Most students about to
embark on a protracted undergraduate course of study should be able to give a
basic definition of the subject they are studying. After all, if you are about to devote three
or four years of your life to furthering your understanding of something into
which you may already have devoted a lot of educational effort, it seems pretty
obvious that you will have thought about the subject and be in a position to describe
it to others. Students of, say, Psychiatry,
Sociology, Pharmacy, Botany, Theology, 12th century Icelandic Literature,
Interior Design, Hairdressing, even Baristaology (I kid you not: I saw a
billboard promoting such a course in Mumbai) would all, surely, be able to give
a broad description of their chosen subject (although I suspect Baristaology is
less concerned with the art of making coffee than with the ability to press
buttons and turn handles on a coffee machine without continually consulting the
instruction manual). Students of music,
however, seem to be an exception. The trouble
is just about everybody knows what music is, even if no two people have quite
the same perception of it, and so it is highly unlikely that anyone would ever
ask a music student to provide a brief description of it. As a result few music students have ever felt
the need to sit down and think precisely what it is they mean by music.
Over my 40 years of
intermittent university teaching, whenever I have a class of first year
students, I ask them to define music in a way which encompasses Bach, Boulez
and Beyoncé but excludes Birds and Bells; we all recognise the former group as
musicians while accepting that the musical sounds created by the latter is not,
in itself, true music. These, though, are
instinctive thoughts; surely part of what being a music student is all about it
to be able to quantify these instinctive thoughts into coherent definitions? Yet no student has ever been able to come up
with a meaningful definition of music, and my question has been met with blank
stares, tears, spluttering utterances and a succession of random words, sometimes
including pitch and rhythm, but rarely grouped together to form a coherent
sentence, let alone a clear definition.
Some years have elapsed
since I last had a group of first year university students, and perhaps in that
time students have become more savvy (or, more likely, the admissions panel has
become more rigorous in its selection process), but the first year students I encountered
this year nearly all were able to come up with their own sensible, fairly
coherent, if flawed definition of music.
True, one or two attempted the opt out “I agree with the previous student’s
definition”, but mild coaxing soon produced a reasonable, independent
response. What struck me was how many of
these definitions of music from students embarking on their university course
in 2015 included the words “nice”, “pleasant”, “satisfying” and “beautiful”.
I have no problem with any
of these words being used to describe music, unlike the authorities at Trinity
College London who have placed a blanket ban on all examiners from using the
word “nice” in their report forms. (The
rationale being that, since the word “nice” has assumed vaguely pejorative implications
amongst the trendy middle classes of the south east corner of England, the risk
of upsetting Tarquin from Epsom is more important than delighting Tariq from
Dubai by describing their various performances as “nice”: the examination board’s
obsessive terror of a customer complaint demanding the replacing of
artistically-driven individual reactions to a performance by bland, uniform and
ultimately meaningless stock phrases.)
My problem comes with these words being seen as defining music, rather than
describing aspects of certain musical sounds.
It is what I describe as the Classic FM or Symphony 92.4 approach to “classical
music”; the selection of sanitized titbits from the repertoire as a kind of
aural analgesic, intended to ease the pains and aches of everyday existence. Music can provide that, but to define music
as being that in totality is to undermine one of the most elevated and profound
of all human endeavours.
Music is one of those things
which defines humanity. Only mankind
creates and performs music – the wild beasts may produce musical sounds, but
they cannot create true music – consequently, music is an expression of
humanity; the totality of humanity not just the nice bits. If we go along with Victor Hugo’s assertion
that “Music expresses that which cannot be put into words”, then we must accept
that music expresses all human thought and emotion. And while different kinds of music reflect
the society and the age in which they were conceived, one continuous thread running
all through human existence is the gamut of emotions passing from hatred to
love, from anger to tranquillity, from misery to joy and from nasty to nice. Music must reflect all of these to be in any
way a legitimate art form.
Immersion in a musical
performance, either as a performer or as an audience, has a certain element of
escapism about it; for the time you are wrapped up in the music, the rest of
human existence temporarily passes out of reach. But escapism does not necessarily equate with
nirvana, and one can just as well use music to escape a happy experience in
order to indulge in the passion and misery of the composer’s creation, as to
escape the drudgery of washing up the breakfast dishes while “nice sounds”
emerge from the titbit of “classical music” presented on any one of a whole
number of easy-listening classical music radio stations.
If any one of my first year
students had defined music as “expressing the totality of human existence”,
they might have got a little closer to the point. As it is, they can rest easy; after 40 years
of deep contemplation, I am still no nearer to finding a definition of music
which would encompass Bach, Boulez and Beyoncé but exclude Birds and Bells.
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