The Value of Music

Ray Briggs
Can music express every human emotion?

Josh Landy
Why do people deliberately listen to sad songs?

Ray Briggs
Is music a metaphor for time?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosopher’s Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today we’re asking about the value of music.

Josh Landy
It’s one of the greatest things ever Ray. I mean, look, it brings people together. It it lifts us up when we’re down, it’s one of the only things we do that isn’t for any practical purpose. How lucky we are that we have music in our lives.

Ray Briggs
Hey, I think you’re contradicting yourself. First you listed all the benefits of music, and now you say it’s not for any practical purpose. Which is it?

Josh Landy
Well, when I said practical purposes, I meant things like making money or getting famous or things like that, right? I mean, yeah, there are a few people out there who make money from music. Some of them even get famous, but the rest of us, we’re just singing in the shower or in the car on the way to work, and it makes us happy. What’s wrong with that?

Ray Briggs
Well, it’s great that singing makes us happy, but that’s not why we do it? Imagine you’ve got a person with a bottle of antidepressants in one hand and a Taylor Swift album in the other, and after looking at the research, they conclude that singing along to Taylor Swift has more mood benefits and fewer side effects. Is that really how you want us to think about the value of music?

Josh Landy
Okay, not that scenario in particular, okay, but think about this one. You just had a bad breakup. You want a way to get fully in touch with your emotions, so you put on last kiss, right? Or you want to feel strong and independent again, so you put on we are never, ever getting back together. Those are cases where you really do deliberately choose music as a way to affect your mood. Isn’t that exactly why we listen?

Ray Briggs
But how much of that is the music really, and how much is the lyrics? You hear the words and then you connect them to your breakup. If Taylor Swift had sung, we are never, ever getting Baskin Robbins, I don’t think you’d be crying on the floor of your shower.

Josh Landy
I don’t know, no more ice cream ever. That really would be a sad song.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but seriously, it’s not the music doing the work you’re describing. It’s the words take the same melody on its own, and it just isn’t gonna have the same impact. Like think about Coolio singing “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

Coolio
As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I take a look at my life and realize there’s nothin’ left.

Ray Briggs
That’s a moving song about life on the streets. But Weird Al singing “Amish Paradise”?

Weird Al
But if I finish all of my chores and do finish time, then tonight we’re going to party like it’s 1699.

Ray Briggs
Same tune, very different impact.

Josh Landy
That is a really great parody, and I like your point here, but still think about music that doesn’t have any words at all. Listen to this beautiful bit of Tchaikovsky.

Josh Landy
Didn’t that make you verklempt Ray? I mean, that is some sad music right there.

Ray Briggs
Well, sure, but that’s only because we’ve been conditioned to hear it as sad for years and years, you and I have been exposed to all these movie scores and funeral marches and sad pop songs, and they all sound a little bit like that. So it’s not that there’s anything inherently sad about that music. It’s just our cultural training.

Josh Landy
I don’t know. I think you’ve got it backwards. It’s not that we’ve been trained somehow to associate sadness with a series of musical notes. It’s the reverse. It’s when we want to express sadness, we reach for the notes that already sound sad, because they really do sound sad?

Ray Briggs
I don’t know. I think this entire conversation about sadness is really beside the point. Music doesn’t express sadness or happiness or fear of frogs or anything. What’s beautiful about music is that it’s totally abstract. It isn’t about anything, and it isn’t expressing anything. It just is.

Josh Landy
I mean, that is a beautiful theory, but does it really help us understand the power of music? What is it that compels billions of people around the world to sing and dance and play instruments and go to concerts? I mean, surely music must be doing something for us.

Ray Briggs
Nah, don’t forget your Zhuangzi. Josh, he says we should never forget the use of the useless 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. Birth it. Life isn’t just about having a purpose. It’s about other things.

Josh Landy
Well, I totally agree that life is about other things. I just think we can still enjoy singing along to Taylor Swift when we’re miserable.

Ray Briggs
Well maybe our guest will convince you to do something better with your time. It’s Andrew Kania from Trinity University, author of “Philosophy of Western Music.”

Josh Landy
But first… Are you a Swifties or a Metallica head? What makes some people love soft pop and others heavy metal? We sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Sarah Lai Stirland, to find out. She files this report.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Why do some kinds of music move some people but not others? This is a question that a Metallica concert recently left me with.

Metallica Saved My Life
Metallica is hope, freedom, escape. Every fan has a story. Why are you listening to this white people music? It didn’t fit like the stereotype. You’re doing something different than everybody else. I want to hear them—I want tohear em all.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Some of the band’s many fans were recently interviewed for a new documentary called “Metallica Saved My Life.” Metallica, of course, is one of the most successful heavy metal bands of all time. They’ve got fans in countries from Japan to Botswana and who travel the world to see them perform. But this kind of passion mystifies me. How can American heavy metal music find people across the globe so closely, and how come I can’t experience these feelings when listening to Metallica.

Metallica Saved My Life
The Metallica subculture in Botswana is completely different. We have an identity here. It gives me the lion heart.

Susan Rogers
Think about who would want to feel as though they have a lion heart.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Heart. Susan Rogers is a former record producer and sound engineer. She’s also co-author of the book “This Is What It Sounds Like: What the Music You Love Says About You.”

Susan Rogers
Perhaps people who are under duress, people who need to be brave, people who are struggling and being challenged by others. It would feel great to feel powerful and strong and brave and driven, which metal music is giving us—if we like it.

Sarah Lai Stirland
Rogers teaches music and cognition at the Berkeley College of Music. She says neuroscience research confirms that music strikes a major chord in shaping how we feel and see ourselves. Scans show that our brain circuits retrieve memories of our unique life experiences when we recognize patterns of music and like what we hear. So it’s no surprise when another fan in the Metallica documentary says…

Metallica Saved My Life
Growing up in a civil war, I found the music that had been the soundtrack to my life.

Susan Rogers
Our auditory processing circuitry goes from our ears to the whole rest of the brain, but in particular, it activates our sense of self, and it goes through the thalamus. The thalamus is responsible in part, for emotions.

Sarah Lai Stirland
In other words, we’ve evolved to feel sounds before we think about them. It led the late neuroscientist Jack pans kept to characterize sound as an invisible form of touch.

John Lucasey
That’s what he wants. Is heaven. He wants that angelic sound.

Sarah Lai Stirland
John Lucasey is a music producer and Metallica fan in Oakland, California. For him, Metallica frontman James hetfield’s voice provides the perfect blend of novelty and familiarity, he explains as we listen to the band’s landmark 1980 song “One.”

Metallica
I can’t remember anything / can’t tell if this is true or a dreamDeep down inside, I feel the scream / this terrible silence stops with me.

John Lucasey
There’s so much drama—”deep inside…” You know what I mean? “Stop MEAH”—right there. He doesn’t say “stop ME.” It’s very guttural in barbaric.

Sarah Lai Stirland
But this growly male timbre doesn’t resonate with me. It turns out that I’m not part of the Metallica family, because the kinds of melody lyrics and rhythms that I like and that activate my brain circuits are different. Growing up, my mother kept a lot of soul and R&B music in the house, and I found my release by dancing in nightclubs.

Susan Rogers
Just because a piece of music isn’t serving a function for you that it does for others doesn’t mean that there’s anything out of whack with your own music listening brain.

Sarah Lai Stirland
My brain is more tuned to female soloists and the music of someone Susan Rogers used to work for as a sound engineer.

Prince
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today  to get through this thing called life.

Sarah Lai Stirland
So I do belong to a global musical congregation. It’s just not the same one as Metallica’s

Metallica Saved My Life
Whatever you want to put on that religion, cult, family, family, family, family, whatever label I don’t care. It’s a gathering of like minded people that are there to celebrate life. It’s called Metallica.

Sarah Lai Stirland
People from all over the world share similar emotional experiences that make Metallica’s music the perfect release for them. It’s just that my brain circuits recognize the patterns in Prince’s melodic vocalizations more readily than James hetfield’s guttural growl. For Philosophy Talk. I’m Sarah Lai Stirland.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that fantastic report, Sarah, I kind of found myself getting closer and close to becoming a metal fan. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re asking about the value of music.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Andrew Kania. He’s professor of philosophy at Trinity University and author of “Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction.” Andrew, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Andrew Kania
Thanks so much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Josh Landy
So Andrew, you’ve, you’ve written a ton about music, but I know it’s not just a theoretical interest for you. What’s your favorite musical memory?

Andrew Kania
Well, I mean, there’s a lot to pick from. But recently, the New Zealand youth choir won the choir of the world competition. And that brought back a lot of memories for me, because the last time they won that competition was in 1999 and I was a member of the choir.

Ray Briggs
Wow, I bet you sounded angelic.

Andrew Kania
It was useful to have you know 49 better singers than me around me.

Ray Briggs
So Andrew, when people talk about music appreciation, it sounds really high brow, like going to the symphony in your fancy clothes. But aren’t there other ways to appreciate music too?

Andrew Kania
Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting. I do feel like that phrase music appreciation has that awful looks, it sounds like you’re in a classroom or something. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. And I think that phrase is associated with, like learning, kind of Western music theory or something, so that you can appreciate, you know, Western classical music in particular. But if we just mean by music appreciation, like, you know, listening to music and enjoying it, then, of course, it happens all over the place, right? People go to rock concerts. People wander around these days with earbuds and all the time. And I mean to the extent that they’re kind of listening to the music and understanding it, and thinking it’s good or it’s bad, enjoying it. I think that’s music appreciation.

Josh Landy
But does it make a difference if you have some kind of training? Obviously, training could, could happen in the classroom, but it could just be somebody talking to someone in the music biz, or someone who really knows Metallica or something like that. I mean, do you think it’s good enough for us to just sit and listen, maybe repeatedly, to things that we like, or is there some kind of value in getting information, getting training, learning some of the tricks of the trade?

Andrew Kania
Yeah. I mean, I do think there is a really important aspect to appreciation of understanding the music. So in that sense, I think, yeah, it is important to get some training. But I think what that means exactly is a little bit different, like you talked about sitting there and listening to the same stuff over and over again. But even if people are kind of real fans like that, they don’t just listen in isolation. They’re connected to other people. They’re listening to other music that Spotify suggests to them, or back in the old days, a real live person suggested to them. And so I think we pick up a lot that way. I mean, apart from just being enculturated right growing up listening to various different kinds of music, so I think we do get trained. It’s just a lot of it happens kind of without our thinking of it in that kind of educational way.

Ray Briggs
It sounds a little like learning a language where just by being surrounded with it, you kind of pick up a bunch of things. And the analogy with speaking English is interesting, because you produce English sentences all the time. And I think a lot of people think of themselves as consumers of music, without being producers of music. Does that affect how much somebody understands music, whether they can make it?

Andrew Kania
It’s a very interesting question, and I think it probably does. You know, people primarily experience music these days through the form of recordings. I mean, people do, of course, go to live shows. People do, of course, like, you know, play their guitars and pianos at home. But this kind of situation we find ourselves in where people can, and often do, surround themselves with music constantly, right, in recorded form. That’s a very different way from how human beings have been living for the rest of history, right? Even some of these studies that get done about, like, you know, the importance of music and the omnipresence of music, it’s like, that’s not how music used to be. You used to have to have talented people around in order to produce music, in order to enjoy music, and often that meant that, yeah, everyone was a musician to a greater or lesser extent. And I think today that’s that’s not the case so much. And I think something is lost there. And I think you’re probably right that you don’t understand music, at least in the same way if you don’t make music yourself.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re asking about the value of music with Andrew Kania from Trinity University.

Ray Briggs
What’s your favorite kind of music? What makes it so special? Would you still listen even if it had no positive effect on your life?

Josh Landy
Mood, Melody and melancholy—along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

Cat Power
When I’m riding around the globe and I’m doing this and I’m signing that, and I’m trying.

Josh Landy
if you can’t get no satisfaction from life, could music make you feel a little better? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re asking about the value of music eith Andrew Kania, author of “Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction.”

Josh Landy
Got questions about the soundtrack of your life. Email us at comments@philosophytalk.org, or you can comment on our completely revamped website. And while you’re there, you can become a subscriber and find the music in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Andrew, we just heard a snippet of Cat Power’s version of “Satisfaction,” and it’s really different from the original version by The Rolling Stones. Is that the same song, or is it a whole new song?

Andrew Kania
That is an excellent question. I think that’s a that’s a great example. I mean, usually when we hear a performance of a song or a recording of a song that we know, we expect it to be different, right? We want to hear something kind of new in the interpretation. So, you know, people’s voices are different, they play in different keys, they use different instruments, all sorts of things. But of course, there’s kind of kind of limits to that, right? You can change the words a little, but you can’t, like, sing a completely different text, or it won’t be the same song. And and cat powers satisfaction is like this weird kind of uncanny valley there, right? Where the music is just totally different. There’s no resemblance to the to the Rolling Stones, and yet the words are exactly the same, right? So it’s instantly recognizable if you know the song. Except, of course, the chorus, which includes the kind of title line, is totally absent. So it’s this kind of bizarre case where we kind of, I think, can’t tell, in a way, whether it’s the same song or not. And actually, Michael rings, I, coincidentally, I just read this awesome paper by Michael rings, another philosopher of music. He talks about this very case, and he and a bunch of other cases like it. And he says these are kind of conceptual artworks. So in fact, the point of the track is to get you to think about these questions about the identity of song and the nature of music and and the relationship of rock music to its past and so on.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So there’s like, a whole bunch of questions here, right about, like, what are you doing when you write a song and bring a new thing into existence? Like, what is this new thing? Is it like? Is it just wherever somebody is singing the song or playing the song? Like, how do I even start thinking about that?

Andrew Kania
Oh, yeah. Well, that’s a, that’s a big field that, you know, philosophers use this fancy word ontology to talk about, you know, but basically, just like, what are the kinds of musical things there are? And, like, what’s the relationship between them? Right? So we’ve got, like, we might call musical compositions. That’s sort of what, what we’re talking about so far, right? Like songs, or in class. Music could be symphonies and string quartets and things, but then there were also performances, right? And performances are often, you know, of songs or of compositions. And so when you listen to music, you’re often listening to two things at once, as it were, not because it’s a mash up, but because you’re listening to musical work, like a song, like satisfaction, maybe, but you’re also listening to a performance of that song, right? And it’s very hard to think about, like, well, what’s the relationship between these two things? It feels like one thing. But on the other hand, we distinguish between these two things all the time.

Josh Landy
That’s really interesting. I mean, you know, when I go to a concert by a band that I know pretty well, they’re not they’re never gonna sing the song exactly the way they recorded it in the studio, partly because it’s impossible, partly because you don’t want to do that. It’s boring, right? But there you are listening to a song we can play, but also kind of hearing the version you know really well in your head. And I guess if it’s a cover, then you’re also kind of hearing the song that came before it in your head, and how am I handling all that at once? Somehow, without even I’m not even trying. Somehow, I’m bringing, you know, bringing my knowledge of the Rolling Stones version of satisfaction, but then also the studio version of Cat Power satisfaction. But now I’m listening to a live version. What’s going on in my head when I’m doing all that.

Andrew Kania
one interesting question there is, just like you mentioned the cover version idea, and it’s like, well, what is a cover version? I mean, we think of cat powers as maybe a cover version. But of course, it’s got this kind of weird conceptual element, because it’s like, not quite close enough, and makes us feel a little bit weird. But then when we go to a performance of a band, we know, as you’re saying, and we hear them play their songs, and we expect them to be, as you say, musically different from what we hear on the album. They’re not trying to, like, sort of mimic exactly the sound of the record. We don’t think—

Josh Landy
They’re covering their own song.

Andrew Kania
Yeah, exactly. It seems like, Well, shouldn’t we say that? I mean, if we say that other artists, when they play songs live that have been previously recorded, are covering, I mean, they’re doing exactly the same thing, right? We’re hearing the music in the same way, as you say. We’ve still got all of these different things in our heads, the original version, other versions we’ve heard, what we think about the song. So shouldn’t those count as covers? And yet, we don’t say that.

Ray Briggs
I think I might have a question about doing what you call musical ontology. So there are, like, a bunch of projects in here that I might do. I might want to be like, how many songs are there? If the band first records a version and then edits it and, like, remasters it and then plays it at a concert, um, or I might, I might ask, what is the thing that the band has created? Like, does it have a location, like, it seems like it might have a length, which is, like, I don’t know, three and a half minutes. Where is it in time? These are fun puzzles. Do you think that much about the appreciation and understanding of music turns on answering these puzzles?

Andrew Kania
I don’t think much turns appreciatively on some of those puzzles, but I think there are kind of related questions that a lot turns on. So, for instance, the thing about, like, writing a song, creating a song, did you bring a new thing into existence there? Or has it existed for all time, and you’re just sort of discovering it. Philosophers do discuss these sorts of issues. That’s what I’ve sort of called fundamental ontology, and it very much seems to kind of bleed into traditional metaphysics. I mean, old, old questions about, you know, how two things could be the same, right? You’ve got two keyboards in front of you. They’re exactly the same brand and everything, right? So they’re the same, but they’re not the same because they’re two different keyboards. So this goes back to kind of Plato and Aristotle in the West. I mean, everyone’s talked about these sorts of questions, but I actually don’t think there’s that much new that music brings to the picture. There might be some things because they’re cultural productions and so on.

Josh Landy
I mean, sometimes it gets kind of sticky, because you get court cases over whether two things, two songs, are the same thing, right? So you get, you know, George Harrison’s My sweet lord versus Ronnie Max. He’s so fine and and Blurred Lines versus, got to give it up and all of that. So it seems like sometimes these questions that seem like just fun puzzles for philosophers really have a kind of meaty payoff in the real world.

Andrew Kania
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. But I think we’ve now kind of shifted to these, what I’ve called more kind of higher order ontology questions, so sort of the relationship between a song and a performance, when is a performance an instance of a song. So just the question we were asking about the Cat Power cover, in a way. But there, I think we can talk about those questions without answering the fundamental questions, right? So there we’re really kind of asking, well, how thin or thick is a song to use use language that Stephen Davies, another philosopher of music has introduced a song is thin or thinner to the extent that there’s less you have to do to get an instance of the song right. And rock songs, popular songs, are typically pretty thin. If you get the tune and the words mostly the same, then you’ve got an instance of the song. Western cloud. School music is quite thick by comparison, right? So we heard a snippet of the Rococo variations earlier. If you don’t have a cello playing that solo part, if the cello doesn’t play basically all of the notes Tchaikovsky wrote in the score, you don’t have an instance of that work. So it’s a much thicker work. But I think to think about how thin or thicker work is, we don’t have to answer these kind of deep questions that Ray is asking about the nature of time and whether abstract objects exist.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re asking about the value of music with Andrew Kania from Trinity University, and we’ve got a question from a listener, Kevin in San Francisco. Kevin asks throughout his career, people have complained about Bob Dylan never playing the song like he recorded it on the album. He even changes lyrics sometimes. Is he forever covering himself or creating new things or both, or something else?

Andrew Kania
I’ve been thinking about this. Actually, recently I’ve been working on a paper on cover versions, and I think the first thing I’d want to say is, I think in western popular music traditions, so including, you know, rock and pop and that sort of thing, the sort of stuff that I’d say most people listen to most of the time, recordings are the primary focus of appreciation, right? So we talked about appreciation earlier. What is it that we are kind of trying to understand and enjoy and evaluate when we listen to popular music. I’ve been very influenced, like a lot of people, by some work by Theodore gracek Back in the last millennium, who influentially argued that we use the terminology of songs and performances all the time to talk about popular music, but when you look about what features people are talking about, and how they compare one musician with another. They’re really talking about recordings. And so it’s Bob Dylan’s recordings that are the kind of center of his artistic practice and what he’s going to be remembered for. Of course, he like performs live, and that’s very important, an important part of his musical practice, and put about part of our traditions. But I think recordings are even more central, even more important, to popular music traditions.

Josh Landy
All right, we’ve been talking about what music is and what a song is, or what a piece of music is, but what about what music isn’t? Is there anything that cannot possibly be music? Obviously, this is something that people say all the time, that’s not music, that’s just noise. I heard that a lot of my parents growing up, you know. And you might wonder about John Cage’s piece four minutes, 33 seconds, where it’s just silence for four minutes, 33 seconds, you know, a jackhammer outside my house. That’s rhythmic, but it’s, I don’t think that’s music. How do you draw the line between things that are music and things that are not music?

Andrew Kania
It’s an excellent question, and I think a very difficult one, possibly an impossible one, if you really want a kind of sharp line that’s going to count everything in or out. But I think one good place to start is like, there are things that are obviously not music that no one even considers so, you know, I noticed you didn’t in your tricky examples, you didn’t bring up, you know that you have a cup of coffee in front of you, and it’s like, well, is that music? Nobody thinks a cup of coffee is music. I mean, if somebody said that, you’d say, Wait, do you mean like the sound of it slurping into your mouth, right? So it seems like music’s got to have something to do with sound or hearing auditory experience. But then the question, of course, is like, okay, so which sounds count as music? I think one thing that that I think has got to be central here is intentions. So you’ve got to it’s got to be intended to be music, you might say, or intended to be received in a certain way. And that’s why the jackhammer, at least in the case that you’re talking about, doesn’t count as music. But that’s not to say that a jackhammer couldn’t be part of a piece of music if somebody put it in there.

Ray Briggs
We’ve got a question from listener Eric on blue sky, who wants to follow on with this, what is music topic? Eric writes, was Socrates? Right? That philosophy is a kind of music or dead wrong?

Andrew Kania
Wow. I have not thought about that question, I would say philosophies being music is just a metaphor. I don’t think there’s any way in which philosophy is is literally music. You might also ask, Can music be philosophy? I think that would be a pretty tricky case to make, too, though, of course, if it has words, it can be philosophical, and maybe it can even do philosophy. But that, I think, brings us back to this question of, like, what is music? Songs are going to be everyone’s first examples, I think, in contemporary Western culture, when you ask kind of for examples of music. But I think that that idea skates over a very important distinction that I talked about in my work between music as a genre, right, which is the sense in which songs definitely count as music and music as a medium, in which case the answer is a little more complicated. I would say songs are a combination of at least two media, music and words. Interestingly, we had this kind of distinction in English. Some cases, like, we distinct between language, which is a medium that can be used in all sorts of ways, and literature, which is language used in an artistic way. But we don’t really have that distinction in the language of English, right? We’ve just got this one word music for both, right?

Ray Briggs
So I’m thinking about all the places that music shows up where it’s not really art. So like advertising jingles, incidental music in movies and TV shows. And I have a friend who’s really interested in sound logos, these things that just appear on the TV screen before a show and have, like, a couple of little identifying notes. What is the music doing there for the rest of the media it’s in?

Andrew Kania
Yeah well, that’s interesting. And I’d say there’s important distinctions between those, of course, don’t ask me what art is. Other cases, I think, yeah, music, but not art. And I think once you start thinking about that again, you’re inevitably thinking about what art is. So I think of like very simple old school doorbells, you know, Ding Dong, I do think that’s music, but I don’t think that’s an artistic use of music, right? The musical sounds there. We hear them as music. We hear them as two notes with a certain kind of harmonic or melodic relationship, but we don’t think of them as kind of trying to do what what music does for us when we think about the value of music.

Josh Landy
Okay, so there’s two things here, right? So there’s what music’s trying to do, and then what it’s actually doing. So let’s start with the first. I’m very curious why we sometimes care who wrote a piece of music, and sometimes we don’t. But you know, a lot of the popular songs that people listen to, myself included, I’m often surprised when I find out, Oh, wait, blondie didn’t write that song. That was someone else’s song. Why didn’t I need to know, why does intention seem to matter a lot sometimes and other times not? Or at least, why does authorship seem to matter a lot? If I want to appreciate this, this symphony, I really need to know it was Mozart?

Andrew Kania
Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, I think those two different cases are actually more similar than you’ve you’ve presented them as being, I think if you want to know more, if you want to go deeper into understanding a piece of music and and that’s partly like how it fits into the rest of music around and the history of music, authorship is going to be part of that. So I think if you want to go deep on Blondie, then you’re going to want to know that this is a blondie track. And you also might want to know, I think it brings up that question again about recordings versus performances versus compositions, right? Maybe the track is the important thing, and it’s that Blondie sound that you’re so interested in, but then you might be interested in finding out who the sound engineers were, and the producers and so on. But similarly, I think, I mean, lots of people listen to Mozart not knowing it’s Mozart, or might not be able to tell the difference between Mozart and Beethoven. I think there’s nothing wrong with that if you kind of enjoy it. But of course, if you want to understand the music, then I think you’ve got to be able to tell the difference between Mozart and Beethoven, and that’s going to involve thinking about their historical relations and so on.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re questioning the value of music with Andrew Kania from Trinity University, author of “Philosophy of Western Music: A Contemporary Introduction.”

Ray Briggs
Is there a genre of music you hate? Is there one that you first hated and then came to love? How do we expand our musical tastes?

Josh Landy
The reasons for resonance—plus commentary from me and Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Tanya Donnelly
Sometimes it rains fish from the sky and the statues all start to cry, and someone writes another beautiful song.

Josh Landy
When someone writes another beautiful song, does that redeem this tinker toy world of ours? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is Andrew Kania from Trinity University, and we’re asking about the value of music.

Josh Landy
Andrew, we just heard a beautiful Tanya Donnelly song explaining the magic of music. When you hear it, she says it’s like fish falling from the sky. So what do you think would be lost if music disappeared from the world?

Andrew Kania
Well, I guess if Donnelly’s right, we’d have a lot fewer fish based concussions. But in a way, I feel like that would have to be a world without us. I mean, we just are musical creatures. So I find it kind of hard to think about that. You know, even if a fascist dictator, you know, banned all concerts and all the records were destroyed, we could still that would obviously be a terrible wrong, but we could still enjoy music in our heads, right, listening to music, even without making music out loud. And I think that’s a really important thing to remember when we ask this question.

Ray Briggs
I think it would be really sad if we had to only enjoy music in our heads, though, like it seems like a key part of music is that it sounds like something out loud.

Andrew Kania
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this question is really about kind of, what is the value of music? And again, Nietzsche famously said a life without music would be a mistake, of course, as a philosopher of music, as a lover of music, I really love that kind of sentiment, but when I think about it as a philosopher, I think, Geez. Now hold on here. Niet, it seems like lots of people love music, but some people don’t love music, and some people are, for various reasons, not capable of appreciating music. I don’t think their lives are necessarily mistakes, so I do think it’s important to keep some perspective here and remember that music is just one thing of great value to us, but there are lots of other things that we can value too.

Josh Landy
That makes sense. But let’s dig in a little bit to the value, the potential value of music. You were saying before that something that distinguishes art music from music is an intention to do something a little bit special, do something for us. What does that come down to? I mean, there are all these theories out there about why music feels like it enhances our world? I mean, some people think has to do with emotions. Some people think it has to do with like, a kind of intuitive understanding of the world. Schopenhauer has that fascinating picture of music. There’s even moral theories of music. So I’m thinking here in part of shunza, the Chinese philosopher who says, when music proceeds, that people will turn towards what is correct. So for shunza, at least music is actually going to or at least the right kind of music is actually going to make us morally better people. What do you think? Do you think music is going to make us better people?

Andrew Kania
I am a little bit suspicious of kind of causal claims in that realm. I do think music can be morally criticized, and maybe, of course, it does have some causal role. But again, I think it’s really important here distinguish between the medium and genre senses of music. Because when junta was talking about music, he was definitely talking about it’s translated as music. But my understanding, I’m no expert. My understanding is that he’s talking about a whole kind of ritual involving music, dance and all sorts of kind of associations that would come along with it. So philosophers of music in the Western tradition have focused on what they’ve sometimes called Pure Music or absolute music. None of these terms are really great, right? But again, I think what they’re focusing on is the idea of kind of music, alone by itself, can that do anything moral? And I think that’s a much more difficult question, even whether we can morally criticize or morally evaluate instrumental music is a lot more difficult. So I would say there’s two main theories of the value of music, if we think about just instrumental music or just the medium of music, and you touched on one of them, which is emotion, or we might say more generally, kind of representation. Can music kind of be about things in the world the same way painting is or film or literature? Literature. And then the other big theory is what sometimes called formalism, where the idea is no, it’s not about content. Music is an abstract art, and so it’s all about the structure of the piece, the shape, the relationships between the parts. But none of it really means anything.

Ray Briggs
Wait, wait, I feel like these are nice theories that both capture something that is valuable about music. But there’s this third thing that both of them leave out, which is the sensory aspect of music, like it just feels good to listen to.

Andrew Kania
Yeah, I think that’s right, though. I think maybe philosophers have downplayed that a little bit, just because of their suspicion of the value of kind of purely sensory experience. So if it’s really just like the timbre of the saxophone that you really like, and you could just sit there all day and listen to one saxophone note playing on and on and on, we might sort of think, Geez, that’s a kind of a shallow way to get your get your thrills, isn’t it really about the kind of melodies that the the saxophone is playing, and the way that the melody of the saxophone interacts with the rhythm of the drum kit, and so on so forth. And here we’re getting into things that might be representing emotions or they might have certain formal properties. And so we’re back to the two, the two main theories again.

Ray Briggs
I mean, these, these don’t seem mutually exclusive. And also, I’m a little bit suspicious of the suspicion of sensory pleasure. It’s it’s nice to feel good. People should feel good rather than bad.

Andrew Kania
Yep, I agree. So I definitely think that’s something that philosophers have ignored, perhaps somewhat at their peril. And I think, yeah, if you get some pleasure out of that, that’s totally fine. But as I said, I think it only is only going to take you so far. I mean, notice genres are not really divided in terms of, well, as soon as I say this, I know I kind of second guess myself divided in terms of just the pure kind of timbre. Of course, there are differences between heavy metal and hard rock. You might think that’s certainly an aspect of it. But again, I think it’s a it is a kind of superficial aspect, right? It might get you into it. You might really enjoy it, but there’s got to be more to it. I think if you’re really kind of enjoying the music than just that sensory surface.

Josh Landy
I would agree with that, and I’m interested in part in the emotive capacities of music, that music seems to be able to get us to feel things. Sometimes, feeling sad. It’s going to help us feel more sad, if that’s what we want. Sometimes it might help us feel less sad. It might be comforting in time of need. Some of my favorite songs are actually this interesting mix where the you have the this kind of chirpy, upbeat music with sinister lyrics. So there’s a song by the beautiful South called song for whoever, where their lyrics are, something like, oh Jennifer or Alison Oh philippo Sue, you made me so much money. I wrote this song for you. I mean, so what’s going on when you listen either to a kind of weird combo song where it’s half happy, half sinister, or just a straight up sad song. How does music affect our emotions?

Andrew Kania
There’s a number of great questions in there. I mean, one again, I just can’t get away from this topic, the nature of song as a combination of words and music, these two different media, right? You can’t even begin to understand the sorts of ironic songs you’re talking about without making that distinction. But then there’s also these questions. Put the words aside for a second. I think it’s really important to distinguish between the emotions in the music and the emotions in the listener. And a lot of people kind of run those together. They think, well, what’s a happy song? Well, it’s just a song that makes you happy. What’s a sad song? Same thing, it’s a song that makes you sad. But I don’t think that’s right. I think a song can be sad and yet leave you emotionally cold. A song can be happy and make you sad for various reasons. So I think we want to separate the question of what makes music emotional from the question of why and how does music make us emotional.

Ray Briggs
So I see that you can have a happy song that makes you sad. Maybe you listen to the happy song with your partner who left you and now you’re sad every time you hear it. At the same time, these things don’t seem unrelated. Like could you have a happy song that made every single listener sad upon hearing it because of the way it sounded like I’m not sure about that. Is there some more complicated story to tell about how these two things connect to each other?

Andrew Kania
Yeah, absolutely. So of course, there’s a connection between the two, but I think that the danger isn’t kind of running them together immediately. I mean, it might be a happy song in the sense that you can tell it’s it’s trying to be an upbeat happy song, but the person’s just so bad at singing and playing the guitar that everyone is made miserable by the song. And I take it that’s not exactly the kind of emotional response you were talking about, right? Because you’re talking about more about responding to the expression in the music. But it’s just another example of how complicated these questions can be, the different ways in which we can be made emotional by music.

Josh Landy
All right, so we’ve talked about emotional impacts. We’ve talked. Potential learning about something, the Schopenhauer idea, we talked about moral improvement, if we buy that. There’s a really interesting additional theory that we find in Proust and a little bit in Sartre, this idea that you could look to music as a model for how you could think about your own life. So musical compositions have a form, and if they’re good, it’s a beautiful form, and things kind of hang together, but in this special esthetic way, do you think there’s some kind of payoff there? Is that? Is that also a reason, potentially, for getting into music, getting excited about music, making music part of your life, that the more you’re around music, the more you can think about your own life as a symphony or as as a song or something like that.

Andrew Kania
I’m skeptical about that idea if we’re talking about instrumental music. So again, song, I think, yeah, a lot of people do use music that way, maybe for better or for ill. But of course, that’s because songs have lyrics, and so they can tell stories, and you can kind of see your own life in those lyrics or not. But I mean seeing your life as kind of going, you know, intro, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, outro. I mean, that doesn’t seem like a very good structure for a life, similarly for a symphony, right? It’s like, Well, I think of my life as having four movements. The first one will be kind of, you know, in four, four time, and then I’m going to waltz for the for the second quarter of my life. So I just think there might be some pieces of music where it makes sense to think of it as a kind of a life story. Jennifer Robinson done some really good work on a certain tradition in western symphonic music, of thinking of the symphony as a story of a life. But I don’t think I’d want to push that idea too far or apply it to too much music.

Ray Briggs
So Andrew, while we’re talking about genre, suppose our listeners want to expand the genres of music that they can listen to and enjoy and get something out of. What advice would you give them for being able to appreciate more different kinds of music?

Andrew Kania
It’s a great question, and I think it can be easy for some people and hard for others. I think it’s really important to have a kind of community to talk to about it. Talking to somebody who understands the music that you’re trying to get into can be very helpful. Of course, talking to is a vague term these days that could be a community on the internet or reading websites, but somebody else who understands the music and can tell you kind of what to listen for, what it is that that people tend to find rewarding this music, I think can be really helpful. And I think it’d be especially helpful if they also know and like some music that you know and like, because then they can draw connections between the stuff that you’re already familiar with and the stuff that you are not so familiar with.

Josh Landy
Well, that upbeat note, no pun intended, is a good place for us to stop. Thank you so much for joining us today. Andrew

Andrew Kania
Thanks so much. It’s been a lot of fun.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Andrew Kania, professor of philosophy at Trinity University, and author of philosophy of Western music, a contemporary introduction. So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So thinking about the conversation we were having about music expressing emotions, one of my favorite example songs is called “The Hook” by Blues Traveler. It sounds deeply nostalgic. It soars. And if you listen to the words, it’s all about how the music is tricking you into feeling deeply nostalgic, even though the words don’t mean anything. I love that song.

Josh Landy
Those songs are the best. Amy Mann’s Red Vines are so many wonderful examples of songs like that. So much to think about such a great conversation. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our completely revamped website philosophy talk.org and while you’re there, you can subscribe to our feed for free, or you can support us with a premium subscription and gain access through our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
Now speed up the metronome—it’s Ian Schoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales… After centuries of singing in the shower, opera, attending, fiddle playing, dancing and yodeling, there’s still disagreement about what music is exactly.Aas John Cage put it: there is no noise, only sound. If it’s all just sound, though, why do some songs get stuck in our heads? The Germans have a name for this (of course): Ohrwurm. In English, that’s ‘earworm’. James Kellaris, professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, popularized the term. In 2003 he wrote that 74% of ear worms are songs with lyrics, followed by commercial jingles 15%, and instrumentals at 11%. Earworm episodes last a couple of hours on average and occur frequently among 61.5% of his sample. He also discovered that women are more irritated by ear worms than men are. And almost everybody has had an ear worm at some time or other—sing along if you know it!

“It’s a small world after all”

Google earworm, and you will find scores of sufferers. Among earworms mentioned are these:

“I want my Chili’s Baby Back Ribs”
“Who-who-who-who let the dogs out”

Not to mention…

“We will rock you”

It’s hard work getting these out of your head!

“Working nine to five”

Well-nigh… impossible!

[Mission impossible theme]

And there are these:

“It’s fun to stay at the YMCA”
“We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun”

How about this head stopper?

“Wee-hee-hee-hee, dee hee-hee-hee-hee, wee-oh aweem away”

And of course…

“It’s a small world after all”

One poor fellow had “The Lonely Goatherd” from “The Sound of Music” stuck in his head. Another one had just one line from a song stuck in his head and couldn’t remember the rest of it or what band had done it. And there’s a woman who had Pink’s “Get This Party Started” stuck in her head, only for some reason she was hearing it as “Get This Starty Parted.” That’s just weird. Did I mention…

“Whn something’s going wrong, you must whip it”

There it is—

“Stuck in the middle with you”

…of your head!

[Hawaii Five-0 theme]

Don’t forget…

“Little Red Corvette”

Can you remove these earworms?

“We’re gonna make it”

How? Well there’s the lobotomy

“don’t worry, be happy”

Some suggesting in the earworm all the way through deliberately—supposedly, that gets it out of your system. In my case, that wouldn’t have worked, because the only part of my ear worm I could remember was…

“You’re the one hat I want, you are the one I want”

And I was damned if I was going to rent a copy of “Grease” just so I could sing along with a song that I hate. Others recommend singing other songs. Earworm sufferers say that “Viva Las Vegas” and Hava Nagila drive songs out of your head in a jiffy. Me, I finally got rid of my ear worm by singing “Go Down, Moses” in a booming baritone. Just goes to show there’s a cure for everything, if you know where on earth I’ll look for it. Luckily for us…

“It’s a small world after all.”

I gotta go.

Ray Briggs
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University, copyright 2025.

Josh Landy
Our executive producer is James Kass. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is the Director of Research and Advancement.

Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Pedro Jimenez, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the members of KALW local public radio San Francisco, where our program originates.

Ray Briggs
The views expressed (or mis-expressed_ on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or of our other funders.

Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in a library more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Blues Traveler
On that you can rely.