Why We Love Music

by Carl E. Seashore

Tonal sensitivity. All great musicians are highly sensitive to sound in all its elements. A physiological irritability acoustically leads to a profuse awareness of sounds. This sensitive and selective hearing gives the musician a richness of material in the musical medium. He becomes intolerant and rebellious to disturbing sound stimuli which have no such effect upon unmusical persons. To him, the world of sounds has infinite richness of resources for musical pleasure, but equally exceptional resources for the suffering of musical pain.

Artistic license. To the trained musical individual sounds are heard as different from what a matter-of-fact listener hears. The hearing of pitch, loudness, time, and timbre is not in the ratio of 1:1 with the physical sound, but always runs into artistic analysis and interpretation with artistic license. The musical interval, the dynamic phrasing, the rhythm, and the tone quality are always heard in relation to their artistic setting. Here we find auditory illusions operating in their fullest glory. The pitch value varies with the quality of the sound. Time may be a substitute for stress and vice versa. A subjective rhythm is richer and far more realistic than the physical rhythm. The quality of tone is heard in relation to its musical meaning. To the musician, the hearing is not so much a question of true pitch, formal accent, temporal rhythm, or vowel quality as it is a matter of musical balance and a recognition of artistic deviation from the true. Meticulously exact performance of a Bach score would be musically intolerable. Notes are frail symbols. The performer must interpret even the shortest measure rhythm or single note value. Thus, while fine sensory discrimination in all the aspects of sound is essential for correct hearing and tone production, the more essential thing is his ability to play with artistic power and impulse in hearing and producing artistic balance and artistic deviation from the rigid. In this artistic balance and deviation, he may be guided by certain artistic rules, but his direct emotional interpretation is far more significant. In this lies individuality. He is constantly tempted to be extravagant.

Thus, in all the variants, combinations, and modulations of pitch, loudness, time, and timbre, the musician hears, feels, and gives meaning to fine and subtle distinctions, many of them quite divergent from the physical tones. At this level, temperament shows itself in exceedingly fine responsiveness to tones which may be a matter of utter indifference or impossibility to the unmusical. This capacity is largely inborn, both in the way of sensitivity to sound and a general nervous, if not neurotic, disposition, and is in itself enough to make the musician different from other people. Artistic license as a medium for self-expression is, therefore, clear evidence of a musical temperament.

Ear-mindedness. The successful musician is ear-minded as distinguished from the painter who is fundamentally eye-minded. This ear-mindedness grows out of his genetic auditory constitution at birth and develops through the practical use that he makes of the various attributes of sounds. Fundamentally, it is the tonal image which, in the great musicians, is practically as vivid, stable, and complete as the ordinary perception of the actual physical sound. His memories, his imagination, his creative work practically all operate in terms of his powerful auditory image, usually supplemented by strong motor and visual imagery. This makes him different from the businessman, the objective scientist, and the man on the street. The fact that he can live subjectively in this tonal world gives him a type of isolation in which he feels the superiority of his power and becomes disposed to assert his rights, privileges, and dominance in a domain in large part separated from ordinary affairs. Thus, the powerful imagery becomes one of his richest and most fundamental resources for exclusiveness as a musician and, when cultivated in the field of artistry, tends to set him apart from the rest of the world.

Affective response. Since the business of the musician is to hear and produce beautiful effects in sound, he differs from the ordinary listener in that sounds of all kinds not only have intellectual orientation value but are habitually responded to in terms of beauty or ugliness, pleasure or pain. They give him warmth or chills, both of which create feelings of unrest. Instead of identifying a sound as the rumbling of a train, he identifies it as ugly—something which disturbs and irritates him. Instead of identifying the sound as the song of a bird, he responds vigorously in terms of likes and dislikes.

Emotional pursuits are usually sexually stimulating, and persistent emotionality is likely to manifest itself in love "scenes", good or bad. As a mate, the temperamental musician may be a most ardent and exquisite lover or a most irritable person to live with. This is aggravated by the fact that the artistic behavior is worshipped by the opposite sex, often to an annoying degree. Hence, love, self-defense in love, and a sense of superiority in love are keynotes to the temperamental musician's life.

The esthetic mood. The musician is in search of the beautiful and therefore, conversely, responds unfavorably to the ugly. His professional life is, in the main, emotional as distinguished from the intellectual life of the scholar in other fields or the action-patterns of men of affairs. Whether he is a virtuoso, a creator of music, or a director, he is working on emotions through emotions, trying to re-create for the listener the feelings with which he himself is imbued. He lives so intensely and habitually in this activity that he becomes recognized as highly and persistently emotional. This extreme emotionality in his daily work sets him off against the matter-of-fact mind. We say of the intensely artistic person in action that he burns himself up. The emotional life is expensive and flitting; it flashes and explodes and is in danger of running out of control.

This emotionality tends to transfer not only to other forms of art but to ordinary things and situations; such as, money, raiment, or social amenities. Sometimes this takes the form of the characteristic bohemian. He may spend his wages on payday and starve the rest of the month in utter complacence. All his life tends to be set at high tension. He lives dominantly in a mood and therefore often becomes objectionally moody through his impulsive behavior.

Exhibitionism. There is an accretion to the musical temperament in a sort of hierarchy of defense reactions which may be characterized as exhibitionism. The musical mind is pulling on one end of a leash, as it were, trying to drag the more or less resistant and incapable into his own beautiful emotional life, and he feels the drag. Therefore, he becomes impatient and uses ways and means of exclusiveness in withdrawal from the world, or he takes the opposite attack—display. To him, countless means of personal display justify their end, the glorifying of his noble art. Therefore, we see the musical temperament in this artistic form in the manner of living, eating, dressing, and sleeping, and in the demand for hero worship. We see this in the extreme form in the conductor who feels that he must have his choir, his orchestra, his band members each individually at his command. He is like a general in action. For this purpose, he must pose as a great authority, as a hero standing for something superior in the way of personal interpretation, as a critical judge of the beautiful, as having undisputed power, feeling the necessity of imposing his own emotional individuality on a comparatively cool and often resistant group. This is true on a smaller scale in all musical leadership, composition, performance of the virtuoso, musical criticism and passionate listening.

Symbolism. The main function of the great musician is to make his music symbolic. He must take the listener out of the humdrum attitudes of life through the avenue of musical feeling into a state of abandon, which, in its extreme form, approaches ecstasy and obliviousness to material surroundings and facts. Even the devices of program music give but remote and stilted aid. His function is to enable the listener to live the art as he himself lives it symbolically. In this respect he differs from the sculptor and the painter who, while cultivating this symbolic attitude, are clearly held to the necessity of utilizing objective realities. It is not easy for the musician to take himself out of this mood. At the moment that he talks shop and business, the symbolizing habit is constantly pressing in upon him. Through his mastery of the symbolic life he feels rich, exclusive, powerful, and self-contained. Some people think that is queer.