WHAT IS MUSIC?
Music is a sound we put together in purposefully to create the specific atmosphere. Ideas about music are different and variable according to culture. Philosopher Lewis Rowell said that music is a cultural product which gives the richness to the culture. The development of music transpires in various ways. Most music is directly influenced by other music. Music has been called the chronological art, because musical information is performed and perceived through the passage of time and the ordering of sound.
Philosophy of music is the study of fundamental questions about the nature and value of music and our experience of it. The idea of music unfolding in time is a staple observation. Schopenhauer viewed tempo as the essence of music. Hegel understood music as sound which retains its temporality, but is liberated from the spatial and material. Music’s relationship with time can be thought of in two distinct yet interconnected ways. The first is real or ontological time, which consists of organized elements such as duration, rhythm, meter and tempo. Music’s second temporal component is psychological time, or the listener’s perception of music as it is played in real time.
1.1 DEFINITION OF MUSIC
The concept of music is shared by different people. The project of defining the term “music” is the attempt to make explicit the boundaries of this concept. Philosophers have been discussing the nature of music since the beginnings of philosophy in both the East and the West, but their work is not that helpful to the definitional project, because there are two related reason. First, the theory of music held by each of these philosophies is usually embedded in a much larger theory, so they are not ready to proceed with this project. The second reason, the philosophers have simply not been interested in this project. Music textbooks may be unanimous in defining music as sound sequences that present elements such as melody, harmony, and rhythm.
Levinson said the intuitive notion that music is organized sound. A possibility is to amend the definition by specifying that the organized sounds in question are produced for the purpose of aesthetic appreciation. The purpose of music as the enrichment experience achieved through an active engagement which includes activities like attentive listening, to dancing, and to marching to the music.
1.2 MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS
Tania defines Music is any event intentionally produced or organized to be heard and to have some basic musical features, such as pitch or rhythm. Discussions of musical expressiveness are likely to begin by distinguishing between expressing an emotion and being expressive of an emotion. Expressing an emotion means to outwardly manifest a felt emotional state. For instance, I feel sad and express my sadness by weeping. On the other hand, expressive of an emotion means to display the outward manifestations of an emotion. For example, an actor’s behavior on the stage over the course of a play is expressive of a number of emotions without the actor necessarily going through these emotions himself. Contemporary analytic philosophers are inclined to take music. The emotions expressed by the music may often be related to actual emotions, such as when listening to a sad song leads us to feel a sad emotional state.
1.3 ACCOUNTS OF MUSICAL EXPRESSIVENESS
1.3.1 Arousal Theory
This theoretic explains the music’s expressiveness of an emotion in terms of the music’s disposition to arouse such an emotional state in a listener. Arousal theory fails to explain why we would listen to music that is expressive of fear or other negative state if these expressive properties were to be analyzed as the music’s disposition to arouse similar emotional states in us.
1.3.2 Resemblance Theory
"Resemblance theory" holds that the music’s expressive properties are due to their resemblance to human expressive behavior. It was proposed by Stephen Davies and Peter ivy. Expressive of emotions is found in the resemblance between melodic contour and human emotional prosody. In other words, music expressive of sadness sounds like human speech when we are in the grip of sadness, so it acquires its expressive character.
According to ivy, resemblance is not the only source of musical expressiveness. He claims that it is impossible to make sense of the expressive character of some elements of the Western musical tradition on the grounds of their resemblance to human expressive behavior. Davies concedes that music may express Platonic attitudes, that is, emotional states that require an object, such as admiration, pride, or hope.
1.3.3 Persona Theory
Levinson has defended the view that musical expressiveness is essentially the expression of a fictional musical agent, or “persona.” His assumption is that expressiveness can make sense only if it is reduced to some kind of expression.
1.3.4 Other Accounts
Robinson is willing to make concessions to the discredited expression theory of expressiveness, according to which a work of art’s expressive properties are due to its creator’s emotional state. Sam Trivet in 2017 defended an imagination account of musical expressiveness. The basic way we use imagination in relation to music is to imagine the music itself as a sentient being expressing its emotional states. For instance, we could imagine that the music is the expression of emotions of an indeterminate persona.
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