Expressing Music

Deryck Cooke believes that certain musical ideas are related to certain thoughts or physical ideas, so, a falling minor third is invariably associated with sadness.

Messiaen specifically associated certain keys and chords with certain colours, (synesthesia).

Stravinsky has said that (in paraphrase): Music can, essentially, express nothing other than itself.

The idea that music is about games and rules. Music does not inherently express anything, but is made to through the development and implementation of rules, (cf Brahms/Wagner musical transformations).

Music as sophisticated animal signals. Do birds produce 'music'. See Richard Dawkins - evidence that in some species birdsong produces chemical reactions in other birds. He compares this with Keats' Ode to a Nightingale.

Why do we Sing?

Think about it. Especially some popular music. The general culture - masculine, macho, tough. Why, then, does one of the central media of popular culture involve the use of singing especially in men? Even those who wish to maintain a 'cool' image sing. Of course, there are examples of singingless bands, but these represent a small part of the entertainment industry, and even there, the point tends to be dancing!

At the same time, classical singing (and, for that matter, dancing) is generally considered to be sad, wet and very uncool. Why?

Sandra Trehub of the University of Toronto

Developmental Psychology, 1989, 25

Thomas Geissman of the Tieraerzlich Hochschule in Hannover, Germany, writes in The Origins of Music.

Memes

See also Music and memes and Memetically sealed pop.

The concept of the Meme was introduced in Richard Dawkins' 1976 book, The Selfish Gene. He describes it there as:

The new soup is the soup of human culture. We need a name for the new replicator, a noun which conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. 'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene'. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if i abreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to 'memory' or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with 'cream'.

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propogate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on, it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain. As my colleague N.K.Humphrey neatly summed up an earlier draft of this chapter: '...memes should be regarded as living structures, not just metaphorically but technically. When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell. And this isn't just a way of talking - the meme for, say, 'belief in life after death' is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.'

I would have thought that quite a significant number of people would have, by now, heard of and understood Dawkins' concept, proving at least a part of the theory. What is fascinating to me, though, is the introduction of such a completely new way of looking at the musical idea. As N.K.Humphrey proposes in the above quotation, memes should be regarded as technically living subjects. This introduces the fascinating idea of the boundary between description as metaphor and as a technical description. We are usually quite clear about the distinction between these ideas, but here we have that unique point where what can easily be understood as a metaphor demands to be understood as a description of reality.

I would imagine that one of the most disturbing ramifications of meme theory is its effect on the idea of academic argument itself, or even the use of the valuation of academic ideas. If meme theory is correct, the survival or extinction of an idea depends on its ability to infect others. Just as in evolution itself, this does not necessarily mean that those creatures which we might like or consider to have inherent value are going to survive. Indeed, nor does it mean that those ideas which are 'best' (whatever that means) will survive. As we are aware, the easiest way to propagate ideas is to take the most commonly accepted, no matter how erroneous we feel they are and communicate them to others.

This is a new way of thinking about ideas. It is also, I hope to show, a good way, but at the outset the perspecitve it provides is deistinctly unsettling, even appalling. We can sum it up with a slogan:

A scholar is just a library's way of making another library

I don't know about you, but I'm not initially attracted by the idea of my brain as a sort of dung heap in whih th elarvae of other people's ides renew themselves, before sending out copies of themselves in an informational Diaspora. It does seem to rob my mind of its importance as both author and critic. Who's in charge, according to this vision - we or our memes?

There is, of course, no simple answer, and this fact is at the heart of the conrusions that surround the idea of a self. Human consciousness is to a very grat degree a product not just of natural selection, but of cultural evolution as well.... The first rule of memes, as it is for genes, is that replication is not necessarily for the good of anything; replicators flouris that are good at...replicating! - for whatever reason... The important point is that there is no necessary connetion between a meme's replicative power, its'fitness' form its point of view, and its contribution to our finness (by whatever standard we judge that).

Dennett, 1991, p202

Of course, just as in the natural world, there would be different memes with different purposes and not all memes will be competing over the same resources.

It is this boundary between our descriptions of reality and their relationship to metaphor that has become increasingly important to scientists and especially those psychologists involved in the understanding of consciousness. Moreover, the fact that we use so many metaphors in order to help us understand and appreciate complex and difficult ideas, and the theory that, as Steven Mithen has proposed in The Prehistory of Mind that may suggest that it is in our nature, indeed, it is indivisibly linked into who we are as creatures, that our thought patterns involve linking diverse areas and gaining advantage from these links. In this sense, our very idea of metaphor may be intimately linked with the way in which we perceive the world. Daniel Dennett has proposed that this is indeed the case. In his book Consciousness Explained he proposes that our consciousness is organised in a deliberately 'self-deceptive' way (if you'll excuse the apparent contradiction in terms). He sites the most common example of this self-deception is the concept of the Cartesian Theatre - the idea that there is 'someone' experiencing our experiences and coordinating that experience into a single integrated whole.

What about music expressing religious ideas and feelings...

Could one suggest that Stravinsky was wrong, because we know that some others do feel that music expresses something, or is Stravinsky simply saying that music expresses nothing without the 'interference' of a human interpreter, and that this interterpreter is solely responsible for the interpretation, that is that none of it rests in the music itself.

(Note also, however, the story about Stravinsky Violin Concerto.)

Stravinsky also said that (in paraphrase): the more rules there were to follow, the more restricted one is, the more free one is.

• Is there any truth in this?
• Examples of self-imposed rules...
• musical form?

If expression depends on other people understanding our 'dialect' does this mean that the 'best' expression is that which is able to express itself to most people? (Utilitarianism)

When we say we want to express something, what do we do? Do we conform to certain rules that we think will help us to express this, or do we invent rules according to the expression - or a combination of the two. If we wished to express something that appeared to be 'without rules', what would we do?

Chopin and Liszt 'studies' - these are, ostensibly, written with certain 'technical ideas' in mind and the music is constructed around these ideas, does this make it better or worse or neither? And if it is, as it presumably is, neither, what does this say about the use of 'rules'?

Different levels of form, different levels of rules.

Is the use of rules simply another form of 'restraint'?

Is it important that music expresses something? Can you give examples? Is music that expresses nothing other than itself necessarily bad?

Music expressing 'nothing other than itself'.

See also Memes and Music.