What is music for? What purposes do its performers achieve, or intend to achieve? What purposes do its listeners use it for? Why do composers or song-writers write it?
These seem to me fundamental questions in any discusssion about (say) the public funding of music performances and music education, or (say) the apparent lack of knowledge that some people in Britain have about some types of music, or (say) how to increase audiences for particular types of music. But no-one seems to debate these questions, or even to raise them. As a result, there seems to be little awareness that aims and purposes may vary, both across cultures, and over time. (I am reminded of Alfred Gell’s anthropological theory of art which understands art as the creation of objects liable to be perceived by their audience as objects with intentionality, that is, objects carrying some purpose.)
- To entertain, to give pleasure. The pleasure may arise from the sounds themselves (eg, elements such as the sound qualities, the melodies, the harmonies, the overtones, the timbres, the beat, the rhythms, the combinations or interplay of the various elements), or the performance of the music (the skills of the performers may provide pleasure), or the construction of the music (eg, repetition or novelty, contrapuntalism or other stuctural features, the composition or improvisation techniques evident to a listener), or allusions to other sounds and music.
- To express some emotion or mood in the composer/writer, or in the performer.
- To evoke some emotion or mood in the listener. The sturm-und-drang movement in the mid-18th century, for example, led symphony writers to imitate thunderstorms and other effects, often seeking to frighten or surprise listeners.
- To express solidarity and communality, whether by performers or by listeners. See, for instance, Mark Evan Bonds’ great book on how Beethoven’s symphonies were perceived by their audience as expressions of and occasions for communality. John Miller Chernoff’s observation that African people express their opinion of a musical performance by joining in (themselves performing, singing, beating time, or dancing) is an example of this particular aesthetic of music.
- To inspire listeners to action, as, for example, with the music of the 19th century nationalists such as Verdi, Chopin, Dvorak, Smetana, Sibelius, Hill, etc. Such nationalist aesthetics may be very powerful: The white minority regime in South Africa, for example, banned the singing of the hymn, Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika (“God Bless Africa”), because of its association with the movement for majority rule. (The hymn is now the national anthem of South Africa.) Similarly, although Japan’s illegal military occupation of Korea ended in 1945 and both countries are now democracies, Japanese pop music is still banned in the ROK (South Korea).
- To induce altered mental states in listeners, for example, as an aid to entering a trance or to prepare them for some other spiritual experience.
- To think. Contrapuntal music, in the North German tradition that reached its peak in the middle of the 18th century, used fugal writing as a way of articulating the possible mathematical manipulations (eg, overlay, delay, inversion, reversion) of the theme. Similarly, the tradition of western art music from the mid 18th century through to the present day has focused on the articulation of the musical consequences of a theme or motif. Beethoven, who was never very good at melody-making, was perhaps the best composer ever at development, with Mendelssohn a close second. Chopin, by contrast, was good with melodies, but not at complex development. The development of musical material during improvised performances of modern jazz, of Indian ragas, or of Balinese gamelan scales are further examples. Likewise, much minimalist music forces performer and listener to pay careful mental attention to aspects of music ignored in the dominant uptown tradition, such as rhythm and metre, and how these vary.
- To pray. Much western religious music is expressed in a form of supplication or worship to a deity.
- To channel messages from the spirit world, as Zimbabwean mbira players are aiming to do when playing.
- To provide an unobtrusive background to other events, as Muzak seeks to do, and as much film music appears to be seeking to do.
- To pass the time.
These goals may overlap. For instance, music may entertain by providing an opportunity for musical thinking. A listener to music may gain intellectual pleasure by discerning and re-creating the thinking that the composer undertook when writing a piece, or that was undertaken by a performer engaged in an improvisation. Such pleasure at thinking, in my experience, is similar to the pleasures which people gain by doing crosswords or doing Sudoku puzzles; it may also be a form of mathmind.
