What's Music?

One of my favorite musical stories features Pythagoras, the great mathematician, philosopher and scientist of ancient Greece, and I recently told it to a group of parents during a curriculum night at the high school where I teach.

According to legend, Pythagoras was walking home one day about 2500 years ago when he passed a blacksmith shop and something piqued his curiosity: the sounds of multiple hammers simultaneously hitting metal, he noticed, were sometimes pleasing to the ear and sometimes not. Wondering what caused the tone combinations to be harmonious or discordant, he devised a series of experiments to find out. Changing the weights of the hammers and trying different combinations, he eventually discovered musical intervals – like the octave, fifth, and fourth – were the result of precise mathematical proportions, such as 2:1 and 3:2 (in this case, the proportional weight of the hammers). Pythagoras went on to invent the Monochord, a one-stringed instrument with adjustable tuning, to teach about musical intervals, and the rest is history. Western music theory had begun.

Pythagoras believed numbers, generally, and musical proportions in particular, were keys to understanding the structure of the universe; the concept “Music of the Spheres” dates from his time and refers to the belief that celestial bodies are spaced according to musical proportions and through their movements create heavenly sounds. For Pythagoras, music was synonymous with science, and it was relevant to the deepest questions of the day.

I like this story because it reminds us music is precise, measurable and scientific – something that’s often overlooked these days. It also calls attention to how much our understanding of music has evolved since 500 B.C.E. It’s still science, of course, but these days we have more diverse conceptions of what music actually is, variously regarding it as an art, craft, entertainment, social identity, commodity, therapy, healing medium, or transformational practice.

We all have relationships with music that rest in one or more of these domains. Most music educators I know, for example, emphasize developing craftsmanship and artistry and consider them gateways to music’s transformational powers. Students, on the other hand, often look to music first for entertainment value and for strengthening their social identity, while parents tend to have a more therapeutic view – music should be enriching and creative, as long as it’s fun. Some spiritual seekers take yet another view and practice devotional chanting as a means of transforming consciousness.

With all these possibilities, it’s hard to know exactly what people mean when they say, “I love music!” How are they connecting to it? How do you? And what should music education programs emphasize?