The question "Music as intellectual ?" may perhaps be discussed through an
exploration of what may be called, provisionally, "the music experience" (a
shorthand of "music as experience", which is too long). I write
"provisionally" because I am not entirely certain of its being a distinct type
of experience as ,say, the aesthetic experience is accepted to be. If I may be
allowed to use for a while the notion of a distinct 'music experience' as a
working hypothesis; then I could proceed to explore the various components of
such experience (components, not parts).
The preceding posts here provide a good insight about the possible
components. First and foremost the aesthetic experience, as emphasized in
previous posts: Although few may disagree, there is an overall consensus about
considering aesthetic experiences as intellectual; hence a positive answer to
"Music as Intellectual?". However you might agree that to consider a music
experience as solely aesthetic is to severely limit it, leaving out experiences
connected with the so-called 'banal' music. There is far more to our
experiencing of a certain piece of music than its aesthetic value. A piece of
music may have a profound emotional effect on some of us because of
associations with childhood memories (i.e. lullabies), or associations with a
dear one, or of our complex identification with a group or nation (as in dmb's
example of "God Save the Queen") or cause (like in protest and revolutionary
songs). The list is long and also heterogeneous; but if we were to include them
into a set (which I don't intend to) the only common property would be
"non-aesthetic experiences". For lack of a better name I'd call them 'musical
experiences involving strong positive affect'. As to how these fit into the
"Music as intellectual?" question, it depends on whether we think of emotions
as 'intellectual' or not… a question that I studiedly try to avoid.
Yet another group of experiences may be envisaged which have in common that
they entail body movements as reactions to the music (see also dmb's post).
Surely our ancestors, as far back as the Cro-Magnons, had intense music
experiences, long before the Greeks ever pondered about aesthetics. Music and
dance were later separated at some stage of our History, but experiencing a
certain piece of music resulting on more or less gracious movements of our body
continues strong, up to our very days (what R. Jourdain calls muscular
representation). At one end of the spectrum we have, in our culture, what we
see in discotheques, people absorbed in the music and moving with the beat or
rhythm ( clearly also a non-aesthetic experience) at the other end the body
twitching and hand movements that some of us find hard to repress in concert
halls, when carried away by the music.
I have not set up to 'classify' different kinds of music experiences,
only to exemplify experiences of different kinds which in an actual music
experience may constitute it as components, to a larger or lesser degree. Take
some of Bach's compositions for instance, for many of them what Arlo says
about mathematics may hold: "It may help to liken music to mathematics in this
particualr instance. Both are the arrangement of symbols towards some symbolic
representation. And both when done properly, open the door to an aesthetic
experience which trascends the particular symbols."
But the difference between that and the aesthetic experience of , say, solving
a differential equation, lies largely in the fact that we experience it also as
dance, as body movement (I'm thinking of some of his Partitas). There's no
doubt that the musical experience on listening to his Mathew's Passion will not
be the same for an atheist as for a devout Christian, the added component being
a religious experience.
As an end line, I'd venture to say that to consider the music
experience as an intellectual one, holds only for a very limited section of the
broad range of the multitude of our music experiences.
Jorge Goldfarb.
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