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.
