MUSIC

the art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony. Other major components of musical sound include tone, timbre (tone colour), and texture (instrumentation). Although music involves sounds of all kinds and although there are no sounds that can be described as inherently unmusical, musicians in each culture have tended to restrict the range of sounds that they will admit. Music is treated in a number of articles. For the history of the European music subject, see music, history of. The music of other regions is covered in the music sections of various regional arts articles, including African arts; Native American arts; Central Asian arts; East Asian arts; Islamic arts; Oceanic arts; South Asian arts; and Southeast Asian arts. Folk music is covered within folk art. Other aspects of music are treated in counterpoint; harmony, instrumentation, mode, musical criticism, musical composition, musical performance, music recording, musical sound, notation, rhythm, scale, and tuning and temperament. See also such articles as blues, chamber music, choral music, concerto, electronic music, fugue, jazz, opera, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, symphony, sonata, theatre music, and vocal music. Musical instruments are treated in electronic instrument, keyboard instrument, percussion instrument, stringed instrument, and wind instrument, as well as in separate articles on individual instruments, such as clarinet, drum, guitar, piano, and theremin. art concerned with combining vocal or instrumental sounds for beauty of form or emotional expression, usually according to cultural standards of rhythm, melody, and, in most Western music, harmony. Both the simple folk song and the complex electronic composition belong to the same activity, music. Both are humanly engineered; both are conceptual and auditory, and these factors have been present in music of all styles and in all periods of history, Eastern and Western. Music is an art that, in one guise or another, permeates every human society. Modern music is heard in a bewildering profusion of styles, many of them contemporary, others engendered in past eras. Music is a protean art; it lends itself easily to alliances with words, as in song, and with physical movement, as in dance. Throughout history, music has been an important adjunct to ritual and drama and has been credited with the capacity to reflect and influence human emotion. Popular culture has consistently exploited these possibilities, most conspicuously today by means of radio, film, television, and the musical theatre. The implications of the uses of music in psychotherapy, geriatrics, and advertising testify to a faith in its power to affect human behaviour. Publications and recordings have effectively internationalized music in its most significant, as well as its most trivial, manifestations. Beyond all this, the teaching of music in primary and secondary schools has now attained virtually worldwide acceptance. But the prevalence of music is nothing new, and its human importance has often been acknowledged. What seems curious is that, despite the universality of the art, no one until recent times has argued for its necessity. The ancient Greek philosopher Democritus explicitly denied any fundamental need for music: For it was not necessity that separated it off, but it arose from the existing superfluity. The view that music and the other arts are mere graces is still widespread, although the growth of psychological understanding of play and other symbolic activities has begun to weaken this tenacious belief. Additional reading Modern theories of musical meaning Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1883; Eng. trans., The World as Will and Idea, 1961); and Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, trans. by Clifton P. Fadiman in The Philosophy of Nietzsche (1954), are two important expositions. Eduard Hanslick, Vom musikalisch Schnen (1854; Eng. trans., The Beautiful in Music, 1957), remains the best single exposition of the formalist (or nonreferentialist) position in musical aesthetics. Edmund Gurney, The Power of Sound (1880, reprinted 1966), maintains a similar point of view but with considerably greater amplitude and subtlety. For background of the contemporary symbolist views of musical meaning, see Alfred North Whitehead, Symbolism (1959); Susanne K. Langer, On Significance in Music, in Philosophy in a New Key, 2nd ed. (1951), and Feeling and Form (1953). Leonard B. Meyer has made an important contribution to the aesthetics of music. His interest in the relevance of information theory to music has been evidenced in two articles: Meaning in Music and Information Theory, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 14:412424 (1957), and Some Remarks on Value and Greatness in Music, ibid., 17:486500 (1959), reprinted in his Music, The Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture (1967). John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934, reprinted 1959); and Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (1947; Eng. trans., Truth and Symbol, 1959), have given reinforcement to organic and symbolic theses, respectively. Peter Le Huray and James Day (eds.), Music and Aesthetics in the Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth Centuries (1981), expounds theories of musical aesthetics from the pre- and early-Romantic period. Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell (1981), is a study of the emotional expressivity of music. Performance practice, styles, and musical forms The best historical accounts of musical forms, styles, and performance practice are to be found in Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music (1960); Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (1940), and Music in the Renaissance, rev. ed. (1959); Manfred F. Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (1947); Alfred Einstein, Music in the Romantic Era (1947); and William W. Austin, Music in the 20th Century, from Debussy to Stravinsky (1966). Sir Donald Francis Tovey, The Forms of Music (1956), contains informative and engaging short pieces. Robert Schumann, On Music and Musicians, ed. by Konrad Wolff (Eng. trans. 1947), is an example of the work by a 19th-century precursor of the phenomenon of the present-day composer-authors who have contributed to aesthetic theory by elucidating their own works and commentating on other composers and on the scene in general. See also Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons (1947); Paul Hindemith, A Composer's World (1952); Aaron Copland, Music and Imagination (1952). Discussion of music and film may be found in Lewis Jacobs (ed.), The Emergence of Film Art (1969). Twelve-tone technique and varieties of serialism deriving from it are treated in Arnold Schoenberg, Style and Idea (1950); and Ren Leibowitz, Schoenberg, et son cole (1947; Eng. trans., Schoenberg and His School, 1949). Short pieces on electronic music appear often in periodical literature. Harold C. Schonberg, Facing the Music (1981), is a collection of performance-oriented articles. See also Carol MacClintock (ed.), Readings in the History of Music in Performance (1979).