ABSTRACT
Introduction: What’s in a Name?
The “cliffhanger” of Chapter 3 is resolved in Chapter 4, where we take the time to explore the nature of music, and use the chapter to develop a working definition of music for the purposes of this book. Again we make the point that we do not define music to undertake a major battle with theorists and critics, but so that we can all agree on what we mean throughout this book when we use the word “music.”
Music Is Organized Sound
We begin our exploration by examining a definition of music proposed by Edgar Varèse, and its relation to my own 1976 definition of sound design for theatre.
Narrowing Our Definitions of Music
We argue that such definitions of music need to be narrowed a bit, and we turn to another definition proposed by Rodriguez. We introduce the concept of music as an art form, and differentiate between the properties of music and the properties of ideas as expressed in language, natural sound and visual images. This leads us to neuroscientist Ian Cross, who proposes a definition that separates distinct attributes of music from those of language and ideas.
Music Is Visual as Well as Audible
Next we argue why it is so important that our definition of music includes the music we experience in the visual realm as well as the music we experience audibly, especially the visual music of dance.
The Elements of Design
Having explored the various characteristics that we will include in our admittedly broad definition of music, we move on to describe the various elements we can manipulate to create music. These include the energy characteristic of the object producing the stimulus, such as color, mass (shape and form) and texture, the temporal characteristics related to how the energy characteristics unfold in time: rhythm (including tempo and meter), line (melody) and, finally, the spatial characteristics of both the stimulus and the spatial area that encloses it. We conclude this section by arguing for the importance of learning to manipulate these elements of music as part of the craft of learning to create sound scores.
A Proposed Definition of Music
The preceding discussion leads us to propose a working definition of music useful for the purposes of this book. We again suggest that there can be many definitions of a word, and that this one is necessary in order for the reader to understand what we mean by the concept of music as we proceed through our story.
