--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 020
+title: On the difficulty of discussing musical works
+date: May 17, 2014
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: asphalt
+---
+
+Back in the day when I was writing in Romanian, and this is something of which
+the post-spyked-bricks-in-the-wall readers might be completely unaware of,
+I was, like any melomaniac, discussing music on the blog. [Everything][1] from
+[jazz][2] to [progressive rock][3] had a place there, and for a while I had
+felt that I just *had* to put my musical experiences into words.
+Uncoincidentally, my music intake was gigantic for something like six years in
+a row, so maintaining some sort of journal on the matter was actually quite
+inspired, and somehow inspiring.
+
+But I must admit that at some point the whole thing started bothering me.
+
+In the last couple of years I started listening to fewer musical works, partly
+due to a lack of the capacity to focus derived from my increasingly busy
+schedule, and partly due to my desire to grasp the depth of the music I was
+consuming. As you might know, progressive rock and jazz aren't particularly
+easy genres, and I've started complementing them with classical works, as well
+as whatever new "releases" I found interesting[^1].
+
+This being said, I found (and still do) that keeping a musical journal
+continues to make sense. However, my latest journal entries failed to cover
+the actual depth of the music I'm involving myself with. Admittedly, this
+might partly account for my lack of formal musical background, although I have
+composed music in the past and I'm able to understand the underlying
+complexity of various musical works. What is more confusing is that while
+looking into "more professional" writings such as those supposedly made by
+[Prog Archives'][4] reviewers, I tend to see the same shallow approach to
+music analysis that plagues my own. And this is what made it even *more*
+bothersome.
+
+I therefore postulate that discussing music is inherently hard, as hard as
+discussing love or beauty, or virtues or good, or even existence itself.
+Indeed, we seldom think of the nature of love while we become attached to
+someone, yet this doesn't make it any less dumbfounding; and that is, after
+all, what makes love so hard to put into words. The same goes for music.
+
+From a purely mechanical point of view, music is but a sequence of sound waves
+which occur in such a way that they are processed by our auditory system to be
+interpreted as "likeable". This definition may be considered by some to be too
+broad, since then I would consider mere words spoken by a woman to be music;
+this is, in fact, not too far from the truth, given the expression "music to
+my ears". The hard fact is that humans grow to develop an affinity for certain
+sound patterns, with the possibility of cultural relativism: what I find to be
+music, you might find to be noise and vice-versa.
+
+But then we could approach music from an abstract point of view; it, as many
+other (physical or otherwise) phenomena occuring in nature, can be described in
+mathematical terms, or, to quote Leibniz:
+
+> The pleasure we obtain from music comes from counting, but counting
+> unconsciously. Music is nothing but unconscious arithmetic.
+
+Any person with basic musical training can confirm this: scales, modes and the
+circle of fifths are all part of a mathematical framework used to make sense
+of how musical "notes" happen, and all this without even discussing rhythm.
+Furthermore, musical notation is a purely formal construct, not unlike
+standard mathematical notation, which leads us to the possibility of
+describing music as algebra. It is very much a miracle, if you will, and [one
+that matters][5].
+
+There is, however, a third point of view, which the reader might have failed
+to consider, but which I notice daily in the spring when I open my window:
+music is a language, or rather a set of languages considered by many musicians
+to be universal[^2], despite the aforementioned cultural relativism. We often
+tell ourselves that birds "sing" when in fact they communicate, but it's not
+so often that we tell ourselves that we communicate through music, when we in
+fact do precisely that. The proof is trivial: music has an alphabet and, oh,
+so many grammars which send some kind of message, or tell a story, like B.B.
+King likes to say; one which we understand only subconsciously.
+
+And therein lies the difficulty: describing a song's deep(ly) musical message
+would require us to translate that message into English or some other human
+language, and that is, I argue, impossible, since we don't, and can't, because
+we have no means to understand deep(ly) musical messages in terms of human
+language.
+
+Let's take Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" as an example. The suite
+gives a detailed musical account of an exhibition of Viktor Hartmann's
+paintings, being split into sections accordingly. Now, our greatest luck as
+listeners is that the author has annotated his work, while the [extra
+commentary][6] describes the meaning of each movement. On the other hand, if
+we were to give the raw suite to a child without providing them with any extra
+information about the song[^3], their own unadulterated interpretation would
+be nothing close to that.
+
+Generalizing, I am arguing that the author's subjective interpretation of
+a musical piece has, in fact, no relationship whatsoever with the public's
+interpretation, or, more exactly, with the billions possible interpretations.
+Thus we can't naïvely assume that there is in fact a one-to-one mapping
+between the language of a song and human language, let alone a mapping between
+the language(s) of many songs and the latter. In fact we can't assume that
+there is any mapping at all.
+
+Having said that, I find it extremely difficult to write about my own musical
+experiences anymore, although they are now as rich as ever, if not richer.
+Granted, I'm not sure they were ever useful to anyone except myself, but all
+I can do is hope that I'll get to explore some new (or old!) music in writing
+in the future.
+
+[^1]: Looking at things in perspective, I observe that "albums" are a stupid
+format to release to the public. One would have thought that Internet would
+free us from the need to have $x$ songs in $n$ minutes, but alas, old habits
+die hard.
+
+[^2]: Not unlike mathematics, by the way.
+
+[^3]: This is bound to happen when you're in a bar or a pub and you hear "that
+song" and then you have no idea how to find it afterwards. If it weren't for
+Shazam and whatnot...
+
+[1]: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/bricks/tag/music/
+[2]: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/bricks/tag/jazz/
+[3]: http://lucian.mogosanu.ro/bricks/tag/progressive-rock/
+[4]: http://www.progarchives.com/
+[5]: /posts/y00/01d-on-numbers-structure-and-induction.html
+[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_at_an_Exhibition#Movements
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