Music

Some possible definitions

There exist two “methods” to define the music: intrinsic approach (immanente) and extrinsic approach (functional). In the first approach, the music exists before being heard; it can even have an existence by itself, in nature and by nature.

Anthropocentric definition

With each end of the chain, it there with the man and/or the group. The music is conceived and received by a person and/or the group (anthropological). The definition of the music, like whole Art, also passes by the definition of a certain form of Communication between the individuals of the same community. It is what makes music a universal language likely to be included/understood by everyone.

Tautological definition

The music is the “art of the sounds” and includes any artistic construction intended to be perceived by hearing.

Social definition

Music and company

The social phenomenon

Each time is dependant on the relationship between art and the company, and more particularly between the music and the forms of its reception. This social study through ages is undertaken in a test of Jacques Attali ( Bruits Paris, PUF, 1978). The questions which are put there can be found today in the form: Which is the role of the music in the life of today? Why is a different consumable (compared to the other consumables, and other arts)? Does the music become an instrument of being able (Major Companies, industry of the disc, policy of the media)? Which are today opportunities, the prospects, of the Internet and the online musics? etc

“Evolution” of the music

Release of the esthetic attitude of the type-setter with respect to the rules and the interdicts, and that, concomitant, from the bonds which it ties with the listener never does not go without clashes. All the forms of communication under consideration by the music are a need without which it would not know to have history there. The historical evolution of the currents stylistics is marked out conflicts and of idylles. Each time is concerned with such questionings.

The history of the music works with the margin of the company. Thus, the dominating place that Jean-Sebastien Bach in the repertory of the sacred music occupies, consequence of the creative genius of this musician of exception, cannot make us forget all the type-setters who preceded it and who wove these bonds with the public by preparing it with evolutions major stylistics. The work of Bach concentrates in fact a beam of German influences (Schütz, Froberger, Kerll, Pachelbel), Italian (Frescobaldi, Vivaldi), Flemish (Sweelinck, Reincken) and Frenchwomen (Grigny and Couperin), all put by Cantor at the service of a function.

In the same way, one can only approve Nikolaus Harnoncourt, for which: “Mozart was not an innovator”. Mozart was only the cristallisator of the traditional style, and the genius which could carry to its apogee of the elements in the air of time. To concentrate the one time influences, to consolidate the elements and to draw a new sap from it, it is there the characteristic of any classicism. Contrary to our experimentative contemporaries who at the same time seek “the system and the idea” (according to an article founder of Pierre Boulez), forever nothing invented Mozart which did not preexist to him. The radical changes that it knew to impose come well from designs already in germ.

One perceives in fact that the bond between the technological developments and the writing, between the material adequacies (instruments, places, spaces) and the expression, especially succeeds in locking up the type-setter in the double ambiguity of the systemic yoke and the expressive release. The music is built around structures, of categories, which it is necessary to know to exceed (work in extreme cases). It often oscillated during the centuries between a rhetoric of the understatement and minimum of syntactic elements (it is the case of Bach or of Lully, it is also that, with an extreme degree of J. Cage) and a excessivity (Wagner or B. Ferneyhough for example), dilution in the emphase (another definition of the Baroque), revolt against conceptual alignments. With the historical passing, the phases of this development appear to follow successive stages; the expressive capacity passes from strictly personal contributions to a complexification which denatures the first richnesses of the innovation while seeking to exhaust the resources of initial material.

Esthetic definition

Esthetics of the reception

Rebirth until the 18th century, the representation of the feelings and passions was carried out by preestablished musical figures, which Monteverdi called the assisted prattica expressio Verborum .
Simultaneity in the dimension the heights (polyphony, agreements), advanced Ars Nova with the 15th (pH. From Vitry), was codified with 17th and with 18th ( Traité universal harmony of the father Marin Mersenne, 1627, Traité harmony reduced to its natural principles of Jean-Philippe Rameau, 1722). Since, the representation of the music posts more personalized tendencies. This translation of the personality leads quite naturally to the 19th century with the passions developed by the romantic music.

But all the universities of style are often only one regrouping factitious around theories a priori . The music passes as much by the symbols of its writing as by the directions granted to its “value” (emotional, emotional…). Theory and reception meet to grant to the music a statute, artistic since communication, esthetics since translation of representation. However a ditch did not cease growing hollow in the Western music between the type-setter and his public. The current music research tends to make music a support of the representation of the complexity of our world (of the infinitely small to the infinitely great). They moved away from this purely esthetic research where the type-setter sought to be in phase with the evolution of the history.

Esthetism of the composition

Each important stylistic stage (Rebirth, baroque, classicism, romanticism, and in a certain way modernism…), thus carries in it one or more esthetic junctions.

Comparatively, where is one today? Which understanding could go so far as to lock the limits of the field of the music? In the middle of the 20th century, in the years 1947-1950, after the formal attacks of the serialism, the federator core which remained on arrival of the tape recorder and electronic engineering resided in the demonstration of sound perceptible and built. Treaties of harmony of the end of the 19th century (for example the Treated of harmony of Th. Dubois), taking again the theory of Branch, had endeavoured to moor the tonality with a need developed by the history since Monteverdi. However one realizes that the 20th century, while breaking since 1920 with these diagrams, only confines the tonal system at the 18th century and 19th centuries, in the strict geographical delimitation that we know to him in Europe and in the United States (what, altogether, can appear negligible compared to the history of humanity). If it is so difficult to be satisfied with the traditional definition of the music like “art to combine the sounds”, it is that this definition crumbled shortly after the middle of the 20th century. Perhaps let us be us invited today to replace musical works and the currents which they caused in a context impresses of provocation, context where all the products of the avant-garde obey a logic whose only appreciation a posteriori makes it possible to determine the range.

Quotations on the definition

“the music is used to make the life more beautiful than the music - Bernard Lubat (strongly “inspired” of: art it is what makes the life more interesting than art” - Robert Filliou)

“the music is expression of the interior world of the man exit of the outside world” - John Blacking, quoted by Mario d' Angelo)

Musical classification

There exist several manners of classifying the music: by standard, kind, by geographical area, by chronological list , etc

Artistic dimension

Music above all, and any definition must set out again from there, is a Art (that of the MUSE, says one). It is thus creation, Représentation, and, of course, communication. For this reason, it uses certain rules or type-setting systems, of simplest (pure risk) with most complex. Like any creation, the music creates the unknown with the known one, the future with the present. But the music is évanescente. It exists only in the moment of its Perception.

Music, an art of time

It will be noted simply that time controls the music like it controls the perception of the sound: since the microphone-time, which is the scale of the sound vibration (the sound is a setting in vibration of the air), until the musical Forme, its construction in macro-time. The music is an art of time, the evolutionary one, thing that few arts can envy to him, except the recent forms of technological art (cinema, video, conceptual art…). In this temporal component, the music can be spread according to three fundamental dimensions.

the rate/rhythm, which concerns the duration of the sounds and their level of intensity (dynamics).
the melody, which is the impression produced by the succession of sounds different heights.
the polyphony or harmonizes (these two terms, taken in their broadest direction), considers the desired superposition of sounds simultaneities.

Another category of the sound appeared in the erudite music as from the 16th century, that of the stamp. It allows a polyphony mixing several instruments (the term harmony is still used besides in this direction when one speaks about “the municipal harmony”), or a Monodie especially dedicated to the one of them.

All these elements are developed in the article Acoustics musical.

Components of the music

All these “components” of the music result from sound découlement in time: simultaneities, successions…

Time and rate/rhythm

Height and melody

Harmony and simultaneity (cf also fusion)

Stamp

According to the Standard of music considered, one or the other of these three dimensions will be able to prevail. The rate/rhythm, for example, generally has the primacy in certain traditional African musics (Black Africa in particular); the melody, it, premium in the majority of the musics of Eastern culture; as for the harmony, the Western erudite music, or of Western inspiration in made its base.

Dimensions of sound and its musical

Thanks to the development of research of the musical Acoustics and Psychoacoustics, the musical sound is defined starting from its components timbrales and of the parameters psychoacoustics which return concerned in its perception. Of sound object, rough material that the musician must work, this material becomes musical object; the music makes it possible to pass to an artistic dimension which metamorphoses “given to understand”. Silence is not any more “absence of sound”. Even famous 4 ' 33" of John Cage, one “is given to understand”, as the monochromic ones of Klein do not represent a univocal uniformity at all…

But this given to understand includes from now on an increasingly broad material. Since the beginning of the 20th century, this widening takes place towards the integration of intrinsic qualities of our sound environment (concerts bruitists, introduction of the sirens at Varèse, catalogs of birds of Messiaen, etc). How to distinguish noise and signal then, how to distinguish order and disorder, musical creation and noise pollution? The Noise, it is only what one does not want to transmit and who penetrates in spite of us in the message; in itself it does not have any difference in structure with the useful signal. One cannot distinguish any more like before the purely musical sound and the noise. With the development of a formalization by nature of the functions of the noise, sounds inharmonic (aperiodic) which belongs to the everyday life take part from now on, in the integration of sound, with musical construction. All the elements of our sound environment contain a certain share of noise, which has vocation to become function structuring by destination.

The whole of these conceptual upheavals accompanies the scientific discoveries and techniques which made it possible to develop new instrumental invoices (in particular with data processing). The primitive musical instrument wanted to be representation of the natural sounds (the wind in the trees being found in the sound of the flute, song of the birds in that of the man…). In this condition, it was the only able one to translate the musical one (to make a distinction between harmonic sounds and noises). The extension of the techniques helping, the concept even of instrument was redefined… The machine and the instrument met. What the men agree to recognize as musical corresponds from now on to an appropriation of an extended sound material, with an integration of phenomena hitherto considered as noises.

The intrusion of the random one

With the Composition computer-assisted, first musical experimentation to use the computer, the musical theories were in turn concerned with inflect or leave the initiative to the machine, and, in parallel, to completely release the man of certain tasks of regulation or to leave him a big part of creation. The problems oscillate thus, in a quasi paradoxical way but finally fundamentally dialectical, between determinism and random, risk and logic, chance and need.

The random formalism (mathematized) “calculates” without it not encroaching on the sensitive assets of the type-setter. The mathematical objects which developed create truly an intermediary towards esthetic paradigms that the musical experimentation gradually tries to update, intermediary which would be between an order regular, periodic, and an uncontrolled chaos, random and singular. Hiller, the father of the composition computer-assisted, without judging which could carry out the compromises, considered already that “the music is a compromise, and even a Médiation, between monotony and chaos. ”

Artistically, the Information theory of Shannon the theory of the indetermination of John Cage answers (information is maximum thus null). In 1951, Cage and Feldman relied on random codified I Ching to build their work Music off Exchanges . This work, which breaks the yokes of the traditional concept of musical work, is used as artistic proclamation with the concept of the indetermination which, on the same moment, was essential on the scientific experimentation: this concept arrived in the middle of the quantum theory and the theory of relativity; indeed the rules which govern nature, the infinitely small like the infinitely great, obey in these contemporary theses more with random that with a universal order.

Cage surreptitiously introduces the chance into the composition in a combinative direction. Music off Exchanges leaves room to the risk against logic by rehabilitating the creative capacity of the experiment divinatoire, the capacity of creation by the chance. John Cage, Morton Feldman and Earle Brown used also a codified chance, the random one of “I Ching”, delivers divination Chinese which shows the possibility for certain numbers of combinations by pentagrams. The chance is sublimated by the destiny in a preaching divinatoire (Concerto for piano (1957)). Then, at Cage the theories becoming paroxystic, he preaches the rarefaction of the music until the total risk (4' 33''): listening is focused towards sound objects which were not directly planned for that. Few criticisms could abound in its direction, deploring that these theories are used only for the justification of a media “blow”.

Algorithmic music

To try to reduce the proportion of chance fatally entrusted to the technique, the machine was used thereafter for its functions of control of the automation which ensures a continuous sequence of mathematical operations and logical. Pierre Barbaud began in this spirit its work on the “automatic” composition and developed with Roger Blanchard in 1959 program ALGOM I-5 for the computer Gamma 60 of the electronic computer Center of the Bull company in Paris.

Stochastic music

This increased mathematisation of possible, continued to be taken into account, but while trying to take again with the machine the share of responsibility which it had conquered. Since 1954 Iannis Xenakis had created its opus one, Metastasis for 61 instruments; it is the first music entirely deduced from rules and mathematical procedures. For its creator, it is a question into practice of putting a direct relationship between music and architecture, combination certainly not very common, but which for the assistant of Le Corbusier goes from oneself. He will make it profitable by using the same rules of construction in the development of the plans of the Philips house for the World Fair of Brussels in 1958 (house where will be given in the same concert creations of works of Varèse ( electronic Poèmes ) and of Xenakis ( Concret pH ).

In 1956 will be published a theorization of the stochastic music which is based amongst other things on the game theory of von Neumann. The chance is not there already more one simple chance; at Xenakis contrary to the third sonata of Swell or other “opened” works, contrary to Cage, and with its resignation of type-setter, the probability is entirely calculated, the clarified rules ( Achorripsis or ST/10-1 in 1961). The total process is foreseeable, even if the events which compose it are random. By this philosophy of creation, Xenakis tries to approach to the biological phenomena and the events of the alive world.

Notation, theory and system

A musical system is a whole of rules and uses attached to a Type of music given sometimes (one speaks about musical theory ). The design of the music as system can go very far, and the former Greeks counted the music like one of the components of mathematics, with equal of arithmetic, of the geometry and astronomy. See the article “Harmony of the spheres”. More close to us, Rameau claimed that the music was the base of mathematics.

Certain musics have moreover a marking system (the Western music, with its musical theory, in is a notorious example). In this case, it is difficult to separate the musical system from the marking system which is associated for him. Other types of music are only of transmission oral, and develop completely different musical systems.

Music: production and reception

Musical work

Perhaps then, to find a certain coherence in the multiplication of the definitions, would be necessary it to be based on the concept of musical work. Allographic music as art master key by musical works. Each one is an intentional object of which the unit and the identity are carried out by its times, spaces, musical movement and form like the writing Roman Ingarden. Esthetic object of perception, work is certainly of ideal gasoline, but its heteronomous existence is concretized by its execution in front of a public or its recording including its digitalization. For Mario d' Angelo, these external demonstrations which take the statute of musical products constitute finally units of matérialisation of the music.

Like all work, musical work exists before being received, and it continues to exist afterwards. One can thus question oneself with good quality on what makes its perenniality (how much works really remain with their type-setters, and are they really all the reflection of its style, of its art). One especially understands by musical work the particular project of a musical realization. But which decides this realization? Listening that makes each individual of it (with its culture, its memory, its feelings particular to this precise moment…) or the partition, transcription which does not comprise all the music?

Starting from the Rebirth and until the beginning of the 20th century, its single support was the Partition of music. This intrusion of the writing was the element-key of the construction of the Polyphonie and the Harmonie in the erudite music. The partition remains plain in the name of or of the Musicien S which it have composed or recorded, according to the case. Certain works can be collective, others remain anonymous.

Since the generalization of average the techniques of recording of the sound, work can be also identified with its support: the album of music, the Magnetic band or with a simple penmanship of the representation of the musical gesture suitable to transcribe the work of the type-setter.

The musical data-processing made still evolve/move this concept of work, since now a simple software is likely to generate “automatically” a musical work, or to produce sounds with which the interpreter is supposed to react.

Formalism and functionalities

As Jean-Marie Schaeffer explains it, in the modern art (and a fortiori in the technological art of the 20th century), the question-key: “What art? ” or “When there is art? ” gradually changed into: “How art function does? ”. In music this displacement of object posed the problem of the elements which one can distinguish a priori in listening structural of a work.

In 1945 the first forms of automation of information appeared, and in 1957 one assisted, with the arrival of the musical Informatique, at a point of junction. Initially a new representation of sound which, although difficult to control, has in fact open of the prospects above suspicion. Then, and especially, these techniques called into question certain theoretical speculations on the formalization of the thought creative, returning the type-setter with confrontation, essential in its step, between an abstract formalism and making of a functional material. How the transition towards atonality have does destroys the functional hierarchies, transformed the role held by the tonal functions elaborate since Monteverdi?

In fact, the logic of the musical forms thus became especially a functional logic, insofar as it makes it possible to maintain the cohesion of work, even if the elements of composition are multiple (rhythmic elements , contrapuntic, harmonic…). The concept of process compositionnel, made it possible to pass from the static vision of the musical object (that one can index, and which would cease living while returning in the inheritance) to a dynamic vision. This vision is evolutionary, which did not take into account the theory based on the GestaltPsychologie which solidifies the thought in images accumulated in the memory. The musical process is more than the structure: it is indeed a dynamic form, to become. This to become is marked by the print of the sound , i.e. by a musical material, and not only by the tool or the theory.

Starting from the communications theory of Shannon and Weaver, other definitions insist more on the means of reception than on the line production of the music.

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