What is art and why is music presented as an art?
Nearly everyone knows more or less when art appeared: around 20 000 years ago, when images were made in the caves of Lascaux. But why did art appear? Because human beings once became aware that something was worthy of representation, outside, as it happened in Lascaux, or inside their mind, like splashed-ink paintings made by Chinese painter Wang Mo during the 8th century BCE show it.
Moreover, when did human beings become conscious of doing art? Of course, there is no reflection related to artistic production during the prehistoric era. In early civilizations like Ancient Greece, Egypt or Mesopotamia, thoughts related to art were part of philosophy, and Pythagoras, for instance, formulated considerations linking aesthetics and beauty six centuries BCE, followed by Plato one century later.
Generally, musical art can be defined quite formally as a conscious product of human activity, whose target is to shape and communicate sounds in a harmonious way. Let us notice that music creation has a special place amongst the various arts, as it is never a representation of something that existed in the world beforehand: it is not what ancient Greeks called a ‘mimesis’. That is why it is the most abstract of the arts.
Musical art and the meeting of listeners’ individual emotions
Why do people care about the beauty of the music? Are certain sorts of aesthetic categories embedded in the human brain as some researchers in the field of music neuroscience say? About beauty, one thing is considered as certain by a a high number of persons: first, people recognize beauty in a specific work of art and then; then, they ask questions about why they recognize beauty in it. Listeners perceive the physical elements of sounds and find some of them especially attractive, partly in relationship with their personal emotions. That is why, as the proverb says, there is no accounting for taste. Curation and musical criticism may present an interest, however they never replace either a personal experience of music, or an individual attempt to understand the content of a piece of music.
Different criteria are currently taken into account to explain why people prefer specific types of music: the characteristics of a piece of music itself (like timbre, tempo or tonality), the cultural conventions related to music (like genres) and the characteristics of the listeners (elementary data like location, age and gender currently being the only ones to be exploited). Yet these criteria were not really articulated within the framework of a coherent musical theory. Now one can find these fundamental elements in the new music theory developed in relationship with the YMusic search engine, that helps listeners to understand better their musical taste and introduces them to elementary musical analysis. What is the impact of such a theory? It makes, to some extent, elementary musical analysis accessible to each unique music listener who takes some time to understand a specific musical content.