Face the music.
How weird that music is considered to be a phenomenon that needs scientific explanation. In general, we do not construct objective theories about how large paintings' work ', or about large literature, dance or sculpture. We are interested in what happens on a perceptual level when we experience these arts, but there is always a space where we let them speak for themselves, beyond the reach of cold facts. But with music, scientific studies seem to be on the trail of an absolute, comprehensive explanation that connects neurology to creativity, auditory physiology, and acoustic physics. There seems to be a belief that the composer Arnold Schönberg was right when he warned:
Arnold SchonbergOne day, the children of our psychologists will have deciphered the language of music.
Boethius
This' science 'of music is part of a very old tradition. In ancient times and the Middle Ages, music was not art in the modern sense; it was one of the four sciences of the syllabus called the liberal arts, in addition to geometry, arithmetic and astronomy. Scholars studied music to learn about the natural harmony of the world, and performed music was often dismissed as frippery. The early sixth-century Roman philosopher Boethius ranked it as the least of his three classes of 'music' and agreed with Pythagoras that music should ideally be studied while 'the earring judgment is put aside '.
Music and Math
Practicing music does have something of the mathematician. Some of the experiments in compositional symmetry, such as the palindromes and mirror reflections of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Joseph Hadyn, are little more than the salon tricks of an era happy with such entertainment. But many other musical forms and theories have a deeper, more formal organization, from Johann Sebastian Bach's intertwined fugues to the quasi-mathematical composition laws developed by Paul Hindemith. In the final grip of Schönberg's twelve-note serialism in the 1960s, composers like Pierre Boulez insisted on a mathematical rigidity that draws their music almost dry and places heavy demands on the listener's ability to perceive ordered forms. And in some types of non-Western music, pattern and structure rather than emotion or tone painting form the basis for composition. This is the case, for example, with polyrhythmic African drumming and the glittering soundscapes of Javanese gamelan.
