User:FloraC/Fundamental principles to musical sense

One of the problems I cannot help but confront is to answer why I approach music composition this specific way and what sense it even makes – even though it has not been made explicit by virtually anybody. This little essay explains what is meant by my use of the term "musical sense", and I would also love to share a few principles I tend to follow as a composer and music theorist.

Chapter I: Essentials

Ideally, music composition or any artistic creation is characterized by a series of conscious choices, by which the unique identity of a work is determined. The choices, set aside if there exists anything known as free will, is a full exposition of the author's agency. That was much the case in the past. With advanced technology, however, the nature of composition nowadays appears to shift, as algorithms and artificial intelligence play increasingly significant parts in composition. That apart, everybody is augmented with at least some sort of technology. It follows with the importance to understand composition in this condition, and evaluation of real works must also be taken with care.

It is intuitive to assert that technology tends to "invade" the author's agency, for which it often acts as a substitute. Using AI to generate music pieces results in the author making fewer decisions and having less control of it, notwithstanding the huge difference between composition which involves consciously selecting the generated result and that which do not. Yet actually, agency has always been central to composition that no pieces can be completed without exposition thereof. It cannot be waived either, because that practice per se is such an exposition. The choice to take whatever the AI generates is still a conscious choice, after all. Therefore, difference of musical sense only arises in how the composer exerts their agency.

We have seen that the major concern is how one decides to control the music pieces. Some modernist composers valued it so much and even acted such that full control of their musical materials is an achievement to be very proud of. However, such impression of controlling may well be but an illusion. What is the subject that controls? What causes the piece to be what it is? The truth is in musical feelings.

Musical feelings are feelings invoked from an understanding of musical experience, which are fundamentally musical with no verbal counterparts in any existing natural language. For example, experiences of the major key and of the minor key invoke feelings distinct from each other. One may be tempted to signify those feelings by "majorness" and "minorness", respectively. Unfortunately, that not only misses the point but also stereotypes them with oversimplified invoking sources. The necessity to verbalize musical feelings should really never be found, as beautifully put by Felix Mendelssohn,

The music fills the soul with a thousand things better than words.

So why would one feel like composing in the first place? It is important to point out that musical feelings lie just in the composer's conscious mind. As one sets out to compose, the musical feelings emerge and flow with tremendous driving force like a defrosting river. As a necessary consequence, the exposition of the composer's conscious mind, or an exposition of controlling if we will call it, entails shaping music following musical feelings. That is exactly where the maximum of musical sense consists.

In contrast, what is sometimes referred to as "control" by the modernists is the scheme where the subject is deliberately departed of musical feelings, an exercise to feed the mind with less relevant materials as they are not rooted in an understanding of musical experience, with its driving force derived from nowhere else than superstition. So we see how those modernist's concept of control alienated the subject. There is no surprise those modernists only produced craps with no musical sense.

Chapter II: Modes to Get Over

The sensual limits to which we human beings are subject do not further help to determine musical sense in any constructive way.

Many a listener, for example, struggles to hear a pitch difference of a couple of cents, on which basis they believe such pitch materials make no musical sense. Obviously, they may reason, if you cannot sense the music, it does not make musical sense.

It turns out that the premise is false. Actually, in order for that reason to hold, the scope of sensation has to be dramatically dwarfed. Now suppose I cannot see a piece of hair, should I say hair makes no artistic sense because I cannot see a single piece of hair, everyone would deem it ridiculous – just because I cannot see a single piece of hair does not mean I cannot see a bulk of thousands. The assertion about the pitch difference of a couple of cents is not anything different.

Furthermore, it is totally reasonable to make sense of what we literally do not sense. Did Beethoven quit composing since his hearing collapsed? He did not! With grace and courage, he embraced the destiny and thereby carried on with some of the most exciting and inspiring creations of all time. That only tells us: the sensual facticity imposing on us by sheer contingency is hollow and absurd. Our mental capacity i.e. the capability of apprehension extends well beyond what we sense.

Another mode quite harmful to musical sense is to take certain instances of homo sapiens as the projected audience. Hence they worry about the audience not taking the opportunity to hear all the subtleties in their works. In fact, the audience is a historical being, whereas music is "absolute sonic phenomena", said Kyle Gann, and musical sense does not depend on the very presence of audience. Au contraire, it does harm to shy away from what we presume the audience cannot grasp. Most materials, techniques and cultural gestures demand certain level of knowledge or training, and it is fine. Their nominativity is evidence of their feasibility. A composer sticking to musical sense always remains faithful with the audience.

Therefore, the only hard limit of musical sense is our mental capacity. In the Matrix, the Oracle said to Neo,

We can never see past the choices we don't understand.

Chapter III: What Music Is Not

The literary theorist Roman Jacobson considered literariness to be "what makes a given work a literary work". For this, we may similarly define musicalness, or musical sense, as what makes a given work a musical work. The main takeaway is that a given work may or may not be a musical work; it follows that a work is a musical work if there is some musical sense to it.

How do we tell if there is musical sense? Let us start with the choice of artistic forms. An artist can choose from many forms, depending on what they want to convey. The traditional seven arts are painting, architecture, sculpture, literature, music, performing, and cinema, and new forms have been emerging, such as games. If you see something and want to visually replicate it, you draw it, paint it, or photograph it. If you want to make a tangible object, there is sculpture. If you have a story to tell, you write it, making it a novel or a drama. If you have a rule and want people to interact with it and have fun, you are designing a game. Now, what makes you choose music? The answer is probably too obvious: it is the sound!

Music has been considered as a main, original art. It is not derivative or composite, while some others are. The uniqueness of music is due to the fact that there are feelings that can only be expressed and experienced through straight-up listening. Hence, if a work's main purpose is to convey that, it is music.

Corollary 1

Music is not an encoding of another art.

More generally, all artistic works should be considered in their fully decoded forms. If I draw a picture on the piano roll and export it to an audio, that is pixel art, not music, because the last step only serves as an encoding of the drawing. I could as well present this work through a plain image, which is a fairer way to appreciate it. Meanwhile, sheet music is music (if it is not pixel art), because the drawing only serves as an encoding of the music.

Such a criterion creates some apparently difficult cases, as reality is not so clear-cut. One can obviously encode something in their otherwise purely musical pieces. Even J. S. Bach hid his signature in many of his works. One can also compose music with encoding materials e.g. Morse code and still convey a mostly musical idea. There is, actually, nothing to be worried about, as we are simply creating composite forms of art, or augmented music, if you want to call it. Most of the time it does not take extraordinary brainpower to tell if music is the foreground of a work.

Despite common misconceptions, a song is a multidisciplinary art, as it has music as well as lyrics, the latter being a form of literature. Some songs are more musical than lyrical and others are the opposite. It is a spectrum and there is no point to argue which side has the higher artistic value.

Corollary 2

Music is not a mental exercise or mental puzzle.

More generally, all artistic works are not mental exercises or mental puzzles. Most works call for a certain level of mental load, and due to the varied mental strength of individuals, it is normal that some works are "hard". However, some other works are deliberately created to confuse the audience. This is also a spectrum, with the worst works closing on the edge of being unrecognizable as music. If you have to look at the score to enjoy a work even though you have listened to it many times, that is probably not your fault (except when you are studying it, in which case the purpose is not to enjoy it but to understand it). For works which look nice on the score but sound horrible, I would consider them more as a new form of art – score art – than music. Score art is suspiciously similar to pixel art, the only difference being it uses music-specific language and operates in the music space.

Chapter IV: Absolute Music vs Programmatic Music

The way I categorize absolute music and programmatic music is different from how many others do. For example, Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 "Eroica" is absolute music to me, even though it has a title. A title is not equivalent to a programme. It often serves a mnemonic purpose more than anything else. In this case the title is not much different from the dedication, wherein he stated:

Heroic symphony, composed to celebrate the memory of a great man.

Symphony No. 9, on the other hand, is programmatic music. This is not because it is a choral symphony, but because – in the piece – the baritone would sing:

Oh friends, not these sounds!

It is worth the highlight that this line is written by none else than the author himself. It negates the music that has been performed, creating an apparent contradiction between the author's attitude and the very existence of the music.

As one would normally expect, every single moment of a piece is perfect if the piece is serious for the author, that is if it is not created for a joke (no one would say Symphony No. 9 was a joke). If the author is not content with a part, they will never publish it. They will keep revising it until they are content. Therefore upon hearing a piece, you know you can wholeheartedly enjoy every single moment and believe in every bit the author has to show. That is, I think, a defining feature of absolute music. As we see with Symphony No. 9 however, the voice tells us what has been performed is not perfect: they are not wanted; what is to be performed is wanted; thus follows a thematic change.

So Beethoven could have gone totally insane, but more plausibly, it is explained like this: the voice is not coming from the author, but from a character, like a protagonist or a narrator, whoever he is, on the scene. The attitude change as music goes on in time is undoubtedly a programmatic, dramatic effect. It denies the audience the absolute space of all-time enjoyment, because the audience is supposed to follow the author's narrative, an external element to the music. In order to fully follow this narrative, the audience needs to step out of the music to reflect on it.

On that basis, I argue that absolute music is more authentic than programmatic music in general. In the more explicit cases of programmatic music, they become less of music but more of a multidisciplinary art.

Chapter V: Music vs Architecture, Spatial Music

Since light is an integral part of architecture, why not sound? Well, architecture regards living spaces, and a living space that emits sound (or really noises) can be annoying. Most of the time, soundscape concerns interior design than architecture, and serves a functional purpose. Adding music for purely aesthetics is nonetheless possible, and thereby we consolidate architecture with music. It rings particularly true for virtual spaces.

Meanwhile, music could be presented in an interactive way that requires traveling in space. Part of the minimalist music regards creating multiple small repeating segments of music and let the performer put them together according to a rule. That is the prototype of what I am introducing next.

In this kind of music, the sound is repeatedly played from multiple sources. The audience must move around in the space to receive different segments of music, and the way they are combined is determined by their locations. Any physical material may be used to filter or otherwise alter the propagation of sound, and of course the audience should feel free to enter or exit the space at will. This idea of spatial music is distinct from architecture with music in that the main purpose here is just to enjoy the music.

This approach is not as free as the minimalist approach, obviously, since the sound can only be combined in physically possible ways, which is a subset of all combinations. However, this subset is worth a mention because it is tangible, organic, and dual to the architecture with music discussed above.

Chapter VI: Living in a Society

Living in a society, nothing is transparent. Studying the work often reveals little about the composer's ultimate intention.

That is why, while I hold the stricter criteria on musical works and authentic musical works, I try to only apply it to myself. For the works of others, I try to take a more permissive approach to judgement: authenticity is assumed, and inauthenticity requires evidence. As an interesting epistemological turn, evidence is never 100% certain. Taking this stance to extremity, we can give up all judgement and approach the external world in a purely experiential manner. This will spare us lots of troubles and give us peace of mind when we are not feeling smart, and let us be honest, we sometimes do this, because we are mere mortals that do not possess omniscience.

Another aspect of living in a society is to recognize and accept widely used standards, as long as they do not stand in the way of artistic expression. For example, standards like A440 greatly facilitates communication in 12edo. Some standards impose limitations on the music: the finite note range of MIDI, the length of a CD, etc. These things are often inclusive enough that pushing them is a sign of an extraordinary artistic choice. I personally stick to a much smaller pitch range than what is covered by all the MIDI notes.

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