Many times people ask questions related to music and here I’m filling in the gaps that I find were relevant in those conversations for all music listeners.
The Mini Dictionary of Musicological Thinking
What is music
Music is a humanly organized sound. Regardless of individual taste, we cannot say that something is not music if its sound was organized by a human. Even the piece 4’33’’ by John Cage, which demands silence from the performer for four minutes and thirty-three seconds straight, is music. Its unique performance is created together with the audience, which participates in this humanly co-organized sound of ‘silence’. Everything else that is not a humanly organized sound is a sound of nature or a soundscape.
Music function
Music has a function. It can stimulate intellectual thinking, calm or strengthen the spirit. Even before the music can be classified based on genre, it is processed by the amygdala - i.e. the center of our emotions in the brain - which determines the function of the music based on the vibe. The best example of this today is a playlist on Spotify or other music streaming platforms, which combined songs using computer algorithms to fit the current mood of the listener: e.g. chill music, summer vibes, or happy hits.
Music division
Music is logically divided in several ways. First, on the basis of its sound, social context, historical period, country of origin, and national origin of the creator. A group of similar ‘musics’ has its own genre name, e.g. blues. The second division follows when we combine genres into: 1) serious and 2) popular music. Serious is the one that is more intellectual in its function (usually more complex), and popular is the one that calms or strengthens the spirit (usually more simple). The third division is the most ambiguous - contemporary vs classical music - and needs to be explained thoroughly. Everything that is being created today is called contemporary music, regardless of the genre or its function. Some of this will survive and it will become classical music. Although Mozart wrote many classical music pieces, he is not a classical composer. He is a classicist composer, meaning he created art in the age of classicism. Vivaldi wrote a classical piece Four Seasons, but he is a baroque composer. His Spring concertcan be heard everywhere: in a TV commercial, as your neighbor’s doorbell, or as background music in an elevator. Because it is still used and ubiquitous, almost 300 years after it was written, it is considered a classical piece. Will it remain classical for the next 300 years? We don't know. Trends are changing, so music pieces can also lose their classic title.
Classical music of today
Contemporary classical music is a paradox. Where is classical music today and who is today’s Vivaldi? Time will tell. A music piece needs to hang around for at least 75 years (three generations) in order to establish itself as classical. Everything that is written today has the potential to become a classic. After three generations the following happens: a) rarely anyone who wrote the music piece is still alive, b) the piece of music usually lost royalties, becoming a public domain and no one is pushing it for revenue purposes, and 3) the sound of music has changed so much over time (with novelties in sound technology) that it has to be something special if we’re still listening to the old sound.
The taste in music
Musical taste begins to develop in the womb and keeps on changing throughout our lives. The baby in the womb hears muffled sounds of the outside world and feels the vibrations of mother's vocal folds. In childhood, the mind memorizes harmonic functions, the style of singing, and the variety and combinations of musical instruments. Taste is most formed in adolescence, so everything we hear then is very important. The emphasis is on hearing - whatever you hear at the time. That might be different from what you choose to listen to deliberately. Music memory is very efficient, even patients with dementia remember songs from their youth. Working with my students, I have also noticed a difference in taste between listening (what they like to listen to) and performing (what they like to sing).
Bad and good music
Any piece of music can be useful for a person at a certain time. Music is not good or bad, but rather fulfills its function or doesn’t. We talk about ‘bad’ music when it doesn’t fulfill its function (for example metal music in the doctor’s reception room), meaning that the issue here is more about using the correct music in a specific context than about evaluating music in an abstract sense. Musicologists can scientifically measure tangible data about music. Within the research, we define the form of the musical piece, how many chords it has, in what sequence they follow each other, and interpret the complexity of the harmonic functions. Based on this type of analysis, we elevate certain music pieces as higher quality. However, we cannot assess the energy value that music carries within itself as art and how much this energy can add or take away from the listener. It’s very hard to prove that punk is worse than rock or something like that. It depends.
In reflection:
What music pieces do you know from the 50s and 60s that have survived through time and are in the current battle to become the classical music of the 20th century?
In your opinion, which are the songs of today that will be relevant for generations to come?
Imagine examples in everyday life in which the music fails to fulfill its function (e.g. metal music at a beach party or techno in the pilates studio).