DOES MUSIC INFLUENCE HUMAN BEINGS?
How pieces of music are sorted out as if they were pebbles
For several decades, music has been everywhere: in escalators, in hotels, etc. It is so true that a lot of people tend to forget that music has always been produced sparingly: music once used to be rare, due to the absence of recordings and also to the fact that a lot of people could not afford to go to concerts. For example during the life of Beethoven, who could claim to listen to the Ninth Symphony in its entirety?
Today, music listeners not only have access to lots of music but can choose between different performers and orchestras, skipping parts of the music and comparing performances. In doing so, do listeners miss the point? Selection has always existed when it comes to music. It was imposed at the social level. For instance, in ancient Greece, soldiers were forbidden to listen to certain modes of music because they were seen as sensuous and incompatible with the nature of military training, while others were conceived as good and character building.
This way of sorting music like pebbles is an indication that music is seen as powerful. Music has an influence on human beings. It is so true that during centuries, the tritone (an interval composed of three whole tones) was prohibited, considered to be unhealthy, and, until 1900, the tritone was not used by composers. During the first part of the 20th Century, jazz was labelled ‘non fit for decent company’. In Nazi Germany, many composers were said to be degenerate and banned. Nowadays, some dictatorships say that Western music is morally corrupting. This is proof that music is conveying messages to its audiences.
How do musicians and audiences assign meaning to music together?
Music listeners may attribute a sense to a piece of music by association; music genres and musical instruments may evoke a time, a place, or a situation: salsa is linked to South America as the didgeridoo is to Australia and organs to are places of worship; ragtime is strongly connected to the singular period named the Roaring Twenties; the harp is a cosmic or a political symbol.
Also, through music, both music composers and music listeners may change their relationship to time. It is shown in movies, where music may notably signal an incursion of the past into the present or a move from one time frame to another. That type of incursion helps the listener to experience time as it is experienced in inner life, where an hour can last a minute and a minute can last an hour, far away from chronological time.
Music conductors share their perception of musical meaning using their baton, their hands, their eyes, and sometimes their feet: upward movements indicate optimism or hope, downward motions reflect sadness, death, etc. Through dozens of movements, conductors are shaping a piece of music, communicating with ensembles and orchestras. In any case, we see that music performance and music listening rely on social elements and codes that are binary and are not peculiar to the field of music: oppositions like up and down or past and future are very common in all fields of human thought.