What is the music?

The scientific basis of what you hear, what moves you, and what changes your cheer up.

 

By Orlando Páez (professional musician, special to FACTORTIERRA)

 

 

According to the sterile definition that Google carried ut, it says: “Art of combining the sounds into a temporary sequence by observing the laws of harmony, melody, and rhythm, or to produce them with musical instruments.” | “A set of sucesive sounds combined according to this art, that in general produce an aesthetic or expressive effect, and result nice to the ear.”

 

On Wikipedia, it says the following: “The music (from Greek  μουσική [τέχνη] - mousikē [téchnē], ‘the art of the muses’, is, according to the traditional definition of the term, the art to organize sensitively and logically a coherent combination of sounds and silences by respecting the fundamental principles of melody, harmony, and rhythm, through the complexe intervention of psychological-motivational processes.”

 

“The concept of music has been evolving since its origin in Ancient Greece where met without distinction the poetry, the music, and the dance like a unitary art. Since many decades ago, the definition of what the music is and it’s not has become more complexe because highlighted composers, in the frame of diverse artistic frontline experiences, have made plays that, although they could consider musical, expand the definition of this art.”

 

“The music, like every artistic manifestation, is a cultural product with multiple purposes, among others, to break out an aesthetic experience in the listener, that to express feelings, emotions, circumstances, thoughts, or ideas, and everytime more to accomplish an important therapeutical function throughout the musictherapy.”

 

 

Now, I ask the public who reads me to forgive me – I currently have no dictionary or anything similar right here, but like everyone is in the digital era, I take like someone else such as sources. The same, I ask the questions where both definitions meet, and it’s curious to see how in the first definition it names the harmony like ranking its importance, then the melody, and then the rhythm.

 

I don’t know if the person who wrote it is a musician or if simply set it up so by alphabetical order. In the second definition it changes the place of melody instead of harmony, letting the rhythm like in third order again. But historically, what could be first?

 

Currently, what’s the most important? Or am I targeting rrandom realizing of it by taking importance to something that really circles all and I’m losing and I’m making to lose your time by making you to read this. As well, if you permit me, I want to follow writing and maybe understanding that and, who knows, we learn something new today.

 

Now, let’s screbble the definitions for a while and let’s ask what the rhythm is, what the harmony is, and what the melody is. Here I have some ideas. I wanted to rank everything just a Little but it’s difficult, so I base upon what it was first historically. It’s like that question – what was first, the egg or the chicken, and we let its ancestors aside – dinosaurs.

 

The rhythm, without doubts, is the most hard to explain because the the idea of rhythm is understandable when it is heard, when it is appreciated from a musician or from something that keeps a rythmical structure that can be an engine motor, even the sounds created by any animal. The rhythm is linked to every art, not only the music, and keeps a straight relation to the movement and the word. Also in the most philosophical sense of the life, so the rhythm is movement. Here another keyword for the musician helps us, for the life itself – beat.

 

Like every being has a pulse marked by muscles and electric waves existent in your/our heart, the beat is, no doubt, the measure for a good rhythm can be performed in the music. Then, where does the rhythm really born? In our heart that pumps us up the blood?

 

The rhythm is something very abstract but the beat save us the pulse as a measure, and it can be measured, the metric clarifies us many things, organizing all this into compasses to give it a sense beyond what our body and our brain can feel, and to understand that the salsa or the merengué have their strong tempos as well as Mozart’s 40^th Symphony, only that one is felt some beats more with the hips to below and the other one is felt from the hips to above.

 

 

But beyond of all the exposed, where does it born? We can imagine our more ancient ancestors who didn’t build yet the first city or domesticate the first crops, by taking some corpse’s bone, whether some relative or the lunch, and begin to percute it against a rock or a trunk, maybe another bone, and discovering such as sound can create fear or to alarm the bunch. Maybe it has to be with the singing, with their different sounds to say there is food or there is a predator around.

 

Like it happens in some actual primates or other animals, then, was the word first?Could have been the word born from the rhythm? We’ll never know that. Leave that for the anthropologists and the scholars. Them, letting the rythm as the basis of all the music, let’s enter into two still youngest lands but almost the same age old, overall the melody, although I have my doubts about that, then the harmony (at least what we use at the western).

 

The harmony, for who don’t know and what I learned at the university and the music conservatory, is the correct and sucesive link of overimposed accords in thirds, and depending on its status or position, they sound different to the fundamental state.

 

Well – not to go into theoretical details and get you bored, it was building, according to some History books I red upon a moment, since 13^th century, but I suspect that with an instrument like the aulos, it could say the Greeks were already creating music with a melody, rhythm, and overall harmony, but we are so foolish, sometimes I think, so positivistic, that we need the proofs to believe the tale like the Greeks had TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, or something like that, and they were leaving their legacy to us, or maybe other older civilizations.

 

What remains is the modern performance of such instrument and the western-centrist affirmation that the harmony born at some chapel in Europe after years of Gregorian chants and cantus firmus.

 

The melody is, no doubt, the closest one to the word, to the poetry, to the rhythm too. The melody is, no doubt, the source of musical beauty, its discourse, at least in the pure music, or the music that doesn’t use words as a mean to transmit the message, and I’m referring to the song of any kind.

 

The melody is the most intimate expression, linked to the harmony, to the accompaniment. Without the word in the middle, the melody is a chant that rises, and that the rhythm and the harmony accompany for highlighting, although the melody can sound alone without any accompaniment.

 

 

The Ode To Joy can be hummed, Beetthoven’s music from his 9^th Symphony, and proving that, or the melody of your national anthem without lyrics.

 

The power of the melody gives personality to the play. In the music with lyrics, the song in other words, the melody loses a little of that although the 20^th-century music built songs with an impeccable melody for good.

 

Then, what is the music? For me, it’s the construction of a new identity, even mystical, it could be said, from the pre-historic rhythm and its shamanist trance to the construction of the first civilizations and their melodies, until the Middle Age and the vertical building of its chapels and churchs, as well as the harmony and its evolution since the Gregorian chants until Bach and his revolutionary well-tempered key, since Mozart until the 20^th-century music to the pop music, the rock, the reggaeton (although we don’t like it).

 

The music is everything that the human being has expressed with instruments, pure music, as well as words (like the song no matter the genre) that leaves us a message, hypnothizes us, and even controls us mentally, rises us or lets us fall into the worst melancholia.

 

Without music, we would be a humankind sterile of any expression. No the poetry, neither the dance, could be fed, neither any art. Everything would be like that just-born cinema, black & White unsounded, although it has its grace, lack of all sense.