Abstract

The paper looks at the nuances that make music a way of representing the world, relating to it and concretizing new worlds. It verifies how music is a metaphor of life, of our Self, of the Other, of Us, and how these relationships are metaphorically present in the musical structure rhythmic, melodic, contrapuntal and harmonically. Methodologically, the literature review will show how music became a means of symbolizing, signify and re-signify human existence through sound and its organization by the human being, as a means of communication that gives and attributes meaning to life. Thus, it will draw some considerations that show the idiosyncrasies of human behavior with music and their interaction with life and with its creation. The paper concludes that music is a way of trans-signifying the real, of communicating something, of informing, of going beyond what has already been set, of symbolizing existence as a whole.

1.1.  Initial considerations.

This article is about the importance of music for the human existence. There will be three topics. The first one presents the conception of some scholars that reflect about the function of music. The second one glimpses the subtleties that make music a language that cannot be compared to the word. The third and last one analyses the significance of music. Methodologically, this article restricts itself to precisely gathering important information that determines music as one of the most important experiences lived by the human being.

1.2.   Music in the human existence.

There are countless and controversial opinions and theories about the origin of music. The first theories are connected to Greek mythology figures and biblical characters. However, nowadays it is already known that its origin is much older with sounds already produced by the ancestral human being.[1] About music, the only consensus there is between scholars is that its vital part is formed by two elements: rhythm and sound; and that the human being, with its prodigious intelligence and creative power, joined them into a marvelous symbiosis, making the music the only language that can be comprehended by all the peoples.[2] [3]

It’s important to ratify the intelligibility of music concerned to the human life and the human rational relationship with art. The exclusivity of perceiving, producing and searching for the beauty distinguishes the human being from other living creatures. Music doesn’t need to be clarified or called upon any kind of statement. It is essentially organized rhythmically, melodically, harmonically from chosen sounds by humans, who are the only able to establish the intermediation or relation between art and the world as a whole. In conclusion, music comes from the human rational intervention and is diffused by the human intellectual action of production, interpretation and appreciation.

The ethnic musical production of a people, that creates and appreciates musical elements instead of other characteristics present in other cultures, has been studied since Darwin by musicologists, musicians, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, music therapists, etc. Darwin himself believed music was developed by natural selection, integrating human and paleo human mating rituals. Steve Pinker, a reputed cognitive scientist, said that “language, with all evidence, is an evolutionary adaptation.”[4] However, since music is a kind of language/significance through signs and meanings that may be considered a language, it is part of all human processes of evolution and rationality, developing in each cultural sphere together, with other languages, ethnic particularities that are defined by the time and space each people live in.

Throughout history, many thinkers of a variety of fields have expressed their worship for music. Martin Lutero, 1483—1546, eternalized his comprehension about music in the following way: ″it’s a gift from the gods and not from the men. […] With it you forget all the anger and addictions. So I’m not afraid to claim that, after theology, no art can be compared to music″.[5] [6]

For Nietzsche[7], 1844—1900, while words reproduce a phenomenon, music reproduces reality. Music comes before the word metaphysically[8] [9] and has primacy over it.

Susanne Langer, a music philosopher, who studies reflections about signs, the significance, the meaning and their esthetic transmutation[10], explains that: “the artistic activity […] is an expression of primitive dynamism and unconscious desires and uses represented objects and scenes for solidifying the artist’s secret fantasies”[11]. From this, the author considers that ″music is preeminently nonrepresentative […]. It presents its pure form not to beautify″[12], but to show the real essence of the human being. In the same way, Nietzsche relates music to life. For the philosopher, life is (or should be) “will to power”[13]. Music related to the will to have power, that is, about the living beings, influences the most intimate elements that constitute them, the cells, the tissues and the organs.[14]

J. de Moraes, important Brazilian writer, songwriter and researcher in the field of music, says:

″Music is, among other things, a way of representing the world, relating to it and materializing new worlds, […]. In music, what we call past is existent, […] fluid meeting point that sends us to what we still don’t know. Simultaneity – since the interlacing of temporal planes, spaces, ideas, memories, feelings, structures – transforms the present that indicates the first category: fantastic field full of possibilities to come.[15]″

The author alerts that there is a series of misunderstandings about the statement that says that music is a universal language that can be comprehended by everyone. Moraes questions: ″universal phenomenon – it sure is; but universal language – to what extend?[16]″

However, the next topic discusses how music can or cannot be comprehended as language.

1.3.  Music and language

All the peoples in the world have developed musical manifestations, sound with some type of rhythmic organization. Different from the oral language, which can be translated and adapted to other cultures without excessive damage, ″the musical manifestation of a certain people, […] loses its fundamental characteristics when translated to other community’s conception″. This can be included in the following question:  What meaning does an Islamic/Moslem song – that is religiously sung at a certain time, on a certain solar day, with a certain Arabian melodic scale- have when played in a Catholic church in Brazil at a Christmas celebration?

According to Nietzsche:

“Music is not an universal language that goes beyond time,  as was told many times in its honor, it’s exactly a measurement of feeling, heat, and the condition it brings within itself, like an inner law, a culture perfectly determined, bound to time and space[17]”.

In a similar way, the Brazilian musician and researcher J. de Moraes made an intriguing question: Can the orchestra Balinese music, that used to be part of an ancient warriors’ dance, and now has become a ritual dance presented in temples, be understood by a Brazilian person that doesn’t belong to the Javaé tribe?[18]

The point of the question is in the word understood. The problematic of the word to understand in relation to the communicative agents of the language, the sign, the significant, the experiencing, the signifier, is part of the semiological tangle, which is a lot discussed and controverted by the scholars of semiology, language and music.

If we consider that the simple comprehension of something stated is characterized as language, we could say the musical language is exclusive for musicians with solid formation since they would perceive, understand and comprehend the Balinese music and its rhythmic, melodic and harmonic structures, even not being part of that culture. However, the ethnic/cultural meaning would be missed. A layman in music that is not part of that culture could really say that wasn’t affected by any communicative agents. They only noticed the sounds with the vibration felt by their eardrums, which only enabled them to realize that that was a piece of music. But what does that mean? On the other hand, to a layman in music that is part of the Balinese culture, the song would mean, in its cultural measurement, according to Nietzsche, something that is already part of their éthos (costume, religious ritual, dance food, celebration, love, wedding, death, etc.)[19].

According to Abbagnamo, in his Philosophy Dictionary, language is the use of intersubjective signs, which are the ones that make communication possible, but the signs can only be part of a linguistic speech with a certain function: they can combine in a limited and recognizable way, meaning something to a certain code interlocutors. It’s possible to see through the optic of the musical language that are levels of language (oral and written) and, therefore, levels of communication[20].

It’s questioned what the perceiving, the understanding, the comprehending and the meaning have in common and what their relation is in the ability of the music to mean.

The oral language constitution by humans was built by aspects that are part of the musical language structure, that is, a word (a syllabic combination/a specific phonetics) only expresses something when the rhythm, melody, height, intensity and voice timbre are agreed in certain contexts determined by each culture. In some time, before humans started to speak, they babbled sounds, made faces and informed without words. These information, related to specific contexts, organized the language that, with the creation of codes and words, started to express limitedly the phenomena of the existence.[21]

It can be thought that the (written) phrase “I am sad”, despite informing the sentimental state of a person, does not communicate anything for being below the sonorous sense that it has for the informed person. E.g. What is the convincing/communication power of a person who, in laughter, claims to be sad? What is the convincing/communication power of a person who, in tears, claims to be happy? A person stumbles on a stone, breaks their toe, cries and says: What a happiness!

As follows, the classical saussurean distinction between language and word.

″It is due to language, social part of speech external to the individual, that the ability of building up sentences is elaborated. […] It is noticed that words produced due to language can be of two types: the words of communication/intercommunication and those of written material, [letters, poems, plays, books, etc].[22]″

It is less absurd the perspective that music is a language, a way to communicate, to mean something, if we think through the sausserean view that goes towards to Nietzsche’s proposal: ″while word reproduce the phenomenon, music represents reality, which, being metaphysically prior to word[23] [24], has primacy over it.[25]″

From this perspective, it was due to the musical structure (rhythm, melody, height intensity and voice timbre) that speech, language and consequently words were produced and established as sonorous codes organized by each culture.

1.4.  Music as the significance and representation of existence.

Considering music as a language that cannot be compared to the word, but an intensifier of the language, Claude Lévi-Strauss says that in the language “we have a sound and the sound has a meaning and there is no meaning without the sound to carry it. The music is the sound element that communicates”. However the author doesn’t consider music as a language since both music and word lack the same aspects.

To Lévi-Strauss:

″The basic elements of the language are the phonemes – that is, those sounds we incorrectly represent with letters – that doesn’t have any meaning alone, but are combined to distinguish the meanings. We could say the same about musical notes. A note […] doesn’t mean anything alone; it’s just a note.[26]″

Lévi-Strauss also says:

″In the next level of the language, we see that phonemes combine in a way to form words; and words, then, combine to form sentences. But in music there are no words. The basic elements – the notes – combine and immediately form a sentence, a melodic sentence″[27].

Now some considerations based on the conceptions offer by Lévi-Strauss: 1) The phonemes combine in a way they form words; 2) Comparing the phonemes to the musical notes, the latter combine in a way they form non-defined harmonic principles²⁷. Harmonic principles (two combined notes) combined to other notes (the placement of notes on the score, for instance) would correspond to the word in language. The difference would be in the formation of the sign because while the words are formed by syllables visually combined in the horizontal, the chord – which, in music, corresponds to the word in this approach – is formed by sound combinations that are written vertically in the score. The harmony between the phonemes makes up the words in which the phonemes are executed successively. The harmony between the sounds makes up chords in which the sounds are executed simultaneously.

Just like the words, already formed by syllables, school, is, today, the, open can be organized to form, among others, the sentence “Today the school is open”, the chords A minor, C major, F major, D minor, C major and E major can be combined to form, among others, the musical discourse C major – A minor – F major – D minor – E major – C major. When played in a polysemic way, considering the qualities of the sound, which are height, intensity, duration and tone, this sequence can be recognized by people who are part of the culture that song belongs to, informing, communicating, creating and recreating meanings to sad or happy moments, creating and establishing sentimental motives related to the cultures of the peoples. Example: Funeral march and/or wedding march. No words are said, but when they are played, at least the occidental culture knows what it is about, what the significant-sound presents, represents and means to each listener and, finally, it’s made clear what words couldn’t express.

Through this optic, music is language because it informs, communicates, means through signs and signifier the ineffable of a culture.[28] However, it’s a language that can’t be compared to the word. For example, in music there isn’t anything similar to the word ball. This way, the virtue of the musical language is its ability to evoke and transmit feelings through the sound-musical expression. Feelings that words aren’t capable of transmitting. ″Communication […] would be impossible without the signifying, that is, the social production of the meaning.[29]″ This is the key of the conception that assures that music is a language, since it’s a way of communicating something, informing something, going beyond what there is. Go beyond that words want to say, be it in the religious worship, the play, the soccer game, the therapy, etc.

The English researcher John Blaking, as J de Moraes ascertained said:

″The Vedas (African Indigenous people) taught me that music can never be something by itself, and that all the songs are popular in the way that no song can be transmitted or have a meaning if there is no association between the individuals.[30]″

1.5.  Final considerations

This way, this project gives a glimpse and proposes that the communication established by the musical language, structured by rhythm, melody, counterpoint and harmony, represents the association between the individuals and, so, it’s a metaphor of life. Metaphor, in Charles Peirce’s conception, is what represents the representative character of a representaman or sign[31].

With this, in a semiotic proposal, music is the metaphor of life because time can only be noticed with the relativity between the events. The rhythm is movement, continuity in defined times and spaces. The rhythm accentuates the events, qualifies the spaces and, consequently, locates in time. Without rhythm, there is no life – there is no becoming. The melody is the subject and, in its individuality, meets in the counterpoint – in the coexistence – in the voice of the Other – the meeting with the Other - its only way to become Subject – to become communitas. The counterpoint is the relation between the subject and the other – the alterity. The harmony is the relation between the individuals in a society, with all the agreements and disagreements that are part of the becoming of the existence. The harmony is the constant tension and rest where the societies, their ethical and moral principles, beliefs, costumes and values change and transform.

Music as a metaphor of life is an idea in the place of other idea. Music reproduces the idealization of a reality. In the complexity of the human musical experience, music, as physical matter and event, acts as a fact in the place of other fact, enabling the making of music in a music therapeutic session or a religious ritual to be the rigorous reproduction of maximum demands of what the intellectual, sentimental, perceptual and cognitive faculties of the human being can do.

References

Alves, Rubem. 2007 O enigma da religião. 6. Campinas: Papirus.

Carvalho, Any Raquel. 2006. Contraponto modal: manual prático 2. Porto Alegre: Evangraf.

Dias, Rosa Maria. 2006. Nietzsche e a música. São Paulo: Discurso Editorial; Ijuí: Editora UNIJUÍ.

Díaz Bordenave, Juan E. 1986. O que é comunicação. São Paulo: Bova Cultural: Brasiliense.

Langer, Susanne. K. 2004. Filosofia em nova chave. Translated by Janete Meiches e J. Guinsburg. Original title: Philosophy in a new key. São Paulo: Perspectiva.

Leinig, Clotilde Espínola. 2008. A Música e a Ciência se Encontram. Curitiba: Juruá.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Mito e significado. Lisboa: Edições 70.

Levitin, Daniel J. 2010. A música no seu cérebro: a ciência de uma obsessão humana. Translated by Clóvis Marques. Original title: This is your brain on music: the science of a human obsession. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.

MICHAELIS. 2008. Dicionário prático da língua portuguesa. São Paulo: Editora Melhoramentos.

Moraes, J. Jota de. 1986. O que é música. São Paulo: Nova Cultural: Brasiliense.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Semiologia da música. Lisboa: Veja.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Miscelânia de opiniões e sentenças. Translated by Antônio Carlos Braga e Ciro Mioranza. From: Vermischte meinungen und sprüche. São Paulo: Editora Escala.