How Music Works Essay -- Music Musical Essays

How medication WorksThe way in which music affects the human organism is complex. Attempts to explain the relationship between the organized sound which we call music and our responses to it fall into two broad classes, heteronomist theories and autonomist theories, although the boundaries between the two may be by no means watertight. That music causes a response in humans is undeniable, only if does it do so by some form of signal appeal to our inner selves, our emotional sides, as the proponents of heteronomist theories argue, or, does it do so, as the autonomist argues, by virtue of some intrinsic property that it has within itself that is peculiar to music? Music cannot convey meaning or express emotion in the way that language conveys meaning or expresses emotion.Language employs signs which, to use Saussures terms, are arbitrary and differential, but signs which nevertheless enable us to identify their referent. Music, like language, consists of organized sounds, but unlik e language, those sounds have no referent. Eduard Hanslick wrote The Beautiful in Music in 1854 and whatsoever explanation and evaluation of his claim that the essence of music is sound and motion must have regard to historical context in determining the authors meaning. For Hanslick music meant principally the slavish and orchestral works of the 18th Century and first half of the 19th Century, the period we might loosely call classical- music whose primordial element was euphony (The beautiful in music, TAB, p.421). Hanslicks views cannot slow be extrapolated to the late 2Oth Century where even a period of silence (433 by John Cage) can claim to be music1, a composition which underlined, albeit provocatively, that silence, as healthful as s... ...cohol and grape juice and its mysteries are not revealed by distillation. The essence of music, certainly of great music, is more thanits ingredients, it requires the passion of the soul and the logic of the intellect - a combination of natures gifts and skilled human endeavour, an endeavour both of composer and of performer.BIBLIOGRAPHYFootnotes and other reference material1. John Cage 4 33 (Probably his most provocative piece is4 33 in which the performer, sitting in front of the piano,plays nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds) Groliers.2. Tess Knighton, Decca Notes 1989 to Ashkenazy & RoyalPhilharmonic Orchestra.The Oxford Companion to the Mind. OUP 1987.The Oxford Companion to music OUP 1980 reprint.Groliers Academic American Encyclopedia.Blackwell Companion to the Enlightenment. Yolton, Blackwell1991.