Some thoughts on music

Teleonomic and autotelic elements

Music is the art of patterns through time. The original kinds of elements in which these patterns emerge into perception can be divided into two categories: teleonomic (vital, biologically-indexed phenomena) and autotelic (non-indexed phenomena, autophenomena).^[1] Teleonomy is a concept coined in the realm of evolutionary biology that refers to the apparent goal (telos) directed functions and processes of living organisms (in contraposition to teleology, which refers to a goal-directedness planned by a deciding, intentional agent); in this text we will use it to refer to all patterns whose meaning emerges from biologically (evolutionarily) coded phenomena. Some examples of these include the notion of a steady pulse, and the similarity (mimesis) between high screeching sounds and human weeping. The other kind might be called autotelic (having a telos of its own, not related to any particular external influence), in which we include most of the harmonic significance of music, and many melodic and formal considerations too (though the most primordial elements of form —repetition and variation— are abstractions from pure basic pattern-recognition, a most teleonomic function).

Let us think about the different social uses of music in the domains of the sacred and the profane: sacred music and bacchanalian music. We note (and generealise) that sacred music often emphasises the autotelic aspects of music, and that Bacchic music most often is based purely on the teleonomic aspects of music (because the social rôle of it is very biologically crude).

The problem of music and mimesis

Music is, in a very specific sense, the most abstract artistic domain. All other artistic domains can be shown to have an origin in the act of mimesis (imitation, representation). But music is the artistic domain in which it is most difficult to draw a direct one-to-one correspondence between some object in the artistic-domain-space (in this case, the musical space) and some object or experience in the actual world. We do, however, hear descriptions of music (even pure instrumental music, with no concrete literary explicit contents) as "sad" or "happy", and we know perfectly well what are those analogies pointing to; it has to be noted that a "happy" piece of music is very different in the analogy-to-the-actual-world-aspect from a "happy" poem, the same for a "sad" music and a "sad" poem. There is, of course, a lot on the cultural influences of the perception of music (and music, being, as it is, the most abstract of the arts, is the most vulnerable to widest differences of perception by culturally different perceivers). This does not, though, diminish the importance of the semantic problem, because some meaning is being perceived. We could refer to the literary realm, in which, if one does not know a language in which a poem is written, will hardly be able to get the meaning that a native gets, this is because we ignore the syntactic-semantic system (language) in which the poem is written. But this syntax-semantics is, ultimately, connected in a clear (most often arbitrary) way to the actual world, and the perception of the poem is related to the actual world through the language's syntax. In the case of music, the matter is much more convoluted, and we find no clear way to connect the meaning of music back to the material world.

Music and literature

We often hear, as a description of literature, the adjective musical being used. The elements of rhyme, metre, alliteration, etc.; all of them are on what we could call the autotelic side of literature, and have nothing to do with a semantics of correspondence to the actual world. We see here that, though in an unconscious way, we recognise the abstractness of music as a distinctly musical characteristic.

Music and dance

Dance is a spacial music of movement. Evolutionarily (think about mating rituals present in a number of species) we can see why dance has been very concerned with the biologically-indexed (and it stills fulfils that primary rôle today) and the signalling of the dancer's general fitness as a potential mate. But dance as an art (as a domain for general creative exploration) concerns itself also with the abstract movement of bodies through space and time. In this sense, it is analogous to music.

What is music?

As we have discussed, music seems to be quite peculiar. An equivalent —almost symmetrical— point to the aforementioned problem of music and mimesis is that music is, ordinarily, not a mimesis of sounds from the actual world. This is a perogrullada, but it begs the question: what is, then, music? And why (and how) is it expressed by sound in time? It is easy to see why painting has to be visual, why dancing has to be spacial (our bodies occupy physical space). But what music does does not, ordinarily, seem very connected to what sound means in day-to-day life. This is where I venture, not without hesitation, my most daring conclusion: Music^[2] is the art of the abstract patterns (in the broadest possible sense of the word). Music, therefore, is not inherently a sound or time phenomenon, but our perceptive characteristics as humans lend themselves so that the combination of the time and sound domains make possible the intelligibility of the abstract, some glimpse of the True. If we had access to more abstract qualia-domains (apart from sound we can also mention colour; smell, touch, taste, are too teleonomic in comparison) we would be able to feel different kinds of Music.