I asked Twitter that question and got a lot of impassioned
and very different answers
The problem is that all these answers almost seem to be answering different questions
It's because the question itself is
admittedly fairly poorly worded
It kinda almost sounds like I'm asking the question
What is music?
Alright How it's going, everybody?
I'm very excited to be here
This is the question
What is music?
A better way of wording that initial question would be
which is still fairly ambiguous but a little bit easier to parse
In our daily life, we never have to ask this question
We just kind of know what music is
and what music isn't we never really have to put like a dividing line even though there clearly is one
I want to know what, if anything music communicates
And how it might create information beyond the surface level of the sound of music itself
In other words
Great question Mr. Bieber, Great question
Now I'm not really going to talk about the personal meaning of music although that does have an important place here
When you say a song "means" something to you
what you're saying is the song accurately reflects in some way your emotional state
or your culture
or your identity it's a means of self actualization
This is important but what I'm looking for is slightly different
What I'm looking for goes back to the ancient Greeks
Pythagoras in addition to giving us his lovely theorem was among the first to give us musical meaning
A theory of music one that was very much tied to his work in mathematics
He's associated with a very influential idea known as the Music of the Spheres
a mathematical as well as quasi-mystical approach to music-making which says that
the proportional relationships between things expressed tones of energy
The proportions between the movements of the heavenly bodies in the night sky are measurable
and therefore they create the grandest music there is
So when they're moving around and you can see they're moving around that represents a divine music that we can't experience directly, but we can see
Everything else that we do here on Earth is a pale imitation of what's actually happening up above
So in this way music is kind of like painting a landscape
The same way that an artist might imitate the essence of a landscape before them
We try and imitate the divine proportions of music with the music that we make
Roman historian Pliny the Elder would write
This is an interesting concept of musical meaning because it's actually a fairly alien mode of thought for us
we typically don't go into making music with the austere purpose of creating a
celestial border and even if we did Pythagoras got the actual proportions between the planetary orbits
completely wrong so we would be worshipping a heavenly order that simply wasn't there to begin with
Instead music is a more human endeavor. It's a more cultural endeavor and also a more personal endeavor
We don't watch in awe as Steve Vai plays Tender Surrender and think
"Oh my gosh look at the beautiful proportions between those pitches"
His performance is clearly for a different purpose
A purpose, which apparently can only be achieved by wearing a blazer without a shirt
A modern and non-Pythagorean view of musical meaning comes from thinking about music as a form of language
After all we use both to communicate ideas and emotions albeit in slightly different ways
During Victor Wooten's TED talk
He makes the case that music and language are learned in very similar ways and the more that we think about music as a language
The easier it will be to study and master musical performance
But with language, to use a musical term
Even as a baby you're jamming with professionals
All the time
Music is very different from language, though
You could say the phrase 'I am ecstatic', but the syntax alone does nothing to convey the feeling of ecstasy
Music on the other hand
Steve Vai is using a musical language among other things to express ecstasy in a way that the phrase 'I am ecstatic' does not
Vai expertly expresses ecstasy through this move
A move he clearly borrowed from another musical master, the American composer and conductor, Leonard Bernstein
Okay now
What do you think that music is all about?
Bernstein had a series of televised concerts with the New York Philharmonic called the Young People's Concerts
Which were kind of like a musical explainitlikeimfive because his audience was in a lot of cases
Five
That didn't stop him from tackling some pretty heavy stuff though
One of the concerts was named
Well, it was named the name of this video.
What does music mean?
In it, he tries to get his young audience to start thinking musically
to start thinking about the different relationships between the musical elements that they're hearing
When you say 'what does it mean' what you're really saying is what is it trying to tell you
What ideas does it make me have, just like words, when you hear words you get ideas from them
If I say to you 'Oh, I burned my finger'
Then immediately you get an idea from what I said or some ideas you get the idea that I burned my finger
That it hurts
That I might not be able to play the piano anymore
He was very adamant that musical meaning does not come from the Program
The narrative story that sometimes goes along with pieces of music like the William Tell Overture
Instead, as he told his young audience, musical meaning comes from the comparison of different musical elements
and then our reaction to that
If I have a kick drum by itself playing quarter notes
There's not much music there there really isn't much your ear can do to compare each note to the next
As soon as I add a bassline though
Your ear gets right to work creating musical relationships between the sounds it's hearing
It's not literally telling a story like language might in narrative prose
But the meaning is coming from the comparison of different elements. In this case, the baseline
rhythms of the baseline and tones of the baseline to itself and also the kick drum
For Bernstein the comparison of elements was essential for understanding music
It was the mechanism for finding emotional truth in a language with no words
If I play a note on the piano, just one note
And I hold it a long time that has no meaning at all has it let's say
Let's say I play the note, and then I move to another note
Right away there's a meaning
a meaning we can't name a sort of
Stretch or pulling or pushing, something like that, but it's there
This process of comparing things, which aren't the same
but might have an underlying connection is almost
metaphorical
Now did that word metaphorical register with you?
Well yes, Mr. Bernstein it certainly did
I hope so because metaphor is our key to understanding
In fact, I just used a metaphor
I said metaphor is the key
In the 70s Bernstein gave a lecture series at Harvard University called The Unanswered Question
where he elucidated a lot of the ideas he had about language, music, and meaning
One thing that he says is that musical meaning comes from the comparison and transformation of musical material
In any sense in which music can be considered a language, it is a totally metaphorical language
Consider the etymology of the word 'metaphor' metá: beyond and phérō: to carry
Carrying meaning beyond the literal, the tangible
Beyond the grossly semantic
Metaphor is the leap that we all take from what Bernstein calls the 'grossly semantic'
Let's take a classic metaphor
The phrase makes logical grammatical sense: A equals B
But no semantic sense Juliet is not, in fact, the Sun
To communicate the sentiment non-metaphorically
You'd have to say
True, but 'grossly semantic'
Not as beautiful as 'Juliet is the Sun'
By transforming any musical material from one state to another
We automatically arrive at the test equation of any metaphor, namely, This is That
Juliet is the Sun
Music exists only on this level nothing is meant by these two notes except their
metaphorical union. Their comparison creates a sum greater than their two parts
The grossly semantic doesn't exist in music otherwise it just wouldn't be music
If music were to have this kind of semantic meaning, the kind that would arise from syntactic structures like it does in language
It would look a lot like Jean-François Sudre's solresol
A constructed language that uses tones from the major scale as phonemes
These come together to represent specific ideas
And different clusters of notes come together to have a form of musical grammar
For example
You are hearing the solresol translation of the video you are watching
It's a video essay, which is a form of
fashionable analysis
You can experiment yourself to figure out what solfege tones go with what words on the Solresol Translator
on sidosi.org
The problem is that this is not how we experience music
You're not listening to notes and translating it into some kind of syntax
Music itself works very differently to convey what it does. It works
Metaphorically
Metaphor is the generator the power plant of music just as it is of poetry
Music is like listening to a language you don't speak
It has no meaning to you in that sense, but it does have intonation, it does have cadence
It does have articulation, it does have repetition, and it does have rhythm
All the things that make language musical are the things that make
music
music.
Okay, so here's the crazy thing:
You can translate any music into solresol and it will spit back gibberish
but oddly poetic sounding gibberish
What did that poem mean? Well absolutely nothing
But it certainly felt like it should mean something because music was stripped down to its bare essence
Language stripped of all semantic meaning
Music
means
Nothing
And this is our thesis
Okay, so I have this ridiculous question that hopefully illustrates not only the power of metaphor,
but how important it is to understand musical elements if your musical metaphors are going to have any meaning
Okay, ready for it?
See I told you it was ridiculous. It's kind of like a BuzzFeed quiz for jazz nerds
And yet
Clearly the correct answers would be: Miles Davis is season one, Ron Carter is season two,
Wayne Shorter is season three Herbie Hancock is season four
and Tony Williams is season five
For most of you that metaphor is utterly meaningless you could just insert whatever niche metaphor you want it really doesn't matter
All I want Is that feeling of confusion that comes from
being presented with a metaphor that you just don't get
In order to get a metaphor you have to have some idea of what the constituent parts are
'Juliet is the Sun' is a metaphor but unless you know who Juliet is, or what the Sun is
It means absolutely nothing on its own
Miles Davis's second quintet equals The Wire is also a metaphor without meaning
If you aren't intimately familiar with either side of the equation
If you're checking out a new style of music for the first time chances are
you won't get it you might like it
But you won't get it
The comparisons between the different elements and those styles between the rhythm the melody the harmony and the timbre
won't have as much meaning to you as things that you have more experience with
You won't really know how everything comes together
It will be like that Miles Davis Wire metaphor
And for the people who do know how it comes together, It's that much more rewarding
In his book Emotion and Meaning in Music
Leonard B Meyer writes
Aristotle puts metaphor
midway between the unintelligible and the commonplace
The marvelous remark, it is metaphor, he says which most produces knowledge
Aristotle was onto something when he said that it's something that we can now actually test
Recent fMRI studies give us interesting clues as to how conceptual metaphors are rooted in our interactions with the world around us
I talked about how metaphors might actually change literally
how we see things in my synesthesia video
We'll sometimes you use adjectives for certain senses to describe other senses
For example:
creamy guitar tones or sweet melodies
What precisely we mean by that is actually fairly difficult to say even with the power of metaphor
You know I feel like there's something missing in this analysis however fashionable it may be
feel like we've gotten kind of bogged down in this discussion of metaphors
I feel like we could be kind of go back to the beginning of this video that discussion of Harmony of the Spheres
Let's talk about Pythagoras
His view is that a perfect fifth was beautiful because the pitches contained therewithin
vibrated at a simple ratio, 2:3, the first note vibrates twice for every three times the second note vibrates
So you could say that this note is like this note in terms of its ratio
kind of like saying Juliet is like the Sun in terms of
Radiance
See how that works? Metaphor
When you do the metaphorical transformation the pitches are brought into a union of a new thing entirely
The perfect fifth start piling on different ratio metaphors
Eventually you get chords melodies and music
all through the transformative power of metaphor
It's this way that we can bridge the gap between the old idea of the harmony of the spheres
And our new idea of music as a language of expression
It's all tied together by metaphor metaphor without semantic meaning
During the Young People's Concerts Bernstein implored his young audience to learn how to listen to music
for music's sake not with a story but to let the music speak for itself
And you just all sit back and relax
And enjoy it and listen to the notes and feel them move around
jumping and hopping and bumping and flashing and sliding and whatever they do and just enjoy that
Without a whole lot of fuss about stories and pictures and all that business
Now the piece we're going to play for you is by Ravel and it's called La Valse. I think you'll like it
because it's fun to listen to and not for any other reason not because it's about anything. It's just good
exciting music
So what does music mean?
Music
means
existence
as far as I'm concerned
Because I can't live without it
Oh my God, I don't even know how to answer that
What does music mean?
Music?
Music means music
Alright, that was bad.