PhysicistDave

Jonathan wrote to Barbara: Jonathan, I have not seen anyone here claim that all rock, blues, and jazz music is bad or that a person who likes such music is a bad person. While I am defending some degree of objectivity in musical judgment and am praising classical music, I do like some rock tunes: one can enjoy both “Nessun Dorma” and the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” you know, while still recognizing that “Nessun Dorma” is more musically complex than “Yesterday” and required more skill to compose. I’m even fond of some Beach Boys’ tunes or Roger Miller’s “King of the Road,” and I love “Unchained Melody” (the golden oldie used as the theme for the movie “Ghost”). Similarly, like most people, I enjoy some of Gershwin or Scott Joplin. None of this makes me a bad person, and I certainly feel no need to defend my taste in these respects. (I must admit to a little sheepishness over the fact that I sort of like Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be An American,” even though I know it is musically simplistic and that the lyrics are bombastically chauvinistic. However, anyone who gets to Vegas really should see the Bellagio’s “water symphony” set to the Greenwood song -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgGdQRNLvxo . It’s really spectacular to see it live) Nonetheless, I do recognize that a Bach fugue is more complex than most of the pop tunes I like. And, I also do draw a distinction between pop tines with a broadly positive theme to them and those pop tunes that seem constructed merely to blot out thought or normal feelings or, worse, to excite twisted and perverse emotions. No, a person’s musical tastes do not provide a magical readout of the state of his soul, and it is foolish to restrict one’s musical experience to one single genre, even classical music. But some music really is more complex than most music, and some is rather simple-minded, and some music is aimed at exciting emotions that I would prefer not too see excited in myself or others. Dave Miller in Sacramento

Judith wrote: Judith, I am a theoretical physicist (Ph.D., Stanford) and have been interested in this subject for decades. While I am not an expert and am not up on all the latest research, I can tell you that this does seem to be a hot research topic nowadays. For example, a year or so ago, I saw a paper (sorry, I can’t remember the source) in which the researchers claimed to have shown that it was not so much the ratios between the fundamentals of different notes that gave a feeling of harmony but rather the relationships among the different harmonics of the two notes. We just bought a grand piano, and I’ve come to know some piano techs (fascinating people, at least if you think like a physicist!), and this seems to be something they take for granted. Incidentally, as a child when I learned about the “circle of fifths” I thought it was truly wonderful. One of the first discoveries in physics was the Pythagorean discovery that if you reduce the length of a string by a factor of 2/3 (holding the tension constant), the pitch goes up by precisely a perfect fifth. There is a complicated and fascinating interaction among math, physics, and music in terms of the different tuning methods (Pythagorean, equal temperament, etc.), as well as in the details of everything that affects the “timbre” of a tone (attack, sustain, etc.) Of course, people who do not think like a physicist (or a piano technician) may not find all this quite so fascinating, but this may be one of the reasons we physicists are so fascinated by superstring theory – the whole universe may just be fundamentals and harmonics! Judith also wrote: As someone said earlier on the thread, one’s response to music does seem to depend partly on experience: when I was in college glee club, the choir director warned us that we would initially dislike a new modernist classical piece that we were starting, but that we would come to enjoy it. He was correct: lots of dissonance, but we eventually “saw” how it worked, and I still like the piece. The most famous historical example of this is of course Stravisnsky’s “Rites of Spring.” On the other hand, it cannot just be a matter of what you are acquainted with. You wrote: I had a similar (though quieter) reaction when I first heard a Bach fugue: the polyphonic interweaving among the different lines was immediately fascinating to me. I have two suggestions as to the objective/subjective aspects of all this. First, some music is objectively more complex, in an ordered way, than other music. A Bach fugue is more complex than the Beatles’ music. Musicologists can go into some detail in explaining this complexity. On the hand, with a little googling, you can find explanations by musicologists as to why the Beatles’ use of chord progressions was more complex and innovative than most ’60s rock musicians, which is perhaps why even some of us who are not rock fans prefer some of the Beatles’ tunes to most of the rock that was produced in the ’60s. (To anyone not old enough to remember the ’60s personally, let me say that the “golden oldies” you may hear nowadays are not representative of ’60s rock: thankfully, much of the truly horrible examples of ’60s music has simply died.) Second, it seems to me that there is a large commonality among human beings in the basic emotions produced by a piece of music. While “training of the ear” does have some effect, I know of no one who hears Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” (as normally played) as a calm, soothing piece suitable to serve as a lullaby. I know of no one who finds Bach's “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” or Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” (as normally played) to be wild, orgiastic music that inflames one’s animal passions. Of course, people differ wildly in their detailed interpretations of such pieces: you may hear the “Ride” as inspiring and exciting or as pointlessly bombastic. You may find “Jesu” to be beautifully evocative of the highest aspirations of human beings or you may find it to be drearily saccharine. But, at some level, the “raw feelings” induced by these two pieces among different people seem to be broadly similar. One’s musical experience then does modulate the more complex feelings one gets from these pieces. On the other hand, I think a big part of the difference is that some people, simply, because of the kind of persons they are, wish to experience certain emotions and not experience other emotions. A Bach fugue gives me the sense of an ordered, complex but understandable, universe. When talking to people who dislike Bach, I find that they get a similar impression: but, unlike me, they do not like to have the sense that the universe is highly ordered in a complex but understandable fashion. Physics gives me the same feeling: again, many people dislike physics precisely because they feel it has a “rigid,” mechanical, impersonal, complexly ordered feel to it. Physics does indeed have such a feel: that is why I find physics and math beautiful. Similarly, I find “country/Western” music highly repulsive, not only because it is musically simplistic, but because I find that it gives me almost unbearable feelings of a universe that is “flat”: constrained, simple, lacking in breadth, order, or complexity. Talking to people who like C/W, while I know they would surely use more complimentary terms, I find that their basic reactions are somewhat similar. They simply like to have these emotional reactions: I don’t. After all, it is clear enough that small towns are, in many ways, more constraining, limited, etc. than big cities (personally, I hate small towns). While not all C/W fans live in small towns, the affinity between C/W and small towns and rural life is obvious (drive down the rural Central Valley of California, and it is hard to find many radio stations except for C/W – quite horrifying!). Of course, my evidence here is all anecdotal, and I’d love to see some cross-cultural research on all this. But, I suspect my basic thesis will hold up: the “raw feelings” and the “sense of simplicity vs. complexity” induced by a piece of music in different human beings tend to be broadly similar among different people, though they are significantly modulated by one’s musical education and experience. Whether or not one enjoys those “raw feelings” and “sense of simplicity vs. complexity” varies wildly, and depends on what kind of person you are. People who are really stupid or intellectually lazy probably have trouble “hearing” music with a high level of complexity. And, to steal a phrase from an author we have all read, one’s “sense of life” dramatically affects how one reacts to the raw feelings induced by C/W music vs. Pachelbel or Bach. So… am I saying that C/W fans are simpletons with a horrifying perspective on the universe? Well… of course, it is far too simplistic and grossly unfair to judge an entire human being simply by his taste in music. But, yeah, at the risk of insulting any C/W fans who read this (really – sorry! and I do know there must be some pieces in the genre that are actually good), yes, I do think there is a small grain of truth in that overly simplistic statement. Now, why do humans react so strongly to music in the first place and why is there some commonality in the “raw feelings” induced by a piece? A huge and still controversial question among scholars, so I should probably end this post here. Dave Miller in Sacramento