The Universe of Music

I remember the exact moment when I decided not to switch my major from music to philosophy. This was when I was in my second year as an undergraduate at the University of Victoria. My first couple of undergraduate years at university were a wonderful time for me. It was the first time I had the opportunity to participate in the world of higher learning and I took to it like a duck to water. Apart from my course work in music, English, linguistics, German and philosophy I read an appalling amount: a multi-volume history of philosophy, Dante's Divine Comedy and a bunch of other stuff. I also was a voracious listener. Back then, pre-Internet, the only place you could find a really extensive collection of music to listen to was in a university listening library with their thousands of LPs of everything from Beethoven, to Javanese gamelan, to Machaut, to Stockhausen. It is hard for us to imagine now how limited the opportunities to hear music were before YouTube and iTunes and Spotify. If you wanted to hear, say, the Symphony No. 2 by Beethoven you had four choices:

• buy a recording
• wait for the local orchestra to program it
• read through the score yourself on piano
• take it out from the listening library

And if, as I did before attending university, you lived in a small town with no listening library--or orchestra!--and if you didn't happen to have the score, then you simply had to hope the local record store had a copy! So during my undergraduate years I took out several records every day from the listening library.

But back to my story: as I was saying, I remember the exact moment I decided to stick with music. I had taken a summer course in the philosophy department. It met every Friday afternoon for three hours, like a graduate seminar. The course was Philosophy of Mind, taught by the chair of the department. This was his specialty and it was a pretty high level course, 300 level as I recall. We started with readings in Descartes and moved on to Quine, Strawson and others in the British analytical tradition. Some of the things I learned stick with me to this day such as the concept of "category error" from Quine. But for the most part I felt lost at sea! The course was a huge challenge. There were only three students in the class and on one occasion both of the other ones didn't show up so I had to converse by myself with the professor for three hours. After that my head hurt! At the end of the course the professor gave me a little verbal evaluation, saying that he thought that I was sensitive to a number of the important distinctions. Sounds pretty half-hearted, or so I thought at the time! But it probably was not a bad comment. What was telling for me was that philosophy was utterly a thing of the mind or intellect. Even the professor's body language was indicative of this. He hardly seemed aware he had a body.

While I loved philosophy, it always seemed partial to me--just a slice of the universe. Music, on the other hand, was a whole universe in itself. There are the most abstract levels of pure thought in music theory, and at the same time, the most concrete and practical considerations in the playing of instruments. Your own body is an instrument if you are a singer. Well, that is also true of instrumentalists. Guitarists' fingertips are the source of sound for them as are the lips of trumpet players. The whole of your being goes into playing music and you are constantly dealing with bows, rosin, strings, fretboards, humidifiers, and on and on. Music history delves deep into the past while acoustics delves deep into science.

Music has a lot of eccentricities as well. For example, I just ran across this fascinating clip exploring whether A = 440 is wrong and it should be A = 432.

Of course the reasoning is flawed: we do not have a deep connection to the vibrational frequency of the universe! That's just a bit of scientific mumbo-jumbo. But tuning is one of those areas where obsessive eccentrics have been promulgating weird theories for the whole history of music. Incidentally, Adam Neely, who did the above clip, is a very clever fellow and in this clip explains how to tap 7 against 11:

One of those tuning eccentrics was the American composer Harry Partch who not only invented his own tuning system, but also all the instruments needed to use the system. Here is his Castor and Pollux: