What is Music?

What is music? Is it melody? Harmony? Rhythm? Is it a combination of all three? Or, is it any of the previously mentioned components?

Doe music need melody? Can music consist of just rhythm or just harmony?

Does music need to be produced using musical instruments or the human voice? What is a musical instrument?

I believe anything can be a musical instrument. Nature is a great symphony orchestra.

Crickets chirping create a nice rhythmic ostinato. Water - brooks, streams, and oceans create a sonic texture.

If nature is a symphony orchestra, then the city is a jazz orchestra. Street noise, traffic, the sounds of machinery, cars, airplanes, and so on provide a rich diversity of rhythm.

Listen to the mixture of accents in a city. Spanish. Vietnamese. French. These mix nicely with the variety of American accents.

Music is a rich and diverse art. I once read that music was thinking with sound.

That is the key. Music is sound!

Music is the sound of the human voice and the many musical instruments of the world. It is also the sounds of the world. City sounds! Country sounds! The sounds of nature.

Music is sound and music is silence. Music is the relationship between sound and silence.
art
314 views 3 replies
Reply #1 Top
It's actually an adjective, not a noun.

Derived from the greek muses, anything that was aesthetically pleasing was said to have been caused by the muses. It was muse-ic.
Reply #2 Top
Music is many things, but it is not when John Cage threw a fish on a piano on live Italian tv.
Reply #3 Top
Not to start an argument, but accoring to Websters, the word "music" is a noun.

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=music

IG