Stephanie G. Mathis Musical meaning can be tantalizing, and elusive. Music can touch us deeply and directly. It is tempting to refer to music as “a language”: The notion that music is a form of “language for the emotions” has been around for centuries, and today, some limited empirical experiments support it.
The majority of theoretical work on musical Semiotics views music as a flavor of discourse or another language.
This goes against an old notion that music is a law of nature. The medieval concept “Music of the Spheres” held that the movement and motion of celestial bodies, what we call astrophysics, was, at its core, musical. Planets moved in the sky according to principles such as harmony and resonance.
We music academics miss the days (in medieval university) when music was one of the core disciplines along with astronomy and geometry, and that we were given pride of place over the lesser (thus “trivial”) languages-based disciplines of logic, grammar, and rhetoric.
Highs and Lows
The language and concepts we use for music are influenced by physics. We often use the terms “high” or “low” pitch in music without realizing that they are metaphors.
The pitch of music is not affected by altitude: higher angles are produced by faster vibrations. We don’t refer to “fast” or “slow” in terms of pitch. Instead, we use these metaphors for other things.
The idea of musical altitude is a good one if you think about how the music’s energy levels are expressed. In the following excerpt from Puccini’s opera Tosca, we can hear a soprano maintain a top B-flat (at 2:40 in the recording). We know that this is a state of high energy, and it must be relaxed.
The pitch is infused with the energy needed to create it. In Tosca’s story, she literally encounters the force of gravity. But that’s another story.
String players, keyboardists, and guitarists all work equally hard to achieve high notes as they do for low ones.
This idea of fighting musical “gravity”, whether it is in a Paganini concerto or a Jimi Hendrix solo guitar, can be found everywhere. What goes up, in music as well as physics must come down.
It doesn’t just fall anywhere. The majority of musical systems have a fixed reference point – a particular pitch that acts as an attractor and draws the music to it.
In Western music, we call this the “[tonic](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_(music),” and most people, regardless of their level of formal musical training, can hear and sing the note to which the music is “pulling.” The idea that a pitch has a gravitational or magnetizing effect was the most significant characteristic of Western music from 1600 to 1900 and for much of the music afterward.
The idea of a focal point is a common feature of Western music. However, in other cultures, it can be even more potent, as shown in the following example of Classical Indian Music.
In 1908, Arnold Schoenberg, in Vienna, famously broke with this principle by composing the “atonal” concluding movement to his second string Quartet (see video below). This marked the beginning of a new and controversial era of music.
Albert Einstein, who lived in Switzerland three years before, had also shattered the notion of a fixed reference point in an article on electromagnetism, which later became known as the Special Theory of Relativity.
Question and Answer
To understand the principle of attraction or gravity in music, you must use metaphors from physics.
Other concepts can be used to bridge disciplines. The images of balance and symmetry, which are fundamental in musical structure and are more physical than linguistic in origin, are also important.
In classical music, perhaps the most common phrase structure is often described informally (and somewhat puzzlingly, to me) as “question and answer” – or more formally, as “antecedent-consequent” – two phrases that complement each other structurally, as in two words that make up just the opening eights seconds of Mozart’s Sonata in C KV545 (below).
Rhetoric is a factor in the way these two phrases echo. On a structural basis, however, the identity is almost mathematical.
Both phrases are balanced: Their (gentle, complementary) energies and their shapes are a mirror image of one another; they are two sides of the same equation.
Memory and time
The most significant parallels for me between music and physics are on a philosophical level.
The late musicologist Jonathan Kramer began his book The Time of Music by observing that young children use blocks and toys to understand the basic concepts of space. However, they sing and clap to learn about the concept of time.
Music can be used to accelerate, slow down, bend, and color our perception of time. In a concert or opera hall, we can listen to 90 people making thousands of sounds on wood, metal, and flesh for an hour, but still walk away feeling that we heard a single thing, a symphony or an opera.
The music allows us to hear the time in a patterned, organized way. These patterns help us predict the future. We listen to anticipate a melody or harmony that will make sense in our minds.
