How to: Taste Your Music

It is extremely unlikely that you’ve gone even a single day of your life without hearing any music whatsoever; you’re almost as likely to encounter the art form as air itself. Though it’s not necessary to sustain life in the way that food is, your soul would likely starve in some way without a tune carrying it through the day. But not all interactions are equal, just as not all conversations carry the same weight, just as not all meals bear the same impact. The reason there exists such ‘elitism’ when it comes to an art so ubiquitous is because people have massively different ‘uses’ for music and it plays differing roles in each of our lives.

It might sound like the most pretentious statement you’ve heard in a while, but it’s true: there’s a difference between hearing something and listening. If you pour your heart out to someone, you don’t expect them to simply acknowledge what you’ve said but actually respond with their unique perspective relative to what you shared. This is no different than the way in which you should engage with music: an artist is attempting to have a conversation with you via their work, it would be respectful to take their hand and actively interact.

Take Ludwig van Beethoven for example: it would be extremely hard to argue that he didn’t have both an active interest and ear for music, even if he was mostly deaf. Contrast this with the role that music might have in an average person’s life: maybe they click ‘shuffle’ on a Spotify playlist (that they didn’t personally curate) simply so they have something to occupy their thoughts with while they cook dinner. Both approaches are completely fine, subjectively.

But even that cook would tell you that when preparing food: an analytical and comparative eye cast toward any interpretive medium is vital. The ingredients must be separately collected, assembled in a particular order, scrutinized by external forces, and allowed to take on a final form. That final form can then be consumed, but only bite-by-bite, chewing it into pieces that allow your tongue to taste each segment. You would never dream of grabbing all of your ingredients, dumping them down your throat, and expecting to gain any taste or nutrition whatsoever. In fact, you’d probably get sick. But this is exactly the habit you can fall into when listening to even your favorite music; if you do not take the tiniest bit of effort to learn what you enjoy and why, you will deny yourself the means to find equal or even greater joys in the future. Learn to savor the flavor.

Imagine presenting Beethoven and our ‘average person’ with a piece of music that neither are familiar with and asking for their thoughts. Both will have valuable instinctive notes, stemming from their unique preferences and backgrounds. This is the beauty in how subjective music can be; it doesn’t matter the degree of expertise or qualification that each person might have, all viewpoints are valid. There is nothing inherently wrong with listening to music passively (anyone who tells you otherwise is projecting an insecurity; tell that that Jesse said, “Go back to /mu/ or RYM”).

But there are degrees to validity. The practice of absorbing music objectively has been heavily crippled by a mostly-postmodern viewpoint that art can only be subjective (as in: subject to the specific tastes of a given culture at a given time). If we were to take Beethoven and our hypothetical aveRage person and ask them why they prefer or dislike a piece of music, it is extremely likely that the composer could not only pinpoint their specific thoughts but also differentiate the subjective from the objective, whereas the cook would likely be unable to articulate all but the most surface level observations of both the music and therefore themself as well.

I don’t have the authority to outright condemn the entire postmodern movement (not all dreams come true) but even when limited to the scope of music it has certainly undermined both the creative process and listener engagement in a substantial way. You have likely had some number of disagreements with others over the artistic merit of a specific song, album, or artist and I would wager that in most of these cases neither party managed to successfully convince the other to reconsider their stance, as music is seen as some degree of too subjective to withstand more than a few concrete observations.

The reason that ‘gatekeepers’ and elitists exist in music, perhaps to a degree more-so than in other art forms, is because people indulge in it to wildly varying degrees and therefore measure value with completely inequivalent metrics.

One of my dear friends owns record store in Beijing. He flies to Japan every few weeks to buy hundreds of records for his shop, but he takes the time to listen to the entirety of every album that he buys (like an insane person) so that he can better assist customers who aren’t quite sure what they want. I know a musician who spent their all of their childhood, college years, and now adult life playing for orchestras all around the world. I have a third friend who has no real ambition in life and is content to play music in the background just so the air around them isn’t so empty.

There are very few tangible similarities between these three people. They have very different ages, educations, life experiences, work ethics, perspectives, backgrounds, and uses for music. But what do they have in common? All three have a specific passion for the music of Metallica. Each could give you enthusiastic and elaborate answer, equal in spirit, if you asked why they had such affinity for the heavy metal band, but the details would carry different weight.

My ambitionless friend would have no shortage of subjective and highly-individualized words of praise for how the music makes them feel. The orchestral musician could easily break down their affinity for the band’s compositional tendencies. The record store owner could give you broad and relevant analysis of the cultural significance that the music played in not just their life but world history.

If I’m trying to bond and grow closer with the friend with a passive interest in music, then their assessment is a great vehicle for that, but any notes on the music itself are almost completely irrelevant: we can’t have congruent reactions if our backgrounds or lives differ too much. However, the orchestral musician and record store owner are both able to provide me with tangible details that I can then use to contextualize the art for myself. I can bring a degree of objectivity to support my subjective findings.

Postmodernism has not yet decided its definitive stance on authorial intent but I contend that art free of context isn’t art at all (note: context is not synonymous with purpose, as we will see later). I believe that music has been backed into an exclusively-subjective corner in the last century, to the detriment of the listener’s enjoyment and understanding of the music and, therefore, themselves.

So today we are going to learn how to listen to music. You may still put it on in the background while you cook, you may still devote your life to playing it, you may still collect as much of it as you can. But from this day forward you will have more tools in your toolbox to contextualize music relative to its objective value and subjective value, allowing you to experience deeper and more profound emotional resonance when engaging with the art form.

In short: you will learn to love music more than you already do*

[*for any self-or-scholastically-appointed ‘music experts’: this guide is not for you. This is a promethean effort to enlighten people who care about music infinitely less than you. I listen to just as much Xenakis as you do; please spare me your, “Uh, AKCHUALY, chromatic harmony cannot even be DISCUSSED without mentioning the diatonic scale.” We’re learning addition and subtraction here, leave your protractor at home. This is nothing more than an even more-rudimentary version of Britten’s Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra]

A Quick Note on Objectivity vs Subjectivity

Any creation which fits the description of “the conscious manipulation of sound” is technically music. I would argue that the song of a bird is music, as it is a sentient being that is emitting a controlled sound, whereas the crash of a waterfall is not music. The jury is still out on wind chimes.

If a toddler sits on a piano bench and slams their little fists onto the keys, simply delighted that their actions have audible repercussions, I would contend that the result is music. However, I would argue that it is objectively ‘not-good’ music, as there is too little intent present relative to the final result. The child doesn’t understand what they’re trying to convey (if anything), is taking no steps to accurately convey their artistic statement, and likely have no regard for the listener’s interpretation of their work.

This is where I would like to introduce you to an artistic ethos that I am a devout believer in: Sturgeon’s Law. American science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon once eloquently remarked,

“Ninety percent of everything is crap”

-and they named a ‘law’ after him. Author Rudyard Kipling had a more forgiving adage,

“Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad.”

I believe in Sturgeon’s Law to such an extent that I apply it to the fabric of space and time. I think that ninety percent of our lives are ‘crap,’ when compared to the sweetness of the best ten precent. I think that ninety percent of all art is terrible. I’d even contend that Sturgeon’s Law is infinitely recursive. Maybe only ten percent of all art is ‘good,’ but then only ten percent of that is ‘really good’, and only ten percent of that is ‘great,’ and so on. Even as an eternal optimist with a cheery disposition: just as elements require a specific number of electrons, neutrons, and protons, I believe the existence of something all but guarantees that only ten percent is ‘not crap.’

So it might be liberating for you to consider that, in regards to objectivity and subjectivity, ninety percent of the music you’ve ever heard was disposable, ninety percent of the music you like is probably not actually all that good, and even that ninety percent of the music that is ‘good’ still probably isn’t really all that good. Once you can understand this principle, you can then search for what might be objectively valuable in an artistic work as it will become very easy to divorce your subjective preferences from the true context that the work sits in. Art is just as disposable as it isn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s entirely subjective.

I don’t believe in ‘guilty pleasures,’ I enjoy plenty of ‘objectively bad’ music. Maybe I have some kind of nostalgic or entirely-emotional reaction to a piece of music from my youth (hell yeah; I listen to this every day), but behaving as if this is an ‘authentic love’ simply because it is individualistically-true is an irrational mindset that is actually incredibly ignorant and close-minded. To limit your musical preferences to simply what ‘moves’ you in a subjective way is a sure-fire mindset to pointlessly eliminate ninety-nine-percent of all the music that’s ever been created from your palate. If music is a truly superfluous and unnecessary aspect of your life, then maybe you’re not bothered by this unconscious ignorance, but I’m not sure I’ve met someone who actually feels that way.

For most of my high school and college years, I listened to between one and three ‘new’ albums every single day (‘new’ as in I hadn’t heard it before). I got into the habit of writing down my thoughts, no matter how simple or obvious, for each listening experience, as I wanted to understand ‘why’ I liked something. It’s tremendously reckless to barrel through life without examining your emotional avenues to the world around you. But one doesn’t need to engage with a lot of records to learn how to ‘actually listen’ to music, you only need to be aware of the tools at your disposal for quickly and acutely understanding the music you may be listening to.

This is not an overly-cerebral or intellectual endeavor, it’s no different than analyzing anything else in your life. Why do you like the foods you like? Why did you pick the career you did? What’s your favorite color? Why is that person your friend? Why do you love the person you love? Imagine answering any of those inquiries with, “I dunno, it just is, I like the way it makes me feel.” Yes, I too have unknowable and unclear impulses, but such conclusions never really inspire confidence, right?

“I’m always looking for sounds that are pleasing at the time. The sound of a helicopter is really annoying until you’re drowning, and it’s there to rescue you.

Then it sounds like music.”

-Tom Waits

The Six Components of Music

Despite all the history and complexity attached to the medium, there are only six ‘noble gases’ of music, of which all other components spawn from. I make no claim to be the utmost authority on the subject, but any aspect of the art form that you can think of likely cannot stand apart nor remain exempt from its two central pillars:

A. The Three Contexts

B. The Three Elements

A piece of music belongs to one of the three contexts, this must be taken into account before analyzing the combination of the three elements inherent within it. I assure you, it’s very simple to understand. Imagine three paths before you: a piece often picks a single path to travel down. Now imagine three gems in the dirt of that path: their specific colors and luster are what you need to examine, but can’t do so until you determine which path they’re scattered along. The characteristics of these gems, objective in reality but subjective in your specific eyesight, are the details you need to note in order to ‘actually’ listen to your music.

A. The Three Contexts of Music

Let’s start with the modern definition of music. We’re not talking about birds and waterfalls anymore, it doesn’t need to be so philosophical. The art form is constantly evolving, but what is ‘music’ as of today?

It’s important for you to not exclude any historical aspect of the planet that you live on when conceptualizing and defining what music is. Music is not ‘songs’ or ‘albums’ or even ‘movements’ or ‘symphonies;’ those are all forms or structures. Music has existed since before not only recorded history but history itself, predating humankind’s capacity for self-awareness. Music is older than the human mind. The idea of an ‘album’ is only about a hundred years old, the concept of a song really only dates back a few thousand years (at the most generous). Regardless of what you ‘like,’ you’re limiting your understanding if you approach music as bound to the historical and cultural parameters within your immediate proximity.

Break free of ‘genre’ or ‘era’ or anything that you would normally use to describe the context of a musical piece. Art is a communicative expression and we can narrow music down to three simple contexts which it can be created for and listened in:

1. Music that Tells a Definite Story
2. Music that Tells an Indefinite Story
3. Music that Exists Simply for Its Own Sake

Before you can analyze anything, the absolutely essential observation you must make, no mater how primitive it sounds, is, “What is this?” Fire looks and feels a certain way, as do rocks, and water. There is something in you, biologically, that can understand the difference between elements and use your general sense of object permanence to understand the ‘inherency’ of an object before you even know what it ‘is.’ We must break music into its three forms of ‘inherency’ before we can even begin to actually listen to it.

1. Music that Tells a Definite Story

Regardless of whether or not the piece has lyrics, it is somewhat obvious if the music you are listening to was designed to convey a specific message to you. Let’s start with an easy example: Richard Wagner’s 1870 “Ritt der Walküren.” You’ve probably heard it a million times by now, as it was most-widely popularized by the famous scene in 1979’s Apocalypse Now. Even ignoring the cultural projection that you might associate with this song’s inherent ‘feeling’ (a group of something going somewhere for a specific purpose), Ride of the Valkyries was written for a specific purpose in the context of a story.

Wagner composed four operas as part of his ‘ring cycle’, Der Ring des Nibelungen. “Ride of the Valkyries” occurs in the beginning of the third act of the second opera (stay with me here). The four operas tell the story of a magical ring that will give the wearer unlimited power and the vices and virtues of the gods and humans seeking to acquire said ring. Just think of it as a giant miniseries; each opera is a season and each act of an opera is an episode. As a definite narrative scene, the “Ride of the Valkyries” is telling a literal story, both in its lyrics and the composition of the music.

A ‘valkyrie’ is a female warrior in Norse mythology, accompanied by ravens, swans, or horses (it’s usually horses or pegasus). In the opening of the third act of The Valkyrie, these warriors are gathering on top of a mountain, each carrying a hero that they have slain. The valkyrie are a personal army for the gods, so this is a triumphant moment for them in the overall effort to secure power over the world via the ring.

Knowing this, listen to Ride of the Valkyries: it all sounds so obvious, doesn’t it? The piece is in a key that suggests victory, sure, but not necessarily a ‘good’ victory for our heroes. It has a consistent pulse, evocative of maybe the collective march of galloping horses? And that melody, transmitted via brass, sure does seem to suggest not only a divine presence but a militant one at that, right? Yes, some of these are cultural projections, but they’re bound to a consistent and observable logic. This is all very simple, and any music that successfully tells a story (i.e. fits into the ten percent of our Sturgeon’s Law lens) does this inherently.

Let’s look at a modern example, breaking down a song that most members of modern culture might be familiar with. The Killer’s “Mr. Brightside” is likely the ‘most successful’ song of the last twenty years as it’s been in and out of the charts since it was released back in 2003. While the lyrics can be interpreted as rather obvious and simple, the song objectively wouldn’t work if the composition of the music didn’t place these words into an understandable context for the listener.

“Mr. Brightside” is a song about infidelity, from the perspective of the betrayed party. You don’t need to do any research whatsoever to gain this insight, the lyrics are literal enough that this is apparent. The narrator is not happy about this situation, which would be more difficult to interpret if not for aspects of the music that you might not be actively listening for. Songs about infidelity typically aren’t the most ‘catchy’ or desirable to listen to, yet this particular song is notorious for group sing-a-longs and repeated listens. Why?

The narrator is not in a pleasant state of mind, as evident by not just the rapid rhythm of his words but the lack of melodic variety. Each syllable, for most of the verses, rests on a single duplicated note that is repeated as if it was percussive, as one might find in a paranoid or panicked train of thought. He’s working through his feelings and recounting the events of the transgression, as if doing so will bring him a greater understanding or even that he could will the sin out of existence.

But notice when he recounts the specific details of the affair in the pre-chorus, only then are the words attached to a greater number of notes and ones held at an extended length. He’s mourning or lamenting. It’s very simple: he can’t believe what he’s seeing and then when he can, he cries out.

Then the chorus is basically a combination of the two mindsets: a bit repetitive in regards to the variety of notes, but the moments with ‘new’ notes are heavily emphasized. It’s a tale as old as time, “What now?” The narrator clearly loves the woman who has been dishonest, how does he confront her? Does he confront her at all? Does he stay or go? Regardless of the listener’s own personal experiences, we’ve all been in a similar situation in some regard: uncertainty.

The composition is ironic given the subject matter of the song. It’s certainly not an optimistic string of words, yet the listener is very likely not depressed by the end of the song. Why? Because it’s wry. It scratches a weird itch; it’s not that we’re necessarily smiling at darkness, but we take note of some odd promise that we will smile again in spite of that darkness, hence the title.

None of this even needs to be a conscious effort by the artist (though writing sad lyrics for a song in a major key is clearly a deliberate statement), it must only be self-evident in the finished work. Is this my personal interpretation of the song? Sure, to some degree, but: I’m not really purporting anything that isn’t apparent in the construction of the song itself and noted in thousands of years of human psychology; this is precisely the attitude you should take when engaging with music that obviously intends to tell a clear story.

2. Music that Tells an Indefinite Story

Most music you’ve heard likely falls into this category. It is by no means easy to write a coherent song, but it is far easier to convey an abstract feeling, state of mind, or series of events than a clearly narrative one. We find these kinds of pieces to be much more ‘relatable’ as it’s far easier to project ourselves and our lives into what is being expressed musically. But this does not mean that this context of music is free from objective analysis, the opposite is actually true: this is where your analytical muscles should be exercised most often.

Objectively-speaking, Jehan Alain is one of the most under-appreciated composers of the twentieth century. He did not live a long-enough life to create a tremendous amount of music and the Second World War buried his name and efforts, as it did so many other composers of the era. Subjectively-speaking, I think he was one of the most talented composers in history. I would be astounded if you’ve heard of him, there’s no reason to feel like his name would have crossed your path unless you happen to listen to quite specific music from this specific era. Take a few minutes to listen to one of my all-time favorite compositions, his “Fantaisie pour Choeur à Bouche Fermée” (or “Fantasy for Closed-Mouth Choir.”) Come back when you’ve finished. It’s short. I’ll wait.

…Okay, now tell me what it was about. There’s not a story with a ‘plot,’ but there is an absolute idea/theme/imagery that Alain is expressing. It is definitely about something. Think about it, what did you see in your head when you listened?

You may or may not have had an emotional reaction, but there is an almost-completely-objective message to the piece: rain.

Go back listen to a bit of it again. It’s not really debatable. It’s a historical fact that he composed it to evoke images of rain, but you don’t need to crack open his biography know that. Listen. The harmonic value of the choir doesn’t really allude to rain for the first fifteen seconds or so, but then they make it unbelievably obvious. Anyone, of any culture and at any point in history, can easily imagine whatever degree of precipitation they want and the general ‘point’ of that moisture is completely up to their interpret4tion, but the imagery itself is too simple and plain to be written off as a subjective viewpoint when saying, “It’s definitely about rain.” You could perform it for any group of bipeds ten thousand years ago and they’d look up to the clouds.

And this isn’t even an issue of old-versus-new when it comes to composition. Would you like to hear a modern spiritual companion to Alain’s composition? Blondes’ 2012 “Water” has a rather obvious title, but could you possibly come up with a more appropriate description of what you’re hearing? The odds are astronomically low that the members of Blondes were inspired by Alain’s work or have ever even heard of him. This type of inherent commonality when in artistic expression is infinitely more common than you might expect and, therefore, you don’t have to look for similar song titles to understand that ‘indefinite’ and ‘objective’ are not antonyms in any regard.

One of the most well-known songs in modern history is John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” This sounds like a bit of a dramatic, declarative statement that I don’t have much authority to make, but bear with me.

I’ve never been to West Virginia, most people in the history of the universe haven’t been to West Virginia. Let’s extend that even further: most people that have, do, and will ever exist haven’t been to the American South or Appalachia and have little-to-no interest in folk or country music. Hell, let’s go all-out: most people in existence not only have never set foot in America but aren’t even fluent in English.

The specific proper nouns mentioned in “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are incredibly difficult for most people to truly empathize with, but the imagery it stirs in ones mind is completely inescapable as a human being.

You might not speak English, and even if you do; what exactly is a “mountain mamma?” It’s a metaphor or a personification or a colloquialism, which means it’s bound by subjective interpretation, but it’s an objective fact that the word ‘home’ is a single, easily-pronounceable syllable and the same can be said of ‘road.’ These words create meaning in any listener because literally every human being has something they consider a home to be, and a road is required to get there. This can be incredibly literal or incredibly abstract but the lyrics of the song, no matter how specifically they reference a specific geographic location, are all just variations on the same theme: “I am not home, and miss it in some way.”

I first heard the song when I was a child, listening from the backseat on car radio, driving down Rocky Mountains roads in the dark. I’ve always been good with geography, but I could not possibly conceptualize what ‘West Virginia’ was, as I had absolutely no frame of reference.

“Dad, what’s a ‘Mountain Mamma?’”

“You’re supposed to be asleep, Jess.”

My parents may have listened to some degree of ‘country music’ but I wasn’t drawing some affinity for John Denver’s song based on nostalgia or an affection for that genre of music. I didn’t consider the steel guitar to be exotic or inherently interesting. To this day, having listened to however-many thousands of albums, it’s not as if the song doesn’t anything explicitly unique or so much better than others. It’s not Beethoven nor Shakespeare.

But twenty years later I was waiting outside the changing rooms in a luxury clothing store in Shanghai when a familiar ode to the mystical West Virginia came on over the radio. I perked up, hearing a song that wasn’t in Mandarin or an obvious 2010s pop hit. Glancing over to the registers, I saw two young employees nodding along to the rhythm as they worked. They didn’t show any sign that it was brand new or stale; it wasn’t special but it was clearly special. One of the young women mouthed the words to the chorus but refrained from the verses, a behavior later explained by the fact that she clearly couldn’t speak English. But she knew ‘home’ and ‘road,’ and knew what they meant.

In China, most residents of the large cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Guanzho, and Chongching are from other provinces, it’s not all that common to be native to the city you might be living in. During holidays like Spring Festival or National Holiday, you’ll see a mass exodus of most of the urban populations as they go back to visit their families at home. China isn’t a completely different planet, they’re exposed to English-language films and music all the time, but it is exceptionally-rare that the youth are inherently-familiar with specifically-Western media from long before their birth.

Country music doesn’t make it that far out of the US, polka doesn’t make it that far out of Germany, and Mongolian throat singing doesn’t travel as far outside of Mongolia as you’d think. But despite the fact that most ‘native music’ (music that defines a culture specific to a particular region) can be so specific lyrically, the compositions are often very rudimentary and evergreen.

“Take Me Home, Country Roads” has an unchanging rhythm, a hallmark of any native music. ‘Regular people,’ historically, use music as communal bonding, so a simple song structure and composition is necessary in order to create a universal experience. People don’t want to sit and ‘think’ in this context, they want to dance. This particular song can be melancholic and heartfelt, sure, but it never deviates from providing an opportunity for you to take your family, friends, or lovers by the hand and sway together (though do take caution when holding the hands of multiple lovers at once, or at least introduce them to one another beforehand (see: Mr. Brightside)).

Instrumentally, yes, this particular song is quite emblematic of a specific kind of music and a definite place in the world. But it is precisely because of that specificity that it travels overseas and across generations. It has an authenticity because it’s not attempting to over-generalize in order to cast a wide net. Chinese people can relate to the composition because the steel guitar isn’t radically different to conceptualize compared to the guqin or guzheng.

Let’s try an exercise. Listen to this piece by 伯牙, called “高山·流水”, and challenge yourself for a few minutes: in what ways is this the exact same song as “Country Roads, Take Me Home”? Subjectively, every single emotion or connotation that I might find in the John Denver song I also find just as clear in the 伯牙 piece. Objectively, on both a compositional and general artistic level, they are aiming for similar sectors of your heart.

“高山·流水” and “Country Roads, Take Me Home” both never really shift from their tempo. They’re incredibly simple, compositionally, as they can each be performed with a single instrument but are deepened by augmenting the arrangement with other ‘native music’ accompaniments. Both are clearly aiming to be purposefully-simple and only touch on one specific emotion rather than embracing a more complex dichotomy (as “Ride of the Valkyries” does).

It’s all very simple. “高山·流水” translates to “High Mountains, Flowing Water.” Lyrics technically exist for it and they’re not synonymous with those of the Denver piece, but they push the same button, “I may be here, but my mind and heart are elsewhere,” and they push that button through emotional resonance.

Remove whatever kind of ‘exoticism’ you might attach to Chinese music: listen to the piece and think of your home and your loved ones specifically. Yes, 高山·流水 is entirely Chinese, but that doesn’t mean that hearing over the radio in some retail store in America shouldn’t technically elicit the same feelings in you that John Denver’s piece does. Write lyrics in your head for 高山·流水 about your home and your road. When you actively participate in a conversation with music, you won’t need to think about what a piece is literally saying, it will tell you.

3. Music that Exists Simply for Its Own Sake

This is a subject dense-enough for its own volume of books, but we’ll see what we can get away with here.

This concept of ‘contextless music’ is both relatively new and centuries old. Music typically always has some ulterior motive, there is usually some inherent call to action; to dance, to fight, to think, to celebrate, to mourn, or any other circumstance or context in which you might hear it.

But both long ago and more recently, some artists and audiences have been privileged enough to enjoy music that does not need to exist for any reason whatsoever. I understand how this can be hard to conceptualize, as music is simultaneously seen as brutally-necessary and not literally-required to sustain life, but again: uninstall your understanding of context for a moment and evaluate it.

Music that seeks to exist simply for its own sake can be referred to as ‘absolute music,’ this is actually a phrase that Richard Wagner used when describing the music of Beethoven (he actually argued the opposite, that “music could not exist without meaning,” but I think that’s an unbelievably simplistic reduction of the philosophy). The history of absolute music isn’t so strictly documented but I contend that it originated in the late 1700s with the blossoming of German Romanticism and actually dominated the general musical landscape until the rise of ‘populist music’ like folk, blues, and rock by the middle of the twentieth century.

To better understand what is meant by ‘music free of context’ just tune your brain to the following statement: follow the money. Yes, music has existed since time immemorial but at some point the compositional and performative requirements could only be achieved through patronage in the form of money.

Let’s say civilization has advanced to a certain state and you’re a composer that wants to pursue music as your profession. It is incredibly unlikely that you’ll be allowed to simply write whatever you want and perform it in the way you want to. No, you will receive money from a higher authority (they’re a higher authority because they have more money than you do) in order to create music in the manner in which they want it to be conceived. You and your creation are bound to the context that they establish.

Thousands of years ago, this entity would have likely been a single ruler, like a king, empress, or other noble figure that wants to be given some form of exactly what they requested of you. They don’t understand music, but they know enough to understand what they like.

Later, in the middle of the last millennium, your services would likely be solicited by The Church or another religious/cultural institution that probably would not want the art to deviate from a pre-established dogma or doctrine. You could absolutely make a mark, like Johann Sebastian Bach, but at no point are you going to be given ‘free rein’ to experiment outside of the accepted forms of the time.

With the democratization of governments and decentralization of power in the last few centuries, you might be given more wiggle room than your ancestors (“This piece doesn’t have to be literally about god nor follow this exact time signature”) but you will have been commissioned by a government, educational, or cultural institution that will intervene between you and your muse if your work is too esoteric.

However…what makes some of the greatest musical minds in history so great is that they were indeed able to make their music autotelic while still appeasing their patrons. Autotelic means “something that has a purpose inherent to itself,” stemming from the Greek ‘auto’ and ‘telas’, or “self+goal.”

A notable example of autotelic music, a work that cannot possibly be given an objective or even inferred ‘story,’ is Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.” Subjectively speaking, you could describe this piece as belonging to the ‘program music’ classification, meaning it is music designed to evoke a specific feeling or image like we discussed in the previous section. Toccata and Fugue in D Minor has indeed been compared to the sounds of a storm but I contend that this is far too much of a projection, as there’s not any credible evidence to it. If big, thunderous brass, strings, and percussion is indicative of a ‘storm,’ then is basically everything Beethoven ever did attempting to emulate tumultuous weather? Go ahead and listen to Toccata and Fugue and let me know if you find the definitive story that more than five people on the planet would find wholeheartedly agreeable.

Let’s follow the thread of this definition though, to Herr Beethoven himself (finally). Listen to the First Movement of his Fifth Symphony. It’s intelligent and productive to theorize the possible symbolism of a work but I think it’s nothing less than asinine to ascribe subjective value to a piece as if there is a ‘possible’ definitive ‘explanation’ when there simply isn’t enough in the historical or inherent record to support the claim.

For example, I could very easily assert that the first movement of the fifth symphony is about Napoleon Bonaparte, but this is completely unprovable. Beethoven is on record, in plenty of instances, as being inspired and influenced by the actions of Bonaparte, and the Napoleonic Wars were occurring when Beethoven was composing this symphony. I subjectively see the piece as instilling the same uneasiness that one might feel when seeing a tyrant or opposing force swallowing up everything in front of them. But there is absolutely nothing in the composition of the piece itself to suggest that anyone could definitively say that the piece is objectively even ‘inspired’ by Napoleon. That would be an extrapolation and quite possibly engaging in some degree of unethical revisionist history: diminishing an artist’s creativity to account for impatience on behalf of the critic.

It is, however, objectively true that later in the symphony Beethoven quotes French compositions from the time of the Revolution. This is where our assessment of whether “art for art’s sake” is actually possible. The Marxist assertion, specifically through the lens of Maoism, would contend that any and all art is inherently political in nature, as human beings cannot possibly separate themselves entirely from the political situation of their lives.

If I write an abstract love poem but have no romantic partner, in some way that piece exists simply for its own sake. If this poem isn’t directly about love but aimlessly fired at a vague feeling, it would be very difficult for another human being to claim that it’s definiTively about love or a specific person, just as it would be untrue for me to claim that it is definitively about anything. However, of course it’s not irrational to claim that I projected my experiences with former lovers into the words of that poem, whether I realized it or not. If I think of the word ‘love,’ there is an abstract and indescribable sensation in my brain, but it would be an outright lie to suggest that I don’t also import people and experiences from my past into that stew.

This is autotelic music: music without a story and existing simply for its own sake. Think of it as ‘unknowable’ music, both to the artist and the listener. It’s not that there’s nothing to know or extrapolate from the piece, or that you cannot project your own meaning, but it means that there is no ‘everything’ to learn and never can be.

Let’s simplify this as much as possible: jazz is predominantly autotelic. Yes, it is technically social music that is composed and performed primarily for the purposes of dancing, but that’s really only the Trojan Horse that it uses to justify its existence to others. Jazz can be super bouncy and energetic, or very lackadaisical and sparse, but I would argue that it’s inherently intellectual in nature; not in the sense that it ‘makes you smart,’ but prods a section of your brain responsible for inspiration, influence, and imagination.

Miles Davis “So What” is a good example of this. There’s nothing you could say this piece is ‘about.’ You can attach a lot of personal meaning to it, but it’s difficult to extrapolate if Davis is saying anything specific with the piece and it’s quite likely that he didn’t give it any thought beyond expressing a ‘feeling,’ which requires its own specific intellectual process.

We don’t have to be so high-brow, let’s get even more pedestrian. When I was a child, I was reduced to tears whenever Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” would come on the radio, because I was overwhelmed with how happy it made me. I was born in 1991, I was probably five years old at the time: any kind of social or cultural association that it might have to ‘1970s disco’ or ‘night life’ or even ‘dancing’ was not something that registered with me. Maybe I understood that ‘the hustle’ was a reference to dancing, but there was nothing about ‘dancing’ which made me inherently happy.

Psychologically, I was likely reacting to the fact that notes in a major key have been assigned a positive or ‘happy’ value by the culture I grew up in and a somewhat-bouncy rhythm is typically associated with positive feelings. But these are conscious aspects of both the music and myself that I need to recognize and separate as an adult when asked, “Do you like that song? Is that song a good song?” I would argue that “The Hustle” is an objectively good composition, irrelevant to the fact that I like it. Convenient, I know, but bear with me.

I don’t really listen to outright pop music, as it doesn’t scratch itches that I would like to be scratched, but I work to maintain active ear so that it’s always possible that I can utter the following statement, “I do not like that song, but it is good.”

Harold Faltermeyer’s “Axel F” doesn’t exist for its own sake, as it was written for a film, one I have no desire in seeing and resides in a genre that I have no affinity for. I think the song is cheesy, naïve, and basically an annoying nursery rhyme that no one over the age of eight should actually enjoy. But I wouldn’t say it’s anything less than objectively good either. The composition is structurally strong and inherent to nothing but itself; it is likely that this piece could survive for centuries. I despise it but also argue it’s objectively great; this is not a difficult mental muscle to flex when you exercise it regularly.

Remember this one? Gimmicky, simplistic, and saying nothing unique at all. I don’t like it. Also: it’s objectively good. Yes, its popularity is based on a trend and it technically exists to encourage you to dance, but it’s just a jazz song. It’s just a song that a group of Neanderthals might dance around a fire to, banging rocks and shouting nonsensical phrases, simply to invoke an abstract feeling that each member can then be inspired by. It’s the kind of march that Polish Winged Hussars might listen to before battle (I’m in a bit of a cavalrous mood, in case you couldn’t tell).

Or this one. Yes, it is primarily popular now because it was featured in a widely-seen film. Compositionally, it maybe captures surf culture, or Southwest North American culture, or simply riding the trend of that particular era of American rock-and-roll. But it’s also about nothing and there’s no real meaning that you could attach to it because it grants you absolutely no authority to do so.

Autotelism is my point of contention with postmodernism in general, but only because the movement has over-embraced it and diluted the meaning. I enjoy the paintings of Jackson Pollock, and not because anyone told me to. But I do not enjoy superficially-similar works, as I do not feel enough of an intent behind the painting. I don’t think the first movement of Beethoven’s fifty symphony is provably ‘about’ anything, but it’d be ridiculous to claim that he completely improvised it simply for the sake of making art.

Now that we’ve covered the three contexts of music that exist, I’ll share one last example of autotelic music so that you can hold on to a clear example. This is an album that you have not heard and an artist that you have never heard of. His name is Yoshio Suzuki, and his 1984 album Morning Picture is my latest obsession (objectively great, a subjective masterpiece). From here on out, if I refer to this third context of music (absolute music, autotelic music, etc), just imagine this piece. (Note: this piece actually has small hints of an ‘Indirect Story’ (‘falling snow,’ you’ll hear it, trust me), but not enough to put it in that second context entirely).

B. The Three Elements of Music

There are many perimeters to music but no universally-agreed-upon list of building blocks exists, so I’m going to argue that there are only three foundational elements. I think music without timbre is possible, the same could be said about intensity, duration, pitch, etc., but three elements not only must be inherent in a series of sound to classify it as ‘music’ but that every other aspect of the art form stems from these three sources:

1. Melody
2. Harmony
3. Rhythm

It is important that, when listening to music, you train your ear to separate these three elements so that you can better understand how they work together to create a ‘whole’ experience. In the same way you can eat something and digest it without little question as to the ingredients, your life will benefit from the knowledge and understanding of that which you intake.

1. Melody

Like anything in music, ‘melody’ doesn’t have one great definition. But, like anything in music, the concept is objective enough to have a quite a simple description:

“A single, identifiable pattern of notes that are played in a deliberate order.”

Subjectively, melody is the most important aspect of music (though the last ten years have objectively shown that listeners do not need it to be present (for better or worse)). While it is absolutely possible for a piece to become ‘stuck in your head’ simply through harmony or rhythm alone, it is very likely that the melody is what buries itself deeper in your mind than any other element can.

If we’ve identified what kind of conversation we’re having, from the three contexts of music, then the melody is the speaking voice of the music you’re listening to. Again, imagine the music you’re listening to is an actual person, seeking to speak with you. The melody is the tone, the word choice, and the posture of the music. The notes themselves are the actual substance of the conversation, but the melody is the way in which your music is choosing to convey its point.

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue” is a prime example of the power of a strong melody, so much so that it’s really just comprised of (essentially) two melodies. The first is the famous notes that you’ll have heard a million times, especially if you’ve ever flown United Airlines (whenever I fly for work, I always pick United for the almost-exclusive reason of seeing these videos; I’m a filmmaker and I think they’re just wonderfully creative for a simple in-flight videos (listen to what they do with the arrangements, I absolutely love it)). The piece is emblematic of the 1920s, jazz, New York, and the ‘American attitude’ in general.

In listening to it, you should now be able to isolate exactly what constitutes ‘melody,’ as the piece is quite dynamic but there is a clear and deliberate series of notes explored repetitiously in each section. The pace and overall ‘fullness’ may change, but we’re constantly embraced by the same ‘idea’ in the form of these particular notes, in this particular order.

“Rhapsody in Blue” is also home to another melody, the tear-jerker you’ve likely heard in plenty of sentimental or ‘important’ montages of twentieth century events. It’s typical in pop music to not have a large number of melodies in a single piece, whereas most symphonic works have an entire menagerie. Gershwin threads the needle in his piece, as it’s not brawny-enough to be an hour-long orchestral affair but certainly not dainty-enough to function as a brief flash. Like any jazz work, the melodies can be played for three minutes or three hours, as the particular combination of notes are ‘evergreen’-enough to provide ample room for interpretation and deviation in the harmony, rhythm, and the other aspects of composition and arrangement.

One of the most prominent musical pieces of the twentieth century is, unlike so many other musical endeavors, only approximately one hundred and twenty seconds long. It’s the shortest conversation you’re bound to have this week, but quite possibly the most memorable, thanks to the strength of its melody.

Paul McCartney claims to have composed the melody for “Yesterday” in a dream and, though it bears some similarities to Ray Charles’ rendition of “Georgia on My Mind,” the timeless and straightforward expression that the specific series of notes follows allows the song to be comprehensible and accessible to anyone with ears. People such as my father may not be the biggest supporters of The Beatles but even their most passionate detractors never deny that there exists an objectivity to the effectiveness of McCartney and John Lennon’s melodic songwriting techniques.

The value of a melody can be extremely subjective, of course, as they are vehicles to project ones identity, culture, and opinions. But, as we are all human and therefore share some degree of objective artistic overlap in regards to our needs and preferences, melodies can often be the most ‘objective’ element of a piece, the element that allows a work of music to travel between great divides and resonate at the same intensity regardless of context.

A very simple and very recent example can be found in the cultural resonance of Ariana Grande. It would be arrogant and ignorant to say that all of Grande’s fans have never heard of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, but I think it’d be a bit of a stretch to suggest that even most of them have even seen The Sound of Music. This doesn’t change the fact the melody of “My Favorite Things” launched the song to great cultural resonance in 1959, 1965, and then later in 2019 in the form of Grande’s “7 rings.” This is not an inherently good or bad thing, but it does speak to the inherency of the melody and how it transcends a certain degree of time and location in an objective way.

I’m not a fan of most of Grande’s work (though I will never shy from professing that “Needy” is one of my favorite pop songs of the 2010s and I listen to it every single day) but when separating the objective from the subject, you can begin to see the artist as a vessel for a melody. In the same way more than one person in your life can say, “I love you” and in more contexts than just one, the melody of a song is the way in which that love is expressed; the stress of particular syllables changes the meaning. “I love you.” “I love you.” “I love you.” “I love you.” “I love you.”

Understanding and isolating the concept of memory is critical in abandoning any pretensions or ‘guilt’ you might have when interacting with music. For example, I think one of the most irritating songs ever released is Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape” but one of my all-time favorite melodies is found in the chorus. I absolutely despise this song, yet an element of it is so dear to me; it’s not difficult to chew that gum and walk that walk at the same time when you take the minimal time and effort to compartmentalize your emotional reactions to the world around you in something as ‘simple’ as music.

In this final exampl3, let’s return to the Middle Kingdom so we can begin to contextualize how melody finds its context in a work and how its resonance is felt. One can listen to almost any rendition of “茉莉花” (or “Jasmine Flower”) from 1700s China and hear the obvious ‘Eastern’ aspects of whatever arrangement they’re enjoying, but the melody itself is strong enough that it escapes its cultural, historical, and contextual foundations to become objectively transferrable and therefore inherently worthy of performance and preservation. Listen to this rendition from The Choir of King’s College in Cambridge, England. With no attention put into it, you might assume it’s some kind of old Latin liturgical piece, given that it’s not in English and accompanied by an organ, but listen to just how intrinsic that inherent melody is to some part of any human spirit. Of course it’s clearly Chinese but listen to the variety of arrangements, styles, and renditions that this single string of notes lends itself to (the last example being my favorite, but we’ll get to harmony in a moment). That is the strength of not just a good melody, but the role that melodic value plays in your enjoyment of a piece.

2. Harmony

The butter on the bread that melody bakes, harmony can best be thought of as the ‘attitude’ or demeanor of the conversation your music would like to have. No, I do not mean ‘tone’ or ‘color’ or ‘texture;’ harmony provides the ‘fullness’ and ‘depth’ that you experience when falling in love with a piece of music. If the melody is seeking to paint you a shade of red, the harmony is what makes it specifically maroon.

Harmony doesn’t technically exist in and of itself, it’s essentially the byproduct of a deliberate effort to bond melody and rhythm. Again, there isn’t a universally-agreed-upon definition, but an over-generalized attempt would be:

“The deliberate combination of musical elements with specific attention to their proximity to one another.”

In layman’s terms, you could say that where melody is wide, harmony is deep, as it pertains to the passage of time. Melody is the progression of a footpath, harmony is the exact detail of each stepping stone. In even more blunt terms: harmony is when more than one thing happens at once. You can pluck a series of single notes on a guitar and call it a melody, but in playing chords you would be introducing harmony into the composition.

In 1722, composer and musical theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote Raité de l’harmonie Réduite à ses Principes Naturels (or Treatise on Harmony reduced to its Natural Principles), a seminal work in the history of harmony. Scales, temperaments, and modulation were all being reinvented and revolutionized, so this book became instrumental in providing Western music with some basic attempt at generalized music theory in regards to harmony, as it is quite obvious not that easy to explain in a vacuum.

By the eighteenth century, we see figures like Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart fully embracing and expanding harmony’s role in composition. Mozart in particular was known for not just his compositional prowess but immediate musical intellect, giving him the ability to improvise and ‘fill in’ areas of his pieces where others might not have seen a void.

Remember when we discussed the contexts in which music can be created for? Mozart was given relatively more freedom than many of those that came before him, but he was also famously frustrated with the conventions and tastes of the time to some degree. He was not financing his own work and therefore subject to the whims of those patronizing him. So, like Bach, he would experiment in the absences that he was allowed in his compositions (i.e. someone can’t restrict you from doing something if they aren’t aware of it beforehand or don’t even notice it after you finish).

Mozart was able to harness both improvisation and the use of chromatic harmony in order to ‘spice up’ his melodies. The simplest way I can explain a chromatic chord (buckle up, kids: we’re doing multiplication tables today) is that it contains a note not present in the key that a piece was written for. The note may fit but it is obviously not a member of the same ‘family’ that all of the other notes belong to. Think of your loved ones as a melody, and anyone else in your life as harmonies. You might have a man as a loved one, the other men in your life provide it some new dimension, but they are not of your ‘family’ like your loved one; they simply provide you with a more dynamic engagement with the world.

Harmony is difficult. I try to refrain from using required video examples, so that we can focus strictly on the audio of a piece, but let’s take a look at a visualization of the principle so that I don’t end up writing my own Treatise on Harmony here.

Mozart’s “Piano Quartet in G minor” is a prime example of chromatic harmony. You can see and follow along with the melody, but notice the ‘depth’ of the notes as it pertains to that melody. He could have written quite simply, one note at a time, and no notes that aren’t in the same key, but notice how he incorporates bold low notes and high notes in his harmonies, in order to give it some ‘color,’ hence the term chromatic harmony.

But let’s jump from orchestral music before we bog down in semantics and theory. What the average person associates with the word ‘harmony’ is the ‘harmonious’ combination of two sounds, usually voices. This is half-correct. The combination of pleasant sounds that resolve themselves is known as consonance, whereas a combination of ‘ill-fitting’ sounds that create ‘uncertainty’ is known as dissonance. Spare me your comments, music theorists, I’m trying to move heaven and earth here.

The Everly Brothers were known for their simple and direct harmonies, as heard in the choruses of “Bye Bye Love.” This is probably what you’d associate with consonant harmonies. Dissonant harmonies can be heard in the piano chords of Ennio Morricone’s “The Crisis,” do you notice how they just sound a bit ‘off,’ but in a way that stirs a genuine emotion in you? Uncertainty, yes, but not necessarily danger or outright fear. Sadness, melancholy, longing; much of this comes from the key the piece is performed in but the way in which those notes are sewn together is what is ‘coloring’ the piece for you.

I was raised Southern Baptist, going to church every Sunday for the first eighteen years of my life. While it’s not a system I subscribe to now, I’ve retained the love and affinity I had for singing in the choir. I spent each Sunday with my nose in the hymnal, learning how the song structures functioned and how everyone somehow knew exactly what to sing and where to place their voices. It’s not a strict dogma but smaller Southern Baptist churches like the one I attended are known for their stripped-down arrangements of gospel songs, relying less on complimentary instrumentation and more on the combined harmonies of the congregation.

I struggled with harmonies, and that’s likely where my affinity comes from; I see it as ‘exotic’ or something not inherent to my abilities (I can visualize a melody but harmonies give me trouble, like all true loves do). In retrospect, I was known for not following the ‘correct’ key or tempo. When I became too old to sing in the child choir (we didn’t have an adult choir), I would simply follow along in the hymnal, placing everyone else’s voices on the correct notes and then trying to figure out what it would sound like if someone (not me) were to be placed a little higher or a little lower. I didn’t know it, and wasn’t doing it with any degree of expertise or talent whatsoever, but I was trying to add texture and color to the harmonies. If only I could claim I was a misunderstood genius, but I think you have to be on key for that.

Most people would likely link you to a Beach Boys song at this point to show you the ‘true extent’ of harmonies in Western, English-language music, but my time in the church and ‘experimenting’ with voices sees that as a bit too obvious and not nearly informative enough.

So, like Jehan Alain, we’re going to go with a composer you’ve probably never heard of but really should listen to.

In the American South, slaves were obviously not given instruments to play nor a route to acquire any, but this didn’t completely destroy their passion for song and harmony. It had quite the opposite effect actually: they were forced to significantly refine the instrument of the human voice and broaden its combined power.

Moses Hogan was a composer and arranger that passed away only twenty years ago, so he is a very contemporary example but his area of expertise was working with harmonies in a ‘long-dead’ genre. The ‘spiritual’ is a musical genre originating from African-Americans in the 1800s, exercising their religious beliefs while simultaneously expounding on the hardships of their slavery.

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” is a spiritual composed by Wallis Willis, who is credited with many other songs in the genre. It’s based on a Biblical story of Elijah being taken up to heaven in a chariot, what would be a wonderful reprieve to imagine when toiling in slavery. One of my favorite renditions was sung by Mel Foster, and is a powerful example of just how inherent and strong the melodies of spirituals are. But, being a solo performance, there is no inherent harmony in the piece. This is where composers and arrangers like Moses Hogan come in, though I’m not sure I would describe any other figure’s work as being comparable to Moses’ talent.

“Old-Time Religion” was a song composed after the abolition of slavery and original only sung as a Protestant hymn. But it was later appropriated by the still-struggling African-American laborers and included in the Spiritual cannon alongside the songs that their parents may have sung on the plantation. This is a song and melody you’re very likely to have heard before, but in extremely simply renditions, as it’s such a simple melody. But Hogan’s astounding arrangement, with those immaculate verses (starting at 0:36), echoes the overall point of the spiritual genre: downtrodden people, with access to nothing, having all the instruments they need in the form of a lucid melody augmented by a thunderous harmony. This genre is meant to inspire and uplift and objectively could not without all-encompassing and inherent capacity for harmony.

3. Rhythm

The grammar of the conversation your music is attempting to have with you, rhythm is actually the most ‘obvious’ aspect of music. What pulls your hips to dance, your shoulders to sway, and your head to nod? Not the melody, she’s after your heartstrings and not the harmony, he’s after your soul. Rhythm-rhythm-rhythm.

Unlike its siblings, rhythm can actually be observed scientifically in a multitude of fields, so it has a nearly-universal definition that doesn’t need to be simplified all that much. It stems from the Greek ‘rythmos’, which translates to “regular or recurring or symmetrical motion,” which we can expand on in regards to music:

“Movement marked by succession of regularly-noted patterns.”

Realistically speaking: rhythm was likely the first aspect of music to exist. All it takes is a rock, another hard surface, and some basic understanding of frequency to create a ‘beat.’ Again, this was likely conceived of before humankind could actually conceive of anything. But we’ll fast-forward a bit.

The waltz was born in central Europe in the late 1500s and, though obviously not the genesis of the concept, it’s the logical first place we should look to when attempting to identify rhythm.

Johann Strauss II was known as “The Waltz King,” as Vienna never met a waltz it didn’t like and the composer cranked out hundreds of them. There’s only one place we can begin to talk about rhythm and the waltz: “An der schönen, blauen Donau.”

Of course you can hear the melody, that’s what gets stuck in your head. Of course you can detect the harmonies, that’s what makes it feel so rich. But listen to that rhythm; oh is it bold. Yes, you may have seen ‘fancy’ people dancing to this in a film sometime, and maybe you assume that’s why you associate it with dancing. No, listen to it and notice how you can perfectly count along in your head:

“1–2–3, 1–2–3, 1–2–3, 1–2–3”

Most waltzes are in triple time (three notes for every measure) and it’s astronomically-rare that you’d hear a ‘sloppy’ or freeform rendition of one. No, they’re meant to operate like a Swiss watch. The melody may be dulled or the harmony hampered but they couldn’t even function if the rhythm was off.

Think of rhythm like the blades of a helicopter. The craft can be flying at any height, and angled in any kind of direction, but without attention to the rate that the rotors are spinning, that orientation will be uncontrollable and the height will be no more. This is true, inherently, of just about any piece of music.

Rhythm is necessary to take note of, as it’s the most ‘obvious’ element that makes music, well, music. There are so many pleasant sounds in the universe, but your mind can’t really comprehend or interpret them as being music without taking note of the pattern. The brain is a slave to pattern recognition.

With the birth of postmodernist music in the twentieth century, composers began to truly push rhythm’s role in composition. One such artist has been a great inspiration to myself and apparently the world itself, being called one of only “a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history.”

Steve Reich is notorious for composing music that minimizes the role of melody and heavily encourages harmony through emphasized rhythm. It’s a bit difficult to describe the influence his work has had on the history of music, from experimental artists to standard indie-pop musicians. The rise of digital techniques and computer tools has really made it tricky to pinpoint exactly why Reich is one of the most crucial figures of the last century in regards to composition.

His 1974 “Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ” illustrates how he uses rhythm to build a harmony through recursion, rather than trapping harmony between the confines of rhythm. Each element is on a quite clear and only-occasionally-changing pattern, with each measure acting almost like a brick in a slowly-building pyramid. By the time you finish listening to the piece, you do feel like you’ve been taken somewhere, but not necessarily by conventional means.

This piece might not be tremendously impressive to you if you’re thinking of it in terms of how music is created today. To do something similar to Reich’s style wouldn’t take much more than a lot of “copy+pasting” on a computer and occasionally shifting or muting certain stems. But Reich has been doing this since the early 1960s, by way of standard compositional techniques for a live performance or as a pioneer in the art of ‘sampling,’ as heard in 1965’s “It’s Gonna Rain.” This piece might sound absolutely demented to you now, but place it in the context of the mid-1960s: literally nothing like this was even being attempted. Someone has to put the cracks in the dam and Reich was the the first to take a hammer to the ‘established rules’ of rhythm.

Similar to Mozart, let’s visualize what Reich does with rhythm in order to showcase the inherent value it has in composition. Watch how what is a very simple rhythm transforms into an actual piece in 1972’s “Clapping Music.” Is it just insane? Yes, but I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t listen to quite a bit of Reich in my free time (be thankful I’m keeping my promise not to talk about Iannis Xenakis).

Most of the records coming out of Motown Records were known for their distinct rhythms, and this is no small part thanks to Benny Benjamin and James Jamerson of The Funk Brothers, the studio band for the company from 1959 to 1972. One of their earliest hits and most obvious displays of rhythmic prowess is their background bass and drum accompaniment on The Temptations’ “My Girl.” Count along; the beat never changes and you’d never want it to. The melody rises and falls, the harmonies enter and exit, but that pattern just keeps pitter-pattering. It’s not rudimentary, it’s intrinsic.

With such a potent duo, it’s no wonder they never missed a beat. Sure, the melody to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” is beautiful, but pay attention to those verses. You can’t have a pop hit without a chorus, but it’s difficult to have a chorus without verses between them, with no better example than their work on Martha and the Vandellas’ “Heat Wave;” the chorus is terrible when compared to that popping rhythm in the verses.

It’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss hip-hop in this context, no matter the obviousness. Hip-hop prioritizes lyrical content, with an emphasis on quantity, so steady and engaging rhythm is vital. There are rarely instrumental breaks, the lyricist/vocalist is the meant to be the primary focus of the composition, which means that any and all instrumentation under it must be both minimal and exciting.

Though there are no shortage of talented artists in the genre, I’m hesitant to highlight the work of an artist from too long ago or discuss a contemporary example; it would be 1.) Too obvious as 2.) hip-hop is the dominant style of the current era (at least in the West, though it has also heavily-influenced the East of course). So let’s aim for the sweet spot, that unheard beat between

James “J Dilla” Yancey was one of the most influential musicians in his genre. Now known as “The Father of Lo-Fi,” Yancey was known for his harmonic rhythms. Though he claimed that he wasn’t a ‘backpacker,’ the proximity his work has to the moniker gives a chance to dive into why a hip-hop beat cannot function without a degree of complexity.

A ‘backpacker’ is an artist or listener who only listens to ‘intellectual’ hip-hop, or simply seeks out music in the genre that has more substance than what might be played on the radio. This is a decades-old term, coming about before rap had true mainstream dominance. The ‘backpack’ refers to the fact that backpackers would carry their favorite vinyls or tapes around with them, either to sample or just to listen to, rather than work with what they might be given.

Personally, I would call any hip-hop artist that finds deep samples in obscure music to be a backpacker and, while there is merit in referencing a simple song that everyone knows, I find backpackers’ compositions to be much richer and ‘fuller’ in even their rhythms alone.

A great example of Yancey’s vivid style can be heard in Proof’s 1997 “Life.” The actual drum machine beat is very simple, but it’s the sample that provides a delicacy to the instrumental. A very simple piano, playing a very simple melody, is all that’s needed to string the measures together. But it’s not a generic piano melody, it’s actually a proven one.

If you listen to “Life,” you’re hearing Bill Evans on the keys. Not only is the tone and style emblematic of his work, but it’s a rather obvious sample, pulled from Evans’ playing on arguably the most famous jazz album of all time: Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, and “Blue in Green” specifically. Hear it? All Yancey did was lower the pitch and slow the tempo a bit. I say ‘all he did’ in the sense that most art seems rather obvious in retrospect.

Let’s look at one of the greatest sample pulls of all time. A melody exists that I find to be subjectively perfect, and in repeating a strong series of notes you can create a rhythm that is not just dynamic but infinitely better than a standard percussion track might be. Listen to Yancey’s production on “Milk Money;” I’m not saying that I’ll give you my first born child if you can guess where that vocal melody was pulled from, but my mind will be so blown it’ll give me a migraine if your estimate is even close.

I remember hearing Milk Money and it took the entire length of the track before I realized where Yancey had found his melody, “Is that…no way…NO…there is no way that’s the sublime vocal melody from the intro to the worst theme song in the history of film, which serves as the opening to the worst film of all time.” That’s right, “Milk Money” samples the oBscure intro of Kenny Loggins’ “I’m Alright (Film Mix),” the song written for Caddyshack. The melodic vocals you’re hearing are not in the actual mix of the song, only the version used for the film (the only reason I could pull this sample from my memory when hearing “Milk Money” was because I had a visceral reaction the first (and only) time I saw Caddyshack, being so blown away by the beauty of those vocals, only to come crashing down to Earth a millisecond later when that godawful gopher started dancing: “Wait, what?”).

For as simple or accessible as hip-hop instrumentation may appear, figures like Yancey prove through their work that there is still so much to be learned and experimented with when it comes to rhythm, through musical literacy. Detractors or laypeople have ‘no idea’ why anyone would even remotely like Kanye West, never quite taking the time to understand that West was a producer before he became an artist, and was/is one of the most prominent backpackers in modern pop music. Rhythm is seen as ‘obvious’ or ‘apparent’ by the listener, for better or worse, but never mistake it for just ‘percussion’ or even just a ‘beat.’

…Okay, one more J Dilla sample, I can’t help myself. “Intro (Alt.)” is nothing more than an instrumental interstitial, yet also carries such a tremendous mood, tenor, and texture, and he pulled it from the most ridiculously-narrow aspect of a largely-obscure 2003 house song. Rhythm is what separates a good piece of music from a great one; understanding that there are details to be found in the ‘beat’ of an old symphony or tomorrow’s pop hit is critical when developing your own viewpoint of a piece.

Using the Six Components to Find Music’s “Color”

Now we’re going to learn how you chew your food, so you can better taste it. Just as you have different types of teeth, we’re going to learn how to chomp down on music from different angles to release the all the flavor.

We’ve outlined The Three Contexts (Music that Tells a Definite Story, Music that Tells an Indefinite Story, and Music that Exists Simply for Its Own Sake) and The Three Elements (Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm), so now we can use combinations of these six noble gases to discover previously unknown aspects to music both new and incredibly-familiar.

In the visual arts, you might consult a color wheel to find which hues best compliment one another. Red doesn’t play well with certain colors, and other colors don’t play so well with red. There are no hard-and-fast rules to color theory, but a color wheel will help you find strong trends exist that would be irresponsible to ignore. For example, maybe you’ve noticed that the artists behind mainstream film posters love to use blue and orange.

In any piece of music, there exist a select number of ‘hues’ that mix to form a single ‘color.’ This is completely pseudoscience and not an actual fact, but it will help you to understand how to immediately interpret music and allow you to more accurately discover/articulate your objective and subjective reactions.

Think of it like paint. Dip your brush into the one context that a piece exists in, add the three shades of melody, harmony, and rhythm present, and you will have a specific color. It does not have to be this literal, but: think of each piece of music you hear in life as being a single color. You now only need to think of two things: ‘why’ that specific color and ‘how’ to communicate which color that is to yourself/others without naming that color (you can’t use a word in its own definition, after all).

Confused? You should be, this isn’t a science. It’s art.

Let me give you an example. We’re going to listen to a song together and I’ll show you how I use the Three Contexts and Three Elements to discover what color that song ‘is’ (to me), and what to do with that information.

One of the biggest hits in recent memory is The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights.” I’ve heard this song maybe once before writing this article. It’s not my favorite Weeknd track. I don’t dislike it either. It’s a neutral piece; one I’m not previously-familiar with, yet a great number of people probably are.

Let’s work through this.

Which Context does it belong to? It’s definitely a “Song that Tells an Indefinite Story.” There aren’t nearly enough proper nouns or direct compositional references to indicate it’s telling an exact story, but it’s certainly saying something that you can project a general narrative or emotional arc to. Very easy.

What about melody, harmony, and rhythm? Again, it’s a pop song, so it’s doesn’t really hide its elements. The melodic value of the piece rests in its chorus, there’s little variety in the syllables being sung in the verses. Harmonically, it’s in a minor key (cheat: series of background notes that end on a ‘down’ note). I can’t hear keys by ear, but it’s in a C minor, which is a pretty common key for pop songs like this. In a literal sense, there’s not much depth to the harmony other than the reverb on his voice. In essence, however, the accompanying deep synthesizers are providing a counter-weight to his higher-register vocals. Rhythmically, it’s obviously a song you’re meant to dance to. It’s artsy and ‘bold’ but listen to the meter, it never really changes from its “1–2, 1–2, 1–2, 1–2–3” and the only thing that ‘3’ is really doing is making a noticeable end to each a measure (musical comprehension in pop music is subliminally recognizing the distance to and from the chorus).

There are over sixteen million colors in the universe, which one is “Blinding Lights”? Realistically speaking, we don’t need to agree on which it is, but we need to have arrived there relatively the same way.

I think it’s this exact shade of ‘pink.’ To me, this song is a combination of pink, orange, and purple. Any and all of the deeper electronic elements are colder tones than they are warm, with an ambiguously ‘retro’ tone, which pushes me to purple. The lighter tones behind his voice are ‘bright,’ clearly not dark and depressing, leading me toward orange. The qualities of Tesfaye’s vocals and the content of the lyrics are soft, warm, and light, pushing me toward pink.

Is this the most esoteric nonsense you’ve heard in your life? Absolutely, it’s ridiculous. It’s ludicrous. On what basis can I assign any of my assessments to a color? Isn’t this the most subjective process ever? Totally. But here’s the trick: watch me invoke this color in your mind, through the way I describe the music. It’s almost impossible to do this accurately, but the byproduct of attempting it is an objective understanding of the song and my feelings in very little time at all.

I’m no Beethoven, but if you were to ask me to describe this track:

“The Weeknd’s ode to the Sin City sunrise brings with it not only the blush that might fill your cheeks when remembering another’s touch, but the beat that your heart skipped when you learned that the morning’s promise might stay unfulfilled. Tesfaye’s voice soars like a spirit over The Strip, swirling around the flashing lights of the marques, with a pulsing beat seeping from the darkened clubs sitting just outside of the hotel’s glow.”

I’m not the best writer or most profound musical genius of our time, but I pulled that out of my butt in about a minute. Las Vegas is in the orangish desert, sunrises are orange/pink, blushes are red/pink, hearts are red. The Strip is characterized by sharp lights in what would otherwise be darkness, those lights usually being either completely natural yellows and oranges or odd colors like pink, blue, or purple. ‘Love’ is red, white, and pink. I’m not going to pretend that if I asked you to read my assessment above without knowing ‘my color’ that you would be able to visualize it just by reading my words, but I did paint you a picture that explained the extremely general feeling of an already-somewhat-vague song.

Do I literally ‘think’ that song description when I listen to it? No. Do I have chromesthesia? Nope. But this is exactly my general point:

You must exercise your ability to ‘experience’ a sensation in a way that isn’t so obvious in order to understand the obviousness of that sensation.

Start thinking of smells as sounds. Start thinking of tastes as a vision of something. Start thinking of something you might see off in the distance of how it is literally touching your skin. Chew your music and look at the flavor on your tongue.

Let’s try another song. Let’s do a famous one that many people have heard of. I’ll describe what I experience and you’ll try to guess the color. It’s incredibly likely that I won’t be able to accurately articulate the hue to you, but both of us are going to actually see the music we’re hearing. We’ll tear off a piece and gnaw together.

Let’s do a neutral one, one with no chromatic album art or music video visuals that might influence us. Let’s do The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.”

“Jagged and jingling, Satisfaction slices through its own imagery; ecstatic to bleed and froth over tales of in-complacency. The irreverent grain to Jagger’s strained and snaggy delivery is matched by Richard’s saw-tooth riffs, the two electric jigsaws finding a consistent rhythm in each other’s teeth.”

There’s not a chance in hell you’ll guess my color, but it’s this. I see very bold reds, with green between, and veins of yellow. The song straddles the line between having a Definite and Indefinite story. The melody is rudimentary. The harmony is bare. The rhythm is direct and danceable.

Assign verbs to the context and elements of your favorite music, and you’ll never have to utter the words, “I dunno, I just like it or whatever.” And you’ll learn to listen for more than just the ‘lush instrumentation,’ ‘dynamic percussion,’ and other empty phrases that critics can’t seem to shake. And you’ll never again annoy me to literal death by describing a work of art as ‘hauntingly beautiful’ ever again.

Let’s return to the concept of Objectivity versus Subjectivity. Just because you may not like a color doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If you take the time to actually taste a flavor that I might not enjoy; you can reveal more about your identity through identifying the details of your preferences.

Objectively, reggae is perfectly fine music. Subjectively, I absolutely cannot stand it. I listen to music from every time period, culture, and context, but I cannot stomach reggae. But that doesn’t make me blind to its attributes. I consider it a statement of extreme ignorance to say, “Yeah, I don’t like that genre of music, therefore I don’t really listen to it, which would give me no reason to like it, which would give me no reason to listen to it, etc. etc. etc.”

Hate reggae. Don’t like it. So let’s load up some Bob Marley & the Wailers “Stir it Up” and take a look at the difference between being honestly Objective and honestly Subjective. Try to guess my color as well.

“Marley’s tangy voice thumps between each stalk, weaving between rich background harmonies and a lead-footed guitar, cleverly tying a knot around a composition rich to the touch. One could run their fingers along the groove, cut so deep and so smooth that it practically entices the listener to empty their troubles into the wobbling pools left like footprints from lackadaisical toes.”

OR

“A crude rhythm bogs down tepid efforts at a melody; with no wind flowing into the sails of Marley’s voice, we travel nowhere interesting and experience nothing all that profound. In many cases polishing a point only makes it shine but this effort feels nothing but dull and muddied.”

My color. Same color for both reviews. Same general shade I might ‘see’ when I listen to a ska song that drifts a bit too close to 1.) horns acting as percussion 2) minimal strings being played for rhythm only and 3.) major-key vocals with relatively minimal variations in melody. It’s just that easy. When you associate music with some other sense, intellectual associations and parallels become easier and more ethical to make.

If it helps, don’t think about eyesight and colors. Try taste. Give the Three Contexts their own flavors, with the Three Elements having some of their own. How does your tongue react to that orchestra piece compared to the synth-pop track? Or smells; how does an Indirect Story with a strong harmonic element tickle your nose? Touch! Is the song cold, hot, sharp, soft, etc.?

This is my method for mapping out a perspective on music. I’m a filmmaker and a writer, so it helps me to understand and appreciate the challenge of describing something but never being to see what it really is. Like feeling around in the dark, I can understand the shape, texture, and form of what’s before me but like the old Blind Men and The Elephant parable: just because something is technically indescribable doesn’t make its reality any less objective. From this day forth, no longer shall you reduce the musical discourse in your mind and conversations with others to, “Well it’s all just opinion anyway, isn’t it?”

It all sounds criminally insane until you hear a brand-new song, something completely alien and unfamiliar to you, and can instantly snap your fingers and shout, “Lavender!” just like you did to that other piece, “and how sweet it tastes: that’s a ten.”

Jesse Stewart is an American filmmaker, writer, and tricky-tune-taster for Epocene Motion Picture Company.

Others in the ‘How To’ Series:

How to: Keep a Journal and Your Sanity

How to: Write a Thank-You Letter to a Mortal Enemy

How to: Hold Hands (and When to Let Go)

How to: Be More Virtuous (with the Help of a Drunk Nudist)