But, a sunset is just imagery until it is captured onto a canvas, from which then it becomes art, yes? There are things that are naturally beautiful, but I would call an oceanview landscape and a painting of such art.

I think there are natural sounds that are very harmonious to the ear, but to say that these are art by nature would be to assume all sounds are music. Perhaps such sounds are musical, because it's natural sounds that comprise the palette for any given artist. But, I firmly believe that it takes an artist to create art, because I will always think of an art as a type of human expression.

What do you think, Jake?

I guess i consider a proposed idea of the purpose of john cage's 4 33. The piece is 4 min and 33 sec of silence from the performer. The proposed idea is that the intentional silence causes an uneasiness on the listening audience. Their reactions and sound produced by them, from moving around in anticipation, or crumbling of papers, or even comments as far as 'lets get the show on the road' is actually the music and not the performers who are in silence.
In this example, the natural sounds from the audience are intentionally induced.
What if the intention was lost.
For example, in the situation of cage's piece, the environment for the audience was uneasy.
What if the environment was relaxed. like someone wrote a piece that had no preformers and was intended to be "performed" with no announcement. Then the same intention is still there but now the environment is one of any regular day attitude. Thus, the natural sounds could be interpreted as music.

Just to let you know, Im fishin!

Only because i believe music can exist without intentional sounds being produced.

this thread makes my head hurt.

Music is:
The art of arranging sounds in time so as to produce a continuous, unified, and evocative composition, as through melody, harmony, rhythm, and timbre.
Vocal or instrumental sounds possessing a degree of melody, harmony, or rhythm.

A musical composition.
The written or printed score for such a composition.
Such scores considered as a group: We keep our music in a stack near the piano.
A musical accompaniment.
A particular category or kind of music.
An aesthetically pleasing or harmonious sound or combination of sounds: the music of the wind in the pines.

thankyou dictionary.com

yea, it could be more than that, but as I'm sure the pro's who made the dictionary realized that if you analyze it anymore than an art, the definition becomes unique to the individual, an opinion if you will, therefore not a specific definition.

Case closed.

For that, Jake, we have to ask ourselves:

"Was Cage intending natural sounds to produce a musical effect?"

The answer, of course, is yes.

Consider an improvisation solo. To the composer, a 32 bar solo, is free game. There are boundaries, of course, but the produced effect will almost always be different. A soloist can take chord changes and evoke all kinds of ideas.

With Cage, I'd compare his ideas of using silence and natural noises to be much like a composer laying ground work for an improvised passage. Of course, Cage has preconcieved notions about the type of sounds that would occur during 4'33". Of course, composers can always be surprised by the performers. However, I would still say that Cage intentionally created this "music" by intentionally not writing any 'notes', making room for something of an "improvised passage" for the entire length.

Consider this also. In the performance of that work, who is the performer? Who is the audience? Here again, we come to the point of confusion that the roles of the audience and the performer can be manipulated in different ways.

Does that comparison to an improvised passage make sense? It's getting a little bit late, so my thoughts arne't as clear as they could be - if it doesn't make sense, I will edit this in the morning so that it is clearer.

Kevin,

The point that Jake made is that music is poorly defined by most dictionaries, and your excerpt from the internet is no exception.

The problem that exists with your definition is that it does not "define" music to a point that is not questionable.

Wouldn't the art of arranging sounds be something more along the lines of musical composition? I mean, by that definition, one would say that Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony isn't music. Instead, the process that Beethoven underwent to create the masterpiece is music. The process. Not even the 'sheet music' is music. Simply the process he underwent. THAT is how your definition defines music.

Secondly, the qualifications for something to be a composition could easily be questioned. There are compositions that are created, to invoke certain emotional moods, using the opposite of some of these "Requirements" (continuous, unified, etc.) One can even begin to further question the degree of these words as to their relevance.

Also, the thing that immediately came to mind was the neccessity for "melody". What about polyphonic music? There is no clear, concise melody, one could definitely argue.

And Jake's example of 4'33" certainly defies vocal or instrumental sounds possessing a degree of melody, harmony, or rhythm.

It also doesn't differentiate what is commonly accepted as music from what is commonly accepted as noise, while allowing the subjectivity associated with music to also exist as part of its definition.

But, thanks to dictionary.com just the same.

Define: to determine or identify the essential qualities or meaning of

The keyword is essential.

In the literature of music, there are numerous examples that go without many of those essential elements mentioned.

First, Evocative.
There is plenty of literature that is not evocative. For example, scales and excercises.

Second, Melody.
What about accompaniement figures. Does this mean that if accompaniements played without a melody are not music.

Third, Harmony.
What about melody only music. If one plays twinkle, twinkle without harmony, are you saying music is not made.

Finally, rhythm.
What about the previously mentioned piece of Cage. There is no rhythm defined. All is spontanious and unorganized on meter format.

If those are the essential elements that define music. Then a lot of currently respected literature is not music.

Thank you Merriam-Webster.

Case open?

Heh, now I can't let the three of you have all the fun now can I?

I'm going to throw a new view into this so prepare, and analyze, disagree, comment, or whatever you see fit.

I'm going to go out on a limb and tackle this in a sociological perspective. I think it might bring a new division of discussion to play.

I'm gonna pretty much say this: dealing with the two of these in my intro class last year, it taught me that studying these two things concerns things like the congenial relations of the overtones of a tone, as well as with the relations of the motifs among each other, the melodies among each other, and the sequences among each other. But also, it deals with the congenial relatinos between the overtones, motifs, and sequences.

In this context, the sociology of music not only corresponds to the system of the inner-human, but also to the outer human social relations, which it describes realistically by means of the mentioned parameters.

How far such a description of the sociology of music can go on the surface is demonstrated by the hierarchic structure of classical music, and on to the dictatorship of the masses in twelve-tone music, where all the tones of the scale and their parameters (pitch, duration, amplitude, etc.) have the same value, and in the technique of serial composing – the perfectioned twelve-tone music – in which all these parameters are applied like patterns manipulated by arithmetic operations.

In the field of inner hearing, but also based on the physiology of the outer musical instruments, there are fixed nature-given orders of the sound-space which, after their systematic investigation, lead us to infer a nature-given sociology of music, because they express themselves as firm congenial relations of the tones among each other, but also of sound-spaces among each other.

These natural, sociological orders of the overtone-spectrum are applied by the great musical artists in the macrocosm of their music – in the outer structure of their compositions – where they can easily be traced and identified by way of analysis.

In this context, it should be noted that an outer deviation from the nature-given inner order of music creates the impression of dissonance within the listener; a phenomenon that indicates a rift between the macrocosm and the microcosm of music, and which appears each time the logic of the macrocosm has deviated from the logic of the microcosm.

The fact that we recognize a dissonance so directly confirms that in our mental faculty of perception there already exists an awareness of harmony being the organizing principle in music, and that we have at our disposal a built-in, musical mental-spiritual capability for perceiving sociological order.

And there is my addition to all of this madness. Something to remember about music in general, it is one of the two cultural universals that all place in the world have in common. We make noise, Japan makes noise, everyone around the world does in some way or another. But man, that's enough of me sounding like a college student tonight sheesh, back to the parties.

So after all that is said.
What do you feel is the most concise way to say what elements are essential in music?
What is Music?