has to rest on belief. We can't observe it obvioulsy and words are little use except in the most simplistic terms: you like it, you think it’s exciting, it makes you sad. Most people have experienced these degrees of pleasure or otherwise but if your reader has never been sad or never known what it is to like music, your words fail.

Thankfully for critics, wordplay allows a pretence of objectivity. They write about music by (among other things) making comparisons that seem objective (and can actually be objective: this performance is faster than that; the performers did not obey the score exactly: observable phenomena) and too soon they sink into totally subjective verbiage. Too often they describe their emotional response that is, as Some Guy says, a report on themselves.

On the other hand music involves objects – a paper score or equivalent (regardless of its inherent ambiguities, it is still an object) – a recording (which is a definitive score), instruments (whether electronic or acoustic), performers, a concert performance. There is also the visible process of composition – the act of coding ideas or experiences (or however you imagine composition originates) into a medium that can be communicated. These are observable phenomena that exist in isolation up to the point of the concert performance whereon we become involved with processes and communication, a subject that just can’t be covered in a single post (or at all without assumptions about the readership) but the process basically entails the transmitter, the intermediary (performer(s)), the receiver (listener/viewer). It also involves language (or at least a metalanguage) and while ‘music as a language’ is debatable, it is sometimes useful to consider its linguistic properties.

The extent to which a listener engages cognitive processes is also debatable. Certainly, cognitive processes are required by a performer unless it’s a machine. It's congition that lets us recognise particular works. It's fair to say that some listening requires no cognition in itself, depending on subjectives: the listeners’ sensuality, emotions, mood, purpose; which in turn usually subsume certain cultural elements. Of course, some listeners will intellectualise ‘form’ and other details as the music progresses but absence of the necessary knowledge does not stop someone enjoying/disliking the result.

From this I conclude that music cannot be objective. The end product – the listening experience – is not an observable phenomenon. It does not respond easily to intellectualisation. But the components that make up that experience are as objective as your definition allows.