Why We Love Music

by Carl E. Seashore

THE MUSICAL MEDIUM

Organic response. Man is born with a psychophysical organism which registers sounds and responds to them somewhat like a resonator, which selects, amplifies and aids in the integration of auditory impressions. Our whole organism responds to sound involving the central and peripheral nervous system, all the muscles, all the internal organs, and especially the automatic nervous system with its endocrines, which furnish the triggers in the physical generation of emotion. Experiments from various sources have shown that sound acts physiologically on nervous control, circulation, digestion, metabolism, body temperature, posture and balance, hunger and thirst, and in general, the groundwork of pleasure and pain. The physical organism as a whole responds to sounds in specialized functions.

Thus, man comes into the world tuned to music. The organism responds to sounds from earliest infancy. Back of all conscious awareness, back of all musical feeling, even back of subconscious assimilations and elaborations is the purely physiological response which is a function and a condition of well-being. This physiologically beneficent response of the organism to sound underlies all musical experience; without it we could not love music.

Sounds in themselves. Like colors, sounds may be beautiful in themselves, quite apart from music. A single sound in nature or art is capable of appearing in endless variety in terms of pitch, dynamic value, duration, tone quality, and noise. It may be an object of beauty in itself in thousands of ways quite apart from its utility in music or musical perception. We find the tonal world in which we live full of beautiful and useful sounds which we love because we are capable of intellectual and emotional response to their beneficent influence. They play a large role in our feelings of attraction and adjustment. They may be beautiful to the untutored and intuitive mind as well as to the intellectually and esthetically cultured mind in the same way that flowers may seem beautiful to a child because they arouse an immediate pleasurable feeling; and yet they are not music but merely the raw material from which music is made. These raw materials from which the musical structure is raised are themselves beautiful, quite apart from musical experience or behavior. They play a large role in the love of nature.

Thus, before the beginnings of music, primitive man responded affectionately to the sounds of nature and was guided by them in his daily life. Even before language took form, single sounds carried meaning and gave satisfaction. Man took pleasure in his own vocal utterances or mechanically produced sounds which played a large role in his human economy and development.

Music proper. Sounds may be woven into beautiful patterns. This is music. We admire the melodic progressions, the rhythmic patterns, the harmonic structure, and the qualitative modulations in the flow of beautiful sounds. Harmony, balance, symmetry, contrast and fusions become embodied in musical form. Here the object of our affections is the artistic creation. The place of the musician is quite analogous to the astronomer's feeling of the sublime as he looks into the heavens in the light of his knowledge of the nature and movement of heavenly bodies.

Music with words and action. Much of the charm of music lies in its association with words which carry the message, as in song. The center of interest in much of the vocal art lies in the meaning conveyed by the words where the music serves as an artistic embellishment. This is true of the lullaby, the cowboy song, the lover's plea, and grand opera. Likewise, much of the charm of music lies in its association with overt action as in dances, work songs, marches, and games, where action is rhythmic. This added power of the music lies not only in the dance steps but more conspicuously in the suggestive rhythms divided into intricate patterns often far surpassing the score or the physical performance. That is what we mean when we say music carries. In such situations the musical appeal may lie for one person in the verbal message or the overt action and for another, purely in the musical appeal. Yet both words and action on the one hand and music on the other are enriched through the association.

Symbolism. Music finds its highest and most universal expression in symbolism. Music is primarily a way of expressing moods, attitudes, feelings, and longings in generalized form. The listener tends to live himself concretely into the feeling suggested. In the esthetic mood he is not aware of the mechanics of the symbolic suggestion, for which the art has many resources, and he may not be aware of the music as such; but he lives realistically within his own personal realm of interests. Thus, music sounds the keynote on great festive occasions in the powerful forms of festive music, as in the great sacred oratorios and simpler but beautiful forms of church music or in triumphant marches and other festive celebrations in major form. But minor forms, as in tone poems and haunting melodies, work on the same principle and perhaps fully as effectively. From the grandeur suggested by the sonata to the serenity arising from the simplest bit of improvization in voice or instrument, music has unlimited power to seize the individual for some form of dreamlike realization of the subjects of his longings.