This Sunday, my pastor preached on the love scriptures in Corinthians. And something struck me. The pastor paraphrased a very famous verse, 1 CORINTHIANS 13:1, which is:
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal.
My pastor said:
You can do all of the right things, but without Love it’s nothin’ but NOISE.
As I pondered this verse, I began to wonder about noise and music. Certainly the sounding brass and cymbals is more than noise. But is it? And although it was a great sermon, I confess that I daydreamed about this for a minute or two. I posed these questions:
When are musical instruments just noise?
Is it a foregone conclusion that if a musical instrument is played or a voice is sung that it is music?
Ultimately, I want to use Paul’s formula to solve the question of music:
If I have sound, but have not X, I am making noise.
These are questions which dominated music of all genres in the 20th century. Music that is now accepted as such sounded like noise at first. Modern classical, jazz, and rock and roll in the 20th century were all criticized as being noise at some point. This raises another question:
Is “sound” music when the composer says it is, when the musician says it is, or when the listener says it is?
Of course, this is a highly subjective and speculative subject. I’ll start with a few definitions.
- Google – “vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion.”
- Merriam-Webster – “the science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity”
- Me – Sounds, other than plain speech and cries, which express ideas, emotions, form, stories, texture, or patterns.
Google is very conservative. They say that three components have to be present in order for it to be music: form, harmony, and expression of emotion. If you interpret this strictly, then sound which is emotionless or lacking harmony or lacking form is not music. Which means that it is something else: noise.
Merriam-Webster is decidedly different. It defines music as either a science or an art. It says nothing about emotion. It alludes to harmony and form. So what is music as a science?
In my Music Theory courses in college, we learned that composers in the 20th century experimented with numeric sequences in the form of music notes. To be honest, it did not sound like a human expression. It sounded like what a computer might produce as music. And yet, it expressed a human idea. Science is ideas proven with experiments. These pieces were musical experiments which resulted in music theories. The process by which sounds are organized into music is grounded in science.
Music theory is the study of the practices and possibilities of music. It generally derives from observation of, and involves hypothetical speculation about how musicians and composers make music
My definition for music, is very broad. I used an “or” instead of the “and” , which means that any one or any combination of the components can qualify as music. The key that holds it all together is “expression”.
So, back to my questions. Of the six components I’ve defined music as, where do the components exist? Within the mind of the composer? With the performance of the music? Or in the mind of the listener?
When the composer writes, they have an idea or feeling which they want to express. And then the musician uses that idea or feeling to make sounds. And then the listener must interpret the sounds as an idea or feeling. You might postulate that this circuit of the three is where music lies.
But what happens when the circuit doesn’t close? What happens when the sounds do not register in the mind of the listener as ideas or feelings? Is it noise? Or what happens when the musician fails to convey the music? Think of the beginning violinist in elementary school practicing at home. It sounds awful. It might not even sound like anything but chicken scratch. Is it still music?
Silence is a very important element of music. Without silence there is no beginning or end to the music. Without silence you have a wall of sound, which although it is music, lacks the punctuation of phrases or the dramatic effects which only the stopping and starting of sound can create.
But what happens when there is nothing but silence in a composition? John Cage, a classical composer of the 20th century wrote 4’33”. To perform this piece, a pianist walks on stage, opens the lid of a grand piano, sits down at it, and then lowers the lid. With a stopwatch set for exactly four minutes and thirty-three seconds, he sits in complete silence, occasionally opening and closing the keyboard to indicate the various “movements” of the piece.
There is certainly a performance element to this, but what would it sound like on a CD? Is it music? Perhaps when you see the violinist and the piano, you might experience something related to sound, which is silence. Sound is nothing without silence. They are fundamentally related. By my three definitions, this is not music at all. I use an idiom based on the old tale “The Emporer’s New Clothes” from time to time. Everybody fusses over the king’s new clothes, which is actually nothing at all. He is naked. He was scammed. That is how I feel about 4’33”: The Emperor’s New Music. But someone out there loves this music. It is still performed in big halls to this day.
I would also add that when I hear a train running through town in the middle of the night, it is music to me, but to the person living near the tracks, it may be noise. It’s just the racket that is keeping them up. Birds and whales and wolves all make organized sound which might express feelings and information. Is it music? And haven’t studies showed that both animals and plants respond to human music in remarkable ways?
The Apostle Paul says that the good things we say are nothing but noise without the presence of love. So what is the component which must be present to make noise into music? Love must make the speech of men and angels into something other than noise. The allusion to musical instruments may just be a random expression of his dislike of noisy music, but maybe he had a sweeter idea in mind. Paul, whether intentionally or not, has expressed that when we speak with Love then we are making something akin to Music.
If you recall, it is this formula I want to solve for.
If I have sound, but have not X, I am making noise.
When I first started writing this, I thought the missing word would be humanity because music exists in the minds of humans. But what of the animals? Are their calls simply a form of speech and only music in the minds of humans? Are their responses to music unintelligent? I do not know. My second thought was expression. And that is certainly true for the making of music. But what of the hearing of music? The reason why the 20th century music was received by some as noise, was their lack of knowledge. Without a frame of reference in one’s mind, stimuli is meaningless. Meaningless sound, is noise.
And so I conclude:
If I have sound, but have not meaning, I am making noise.
And meaning exists in the mind and in the heart. And so, I revise my definition.
Music is the expression of sound, beyond that of speech both articulate and inarticulate, which has meaning in the heart or in the mind of it’s creator, performer, or listener.
And if music is such, then it is far more than entertainment. It is a sound we make to express meaning when speech and noise cannot.
Import complicated 