If you try to explain in your own words what music is, you will quickly find that it is not so simple. music is a type of art in which artistic images are embodied for their auditory perception using such expressive means as pitch, tempo, rhythm, timbre, dynamics and their ways of their mutual organization. It turns out that this is one of the most difficult philosophical questions that people have been struggling with for a very long time, offering more and more precise definitions. So, the most common definition is this: The broadest collection of music definitions can be found in Grove’s Musical Dictionary, the largest English-language reference music publication. Among other definitions, there are such:
- it is the art of organizing sounds in pitch and time;
- it is the art of harmonious and consonant combination of sequential (melody) and joint (harmony) sounds;
- it is the art of reproducing sound feelings and moods in order to evoke them in the listener;
- this is the art of a coordinated combination of sound components that affect a person’s emotional state;
- it is a specific kind of sound activity of intonational nature with strict frequency and temporal organization, aimed at transmitting images, thoughts and emotions.
It is noteworthy that many of the definitions of music may be incomplete, excluding some of its unusual forms or, conversely, including other forms of artistic expression that are not generally accepted in music. There are musical works consisting entirely of silence (for example, the play 4’33 ” by the American composer John Cage), or such avant-garde genres of electronic music as ambient, post-minimalism and their varieties – noise, glitch, drone, low-register music.
The meaning and influence of music
Music, being one of the forms of art, does not have obvious practical significance, since it mainly affects the intangible sphere of human existence. Music affects the psyche and feelings, imagination and fantasy, empathy. The complexity of describing the specifics of this impact leads us to the duality of musical content like Rema songs, that is, what music captures:
- personality, thoughts and emotions of the individual;
- the world around us, universal values.
Thus, linking these two areas, we get that music contains a reflection of the surrounding reality through the prism of human perception. It is worth noting that, unlike other classical forms of art, music most embodies the collective approach, since performance and interpretation play a significant role in it. So, the same work at the same time combines at least the contribution of the composer and performer. But there can be many performers, as well as their interpretations, arrangements and variations of this work.
Music reflects experiences and thoughts
The musical content is inextricably linked not only with the personality of the author (if the work is not folklore), but also with the ideological and aesthetic ideals of this era, country, people, social group. Moreover, despite the fact that music reflects experiences and thoughts, as we mentioned earlier, their musical embodiment is not equal to their real everyday manifestations. Music is life, feelings and ideals. It motivates each of us and in some cases makes us move forward to meet our goal. When listening to a piece of music, you can feel sorrow and joy, calm and annoyance, optimism and depression. Music teaches empathy, transfers to other eras, helps to open up emotionally, to distract from problems. Music heals , develops , improves, relaxes. All this characterizes music as a universal language that can unite people from different parts of the world for communication, intercultural exchange and creation.