Types of Listening

Written by Grace Coberly and Abigail deVries

Twentieth-century German philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno is a controversial voice within the field of music philosophy. However, despite his strong phrasing and elitist tendencies, the organizational foundations of his beliefs have much to offer other music philosophers. Adorno posits that musical works are “objectively structured things and meaningful in themselves” (Adorno, 1989, p. 3). The impact and significance of each piece of music, he says, is not found in the response of listeners or in experts analyzing such pieces, but instead found in the structure of the music and its independence from consumer culture.

Adorno criticizes passive music consumption and sees mindless listening as destructive. Instead, he advocates for active listeners, individuals who engage with music with passion and curiosity. Adorno is clear that an extensive background in and knowledge of music do not necessarily make a good musical listener; rather, active listening requires a critical mind and an alertness in experiencing music. In his own writing, Adorno classifies eight different types of listeners, most of them unfavorable to him: “(a) the expert listener; (b) the good listener; (c) the culture consumer; (d) the emotional listener; (e) the resentment listener; (f) the jazz expert and jazz fan (in fact, similar to type e); (g) the entertainment listener; and (h) the indifferent, the unmusical or the antimusical” (Leppert, 2005, p. 128). Bowman (1998) highlights three particular types of sub-par musical listeners, which he labels as cultural consumers: the emotional listener, the resentment listener, and the entertainment listener. These cultural consumers share both intermittent attention and the belief that music’s purpose is solely for pleasure, but they can be further differentiated by their specific listening tendencies and reactions to different types of music.

Adorno postulates that emotional listeners use musical listening as catharsis. To emotional listeners, the goal of listening to music is to experience a flood of emotions that are usually repressed by the dominant culture. Musical listeners who fall into this type often balk against listening for music’s structure or specific harmonic content. To them, analyzing and observing qualities of music is the antithesis of musical experience.

Resentment listeners swing the pendulum away from the emotions and into an intellectual bubble. Resentment listeners reject the idea that music is for emotional release. Instead of using the rejection to spur them into critical thinking, these resentment listeners tend to retreat to specific past periods of music. They create an isolated clique, setting themselves apart from listeners that they view to be unrefined or uneducated. Adorno believes that these listeners are just as problematic as emotional listeners, as their sense of community lulls them into passive listening.

Finally, the entertainment listener is at the mercy of the cultural industry. This listener does not use their mind to engage and critically think about music: instead, they consume music in a completely passive manner. Adorno claims these consumers are often unaware of the music they listen to and only notice music when it stops. They understand their own lack of perceptive listening and flaunt it as an asset.

Adorno’s position on musical listening is founded in the belief that music is a tool for critical thinking. He types these listeners in order to show how dangerous passive listening is, and to press on his audience the importance of discerning and judicious musical listening. Adorno’s typology gives us food for thought as we analyze our own musical listening type — which is exactly the kind of critical thinking Adorno would want. 

References

Adorno, T. (1989). Introduction to the Sociology of Music (E. B. Ashton, Trans.). Continuum.

Bowman, W. (1998). Philosophical Perspectives on Music. Oxford University Press.

Leppert, R. (2005). Music “Pushed to the Edge of Existence” (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope). Cultural Critique, 60, 92–133. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489211

Music in Politics

Written by Deirdre Tyler and Kathleen Walsh

Jacques Attali, a French economist, believed that music’s nature enables it to register shifts in social order before becoming noticeable and apparent in any other form. This can be seen many times throughout history. For this particular blog, we wish to explore two examples. The first one is a very recent and relevant example from American history. Katy Perry’s 2017 single Chained to the Rhythm has an insanely catchy beat and chorus to pair with it, making it almost impossible to stop listening. However, this song has more than just a catchy beat. Perry’s lyrics, when read, describe how American society is “chained to the rhythm” and “living in a bubble.” Perry performed the song at the 2017 Grammy Awards. The performance began with Perry in her “rose colored glasses” behind a white picket fence and bright blue skies. However, as the song continues and the dancing to the distortion heightens, the visuals surrounding Perry become darker. She takes off her sunglasses and is met with stormy waters, followed by flames and the white picket fence that once surrounded her becomes completely shattered. That fence finally comes back together at the end of the performance revealing the opening words of the Constitution projected onto the pieces that have been put back together. The words, “We the People” taking center stage spoke volumes to listeners around the country.

At the time of this single’s release, February 10th, 2017, we were less than a month into Trump’s presidency. People everywhere had BIG feelings about the election results, whether positive or negative. When looking through the lens of Attali’s idea of music’s nature, it is clear to see that Chained to the Rhythm foreshadowed what was to come. Just three short years later, the world began to take notice that the bubble we were living in was not as “white picket fence” as we were led to believe. 2020 began with Donald Trump becoming the third president to be impeached, although he never was removed from office. A US drone strike killed an Islamic leader and tensions were high. George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter movement was magnified. We would be remiss if we did not mention the COVID-19 pandemic and all the hardship that came along with it, as it did shape so much of 2020, but we do not believe this was foreshadowed in Perry’s song as it was not something that was even remotely predictable. That being said, this pop anthem is a clear idea of music predicting rumblings underneath a seemingly white picket fence life that, like Katy’s fence, ultimately shatters into disarray.

In 1900, poet and NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing. His brother, John Rosamond Johnson, quickly composed the music to accompany the hymnal poem. The song was first performed at the Stanton School, where James Johnson was principal. A chorus of 500 children at this segregated school performed this song in celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. The song’s lyrics capture the feeling and hope for liberty among Black Americans, along with the religious imagery of God and the promise of freedom. Now referred to by the NAACP as The Black National Anthem, this song played a significant role in the Civil Rights Movement. This fits directly into the ideas Attali shares about music making predictions. Lift Every Voice and Sing was written just 50 years before the Civil Rights Movement began. This song calls for justice and peace for Black Americans. The Civil Rights Movement called for equality and the end of racial segregation and exclusion. A song originally written for, and performed by, students attending a segregated school is a revealing example of the determination to end segregation that would come not long after the original performance.

The idea that music can sense rumblings and uneasiness before people can is one that is fascinating when thinking about major events in history. When exploring music as it relates to major historical moments, looking just a few years earlier at the music that was being produced at the time, this seems to reign true. Music tends to stay on the pulse of what society is thinking, staying one step ahead. Taking Attali’s idea and applying it to real life examples helps us to understand its direct implications in today’s world as it relates to music in politics.

References

Bowman, W. (1998). Philosophical Perspectives on Music. Oxford University Press, 1998.

https://naacp.org/find-resources/history-explained/lift-every-voice-and-sing

Goodman: Symbolic Systems

Written by Deidre Tyler and Kathleen Walsh

Goodman’s exploration and detail of symbolic modes can be dissected into three larger subsections, which he describes as digital, discursive and analog. Of these symbolic systems, digital systems have the most concrete points, leaving little room for interpretation to occur. While Bowman believes Goodman’s theory is somewhat blown out of proportion, Goodman believes that the best example of a digital scheme is music notation.

Digital systems have five basic conditions. Two of these conditions are syntactical  (i.e., relating to the grammatical arrangement of words) and two are semantic (i.e., relating to the meaning of language). To truly understand what this means we must first recognize how this relates to music, as music has no set grammar. The syntactical condition relates to the notation and the notational guidelines of music. For example, a quarter note has a filled in note head and a single stem with no flags or beams. The Semantic condition relates to the meaning of the music as presented and written in the score. By this, we mean that musical scores are correct and concrete, and any variation from the written notation is a mistake.

The two syntactic conditions of the digital system are character invariance and finitely differentiated characters. In other words, all notes have a set place on the staff. A treble clef must circle the G line, a bass clef must frame the F line and so on. This character invariance allows the symbols to hold meaning to everyone everywhere. This in turn creates the idea of music as a universal language.

The three semantic ideas surround a similar idea that digital systems must be unambiguous, semantically disjoint, and differentiated. Systems that conform to each of these conditions are few and far between. Even music notation, according to Bowman, fits only one distinct idea of what the score refers to in this context.

The second symbolic system that Goodman explores is analog. The analog system is described as the opposite of digital. While we do not agree they are truly and completely opposite, they counter each other enough to warrant a new system. Analog is more precise. Think about a clock. When you look at your phone, you see the time as 12:18. When you look at an analog clock, you see the time as 12:18:34. Analog allows an exact time frame, which is inherently correct whereas digital leaves room for more specifics. Digital allows for repeatability and invariance but cannot be exact and as precise as its analog counterpart. In the context of music, analog systems leave less room for interpretation than digital systems. Analog systems have a much slimmer margin for error. Although we have already expressed that musical scores are exact and any divergence from the score is a mistake, this becomes more exact and finite when examined as an analogical system.

The final symbolic scheme that is described is discursive. Discursive systems are just as dense as analog systems and are grammatically articulate. These systems use discrete and differentiated characters. They can be, but are not required to, convey what may be dense and overlapping musical ideas. Musically speaking, discursive schemes are employed through interpretations and the idea that conveying specific ideas is not required. Think of a rallentando or ritardando. There is no specific tempo or speed at which to slow down the music. Rather, we know to ritard because of the language presented.

These systems and schemes provide a way to zoom out on these symbols. Specifically, they provide context to music and music notation and provide greater understanding of their importance. This allows us to understand that music can fall into any of these systems when viewed from different angles and lenses. Regarding music education, all three systems can be employed in our practice. Specifically, digital systems are only truly achieved through music notation. Analog systems allow educators to be specific, allowing no room for interpretation and express the concreteness that comes with music as written in a score. Discursive allows us to contribute some of the aspects that make music great. For example that no two performances are exactly the same, and no two performers will perform in the same manner. Interpretation, when asked for, is a welcome part of the system.

Reference

Bowman, W. D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. Oxford University Press.

Langer and Feelings

Written by Olivia Blashford and Julianna Wedding

Susanne Langer was a prominent American philosopher whose work revolutionized the comprehension of emotions and their expression through art. Langer was the creator of the concept known as symbolic forms. This concept provided a foundation for understanding how art, language, and other symbolic activities express fundamental understanding of human cognition and experience. She believed that emotions were paramount to the human experience, and that symbols were a vehicle for how people form concepts of reality. Along with these ideas, Langer also philosophized on what makes valuable versus corruptive art.

Langer’s philosophy revolves around a deliberately vague definition of feeling. Langer argues that feeling encompasses multiple aspects of mental processes: (a) sensation, (b) emotion, (c) perception, (d) cognition, or (e)any other patterns of human sentience. Langer believes that feeling is a process (i.e., action) rather than something you have (i.e., entity or thing). The objective of this essay is to explore Langer’s beliefs on emotions, the role of symbols in music, and her contrasts between good or valuable art versus bad or corruptive art.

According to Langer, only good art or music will adequately serve as an educator offeeling, and that “bad art” is a “corruption of feeling” (Bowman, 1998, p. 220). It is in music’s ability to serve as an educator of feeling that its significance and beauty is found (Langer, 1967). Exposure to bad art is just as hurtful as not being exposed to music at all (Bowman, 1998). Music serves the purpose of an educator in that it catalyzes the conception of feeling. Music is not a cause or symptom of feeling but rather the symbolic facilitation of the education of feeling. Furthermore, creating valuable music is an “act of personal insight” (Innis, 2009, p. 158). The artist must go through the process of mediating their feelings and deciding how to express them through their art. Doing so creates symbolism. The artist’s feelings may be the inspiration or guiding force behind the creation of art, but the product is not the direct representation of feelings. Langer (1967) believes that an artist’s imagination reflects the feelings that they have already experienced; in other words, art (and imagination) mimics life (p. 99). Therefore, Langer reasons that while the artist is working, they are not actively feeling but reflecting and creating symbolism. To clarify, the product may be good, poor, or bad, but Langer assures us that it is still considered art. It is when an artist creates with whole disregard, or indifference, towards this process of expression into symbolism that a product would be considered bad art or not art at all (Langer, 1967).

Langer believed in the existence of two types of symbols. Discursive symbols are symbols used in language. Some examples include words, punctuation, and even mathematical symbols like plus or minus signs. These symbols rely on language and abstract thought. Next, we have presentational symbols, which are perceived through the senses. Some instances of this type of symbol would be visual art, dance, or music. Langer believed these symbols serve as a vehicle for how people form concepts of reality. She believed the senses absorb data, and then interpret objects and/or events to create patterns and meaning from randomness.

If Langer was to watch a performance of an interpretive dance, she would likely view it through the lens of presentational symbolism. Interpretive dance emphasizes the conveying emotions and abstract concepts through choreographed movements and gestures. Langer would view the dance as a powerful form of artistic communication that conveys meaning and evokes emotions through movement and expression. She would also appreciate the meaning and significance of this kind of performance would be subject to each person’s interpretation and life experience. Langer believed that if words could convey the same meaning as music, we would not need music. Under this philosophy, it is suggested that the moods and emotions people feel from music are not moods and emotions at all. They merely sound the way moods feel.

According to Langer, music and feeling are intimate collaborators. Music provides the opportunity for us to feel, process, and reflect upon presentational symbols. These presentational symbols help us to meditate the inner felt life and conceive our reality. Langer made it clear that this special relationship between music and feeling is what makes music so significant. Her philosophies are both romantic, well-founded, and highly thrilling to interpret. It is no wonder she is so well-known for her critical philosophical endeavors and contributions to the arts.

References

Bowman, W. D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. Oxford University Press.

Innis, R. E. (2009). Susanne Langer in focus: The symbolic mind. Indiana University Press

Langer, S. K. (1967). Mind: An essay on human feeling: I. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Intuition

Written by Jamiah Harrison

Music allows us to explore pathways in our minds that are not consistently under consideration. With this idea in mind, we are influenced to think about music as a symbol and symbols we find in music. Susanne Langer (1895-1985) was an American philosopher, writer, and educator. She was known for her theories on the influence that art has on the mind. One of her theories involved what drives us to understand musical symbols. Like language, which stems from intellectual content, music stems from emotions in a similar way. Music is a symbol that helps us understand things that we cannot explain. People feel music and understand words all through the same system. We must understand how we may further explore our discoveries. One of the ways people use music as a symbol is through intuition.

Intuition is the ability to understand something immediately without needing conscious reasoning. Lagner believed that, “Intuition is no irrational, mystical affair, but an act of understanding mediated by a single symbol”(Bowman, 1998, p. 220). The purpose of intuition is to provide a primary way that we can apprehend a symbol’s significance. Humans perceive relations, forms, and significance all at once. This idea leads to the notion that intuition is a natural gift and not something that we can teach. Lagner believed that intuition is the source of all sight and discovery. With intuition comes the lack of being able to explain something in depth.

Intuitive thoughts sometimes stem from imagination. However, it is the imagination which is truthfully right within our minds. “Either one ‘gets it’ or one does not” (p. 221). Lagner’s theory explains how a person achieves the musical illusion through the use of intuition with music. With little evidence of how a person can utilize music as a symbol through intuition, we find ourselves relying on the idea that we can conceive something in our mind and believe it to be so. It is important to note that our intuitive thoughts are our inspirational default when we are in a state of grasping new ideas and concepts.

Apart from music, intuition is a very powerful thing. We can relate to this power in the idea of a female’s intuition. A female’s intuition is known to be very strong. Women tend to use their intuition as an instinct for what others are feeling or thinking. They utilize external cues and past experiences to make decisions. This instinct happens so quickly that the reaction is almost unconscious. The unconsciousness that we utilize in music is quite similar. Using music symbols as external cues to react to them unconsciously, allows our intuition to drive us. As consumers and listeners, we can act on these thoughts to conclude how music makes us feel.

Sometimes intuition can seem irrational and not logical. We need to trust that intuition is like a hunch where we can take a leap of faith and trust ourselves. The job of intuition is to draw from facts filed away below the conscious level. Because they are below the conscious level, it is our job to activate them. Once they are active, they can guide us to conclusions using our most intuitive thoughts.

The Endless Possibilities of Meaning: Molino’s Tripartition and Jean-Jacques Nattiez

Written by Grace Coberly and Abigail deVries

What meaning can be drawn from each song we hear on the radio? More specifically:what can be said of the artist’s intention, our own perception, and the form and specific melodic content of the music itself? Jean-Jacques Nattiez, French music semiologist and professor of musicology at the University of Montréal, poses these questions in his work.

Traditional understandings of communication state that a message is sent from the communicator to receiver with little to no perversion:

Nattiez dismisses this framework as too simple and unable to encompass the vast range of interpretations and fluidity of musical expression. Instead, Nattiez centers much of his philosophy around his mentor Jean Molino’s “tripartion” model of semiology. As significant as the symbol — the object of interpretation — surely is, Nattiez and Molino strongly caution against the assumption that the communicator and receiver will have the same interpretation. “Every symbolic object presupposes an exchange,” says Molino, “in which producer and consumer, transmitter and receiver, are not interchangeable and do not have the same point of view on the object, which they do not constitute in the same way at all” (Molino, Underwood, & Ayre, 1990, p. 130). The tripartion model, then, accounts for the significance of the object as well as the inherently differing interpretations of the communicator and the receiver, granting equal weight to all three of these coinciding meanings.

The first level of Molino’s model is the poietic stage. In a musical context, this is the creation stage in which a composer generates musical ideas, or in which a performer plays them. Nattiez is clear that there are infinite ways an individual can use symbols to signify meanings, and there is no one universal standard for those symbols. In the poietic stage, the communicator utilizes their own unique meaning-system to create a musical product.

Once the music is created, it enters the second level of the tripartition model: the neutralstage. This stage is not a mechanized aspect that directly communicates from producer to perceiver, but rather a relatively isolated moment in the symbol’s life cycle. Here the object exists in its purest form; music becomes a collection of specific pitches placed in certain rhythms and can be analyzed as such. At the same time, the neutral stage also contains traces of the poietic and esthesic stages, the footprints of the communicator and the receiver. The neutral level is ever-changing based on the intent and interpretations established within the poietic and esthesic stages.

The final tripartition level, the esthesic stage, is an active stage in which a person receives the neutral stage and interprets the music through the lens of their own understandings and backgrounds. Nattiez emphasizes that esthesic stage interpretations are always varied due to the infinite nature of human experience. Each differing interpretation is of equal value, as no one person’s interpretation of a symbol can ever truly be wrong.

It is important to note that Nattiez sees these levels working when all three are in effect. It is not his intent to reduce these levels to only one. It is the interplay between the levels that allow them to showcase the differentiating meanings and interpretations that come from producing and receiving sound. Molino similarly maintains that “the object is inseparable from the twin processes of production and reception” (Molino, Underwood, & Ayre, 1990, p. 129). Nattiez and Molino’s tripartition model allows us to see how diversity in all three levels of semiological engagement creates infinite possibilities of meaning creation and interpretation. For Nattiez, the tripartition model is not the pinnacle of understanding, but rather a launch pad in discovering the infinite number of ways music can be created and perceived (Bowman, 1998). Music can, will, and should never be universal. The tripartition model lets this be so.

References

Bowman, W.D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. Oxford University Press.

Molino, J., Underwood, J. A., & Ayrey, C. (1990). Musical fact and the semiology of music. Music Analysis, 9(2), 105–156. https://doi.org/10.2307/854225

Popular Music and Music’s Social Function

Written by Sheir Clark

German philosopher, musicologist, and composer, Theodore W. Adorno (1903-1969), actively analyzed listening tendencies and listener types with his critique of light, or “popular” music (Bowman, p. 322). Light music is custom tailored to the listeners inclinations and what appeals to them and entertains them, while also being tailored to the economic interests and needs of the wider music industry (Bowman, 1998). 

Adorno explained how light music is created to primarily conform to a formula, which is usually standardized and predictable. This process doesn’t add much progress to creating new styles of music. Popular music often pertains to two very simple formulas: (a) the AABA 32-bar song form and  (b) the 12-bar blues. Both of these formulas don’t allow for much variation in their technical style boundaries. Because of this, Adorno believes the sole purpose of light music is to be superficial, with “primitive structural foundations” (Bowman, p. 323). In addition, popular music’s lack of progression tends to quickly grow old with audiences and listeners since there is nothing really new to listen to when the same formula is used and repeated over and over again. 

Adorno’s view of who, and what types of people, are listening to light, or popular music is quite harsh in that he mostly describes that this type of music is actively targeted toward the lonely and the immature who are trying to experience feelings they think they’re supposed to be having. While I am not a well-renowned musicologist, I think this view is extremely pretentious as he does not know, nor does he experience the feelings of the people who are listening to popular music. As such, he should not have made these types of assumptions based on his own harsh opinions. 

There is one distinctive quality that Adorno believes is the most defining characteristic of popular music: in classical music, no one part of the music can be interchangeable with another section of music. This is due to the fact that each piece sounds so different in that they have different chord progressions, different keys, key changes, etc. But with light music, any section of a popular song can be interchangeable with another section of a different popular song as long as they are (a) in related keys or (b) have the same chord progression, which happens more often than it should. Some good examples of these types of songs recently are “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus. Any portion of this song can be directly interchanged with “If I was your man” by Bruno Mars. This is because both songs have the same key and the same chord progression. One music group in Australia called Axis of Awesome made an entire comedy skit based on this entire phenomenon. The video is available on YouTube at the following link, “Axis of Awesome – 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)” and it goes through a list of 38 popular songs that all have the same or similar chord progressions, with slightly varying melodies. While watching this video, it’s hard not to agree with Adorno as the songs end up getting repetitive and boring.

While Adorno makes a good point that popular music can become repetitive and stale, Bowman makes an excellent counter argument by stating that all music, especially popular music, has a seductive power to it, especially with music’s ability to create a sense of community surrounding a group of people (Bowman, 1998). While Adorno argues that people who listen to popular music tend to be lonely and immature, Bowman has a more positive outlook in that music allows people to escape loneliness, isolation, and alienation. Through music, people can find a community of like-minded individuals. Music allows people to feel alive in a world that is, according to Adorno, filled with numbing, repetitive, and mundane everyday tasks. Music allows for immediate engagement and satisfaction or, in other words, immediate happiness and gratification in a world that is otherwise extremely isolating.

Reference

Bowman, W. D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Types of Listening

Written by Stephen Gliatto

Theodore Adorno (1903-1969) was a Marxist-influenced cultural critic who saw the need of music as demanding radical change in a misguided and oppressed world. Any music that did not meet that function, no matter who wrote it, was not good nor worthy of its place in the arts. His list of unacceptable music is long, and it covers many styles and genres, although he saves most of his scorn for contemporary pop music as a tool of thought manipulation by market capitalists.                                                               

Good music alone, he expands, is not enough to effect the radical overhaul that society needs; it also needs to be listened to correctly. One does not need to be a trained musician nor a professor of composition to listen to music well, but Adorno describes multiple ways of listening that fall short of his mark.                                                                       

Adorno’s first level of listening is “cultural consumerism” – having music in your life as a piece of your social standing. In his generation, he saw it in people who boasted of how many records they owned; in previous centuries it might have been expressed by trying to see as many star virtuosos in concert as possible or never missing an Opening Night. In today’s world, a cultural consumer can brag about how many artists are on their playlists, or how their vinyl recordings have superior sound quality to MP3s. Adorno saw this as “market fetishism,” which is comparable to the craze for the latest gadget or fad toy one can buy at a store. Having a record for the sole sake of its cultural value (“everyone should know Mozart”), for its rarity, or to show off to others, is as useless as owning crystal plates you never use.

The next level is “emotional listening” (where I believe myself to be, notwithstanding my music degree). Emotional listeners use music to vent their pent-up emotions, which they cannot express fully in public or perhaps even to other people in private. To Adorno, even if the music is fulfilling its intended purpose, it is still the second consideration after the emotions. If an emotional listener needs a cathartic sob, what does it matter if the music is well written, as long as it provides them the opportunity to sob? This discourages good music from being written if schmaltz will suffice.

Then there are the resentment listeners, who pride themselves on not being emotional listeners. They reject any response that comes from the music. Instead, they get lost in the weeds of the written score. A resentment listener is obsessed with form and structure, and look for hidden meanings, and brag about solving works of music like crossword puzzles. While they are a step up from emotional listeners, as they put the music first, their reaction to the music is too inward to enact societal change. In fact, their attitude makes society more unequal, as they trend towards viewing themselves as a select initiate distinguished from the uneducated philistines.

Finally, there are entertainment listeners. Similar to emotional listeners, entertainment listeners will focus on their surroundings rather than the details of the music, and will listen to anything or everything so long as it provides a soundtrack to their daily grind, or a nice beat to dance to. Adorno views this as awful for two reasons – it makes it easier for the music industry to profit from selling inferior products to indiscriminating listeners, and it removes individuality in the arts by making us all equal rhythmic souls.

If this is the case, then what constitutes good listening? Adorno only says, cryptically, that a good listener should “neither understand everything nor nothing” (p. 320). A good listener should discriminate good music from bad, but not exult when doing so. Rather, they should be highly conscious to experience music for that which keeps them aware and informed to the ways society is kept docile, not for reasons that distract them from the crises they’ve been ignoring.

Reference

Bowman, W. D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Music as Icon

Written by Sheir Clark

American philosopher Susanne Langer (1895-1985) possessed the unwavering belief that music is a symbol to represent feeling. This concept is a bit tricky to grasp, as music symbolizing feeling is often compared to symbolization in language or pictures. Sentences do not necessarily need to resemble what they are supposed to be symbolizing, but you can still understand their meaning based on context clues. Pictures, paintings, and drawings often resemble what they are supposed to be symbolizing, and they can still evoke a response to help us to better understand our emotions.

Langer’s philosophy begs the question, is it possible that music can also be a type of symbol due of its “structural resemblance to feeling,” even if they do not necessarily represent what they are symbolizing (Bowman, pg. 217)? Unfortunately, this idea will forever remain hypothetical, as there are many obstacles that prevent us from answering the question. First, one would need to define an infinite number of forms of feelings. Second, since music and feeling are isomorphic  (e.g., similar to each other), we would also have to explain how and where they are similar. Third, how does one determine whether or not the similarity between the two is sufficient enough to be understood by the human mind?

If we say that music is simply just a symbol, that would mean music can represent a great number of things. Langer wants us to understand that while music symbolizes feeling, it also is feeling. In order to allow us to understand this, Langer emphasizes the way music is formed and how it sounds, which is similar to how we feel our feelings and emotions. This is especially true when considering the similarities between the tension and release we often experience when listening to music. However, similarity is not symbolism, and it’s easy to find things, like music and emotions, that resemble each other without symbolism.

Langer argues that “the essential symbolic function (of music) lies in articulation, not signification” (Bowman, 1998, p. 218). Her theory is grounded in infinite different forms of feeling. This makes Langer’s theory more rooted as she suggests that the only way that the forms of feeling can be adequately grasped is through musical symbols and musical symbolism.

Bowman, W. D. (1998). Philosophical perspectives of music. Oxford University Press.

Music as Ritual

Written by Tevis Tucker

Jacques Attali forever changed our understanding of music with his provocative book, Noise (1985). First, Attali reminds us that music, at its core, is organized sound. But this point should not be quickly dismissed, given how peculiar the medium of sound really is for the human senses. The sense of sound has long been used to alert the brain of possible danger—a rustle in the leaves of a bush, a growl of a predator, a scream in the distance. Sounds startle us and demand our attention (Bowman, 1998). Additionally, extremely loud sounds cause us pain, and excessive sounds in our living environment (i.e., noise pollution) lead to poor health outcomes (Attali, 1985). According to Attali, music’s taming of sound’s inherently abrupt and harsh qualities gives music a special and unique power over humans.

This leads to the first of Attali’s four stages of music—ritual. To Attali, ritual is the communal festival that takes place when humans choose to make music together. Sound is no longer a threat but something representing safety, community, and celebration. To make music together, individuals must surrender their individuality and submit themselves to the greater whole. When the group is prioritized, social cohesion amongst large numbers of people becomes possible. Thus, society is only possible where “individuality is sacrificed to social order” (Bowman, 1998). As Attali puts it, sounds are naturally disorderly and chaotic, just like humans are. But just as sound can be turned into organized music, people can be turned into organized collectives. Simply, “music always serves to affirm that society is possible” (Attali, 1985).

Music’s ability to organize society—by creating and consolidating community—makes music a potent social and political tool. It is no surprise that most cultures center music within their religious traditions and ceremonies. Even in religious origin stories, the idea of sound and order are present—e.g., in the Old Testament, before the world, there was chaos, and man did not hear noise until after the original sin; the first sounds heard were the footsteps of God (Attali, 1985). Furthermore, Attali’s ideas regarding music’s ability to get us to voluntarily submit from “me” to “we” echo decades of research by Michael Tomasello regarding humans’ unique sociality and cooperation compared to our last common ancestor, the great apes (see Tomasello, 2019). As Bowman (1998) eloquently summarizes, “music is a uniquely human and uniquely socializing force; its significance extends well beyond its patterns and structures; and it is intimately bound up in issues of social relatedness, politics, and power.” To Attali, music regulates the society, not just the individual—creating order out of chaos, one ritual at a time.

References

Attali, J. (1985). Noise: The political economy of music. University of Minnesota Press.

Bowman, W. (1998). Philosophical perspectives on music. Oxford University Press.

Tomasello, M. (2019). Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny. Harvard University Press.