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Music is more than a casual leisure, an art or the new way to increase the benefits of a company. It is all of that and even more. The music industry is a rich ecosystem in which everyone and everything has a specific place. From the composer to the listener, from psychology to spirituality, from art to science, get insights on each field of music, learning about craft or history, about human behavior or consciousness. A place is also given to ethical questions.
MUSICAL CULTURE IN ITS VARIOUS ASPECTS
MUSIC IN ALL ITS STATES: WONDERFUL MUSIC STORIES
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The necessity of creating music
Musicians generally reach a state of serenity when they feel they create beautiful music in harmony with listeners, other musicians and all the people who help them to distribute their work. They are first driven by the necessity of making music. Being vulnerable to music is one of their strengths, because thanks to this belief music can reveal itself in more effective ways. A spark may happen, that musicians will remember and develop later, in order to communicate the effects music created in them. They try to touch others in a specific way: they know that they feel most of the feelings most human beings have, they have the same type of thoughts everyone has, but music is the privileged medium they have to share all that thinking and build bridges.
The way musicians compose music is not always cyclic: some feel that it is possible for them to work on a track and then pass it on to someone else while they begin to compose a new piece. Then they come back to the first piece and refine the whole. When they are in a team, such musicians reckon that it gives more space to each member and reduces friction, because everyone is not trying to do the same task at the same time.
Finding the ‘big picture’ and achieving it in reasonable time
As a musician’s career rarely follows the course of a straight line, they must sometimes make moves, learn new skills or do experiments that help them to ‘join the dots’ in order to find the ‘big picture’, be it a new way to express their musical ideas or new methods of distributing their music. In fact, they want to share the space that music creates inside themselves with anybody. Music listening being, in a sense, a form of surrender in which listeners stop being totally in control: they start being part of a bigger entity, be it their own mind or their more conscious self. That is why musicians search to renew the ways in which they can help listeners to reach that state.
Making music, musicians both feel humble and powerful. In a specific way: dance is about moving, painting is about seeing and music is about listening, in order to create the best sounds, songs and albums, for themselves and for listeners. As making errors is never a problem for musicians, being stubborn when they want to develop a musical idea is a valuable option. They can always refine or reshape the results. When they are working with peers, having strong opinions, being tough, may be a plus, so that everyone can design the piece of music without narrowing the field too much.
Which paths do musicians follow to discern targets that connect them to a higher purpose?
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How do musicians want to make a difference in the world?
Worshipping musicians
When people decide to become musicians, what kind of experiences do they have? Which type of journey do they take? It partly depends on their initial situation. For instance, classical music performers that live in small towns sometimes affirm with conviction that being engaged for specific performances in a bigger city and in a context where they will meet peers that they find brilliant is a source of great satisfaction, especially when they make music alone most of the time. Sometimes, they just cannot imagine that the collective performance will ever happen. In a metropolis, emerging rappers, listening to the same question about their musical journey, will sing a rhyming couplet that explains music helps them to improve their condition.
All musicians of course love music and most of them love it passionately. Some talk about that love in a way that is especially moving, saying for example that they began to make music to create the kind of sound that they had heard or imagined they had heard. For them, music making began when they wanted so much to hear it. They actually worship music. Their love does not always prevent them from getting nervous if they feel that other musicians will be better than them, for instance during a recording session in a studio, but at the end of the day, the joy of playing music together comes before everything else. Some begin to do music and go to music school just because they do not want to have an ordinary career and prefer the idea of making a living out of their craft. However, it does not mean that they do not want to be the messengers of music.
Finding the right sounds
Everyone is a musician in the sense that all listeners have an innate appreciation of music. Music appreciation is passive, while music making is active; however music listening can become active when listeners take time to listen to different styles of music and become more aware of their preferences. Listening to more music styles, listeners extend their capacity to appreciate new pieces of music that reveal new elements about themselves.
For some music makers, it is all about finding a match between the sound they want to create and the thoughts and feelings they want to express through it. They love to play with other musicians with whom they will learn new aspects of their art, seeing the joy in their eyes when they create something new. Others are mainly interested in discovering where music comes from. As music is a light for them, they also want to discover what difference their work is making to the world. Their path is rarely a straight line, but each step is for them an opportunity to bring back something new, to learn something new and sometimes to meet new people.
Independently of any music genre, be it highly proportional or more based on elements having a very different timbre and length, determine what is, for you, a combination of sounds that is nice! Try the YMusic search engine, your free personal assistant (it includes musical criteria to select music) and if you want, discover new types of harmonics!
A snail that captures a high variety of frequencies
Sometimes mathematicians are also music theorists. It was the case for Pythagoras, for example, who studied the harmonics of musical sounds, explaining how these sounds relate to each other. He used the ratios that help to constitute the basis of the musical ranges still used in classical music today. Now there are other ways to link music and mathematics.
When listeners hear sounds coming from the outside world, the cochlea, a device they have in their ear, is hit at different places and vibrates, capturing a high range of frequencies or pitch, because the cochlea has the shape of a snail. The ear is, in that process, an intermediary. And singers, when they are emitting sounds, stretch their voice box in different ways to produce various frequencies that listeners will perceive as such. Let us notice that color is transmitted to the eye somewhat in the same way as pitch is to the ear, but not identical.
Should all sounds be proportional to please the ear?
The major triad sounds nice. Is it because of its ratios? Or is it some kind of evolutionary advantage to hear a triad? An evolutionary advantage is a benefit giving to a species, here humanity, a trait that is helpful to survive better as a species. That question is asked seriously by a certain number of music researchers. A clue to the answer is that if manufacturers try to make a musical instrument that only plays music based on pure frequency ratios, it is going to run out of control very quickly because it is not possible to fit all these intervals together very well: to tune all these intervals, another interval, minuscule intervals, like Pythagorean commas, limmas and apotomes, must be added.
So, the harmony of a series of sounds is not totally based on perfect mathematical ratios. And, no, the species does not have any interest in producing only musical ratios that are perfectly mathematical. Imperfect intervals can sound very nice. Nowadays, a lot of listeners mainly listen to the items produced by a globalized music industry, items that are often based on elementary musical ratios chosen because they easily catch the attention of listeners, who are busier and more and busier and multitasking while listening to music.
For that reason, listeners may forget other styles of music in which less regular ratios have their place and even sound very nice. And thus, they may judge any other type of harmonic quality in a negative way. Now it is interesting to see how musical concepts can change over time: from types of music where musical elements were much less quantifiable, music production is now oriented on making quickly a series of recordings where relationships between notes are harmonized and standardized. Yet all listeners have the ability to develop their listening skills if it is their wish.
Mathematical ratios and music appreciation
Be it composed and performed by musicians who are formally trained or not, discover more pieces of music in all the styles you love! Try the YMusic search engine, your free personal assistant (it includes musical criteria to select music)!
Natural musical abilities sustained by a huge amount of work
A certain number of well-known musicians in popular music genres were never able to read and write music, however that did not prevent them from producing the results that we know. It has nothing to do with failure: they simply did not need to learn how to decrypt and notate music to create it. Yet they are highly appreciated music composers or performers.
How do they do it? First, composers and performers without formal training are extraordinary music listeners. These musicians keep their ears open while they are playing, alone or with other musicians, and remember all the musical elements they find, practicing and listening all the time. For some decades, technology has helped. For example, Michael Jackson did not read music, but apparently it helped him to extend his naturally generous vocal style, and he simply used a tape rrecorder to remember the melodies that he was singing a cappella, before recording them in the studio.
Why do some musicians want to get a formal training in music while others do not?
The main reason why some musicians do not want to study music theory is that they do not want to get distracted by written symbols. It is neither better nor worse: it is different. They want to focus on what is the most important thing for them: producing powerful sounds. Concentrating on aural learning, they conceive and execute musical ideas in a more spontaneous way, and it is their way to find more original and unique ideas, watching, when they are not playing alone, the hands of other musicians in order to communicate with them, etc.
It is just a question of choice: during the 1940s, Miles Davis was enrolled in the Julliard music school. Julliard is well-known at the global level to have trained musicians like Henry Mancini, Barry Manilow, Chick Corea, Wynton Marsalis, John Williams, Renee Fleming, Steve Reich, Eric Whitacre and a lot of other composers and performers. But it did not suit Miles Davis, who chose to leave and followed a less institutionalised path to create music from a blank slate. Knowing music theory does not reduce musical creativity at all. It is not appropriate for everyone, that is all.
Actually, the most important thing is to remember that there are many ways to learn and understand music: human intelligence had different forms, and it is not dominated by a unique general ability, be it in the field of arts or science. Musicians identify for themselves what they learn best, how they learn it and why. And sometimes they like to start venturing into uncharted territories, speaking to other fellow musicians to be understood rather than to be correct.
Is it mandatory to read and write music in order to make music?
Beyond any music genre, discover the various types of sounds and how they can combine in a pied of music! Try the YMusic search engine, your free personal assistant (it includes musical criteria to select music) and sustain your curiosity!
How can classical music sustain curiosity?
How can listeners from all horizons interact with classical music?
When it comes to music like in other fields, curiosity is the virtue that leads to knowledge and rich experiences. Curiosity sets up a cycle where new data raises new questions and vice versa. It is like a growing flame, like an oil lamp that has to be filled. Happily, especially now due to the last developments of the internet, curiosity related to music can be satisfied more easily than before: music is, most of the time, free. However, listeners who want to develop abilities in the domain of musical appreciation must work a little harder to acquire them.
For example, when listeners have not had the opportunity to acquire extended knowledge and skills in classical music, what can they do to satisfy their curiosity without being overwhelmed by a flood of information whose quality and relevance vary? In fact, classical music can sustain the curiosity of a listener in a thousand ways. Its numerous aspects can be interesting, for example the multiple ways in which consonance and dissonance may combine in various pieces.
Amazing harmony
Consonance and dissonance are the two sides of harmony, which basically designates elements that work together. These elements can fit together, sounding in a pleasant way to the ear and thus being in consonance. They may also sound harsh or discordant, producing then a dissonance. These two types of harmony are both of interest and their combinations produce various effects when composers are telling their musical stories. For example, a dissonant chord which creates a tension in the mind of the listener may be followed by a consonant chord which will quickly induce relief.
Now these are generalities, as listeners perceive music according to their own cultural context. For example, most pop music is consonant. And as pop music is now better known than a lot of other music genres, dissonance, bringing in unknown parts of the musical space, can really sound strange and undesirable. Yet dissonance can produce interesting musical effects. Mozart once wrote a piece of music called the ‘dissonance quartet’: his ‘String Quartet n° 19’. In it, Mozart is using a musical scale highly unusual, even at this time. That piece was shocking to the public, listeners did not understand. However, the piece is extraordinarily powerful and contains hundreds of effects. The first movement is bright and the third dark and exuberant, the whole forming a strange ensemble where traditional musical elements, like those found in Bach fugues, merge with new ones: in the quartet, there is no clear distinction between the old-style counterpoint, which is baroque thus highly elaborate, and the new-style accompaniment and melody, which verge on simplicity. Other composers did similar experiments, however Mozart went further.
How can classical music sustain curiosity?