My best friend and I are preparing to present at a conference and I realized it’s actually insane what we’re going to try and accomplish, and it could be a total trap that makes us look like fools. We’re presenting on quality wind band music. Which means if we don’t pick good pieces, we’ll look dumb. But also, I’m going up there and claiming to understand the philosophical ground that makes up good music, which is an atom bomb of a prerequisite.
It means I have to define the field of aesthetics AND have the taste to know a criteria-meeter when I hear it. And so I realized I accidentally waltzed into one of the biggest philosophical trenches I could’ve picked, all while not having much experience with aesthetics per se.
My definition of good music:
After a period of reflection I have decided how I’m going to characterize this perennial issue of what makes good music good. It’s not anything high-brow, but I think it’s enough to teach an important principle to both laypeople and composers of music.
My principle for goodness is this: “the music rewards multiple listens and continues to reveal itself.”
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Nice versus good:
The opposite of this is “candy music” or music that goes down in one pass, like a Disney song: something so overtly accessible that you are challenged in absolutely no way. That is called nice music, but it is not good music because your expectations are rarely challenged.
Our programs can have NICE music. But I’m going to reserve the term GOOD music for something that aspires to guiding us toward the strange possibilities of cognition in response to sound, if not toward sublimity.
And I’m thinking of this in a balanced way. Things that “push the limit” can aspire to goodness, but by lacking balance they fail to activate the mind/heart in a humane way. I’m thinking of music that mostly makes us respond in a thinking manner with very little sensory or feeling engagement. Thinking is not wholly cognition and the heart is not only feeling etc. ***
***Stuff about Jung in here
(Jung’s functions are a fabulous thing to apply to musical response. For example, we can ascertain an overall picture of a piece using nonlinear intuition. Feeling and thought are not diametrically opposed, and are actually two rational functions etc. Hugely important for describing aesthetic response).
I realize I’m avoiding the question of what is “bad” music here, because I’m not going on stage and saying “this composer wrote bad music.” because I’ve just started composing professionally, and I don’t have a lot of good music, or even nice music!
Further, I think the question of nice to good is more interesting than what is bad, because it helps us distinguish between pieces that are fine, and pieces that elevate us aesthetically. In this terrain we learn something about our cognition in response to stimuli.
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The Aesthetic Response: Cognitive Formations
Let me talk about how music can ignite the play of cognitive formations, because this is an important part of a good piece.
Use the art comparison: When you look at a Kandinsky, it does stuff to you. Formations appear in your mind, associations appear, things bounce off of one another. It might even introduce a sensation ranging from a blissful glow to a curious delight.
I’m not the only one concerned with these “formations” I speak of. Langer wrote about music being an unconsummated symbol of human activity and thought in her book Philosophy In a New Key:
Some music can aspire to these heights of aesthetically representing the nature or quality of thought/activity itself.
But Langer went further and said music is an unconsummated symbol, meaning it is only fully activated once we relate the parts of the music to other parts of it. After apprehending it we can start to understand it. And thus we have an inroad to my thesis that good music must reward multiple listens, because to comprehend music at all, or at the level of a symbol of any significance will require multiple listens at the outset.
I’m going to introduce a big caveat or qualifier here.***
***The big caveat or qualifier***
***What do we make of a piece that we literally only hear once? What about jazz? Isn’t jazz good music when we hear it once at a club?
So clearly other features of musical interest can let us interrogate the good music question, but for today my adumbration is just on the fact of some music being interesting over time.
Or we could say.. WOULD this music I heard just once reward multiple listens? And that could bypass the issue I’ve raised.
If you wanted you could bring up a whole scheme about my discussion privileging European music and the centering of whiteness or something. Go for it!***
Here is an intro to Langer’s forms:
The discursive form of a piece is how it shows up to us when we first hear it. We relate nearby materials to nearby materials and it discloses something cogent to us.
The presentation form of a piece is how it shows up to us when we regard it as a whole. In this form we can pick at it and think about it.
So I want to use this terminology as a means for cataloguing “good” music in terms of listening over time.
Aesthetic responses as they relate to forms of temporality:
Can a piece withstand further listens after we’ve conceived of the presentational form? If something goes down immediately in the discursive form, there’s a good chance it won’t last in the presentational form. A good piece is dynamically updated, not lessened, once we determine the presentational form.
(here I am assuming ascertaining the presentational form is a sort of cognitive act, not entirely a listening one).
I find it unacceptable to think that ONLY our very first listen of a piece is the discursive listening moment. That seems too flippant and marginalizes listening to live music. I think repeated listenings are still discursive, because we haven’t built the mental structure to hold the whole piece in mind yet.
So I don’t think the forms are two kinds of listening. They are relations of cognition…There is plenty more thinking I can do here.
Somewhere in this economy of hearing a piece, being challenged by it, and aggregating a presentational form about it that informs our discursive listening, is what I’m offering as a framework for what a good piece is doing when we both enjoy it and can think about it for extended periods of time. It rewards long-term listening, and repeatedly reveals more of itself to us through our forms of cognition.
What is a masterwork?
Going beyond this, we have those works we find we can do extended thinking about and be impressed by intricacies contained within and find delight in those. I presume these are the kinds of works we canonize and pass down through history. Perhaps this is the territory of the masterwork, because further time and delineation allow the piece to CONTINUE to be revealed to us beyond the time we listen, conceive of our listening, and listen again. Its formulations make it an edifice unto itself and a body of theory will accrue around it.
In sum:
There we go: my formal definition of music that is nice, good, or a masterwork. Note that the term good is not merely “good.” I am conceiving of good as something that produces aesthetic delight, interest, sublimity, and enriches our conception of what cognitive formations are and what being minded means.
And my best clue for a “good” work that makes being human what it is? How many times you can listen to it and still find interest.
Thanks for reading.
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