More than Meets the Ear: Music and Art
One

This book is a philosophical examination of the nature of music. More specifically, it examines puzzles generated by its status as art. Here is one of those puzzles. Our brains appear to be hard-wired for music. But when we’re hard-wired to engage in an activity—eating, sleeping, breathing—we tend to regard it as an animal response. These activities seem to be the very opposite of art. If Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue album consisted of the sound of his breathing, rather than the sound of his trumpet, why would it be an artistic achievement?

Perhaps a hard-wired activity is transformed into art when it is an exceptionally fine example of something that everyone does, but which few do well. Perhaps Kind of Blue is art in the way that the Taj Mahal is a work of art. Compared with most other buildings in a world of cookie-cutter construction, the Taj Mahal is a breathtaking achievement. In this evaluative sense of “art,” few products of human activity rise to the level of being art. The drawings that my children made at school were displayed on our refrigerator, but they weren’t art in the evaluative sense of the term. In contrast, Georges Seurat’s magnificent painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, at the Chicago Art Institute, is a work of art. Three blocks away, the pizza at Chicago’s Exchequer Pub also counts as art, as compared with the stuff sold by the major pizza delivery chains. Notice, however, that a comparative standard generates its own difficulty. If music is art only when it exceeds ordinary standards, then we must say that very little music is art. But this rubs me wrong. From Kind of Blue to the shamisen accompaniment of bunraku (Japanese puppet theater) to the soundtrack of a commercial video game, I think that all music is art.

So which is it? Should we think that music, as an art, is a universal human activity that ranges from the trivial to the magnificent? From the song “Old McDonald Had a Farm” to Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time)? From downloaded ring tones on mobile telephones to the raga Marwa, one of the most challenging pieces in the classical tradition of northern India? That seems awfully generous. If it is too generous, should we look for the difference that divides music into two great camps, the artistic and the rest? This chapter will consider these competing proposals. I contend that we should err on the side of generosity.

I. Birds

Philosophers often attack a problem sideways. Instead of addressing a problem directly, philosophers sometimes explore a related topic as a neutral territory for clarifying the issues and making important distinctions. Then we see how these ideas apply to the main topic of interest. For example, in pursuing the topic of virtue, Socrates asks us to think about different species of bees. In that spirit, I want to discuss music by thinking about birds. Geese and nightingales, for starters.

I was born and raised near the Pacific Ocean. There are plenty of sea gulls but there are no geese. As an adult, I moved near the geographical center of North America. Now, nearly three decades later, I still respond to the annual migration of snow geese as a novelty. My wife and I take great delight in the fluid ribbons of geese undulating across the sky. We often hear the distinctive honking of the geese before we see them, and this makes us look to the sky for them. Like the red leaves of autumn and the green buds of spring, their honking is a transitory feature of nature associated with specific seasons of the year.

Why do the geese honk? I have always supposed that they are “talking” to one another. Not real talking, of course. Not language use, in which a vocabulary is combined with grammatical rules to convey complex thoughts. We have no reason to think that one goose calls out to another, “That was a good dinner last night.” All the same, the geese are communicating with sound. The related point is that I would never say that geese sing, and I would never say that they make music. In this respect, geese are like crows and owls. They are very different from nightingales and other songbirds. (Ironically, media software used for digital music has been named both Songbird and Nightingale, but I can find no evidence of media software named for geese and owls.) However, my exclusion of the hooting, screeching, and “chittering” of the great horned owls that sometimes perch in the pine tree in my backyard may be nothing more than a cultural prejudice. Many medieval writers praised the owl’s singing for its simplicity and solemnity, and recommended it to the clergy as a model for human song. In particular, the owl’s hooting was recommended as a better model than the flashy and trivial singing of the two species of nightingales.

Does it really matter whether owls and geese sing? Until the nineteenth century, European culture regarded singing as one of the paradigms of music making. Where there is singing, there is music. Therefore, if owls and nightingales sing, they make music, and Homo sapiens are not the only animals who make music. Unfortunately, this idea has its down side. If birds make music by virtue of singing, then there is nothing especially human about music making. Music making is no more human than is seeing, eating food, or developing arthritic hips—three things that were also true of my family’s aging Labrador retriever. If some birds sing, then we humans make music because we are musical animals, alongside other musical animals, and it is an error to suppose that all music is art. Since I want to deny that implication, I am going to argue that birds don’t sing or make music—at least not in the sense of “sing” and “music” that is characteristically human. (I remain an agnostic about whale songs.)

While it easy to deny that geese and crows are musical, there is a very old tradition of ascribing song to nightingales. In Hesiod’s account of the oldest of Aesop’s fables, a hawk describes a nightingale as a singer. In the nineteenth century, Europe’s most popular singer was Jenny Lind, “the Swedish Nightingale.” (Who would have paid to hear the Swedish Goose, or the Swedish Owl?) A century later, Vera Lynn’s recording of the song “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” was heard throughout England in the fall of 1940. The German air force was unleashing a massive bombing campaign on London and other English cities. Each morning the citizens of England awaited word on the previous night’s devastation. In the wake of the destruction of whole neighborhoods and of much-loved London landmarks, the song’s references to Mayfair and dining at the Ritz served as a potent reminder of what the Germans sought to obliterate. After the war, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” became something of a jazz standard, eventually finding a new audience in the twenty-first century when it was covered by Rod Stewart, a bluesy rock and roll singer turned crooner.

Because male nightingales sing, common sense seems to dictate that some birds make music. All too often, however, “common sense” encodes cultural prejudices. If it is common sense to attribute music to songbirds, there is also an opposing, equally ancient tradition of explaining why there is more here than meets the ear. One of the oldest philosophical distinctions is Plato’s opposition of the worlds of becoming and of being, of what we perceive and what is. A good magician can make it appear that an event happens when it does not happen: an elephant seems to vanish when its position is unchanged. A pool of water can be an optical illusion generated by heat waves. Similarly, something can sound musical without being music. Philosophy of music was hotly debated in antiquity and the Middle Ages, and Guido d’Arezzo’s eleventh-century criterion was well known and often cited:

Like honking geese and hooting owls, nightingales were classified as beasts lacking rational understanding. Therefore their songs are not music. Updating this tradition, I argue that birdsong sounds musical, yet it is not music. After that, I will unpack the implications of that distinction for human music making.

II. Music and the Musical

Contrary to Jean-Philippe Rameau, the verdict of the ear is not always right concerning music. A nightingale’s song is highly musical, but it is a mistake to suppose everything musical is music. By way of analogy, I have occasionally attributed “piggy” behavior to people. As evidenced by George Harrison’s delightful song, “Piggies,” I am not the only one. A mild example of human pigginess is the dinner guest who takes a third helping of dessert before others have had seconds. Despite the label, it is a mistake to infer that a piggy person is a genuine member of the species Sus scrofa domestica, that is, the domesticated pig. A parallel distinction arises with the musical and music.

For example, rhythm is a core feature of most music. By definition, a rhythm is a pattern of recurring stresses within a pulse. Experiments with human hearing demonstrate that we tend to perceive rhythmic differentiation when there is merely a regular pulse. A machine that produces a steady, regular pulse of sound at uniform volume—the clicking of a ratchet wheel, for example—is perceived as falling into regular groupings of two or three even when there is no stress pattern. This human tendency to hear a stress pattern where there isn’t one is an interesting fact about our instinctive imposition of grouping onto data. However, the psychological tendency to impose a grouping, and thus to hear what isn’t there, is no reason to say that the ratchet wheel has a rhythm. Vision is subject to parallel tendencies. Stare at an image of black, teal, and yellow stripes for half a minute and then look at blank white paper. You will see a visual after-image of red, white, and blue. Hopefully, you’ll realize that what you “see” is not really there. By extension, the psychological tendency to hear warbling as singing is no evidence that there is singing taking place when a nightingale “sings.”

Ornithologists contend that bird songs have two functions that separate them from other communications by birds. In some cases, they indicate that the singing bird already occupies that territory. In other cases, he is providing evidence that he will be a splendid mate. As with some human communication, an ordinary task is made special by adding musical qualities. What are these qualities? Rather obviously, “songs” require a temporal unfolding of distinctively pitched tones. In short, songs have melodies. The songs of two species of songbirds differ melodically; different species produce distinctive patterns of pitched sounds. Birds also exploit the musical parameters of rhythm and timbre. For example, different birds favor different tempos. Finally, different species of birds produce different timbres or qualities of sound. Pitch and rhythm aside, a wood thrush has a flute-like quality that no goose can produce. Thanks to an avid group of bird lovers who film songbirds and post the footage, everyone with an Internet connection has access to numerous samples of bird “music.” After a bit of attentive listening, most people can distinguish the song of the canyon wren from a wood thrush as readily as they can distinguish a slow Baroque flute solo from a passage of rapid Cajun fiddling. Within each species, the songs of individual birds also differ, just as Glenn Gould’s 1955 interpretation of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations differs from Murray Perahia’s, just as Stewart’s reading of “Berkeley Square” differs from Lynn’s.

After reading several ornithologists on the topic of why birds sing, I listened to a few hours of birdsong. I concentrated on songs that birders value highly, such as the skylark and the mistle thrush. What did I hear? Many birds exploit rhythm and pitch in ways that are undeniably musical. Like us, songbirds are attuned to the way that two sounds with the same timbre can be differentiated in pitch, duration, or both. However, geese do that, too, and yet they do not sound musical. Nightingales and skylarks can do what geese never do, which is to arrange a string of sounds with various frequencies into a distinctive, melodic-sounding pattern.

Although nightingales produce “melodies,” it does not yet follow that they produce music. The presence of a few common elements does not establish that two kinds of things are really the same thing. In addition to locating features that are common to all music, we need to know that this combination is unique, occurring in nothing but music. Here, we encounter the central problem with the thesis that bird “singing” is music. The features noted so far (pitch and rhythm and timbre) are manipulated in human vocalizing that is not music. For example, a rising pitch at the end of a sentence turns it into a question. Notice the difference when reading the first two lines of William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18”:

Now, I invite you to read it aloud twice, adding a question mark to the second line. You will produce a sequence of sounds with a distinctive rhythm and with a repeating pitch pattern. Although the result is musical, poems that string together questions are not music. Yet they have precisely as much claim to being music as a nightingale’s song.

I admit that using the opening lines of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” is a weak example. Poems are themselves sometimes classified as music. However, there is plenty of ordinary spoken prose that reinforces the point that a few shared features are insufficient to establish that what is musical is also music. Some languages employ pitch to distinguish different words that are otherwise pronounced the same way. Furthermore, spoken language often takes on a distinct rhythm. In languages with sing-song intonation, such as Swedish, and in those with pitch-sensitive word differentiation, such as Mandarin Chinese, we will find occasions where spoken prose shares all the features that produce the musicality of a nightingale’s song. For example, hearing a Swedish woman reading a bedtime story to a child, I might make a mistake and think that she is singing a rather dull song. Yet my naïve impression is hardly the test of whether she is making music. The test is to ask culturally attuned listeners. Since the residents of Stockholm and Beijing recognize a difference between speaking and singing in their respective languages, the rhythmic arrangement of sounds into patterns of pitch variation is insufficient to define music.

Although not every rhythmic, melodic pattern counts as music, rhythms and frequencies are the pre-cultural bedrock of musical experience. In perceiving them, we perceive objective formal regularities in movements in our environment. When these movements set up regularities in the air, we hear rhythms and sonic frequencies. (There is a normal range for our species. The fact that there is variability between individuals and over a lifetime does not really complicate anything that is said here.) Of course, hearing is not our sole access to the relationships that strike us as musical. Rhythms can be felt, as well, and thus Evelyn Glennie is a virtuoso professional percussionist despite her lack of hearing.

This relationship between movement and sound creates an interesting puzzle. The ancient Greeks realized that distinctive physical movements correlate with distinctive heard sounds— the most famous example is the discovery, supposedly by Pythagoras around twenty-five centuries ago, that plucking strings of doubled and halved lengths produces the same pitch, but an octave apart. Press any white key on a piano, then count up or down seven white keys, and press that one. Unlike any of the intervening keys, it is recognizably the same note. That is the octave, the point at which the same tone is present again. Like humans, many bird species hear the octave and structure pitch sequences around it, which is one reason that their vocalizations seem to us to be songs. Yet that cannot be the whole explanation, because dogs hear octaves, too. However, dogs do not display that capacity in musical barking and howling.

It occurred to Pythagoras’s followers that any regularity in movement is naturally consonant or dissonant with any other, depending on whether the rhythms of the waves of movement are synchronized. For the Pythagoreans and for many subsequent thinkers, the obvious conclusion is that there is music wherever there is regular, synchronized movement. Music need not be audible. Looking at the orderly movements of the planets and the stars, they postulated an unheard harmonization of the music of the spheres—the spheres being the invisible structures that hold the planets and stars in the emptiness of the sky. Given a belief in invisible heavenly spheres, unheard music was not exactly a stretch of the imagination. In the resulting tradition, musical sound was merely a small subset of all the music in the world. For example, early in the sixth century, Boethius taught that music produced by instruments and voices, musica instrumentalis, is merely one of four kinds of music. The other three, including the musica mundana, the music of the heavens, are unheard.

Once you agree that objective synchronized structures of movement explain the harmonies we hear, and mathematical misalignments explain dissonances, it is a short step to agree that the synchronizations are the harmonies, and degrees of misalignment are degrees of dissonance. Peter Van der Merwe observes that the minor seventh seems more discordant than the minor third, yet they are “about equally discordant in strictly acoustic terms.” In the Pythagorean tradition, the ear should not decide what is proper to music, and the ear is in error to regard the minor third as less discordant.

Although I reject it, the idea that sound is merely a symptom of music had profound consequences in Europe. To note one small example, because the interval of the augmented fourth or diminished fifth is inherently unstable, it was more or less banned in Western music. (The prime example is F sharp in the key of C.) However, this tritone interval was occasionally used to disturb audiences when composers wanted to signify evil. As a result, non-Western and folk traditions that embraced the tritone became doubly problematic, as both discordant and as symbolically aligned with evil. Originally called “the devil in music,” the interval’s presence in blues music may be a vestigial reason for its reputation as “the devil’s music.” However, blues music has become so common that its “problem” intervals now sound perfectly natural. And who, in the past half-century, hears this interval in the song “Maria” in West Side Story and thinks of it as endowed with evil? The ancient resistance to this dissonant interval seems very quaint. As Marin Mersenne observed in the early seventeenth century, there is very little alignment of mathematical proportions and musical agreeableness.

To be fair, it is a cheap shot to dismiss the Pythagorean tradition as erroneous on the grounds that Eric Clapton’s guitar playing and West Side Story do not disturb the contemporary ear. A genuine traditionalist looks at contemporary musical taste and sees immature, bad taste. Because the Pythagorean equation of music and harmonious motion is based on theory, not practice, it merits a theory-based response. Mine begins with consideration of the parallel relationship between colors and light waves. Our eyes are completely insensitive to wavelengths beyond the narrow range of so-called “visible” light. In normal vision, we perceive a particular color, red, when the eye registers light wavelengths of 630–650 nanometers. Light with lower wavelengths produces other visual colors. These facts invite the following thought experiment. Suppose that an environmental disaster caused humans to stop seeing colors when wavelengths exceed 500 nanometers. This idea is not radical. In fact, many people are relatively insensitive to the distinctiveness of wavelengths at around 445 nanometers, and so cannot distinguish indigo from blue or purple. Some people are highly sensitive to the difference at this point in the spectrum, and see indigo as distinctly as most people see orange as distinct from red and yellow. My thought experiment takes this fact and extends it. Suppose everyone loses sensitivity to the wavelengths that are perceived as the spectrum of yellows, oranges, and reds. In a world where no one sees them, would the Musée d’Orsay in Paris have a set of light meters on hand, in order to allow visitors to detect and appreciate the subtle interplay of the now-invisible colors of the peaches, oranges, and roses in the still-life paintings of Henri Fantin-Latour? Here, I think, we would agree that invisible colors are not colors at all. Nineteenth-century French paintings are based on the art of exhibiting visible color. If we cannot see Fantin-Latour’s colors, the paintings might as well be pencil sketches. Furthermore, the historical curiosity of the fact that sound waves were discovered thousands of years before light waves should not be a reason to think that painting is an art of the visible but music is not an art of sound. The major art forms are rooted in the realm of the aesthetic, of the perceivable. Because I am concerned with the art of music, I think it’s merely a metaphor to say that “music” is produced by the moons of Mars as they orbit the red planet. In pursuing a characterization of music that recognizes its status as art, I am unwilling to say, in advance of hearing the music, that the interval of the augmented fourth is unsuitable for a love song in West Side Story. The verdict of the ear is not always right, but it’s not irrelevant, either, for we are dealing with an art of sound.

III. Concerning "Art"

There is a position, widespread in the contemporary university, that sees a fool’s errand in this reference to the art of sound. One objection is that I cannot be engaged in a descriptive project, for there are no neutral facts to investigate and explain. “Art” is a cultural category of European origin. Non-European cultures did not develop an analogous concept. It is therefore inexcusably Eurocentric to think that “our” art of music is to be found elsewhere, except as an imposition of Western culture. Since I am trying to characterize something that holds for both Western and non-Western musics, my project is prescriptive. This objection deserves a response. I grant that Europeans, in the sway of the Pythagoreans, endorsed a definition of music that does not align with the understanding of any other culture. Does it follow that only Europe had music, and on that basis that it is Eurocentric to classify ancient Sanskrit devotional hymns as music? No. Likewise, the peculiarities of European doctrines connecting art and aesthetic achievement are no reason to think that the statue carvers of the Yoruba people of Nigeria and the Chinese poets of the Han dynasty were not concerned with the aesthetic effects of their art.

To advance a somewhat traditional position, I think art is created whenever musical design is guided by aesthetic standards. Granted, these standards vary by time and place. So understood, the aesthetic dimension of art is not a Western construct. Marc Benamou has lived in Java, interviewed musicians who specialize in its native music, and studied the historical records pertaining to Javanese music. His conclusion? “Musicians, who are mostly from the laboring classes, are as intent on aesthetic properties of music as anyone in Java.” Skeptics about the universality of aesthetic response might dismiss the relevance of Benamou’s finding on the grounds that the musical tradition of the gamelan orchestras is a culturally rarefied enterprise. It may be the case, the skeptic will say, that a concern for musical beauty and music’s aesthetic dimension is “very Javanese,” but only because Javanese culture has a high art tradition. However, the skeptic’s argument assumes an equation of aesthetics and high art that is refuted by field research. In an interesting coincidence, Denis Dutton and Ellen Dissanayake both lived in India and Papua New Guinea and examined art practices in multiple levels of each society. Independently, both concluded that an important pattern emerges when we stop thinking of “art” as the most high-brow of high-brow material—once we stop equating art, fine art, and capital-A “Art.” When we attend to what people in various cultures say about the things they make, it becomes perfectly clear that, despite cultural differences, every tribe and society recognizes special spheres of activity in which aesthetic achievement is valued. Humans routinely distinguish between art and the rest of what they produce. (In anthropology, similar points are raised by Alfred Gell.) Another relevant finding is that, for every human group that has a distinct word for music or, as frequently happens, for a broader category that embraces both music and dance, music always falls into this category. By examining the implications of that point in more detail, I believe we can arrive at a relatively inclusive understanding of art that will give us good reason to say that music is essentially art. As a consequence, it follows that the singing of birds is musical, but it is not an art of music.

IV. Music and Culture

I have allowed that birdsong is music in the obvious sense that it is musical. At the same time, I’m saying that being musical is not sufficient to make it music in our modern sense of the term. It is now time for me to explain why my distinction is genuine. What’s the difference? What does birdsong lack?

To proceed by way of analogy, consider a friend’s interest in the British television program Top Gear, which features cars. Suppose he’s particularly enthused about the episode that features a Lamborghini Murciélago sports car. I watch for few minutes, then I dismiss it by saying, “It’s just two tons of metal, glass, and plastic, hurled down the pavement at high speed. What’s the big deal?” Although my description is literally true, the Murciélago is not simply two tons of material stuff. Appreciating it requires recognition of differences from other sports cars. Its admirers are completely right to respond to me by emphasizing its distinctive design. That includes looking beyond its most obvious features, such as its low profile and unique door design. A knowledgeable appreciation is influenced by the fact that it is a Lamborghini. As such, it reflects that company’s history of car design, which is itself a manifestation of a unique tradition of Italian engineering and design. In short, even if one does not admire the functionality of the Murciélago as a very fast vehicle, one should recognize that it is the physical embodiment of a particular culture’s exploration of a more general cultural tradition. In short, it does not simply go fast. It embodies a particular cultural tradition.

Precisely the same point holds for music. Like the Murciélago, performances of music are physically embodied manifestations of a culture. More to the point, that is why music is art and birdsong isn’t. But bear with me. This argument will take some time to unfold. It turns on a specific understanding of the concept of culture. Like us, birds have complex social relationships and their vocalizations play an important role in their social interactions. However, cultural interaction involves a great deal more than social interaction.

Suppose that a university student enrolls in a course called “Classical Music,” a survey of music from the Baroque period until the early twentieth century. The first day, the instructor begins the class by playing a recording of Mstislav Rostropovich performing the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1, which is about two minutes of solo cello playing. A student could respond that it’s boring, that it’s nothing but someone sawing away on a big fiddle. (That’s a genuine response to Bach posted on the Internet regarding another Bach piece.) One goal of the music course is to help that student to hear those two minutes of organized sound as the auditory embodiment of a cultural moment. Let me offer two examples of what I have in mind, involving two different cultural moments.

Joseph Haydn came into his own as a composer while in the employment of the Esterházy family, minor nobility of the Austrian empire. Born in 1732, Haydn held the position of Kapellmeister—literally, “master of the chapel” or director of religious music, but in reality general music director. He gave lessons, wrote music, and led both small and large performing groups. The Esterházy family spent summers in eastern Austria and then in later years at their new palace in western Hungary. They employed an orchestra for which Haydn wrote numer ous operas and symphonies. One of his most remarkable symphonies is in F sharp minor. Traditionally numbered as his 45th symphony, it has a highly unusual ending. When the fourth movement begins, the rousing up-tempo music seems typical of closing movements of symphonies at this time. The feeling is triumphant. Around the three-minute mark, there is a radical shift. The music stops without any musical resolution. There is silence. Haydn had already provided the audience with an adagio (slow) second movement. Without any prior signal of heading in a fresh direction, the finale now breaks the silence by offering a second adagio. The effect is as if a Lamborghini Murciélago had been designed to cut back to one-third of its speed when it reached 80 miles per hour. Haydn’s finale maintains the new, slow pace for about five minutes. As it proceeds, it gets weirder. Each instrument in the orchestra is given a space in which to play a brief solo passage, after which there is no further music from that instrument. At the end, there are two violins, whose music fades away without any sense of completion.

This musical organization is bizarre. (Is this the first genuine bass solo in Western music?) And it is weird in a way that no birdsong is ever weird. It is intentionally designed to fly in the face of the established conventions of its time and place. It embodies the conventions of mid-eighteenth-century music, and then it shatters them.

As traditionally performed, the symphony has a visual dimension, too. As each instrument ends its part in the finale, that musician stands up and walks off the stage. This practice reflects Haydn’s original instructions to his orchestra. In an evening performance, the musicians illuminated their scores with candles on their music stands. When their solo passages reached the end, each musician snuffed out his candle, then left. The stage grew darker as it emptied. The standard explanation of this staging is that Haydn and the orchestra had been kept at the remote palace beyond their usual summer duties, and felt like prisoners. Haydn’s music and staging enact the silencing of music through departure. It signaled, in other words, that it was time to leave. According to the early biographies of Haydn, Prince Esterházy got the message and told the musicians that they were free to return to Vienna. This story adds a symbolic dimension to the music. The music is not weird for weirdness’s sake. It signifies that an employee, a social inferior, is stepping forward as an individual and disrupting the employer, a superior. It is an assertion of individual will in the face of social expectations. It illustrates the capacity of the human mind to exploit culture in order to signal some degree of independence within society. Most strikingly, as Richard Taruskin emphasizes, it makes its point with “pure” music, with instrumental music that has no vocals.

I offer a second example in order to make the point that this play of culture is not a special capacity of “serious” music. Consider the album Jaco Pastorius, the first album released by that jazz musician under his own name, signaling his leadership of the music. The opening piece of music is “Donna Lee,” a duet for conga and electric bass. In the context of its release in 1976, it was a revelation, demonstrating that the electric bass can serve as the vehicle for a sustained melodic exploration. In a musical culture that regarded electric bass as a rock and roll instrument and acoustic bass as the only proper instrument for jazz, Pastorius kicked off his solo career with a demonstration of how the jazz tradition was depriving itself of a resource. However, a closer listen reveals another dimension. If jazz traditionalists were likely to be snobs about Pastorius’s fusion music, they were likely to recognize the music. “Donna Lee” was Pastorius’s arrangement of a 1947 recording by the Charlie Parker quintet. A piece of classic bebop, it is a difficult piece that showcases Parker’s skills on the alto saxophone. (There is dispute whether Parker composed it; Miles Davis later claimed authorship.) In recording a bass arrangement of it, Pastorius does more than follow Parker’s sax. He also captures supporting harmonies supplied by Bud Powell’s piano, demonstrating that his bass could supply the musical lines of two instruments. In selecting this piece as the lead track in his solo debut, Pastorius was making it quite clear that he was placing himself in exalted company.

Having made his point about his place in the tradition, Pastorius challenges that tradition in a second way. The next track is not jazz. It is an original song, “Come On, Come Over,” sung by the rhythm and blues duo Sam and Dave. In 1976, the only real opportunity to hear Pastorius’s music was to purchase the vinyl album, which meant that every listener heard the flow of tracks in the order established by the album. There was no jumping around on YouTube among different tracks by Pastorius. If you wanted to go from “Donna Lee” to the complex jazz harmonics of the third track, “Continuum,” you had to physically manipulate the needle to avoid the intervening pop tune. In short, Pastorius sequenced the album to assert the continuity between advanced jazz and popular music in the African-American tradition. I think he’s calling attention to the fact that we couldn’t have “Donna Lee” and “Continuum” without the cultural bedrock of blues vocals and the African-American call-and-response format. To embrace Charlie Parker and Miles Davis is to embrace Sam and Dave, too.

There is, then, continuity between Haydn’s “farewell” symphony, a Lamborghini Murciélago, the Taj Mahal, a poem by John Keats, and the album Jaco Pastorius. Apart from whatever else they are, they embody and respond to their particular cultural traditions. I say culture, and not society, because I am calling attention to the transmission of a group’s beliefs and values. Culture is more than social interaction. When a male nightingale’s song attracts females, there is social communication. Yet it is not a cultural exchange, for the bird’s beliefs and values about the standards for female attractiveness were not acquired from the previous generation in the process of learning to sing. When a North American mockingbird learns to imitate the song of the Carolina wren, it does not appropriate wren culture. In contrast, when the Beatles put flourishes of piccolo trumpet into their arrangement of “Penny Lane,” they are appropriating from an identifiable aspect of the culture of J. S. Bach. (They mimic the trumpet of Brandenburg Concerto No. 2.) By engaging with inherited and appropriated designs, humans can engage with the associated belief and value systems.

Like bees and whales and birds and dogs, humans are social creatures. Social creatures have to communicate among themselves, and sound is a useful medium for communicating. Yet human beings appear to be the only social animals to have culture, in the sense of culture just explained. This conclusion gives us a definition of music that distinguishes it from what is merely musical. Sound patterns are musical when their organization establishes rhythmic or harmonic relationships (or both). Musical patterns are music only if they reflect—and so are intended to be interpreted in light of—cultural expectations about musical structures. By extension, Andrew Kania reminds us, there is also music in the avant-garde practices of Yoko Ono and John Cage, who present sounds that are unmusical but which are intended to be heard in light of these cultural expectations.

The next point in my argument is to explain why this proposal has the additional result that it makes our music into art, and why that makes music an especially interesting kind of art.

V. The Aesthetic Dimension

Let’s backtrack into the history of ideas again. There is an ancient tradition in which the scope of “music” extends to a great deal of non-audible physical activity. I have indicated that I am pursuing the modern understanding of music as a species of organized sound. For nearly 300 years, the modern tradition regarded music as sound that is organized to be pleasing. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the age of Wagner and Brahms, Eduard Hanslick used his position as Vienna’s premier music critic to argue that beautiful organization is the key to musical value. However, practice has defeated theory. The modern art movement of the twentieth century has made it clear that beauty is not essential. Quite apart from the high-art tradition, the same point is made by the musical practices of punk rock, heavy metal, and the repetitive dance grooves of club music. A few people continue to dismiss such music as noise and therefore not real music, but I take that to be an imposition of taste rather than a serious position.

Hanslick was a nineteenth-century music critic who became a professor at the University of Vienna. He was, in effect, the first professional musicologist. His prime years coincided with a bitter dispute about the relative value of opera and instrumental music. There is no obvious opposition here. When Haydn was Kapellmeister at the Esterházy court, he composed both operas and symphonies. For his debut recording, Pastorius composed songs and instrumental music. To generalize very broadly about the history of Western music, Haydn’s generation was pivotal in the public’s acceptance of instrumental music as a focal point of listening. When music lovers think of Beethoven, they do not remember him for his piano settings of Scottish poetry. They recall his symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets. But Beethoven’s ninth symphony throws a monkey wrench into the mix, because it ends with a choral setting of a poem. It shattered the conventions for symphonic form that had only recently been established by Haydn and Mozart. However, Wagner thought that Beethoven had it right: great music supports singing in a dramatic performance. In short, Wagner’s ideal music is not instrumental music or “music alone,” as it’s sometimes called. For Wagner, music is best heard in a mixed-media presentation. It belongs in a Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of arts in one art work. (In the twenty-first century, a Gesamtkunstwerk would require a filmmaker who writes an original script, directs the acting, edits the film, and then composes the film score.) Wagner wanted music to contribute to powerful art, rather than to remain a pure art. In comparison with music in music drama, music alone is an anemic art form.

Hanslick’s defense of pure instrumental music draws loosely from one of the foundational texts of aesthetic theory, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Hanslick probably knew it second-hand, since it was then six decades old and no longer the cutting edge of aesthetics. To put his use of Kant into perspective, it would be as if Hubert L. Dreyfus revised his book On the Internet by adding a chapter that draws heavily on philosophical doctrines that emerged around 1950. However, philosophy is a field where a good idea can have staying power. In that spirit, I want to reach back into Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful in order to extract lines of argument that are seldom noted or discussed. He cautions that we should not make too much of the fact that music functions in a particular way when it is used in song and music drama. To determine what makes music valuable as an art, we must examine pure instrumental music. With opera and song, we cannot tell how much of the success of a particular combination of words and music is due to the impression made by the words, and how much is due to the success of the music. Because we do have pure instrumental music, and because works such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Well-Tempered Clavier are masterpieces of the art, it follows that music does not need synthesis with other art forms in order to achieve its full potential as art. Combinations of music and other art media can be very powerful, but that tells us nothing significant about the value and potential of the art of composing music. (We will simply set aside, until the next chapter, the question of whether there is really any such thing as music alone or “pure” instrumental music.)

The heart of the Hanslick–Wagner debate is a point about function as a source of value. My kitchen refrigerator has value as the kind of thing that it is because it succeeds in keeping food and beverages reasonably cold. Granted, one could keep a refrigerator after its motor dies, using it as a storage unit with a door. But that is not to value it as a refrigerator any longer. For Wagner, music drama always has a function, and the music is of value by advancing that purpose. For example, Act 3 of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg advances German nationalism. Purists, such as Hanslick, say that its success or failure is independent of that purpose, which is incidental to its status as art. Musical pleasure is the only relevant purpose.

I recommend a third path. We can avoid the polarizing “either/or” that pits Wagner against Hanslick by pursuing one of the controlling insights of George Kubler’s study of visual form: “every man-made thing arises from a problem as a purposeful solution.” The key term is purposeful. In Kant’s philosophy, the appreciation of art is the appreciation of its purposefulness, which is the appearance of having being designed. We seem to be naturally sensitive to the presence of purposiveness. Driving through an unfamiliar stretch of countryside, I am attuned to the difference between ordinary clumps of trees and those planted as windbreaks. With a windbreak, the trees are grouped with a regularity that witnesses human intention. This difference can be detected even when we don’t know the actual purpose of a purposeful design. Conversely, we can remain indifferent to its actual purpose or real-world consequences when we know what it is. Thus, I might despise Wagner’s purpose and still admire Die Meistersinger, just as I can admire the Lamborghini Murciélago despite my genuine indifference to fast cars. My reservations about a designer’s goals do not stop me from appreciating the human accomplishment embodied in a purposeful design.

This human capacity to compartmentalize—to appreciate purposefulness apart from purpose—explains how it is possible to admire the art of another culture without endorsing its beliefs and values. But of course the same issue arises within a culture. If art appreciation is merely a matter of endorsing functional value, then an atheist cannot value George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. I cannot value the Philip Glass opera Satyagraha because I don’t endorse the world view shared by Mahatma Gandhi and the teachings of the ancient Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. Yet many atheists admire Messiah, and I admire Die Meistersinger and Satyagraha despite my conviction that their underlying philosophies are a load of nonsense. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley have tried to account for this kind of compart mentalization. On their account, an atheist can look beyond “the tissue of superstitious falsehoods” supported by great religious music and instead admire “the [artist’s] noble aspiration and commitment to a vision,” where that vision affirms the human spirit. However, that seems a bit of a cheat, for it offers no basis of admiration to the bitter misanthrope who thinks that the nobility of the human spirit is, like religion, a destructive falsehood. Neill and Ridley’s account requires artist and audience to endorse some shared values. But what if they don’t?

In pointing to our capacity to appreciate mere purposefulness, Kant identified the core of aesthetic response as a response to the formal appearance of something. By identifying beauty as music’s primary value, Hanslick aligned himself with Kant. Unfortunately, he did so in the context of a debate about instrumental music’s capacity to communicate emotion. (I engage with that topic in Chapter 3.) Putting that aside for now, we arrive at a new paradox. With Messiah and Die Meistersinger, many listeners struggle to set aside the ideas in the text in order to admire the art. So music alone, without text, seems to have the strong advantage that there are no ideas to offend and derail us. It has the same aesthetic status as patterns in rugs and wallpaper. There is nothing to get in the way of appreciating it. As long as the rhythms and harmonies are not too unfamiliar, listening to good music is no more complicated than looking at a sunset. Don’t think! Just observe and enjoy. To return to one of my own examples, Hanslick would maintain that hearing Charlie Parker play “Donna Lee” is comparable to looking through the shifting colors in a kaleidoscope. Granted, complex music is more complicated and therefore more engaging, but it is culturally aligned with other modes of decorative design.

In summary, pure instrumental music is important as a test case for a particular aesthetic doctrine, according to which a lack of any particular communicative purpose is no obstacle to artistic success. If lack of purpose is no obstacle, then one’s disagreement with purpose is no great obstacle, either. For example, there is considerable debate about the message of Dmitri Shostakovich’s fifth symphony. There is conflicting evidence about its proper interpretation. After Joseph Stalin disliked a Shostakovich opera, the Soviet newspaper Pravda openly warned the composer about his artistic decadence. Reading between the lines, Shostakovich could read it as an official warning that he must reform or die. Shostakovich wrote his fifth symphony in the next few months. The result is either an endorsement of Marxist principles about art, as understood in the Soviet Union at that time, or it is a very subtle expression of resentment and defiance directed against Stalin’s treatment of the Russian people. Although I would like it to be the latter, should I withdraw my admiration if we conclusively prove it is the former? If it is an audible kaleidoscope, it does not matter. It succeeds or fails as a musical pattern.

Here, then, is another paradox. Hanslick has not helped matters. Kaleidoscopes are very rarely artworks. If “Donna Lee” and Wagner’s operas are like complicated kaleidoscopes, we’ve downgraded them. Kant was fully aware of this result, warning that his theory placed instrumental music in “the lowest place among the fine arts.” So low a place, it might not count as art. Looking at Hanslick’s argument, Mark Evan Bonds nails down the problem. If music is art, Hanslick cannot maintain the kaleidoscope analogy. Sensing the problem, Hanslick dodges it by introducing a lot of talk about music’s appeal to Geist— the human spirit or mind—and on that basis elevates it, placing it among the arts. Instrumental music has a lofty spiritual content that a kaleidoscope pattern lacks. Unfortunately, when Neill and Ridley discuss Geist in religious music, it is music with words. Hanslick never explains how this works for instrumental music. If there really are no ideas present in “Donna Lee” and Bach’s Goldberg Variations, then they do not seem to be art. To slap a technical label on it, an art-for-art’s-sake doctrine of autonomous musical beauty trivializes music. On the other hand, if ideas are present, what are they? And won’t their presence reintroduce a need to admire the particular communicative purposes of a musical work in order to admire it in a non-trivial way? Can we salvage the idea of appreciating purposefulness?

VI. Culture, Communication, and Style

When traditional ideas generate a problem, one solution is to backtrack into history. In that spirit, I want to call attention to an interesting passage in Kant’s aesthetic theory. It concerns birdsong:

Evidently, tourists have always been targets for exploitation. Setting that aside, Kant is making the point that the charm of the audible pattern is not some autonomous beauty. If we know that a pattern is produced by a human, we respond to it as the activity of a human, and aesthetic judgment cannot circumvent this awareness.

Kant’s proposal is significant and, more to the point, it ties back to my distinction between society and culture. We are social animals. As such, we are always thinking about the actions of other humans as the actions of other humans. I do not want to rely on the findings of developmental psychology, but there is significant evidence that human babies are hardwired to look for human faces and to listen to human voices. Without dwelling on developmental psychology, I proceed with the assumption that we are aware of other members of our species in a special way. Encountering human behavior or even signs of human activity, we interpret them as meaningful. That is, we look for meaning.

There is a strictly philosophical argument that arrives at the same conclusion. If our minds did not contain an innate disposition to identify other people and to seek meaning in their actions, then language acquisition would be impossible. After all, we learn a language from exposure to its use. However, that can only occur if we encounter it in use before we understand it as language. (Otherwise, we wouldn’t be learning it.) Therefore we cannot learn from it, by experience, that it is a source of meaning. Prior to understanding that it is a source of meaning, it cannot seem to be any more meaningful than anything else we encounter. Yet virtually everyone learns to distinguish language use from other patterns, and children become proficient in a native language long before they grasp the significance of any non-human patterns of equal complexity. Since we are constantly bombarded with other streams of patterned information, our early language acquisition demonstrates that we are hard-wired to attend to it differently. We have a special attunement to patterns of human communication. (As portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind, schizophrenia seems to include a tendency to seek these patterns where they do not exist.)

Back to Kant’s odd example. The moment I believe that the warbling in the bush is a human imitation of a nightingale rather than a real nightingale, my attitude changes. A human is deceiving me. The charm vanishes. Contrast this case with hearing someone make the very same sounds in a birdsong imitation contest. Understood as functioning solely as a representation of a nightingale, the same sounds can be admired. In the case of the deceptive innkeeper, a guest’s recognition of the human source reveals the primary function to be deception, which ruins the experience.

The significant point, generalized, is that we should not respond to a pattern as a mere pattern if we believe it reflects human design. Even if we can do so, we should not respond to Bach or Charlie Parker as if it’s an audible kaleidoscope. However, one can become interested in a piece of music in much the way that one can take an interest in the kaleidoscope itself, as an artifact or product of human agency. Gregory Currie’s summary of this point is insightful:

You might respond that the aesthetic appreciation of nature is very different when it is a sunset rather than a birdsong. A nightingale’s song is the product of an activity. Doesn’t that put it on the same level as human music?

There is one more step in this analysis, but it makes all the difference. Musical design displays musical style. This point provides a patch for the hole that Bonds identifies in Hanslick’s analysis. It connects musical design to Geist. Although Hanslick never postulated this connection, he does make the point that there is no stylistically neutral music. Different societies exploit different aspects of possible musical organization. Musical enjoyment requires a trained (gebildeten) ear. Hanslick warns that, however “natural” and “organic” it sounds, musical organization always betrays participation in a cultural tradition:

To see it from another angle, the universality of language does not lead to a homogeneous world language. Following this analogy, Daniel Levitin explains, “Our brains learn a kind of musical grammar that is specific to the music of our culture, just as we learn to speak the language of our culture.” A child learns language by learning a language, and a child learns music by learning a music. Like language, learning a culturally distinct musical grammar embeds an individual in a culture, and therefore, Hanslick recognizes, in a tradition. However, it doesn’t follow that a child, humming the theme song of a favorite television program, is consciously aware of those centuries of preparation. A child in Finland can speak fluent Finnish without becoming aware that there are languages besides Finnish. At the same time, every use of the Finnish language carries two levels of activity. There is the immediate use, for some immediate purpose, such as asking for a cookie or refusing to go to bed. But each time, there is an accompanying activity of carrying on with Finnish culture.

Reflecting on his original purposes as a songwriter, John Lennon told Jann Wenner that the Beatles did not set out to make art. They set out to make functional music. Like the blues, it was music with a purpose in ordinary daily life. Although Lennon doesn’t specify, I take it that the purpose was to support dancing. He offers an interesting metaphor. Jazz and the blues are like two kinds of chairs. Jazz musicians design chairs to show off the design. “The blues is better. [Because] it’s chairs for sitting on, not chairs for looking at or being appreciated. You sit on that music.” The early Beatles music? “[T]hose were our version of the chair. We were building our own chairs, that’s all, and they were sort of local chairs.” In other words, they did not set out to be appreciated. They were working-class musicians. Yet they developed their own style of “local chairs,” a style of pop music that was then imitated by others and which was initially described as Merseybeat— a reference to the local river. Now we think of it as a style of its own. Driving with my wife recently, listening to the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty album, she remarked on passages in which the harmonies are clearly Beatles-esque. Lennon didn’t set out to create a style. Yet his attempt to be practical, to be functional, required the group to arrange their voices (Lennon and Paul McCartney and George Harrison) and instruments to match their practical abilities and their shared sources of musical knowledge as best they could, and a distinctive style emerged. Each engagement with tradition can change the tradition. In perpetuating culture, the culture itself is gradually transformed—or, sometimes, as with the Beatles, rapidly transformed. Fifty years later, it is easy to appreciate the style of their chairs, which is to appreciate how they deviated from what came before. More importantly, to extend Lennon’s metaphor, we can appreciate the local quality of that chair even if we don’t want a chair for sitting. And then we can appreciate how that local chair became the foundation of an international style that remains active in pop music today.

All music is art, because all music has style, which means that all music engages actively with the tradition that feeds it. The engagement can be affirmative, or it can be resistive. Either way, it’s present. The result is that each act of composing or performing music can be significant as an activity even if it has no immediate function that is achieved by that activity. Therefore it is possible to find the play of culture interesting as culturally formed human activity even where there is no interest in the immediate purpose of that activity.

My point about style is not original. Yet it’s a crucial insight about art. Paul Crowther takes it further by noting that style is present in multiple levels of activity. Above all, style is present through “the choice of a medium and facility in using it. The fact that an artist has chosen one medium rather than another, is, in itself, an expression of style.” Lennon and the other Beatles-to-be chose the medium of pop songs, and then made choices within that choice. Think back to my earlier example of Pastorius and his decision to record “Donna Lee.” There is the decision to play jazz, there is the decision to reach back to bebop, a “dead” style, and then there is the facility displayed on the electric bass itself. There are three levels of style here, none of which are obvious choices for a young man to make if he wants to express himself in the United States in the 1970s. Although he had little use for pop music and jazz in his voluminous writings on the philosophy of music, Theodor Adorno makes an importantly related point. It is completely wrong to think that each piece of music brings together form and content, or to think, with Hanslick, that the musical form just is the musical content. Every musician inherits a backlog of musical structures. There are large-scale structures (e.g., the classical symphony as a four-movement work), unit structures (e.g., the sonata–allegro structure of the first movement of such a symphony), melody structures (e.g., the arc of the twelve bars of a standard blues), and brief, local structures (e.g., the cadences that Haydn might have used, but did not, to place resolution at the end of the “Farewell” symphony). As music, these designs are merely jumping-off points for musical activity. These structures are musical materials. Like Paul McCartney’s Höfner bass guitar or Beethoven’s Broadwood piano, they are materials to be used and manipulated. Yet neither the selection of the materials nor the outcomes of the manipulations are pre-ordained.

No nightingale will ever select a Höfner bass in order to supply counterpoint to the song of another nightingale. Birds cannot choose their materials and thus their medium. When a nightingale develops a variation in its inherited song, distinguishing it from that of competing birds, it is not like Pastorius’s display of a new variation on “Donna Lee.” No bird will plan out ways to frustrate the learned expectations of the other birds in order to make a point to them, as Haydn did with Prince Esterházy. You can admire birdsong all you like, but it cannot be admired as culturally purposeful activity. It cannot be admired as art.