WHY IS MUSIC SPECIAL AMONGST THE ARTS AND HOW CAN A MUSIC SEARCH ENGINE HELP TO KNOW ITS SPECIFICITIES?
Since antiquity, a lot of philosophers, music composers and researchers have questioned themselves and their peers to discover the nature of music. Most of the time, philosophers gave explanations related to the essence of music, and musicians, who literally embody the strength of music, demonstrated its effects. Amongst philosophers, two tendencies talking about the essence of music have met with approval from the specialists and from the public. The first one is absolute music. For the supporters of this theory, the essence of music is self-referential, self-contained and autonomous: it means that music functions within its own sphere. That theory is supported by the fact that, in music, contrarily to what happens in painting for instance (at least until the 19th century), there never was a representation of any external reality, so its form is fundamentally always equal to its content. But can music really be absolute? The supporters of the idea that music is not absolute, but created to satisfy human needs, whatever they are, say that it is not and that music production is linked to human interests: for instance, to pay back a loan, Mozart wrote several ‘easy sonatas’ (including KV 545, Sonata Facile, I, Allegro, for piano). Thus these works were not written for themselves, but for economic reasons.
Actually, the question of the essence of music is complex: aspects like its effects on listeners and its form and content play a role in it. Concerning the effects, Pythagoras (5th century BCE) created the concept of isomorphic resonance, which says that it is impossible to judge music by the sense of hearing: music can only be appreciated by the mind. Aristoxenus (who lived during the 4th century BCE and was a pupil of Aristotle), preferred to approach music as an experience rather than as an object and, on the contrary, said that the perceptions of the ear play an important part in music appreciation. For him, the essence of music cannot be explained without any reference to its effects on music listeners.
During the Middle Ages, the contribution of Boethius (13th century) is notable. He talked about ‘musica instrumentalis’, literally ‘sounding music’, reconciling the mind and the senses. For him, music listeners have a ‘mind’s eye’, a sort of intermediary between knowledge drawn from the senses and knowledge that is the result of an intellectual reflection. That approach seems to be fair: musicians love to know how melodies are structured as much as they love to play them; and listeners can be curious too. The spirit or the mind of the listener is responding to physical sounds first and not directly to the structure of a piece of music.
Later, Adam Smith (an economist of the 18th century) called the effect that instrumental music has upon the human mind its expression, but he added that the effect of music is purely musical: it signifies and suggests nothing other than music itself, being a partisan of absolute music. The 19th century led to concepts like ‘pure music’ by Hanslick (a music critic), defining music as an absolute art of tone. Liszt, on the other hand, coined the expression ‘program music’ to name music having an evocative title that orients listeners’ attention toward a cultural object (cf for example ‘Years of Pilgrimage’, including S. 161, Années de Pèlerinage, II, Sonetto 123 del Petrarca).
During the 20th century, the battle raged between absolute music and program music: Stravinsky defended absolute music, saying that music has an intrinsic value which is not linked to the images that it evokes. Debussy (in particular with L 86, Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune) was a staunch defender of program music. Today, after a new rise of absolute music between 1945 and 1970, to forget how program music was linked to politics during World War II, the postmodernist era is welcoming hybrid approaches.