Music Causality

I'm currently reading the Cambridge Companion to Aristotle, largely because Aristotle himself is a really difficult read and I just wanted to refresh my memory. Also this week I received an email from Ted Gioia advertising Eleven New Albums he is recommending. What's the connection? First, let's listen to the first album recommendation, by Jonathan Bockelmann:

Here is what Ted says about this music:

Bockelmann has been playing classical guitar for two decades, and now—finally—releases a debut solo album.

He plays fresh, unfettered music with total authority in a lick-free zone. Although his claimed influences include such disparate voices as Ryuichi Sakamoto, Leo Brouwer, and J.S. Bach, there’s nothing derivative in these guitar vignettes.

I'm not sure what he means by "fresh, unfettered music with total authority in a lick-free zone" but what I hear is basically what is often called "smooth jazz," that is, jazz without an edge, jazz that floats along with no particular direction in a pleasing manner. It is a bit like a cake with a lot of different things on top: here is some fruit (harmonics), then a bit of chocolate sauce (internal pedal), then some icing (wandering harmonies) then a little passage-work and so on. What the music lacks is consistency and direction, it is just a collection of moods--too much topping, not enough cake.

Musical form, like so much else, exists on a spectrum between total unity and total diversity and this pleasant music is well out on the diversity end. For something on the other end we could cite some of the two-part inventions of J. S. Bach or the Art of Fugue which is a huge set of fugues all based on variations of a single theme. Of course, there are jazz examples that are well towards the unity end of the spectrum as well, "So What" from Kind of Blue by Miles Davis is a good example.

Now let's drag Aristotle into this. He was very interested in answering "why" questions which leads him to a theory of causality known as the Four Causes. The idea of a cause is that of an explanation for something.

In Physics II 3 and Metaphysics V 2, Aristotle offers his general account of the four causes. This account is general in the sense that it applies to everything that requires an explanation, including artistic production and human action. Here Aristotle recognizes four different explanatory roles that a thing can play. As a result, there are four different (kinds of) causes :

• The material cause or that which is given in reply to the question “What is it made out of?” What is singled out in the answer need not be material objects such as bricks, stones, or planks. By Aristotle’s lights, A and B are the material cause of the syllable BA.
• The formal cause or that which is given in reply to the question “"What is it?”. What is singled out in the answer is the essence or the what-it-is-to-be something.
• The efficient cause or that which is given in reply to the question: “Where does change (or motion) come from?”. What is singled out in the answer is the whence of change (or motion).
• The final cause is that which is given in reply to the question: “What is its good?”. What is singled out in the answer is that for the sake of which something is done or takes place.

That last cause is not only the most important from Aristotle's point of view, it might also seem the most unusual for a modern mind. Let's take the example of a guitar to make this clear. The material cause of a guitar is the wood, metal and plastic or ivory that it is made out of: Canadian mountain spruce, ebony, Indian rosewood, Honduras mahogany, tool steel and so on. The strings are made from nylon and copper plated with silver. These things are needed to construct a concert guitar. Next is the formal cause, that is, the design, the way these materials and shaped and processed in order to result in a guitar. The efficient cause is the guitar builder or luthier, he or she makes the changes in the materials in order to create the form of the guitar. The final cause, "what is its good?" in Aristotle's phrasing, is "music." The final explanation for why a guitar comes to be is the playing of music.

Now let's move the discussion into the causes of a piece of music. We need materials, of course, pitches, timbres, rhythms, harmonies and so on. They are the bricks and planks that we are going to make the piece from. The formal cause could be seen understood as the structure of the piece: what comes first, second and so on. We talk about "sonata form" which has certain structural commonalities (let's ignore for the moment the wide variations in this form!). The efficient cause is the composer, the person who puts the materials into a certain form. And the final cause, again, is music, or perhaps musical enjoyment.

Good old Aristotle only gets us so far so I want to postulate another element that relates to both the formal and final causes: directionality. Some music has a quality that could be described in different ways: it is gripping, dramatic, directional, it has velocity and so on. The music points in some way towards a conclusion. In some musical genres, like the classical symphony, this element dominates and the locus classicus is without a doubt the Symphony No. 5 of Beethoven:

From the first note we have intensely pointed direction: there are a small number of simple motifs that are developed in a way that points in a direction to a conclusion. Everything that might distract is eliminated. This is one kind of musical ideal: that of unified finality. A more modern example is the first movement of the String Quartet No. 15 of Shostakovich that obsessively focusses on one theme:

Now of course, there are an enormous number of pieces that are not nearly so focussed and instead manage to offer considerably variety on their journey. But in most music there is still a journey with a direction--the form implies a kind of "final cause" in a sense.

Of course, you can have  pleasant listening without any, or very little of this. But I am rather sensitive to the directionality of music and I get very frustrated when a piece of music seems to have no, or no plausible, direction.