What Is Music?

Music is everywhere. You listen to music on your way to work, at shopping malls, while you wait at the dentist, and basically everywhere else.

But, what is music?

Is it just organized pitches that our brains like so we consider it music? Can anything be considered music? Do birds make music? Is it just notes on a page?

The dictionary definition of music is:

1. The science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity

2. Vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony
   Merriam-Webster

Many music scholars have a different definition of what music is when compared to the dictionary. Many agree that what defines music is an agreement between the audience and the musician. The artist has made it clear to the audience that the sounds they are producing are indeed music and the audience is in agreement with that notion. Also, only sounds produced by people can be considered music for no other living sound creating creature can give consent to their sounds as being music.

Image from Unsplash.com

Ethnomusicologists are people who study music of different cultures outside of the western world. When they first went out and explored different parts of the world to document the music of different cultures they were met with some challenges that helped define music. They would stumble across towns and villages where they would hear music, but when they would ask the locals of where the music was coming from they were told that “No, it’s not music, it’s work”. Or that the ‘music’ is a form of religious chant.

An example of this is when the musicologists encountered postal works in Ghana cancelling stamps. To them, the professors; what they were listening to was music. To the biased western ear, rhythms and textures that are intertwined together sound like music. But to the postal workers, what they were doing was just a strategy to keep work timely and to finish tasks more efficiently. So when the professors stepped back and told the workers and the locals that this does indeed sound like music everyone went “Oh, you’re right. It does sound like music, but it’s not”.

Here, there is no agreement between the producer of sounds and the listener, so this is not music.

Another example that defies the dictionary definition of what music is and supports the view of there needing to be an agreement between artist and listener for it to be considered music is the song “Four Minutes, Thirty-Three Seconds” by John Cage.

In this piece, Cage sits at his piano for about 6 minutes in silence. He sits at the piano on stage in front of the audience with a stopwatch in his hand and watches the seconds tick by. He does not play the piano, he just sits there in complete silence. To Cage, this was an experimental composition piece and he wrote this 3 part movement song because he believed that “there is no such thing as silence”.

There are no tones or notes in succession, there are no instrumental sounds or melody or rhythms; in dictionary terms this song would not be considered music. So, what makes this music? It’s music because the agreement between the performer and the audience exist.

As long as there is this agreement between the musician and listener anything can be considered music. Bird song alone is not music but if someone were to record birds then mix their songs into an abstract piece, that would be considered music too but only if the producer claimed his mix was music.

Honestly, music can be anything with the non-dictionary definition and it's a great thing for artists and everyone. It allows for greater freedom in self-expression and creativity. It doesn't limit music to just notes in succession and rhythms. It allows for experimentation of sounds and it encourages the development of cool new instruments.

Take a look at this new instrument called a Waterphone, it creates eerie sounds and it's super cool.

So go out there and make music, any kind of music!

~Cherish~