What Is (or Isn’t) Music?

For many philosophers—and many non-philosophers too—music one of the greatest gifts we have: it brings people together, it lifts us up when we’re down, and it’s one of the only things we do that’s not for any practical purpose. Sure, a few lucky souls make money from music, and some even achieve fame, but most of us are just singing in the shower or in the car on the way to work. And it makes us happy—what a lucky thing to have in our lives!

And music doesn’t just make us happy; it can make us sad (in a good way), calm, or even powerful. (It can also induce anxiety: think of horror movie music!) Maybe you just had a bad breakup and want a way to get fully in touch with your emotions, so you put on Last Kiss. Or maybe you want to feel strong and independent again, so you put on We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together. (I guess we’re in Taylor Swift mode right now!) Music can affect our emotions in all kinds of ways.

But how much of that mood-shaping is the music, and how much is it the lyrics? If Taylor Swift had sung “We Are Never Ever Getting Baskin Robbins,” it would still scan just right, but it would probably not offer quite the same degree of solace. Or think about Coolio singing Gangsta’s Paradise—a moving song about life on the streets—and then Weird Al changing it to Amish Paradise. Same tune, very different impact.

Some fans of music might well say there’s still something in the music itself, independently of the words. We can tell that by listening to music that doesn’t have words, like Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations. Most of us would say it’s “sad music,” indeed music that brings out sadness in us. It’s clearly not because of the words, since there aren’t any. So is it just because we’ve been culturally conditioned to hear it that way? After years of exposure to movie scores, funeral marches, and sad pop songs, have we been trained to associate sadness with certain musical notes? Or could it be that when we want to express sadness, we reach for the notes that sound sad… because they really do sound sad?

Other fans of music might resist this entire way of thinking about things. Why do we need music to make us feel sad, happy, rambunctious, or anything else? Imagine someone with a bottle of antidepressants in one hand and a Taylor Swift album in the other; after looking at the research, they conclude that singing along to Taylor Swift has more mood benefits and fewer side effects, so they put on the album and put the pills in the bin. That sounds like a depressingly practical way to think the value of music.

For fans like these, music isn’t about anything, and it isn’t expressing anything; it just is. Music is valuable precisely because it’s useless—because you can’t build a house with it, or spread it on your toast, or stab your enemies with it. Unlike almost everything else in our culture, it is gloriously without purpose. It helps us remember that life is also about other things. As Zhuangzi put it, we should never forget “the use of the useless.”

So what is it, really, that compels billions of people around the world to play instruments, go to concerts, and sing along to Taylor Swift when we’re feeling miserable? Maybe our guest will have some answers: it’s Andrew Kania from Trinity University, author of Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction.