Does thinking about music ruin it a bit?

[emanresu]

When we were young, there was no thinking. Just feelings without much or rather ANY consideration, and it was fine.

When we think about music, the thoughts about it are never "musical". The thoughts are about music but we don't think in... "music".

Not speaking about theory here really.

[Jimmy blue note]

Thinking IN music enhances the connection I have with the sounds I'm hearing. Thinking like the composer enables me to appreciate the lexicon, syntax and choices the composer made. Thinking WITH the flow of ideas a soloist is lets me know the player better; lets me relate to the emotional content as it's expressed through their use of form.
Thinking ABOUT the form enables me to hear the notes but also the interaction of those notes with the structures that the composer offered. I hear the dialogue of sound and intention, composer's moment and the soloist's dance with that moment.
Like growing into any language, if I'm still trying to figure out the HOW of the music, I may not understand the WHY that a good soloist offers in a solo.

It's a language. The more easily I can think in it, the less I think about it and the more deeply I enjoy it.
Understand?

[emanresu]

Just a quick note, I don't think music is a language. That's just my opinion.

[James W]

Just a quick note, I don't think music is a language. That's just my opinion.

It's obviously not a language, but it is amenable to being treated as though it was, I think.

[emanresu]

It's obviously not a language, but it is amenable to being treated as though it was, I think.

Music shares a lot with language.

But let's skip it.

[Jimmy blue note]

I do see music as a linguistic system, and language as an evolution of our song based propensities.
For the composer, and if the improvisor is a creator with a well assimilated sense of the creative logic within, music, for some of us, is a language. It's a temporal expressive system that orders a lexicon (vocabulary of ordered sound) with syntax (the system or rules by which the lexicon is given a logical order) and semantics (the meaning that is expressed with the sound and intention).
Music is also an inflective language, as any spoken language, especially languages that have a tonal component to them is. It's that balance of dynamics and space, the ordering of phrase members and phrases to order an episodic time dependent statement. Many Asian languages have 5 tonal inflections that, like a song, form an integrated musical element to the formal language without which the words lack clarity.
The more I learn about composition, and the more I learn about sophisticated and masterfully executed solos, the more I see the very elements of language in a musically expressive medium. The choice to pause, to converge on a certain pitch, or a longer duration to express greater importance (use of the pitch/time maximums) to make a meaningful line, the closer I see the kinship with poetry.
Howard Gardner, the educational theorist, separated human thought into multiple intelligences. He saw a distinction between musical and linguistic intelligence but also a kinship that is closer than any other separate intelligences.
Linguist Noam Chomsky saw language (and music, by extension) as an ordering of sound inherent to our brain, hard wired and ordered in a logic and order that is universal to all human languages. It's this communicative use of our hard wired relationship of sound and thought that is the basis of linguistics ...and music.
When you question (or pose a questioning phrase), there is an inherent musical element in the sound of the interrogative statement. It's a form that is deeply human and musical. When we pause between statements, there is the end of a phrase marked by a resolution and space/breath. That's linguistic. That's musical.
And when we learn jazz by rules without recognition of semantic content, we learn eloquence that can't substitute for content: we make gibberish.

But take it as you will. I happen to think of it as a language. But I know lots of people who don't get what I say, and lots of people who won't get what I play.

Like language, it's easy to dismiss the sounds and what is being said. But we just hope someone out there can be touched.

[Jimmy Smith]

I've liked learning the explanations for why music I liked as a kid sounds the way it does, I think it's interesting.

[emanresu]

Like language, it's easy to dismiss the sounds and what is being said. But we just hope someone out there can be touched.

With language, people get touched by what it conveys.
With music, people get touched by what exactly?

Anyway. It is not a language. Music - It is not. IMO. Let's skip that.

edit: Thinking about music and thinking IN music - there's our problem.

[AllanAllen]

I’ve always heard instruments separately. So when I listen I focus on one instrument or the vocals and the rest fades back.

I always wondered what it’s like to hear a song as a whole piece instead of a sum of its parts. Some of the guys I’ve played with couldn’t tell a snare drum from an acoustic guitar.

[Jimmy Smith]

With language, people get touched by what it conveys. With music, people get touched by what exactly?

[mr. beaumont]

Some of the guys I’ve played with couldn’t tell a snare drum from an acoustic guitar.

To be fair, my current obsession is making an acoustic guitar sound like a snare drum.

[James W]

I do see music as a linguistic system, and language as an evolution of our song based propensities.
For the composer, and if the improvisor is a creator with a well assimilated sense of the creative logic within, music, for some of us, is a language. It's a temporal expressive system that orders a lexicon (vocabulary of ordered sound) with syntax (the system or rules by which the lexicon is given a logical order) and semantics (the meaning that is expressed with the sound and intention).
Music is also an inflective language, as any spoken language, especially languages that have a tonal component to them is. It's that balance of dynamics and space, the ordering of phrase members and phrases to order an episodic time dependent statement. Many Asian languages have 5 tonal inflections that, like a song, form an integrated musical element to the formal language without which the words lack clarity.
The more I learn about composition, and the more I learn about sophisticated and masterfully executed solos, the more I see the very elements of language in a musically expressive medium. The choice to pause, to converge on a certain pitch, or a longer duration to express greater importance (use of the pitch/time maximums) to make a meaningful line, the closer I see the kinship with poetry.
Howard Gardner, the educational theorist, separated human thought into multiple intelligences. He saw a distinction between musical and linguistic intelligence but also a kinship that is closer than any other separate intelligences.
Linguist Noam Chomsky saw language (and music, by extension) as an ordering of sound inherent to our brain, hard wired and ordered in a logic and order that is universal to all human languages. It's this communicative use of our hard wired relationship of sound and thought that is the basis of linguistics ...and music.
When you question (or pose a questioning phrase), there is an inherent musical element in the sound of the interrogative statement. It's a form that is deeply human and musical. When we pause between statements, there is the end of a phrase marked by a resolution and space/breath. That's linguistic. That's musical.
And when we learn jazz by rules without recognition of semantic content, we learn eloquence that can't substitute for content: we make gibberish.

But take it as you will. I happen to think of it as a language. But I know lots of people who don't get what I say, and lots of people who won't get what I play.

Like language, it's easy to dismiss the sounds and what is being said. But we just hope someone out there can be touched.

TBH, a lot, if not all, of this is analogy. One cannot talk about music having semantic properties because whatever meaning it has is abstract, rather than language which for the most part is functional. You can not convey the meaning of the sentence 'do you want an apple?' in music. Like I say though it can be treated as though it were a language...

[James W]

When we were young, there was no thinking. Just feelings without much or rather ANY consideration, and it was fine.

... then what happened? No, I don't think thinking about music ruins it, I think it enriches it. I read a book by Anthony Storr not so long ago called Music And The Mind, which, while imperfect, is nonetheless suffused with info about how philosophers thought about music and the author's own ideas about it. It ends with a wonderful paean to music.

[JazzPadd]

The former Mrs., may she rest in peace, pointed out that I often had a barely audible what she called “basal level” of music during idle moments. The current Mrs. can tell when there’s music in my head.

I feel blessed twice that these wonderful women could accept with grace what I was not often aware of, as others may have seen it as a distraction of sorts.

When they would point it out, I would reflect on the moment. In the first case, the basal level was often rhythmic humming, not a particular tune. That was during a period of my life when music had receded. Some people whistle in idle moments, kids have sing-songy things they do while playing alone, maybe it’s akin to those. I guess I hum.

In the second case, it’s always been working out a tune in my head in real time, akin perhaps to rehearsing without a guitar, and it was often accompanied by counting on my fingers. That appeared when playing music was again a big part of my life.

I don’t know if these qualify as thinking about or in music; it seems to me closer to playing music. There’s not thoughts, and as soon as it’s pointed out and I become aware and think about it, it’s gone. So maybe that’s a partial yes for me, that thinking about music can ruin it a bit.

[marcwhy]

Fun topic!
Unlike some of my non-musician friends/family, I cannot have music "in the background" when I am doing something else intellectually (I'm a psychologist/professor), since I get pulled into the music somehow (listening and/or enjoying), and am pulled away from the task. Even in the car, if there's music on and my wife is talking to me, I have to turn the music off. Curse or blessing, I'm not sure.

[Litterick]

Linguist Noam Chomsky saw language (and music, by extension) as an ordering of sound inherent to our brain, hard wired and ordered in a logic and order that is universal to all human languages. It's this communicative use of our hard wired relationship of sound and thought that is the basis of linguistics ...and music.

Chomsky:

[Jazzjourney4Eva]

When we were young, there was no thinking. Just feelings without much or rather ANY consideration, and it was fine.

When we think about music, the thoughts about it are never "musical". The thoughts are about music but we don't think in... "music".

Not speaking about theory here really.

Well, you’re speaking for yourself, which is fine of course. But it’s not about age, it’s about engagement.

Many young people are into music for all it’s worth, study theory etc, etc. And then there are those - the overwhelming majority of humans - who for the entirety of their lives are like the youthful listeners that you describe. They consume and intellectualize music up to a point, but it goes no further. And that is how they darn well want it to be.

[grahambop]

I’ve been thinking about music since I was about ten years old. It hasn’t ruined it for me yet!

[Christian Miller]

I do wish the brain came with a handy off switch. Tbh I think that’s what we must all work to install as a matter of priority as players.

Thinking is important for preparation, less so for action.

[carvingcode]

Of course music is a language! Music has been a part of cultural histories, telling stories, marking important events. Often the same music is used throughout generations to tell the story of its people.

Notated, it is a guidebook through the world the composer intends the listener to move in. I can look at notated music and hear it in my inner ear, with all of the performance markings intact. Just like reading a book.

Language has organization, rules, meaning.

As does music, written or otherwise.

[grahambop]

I do wish the brain came with a handy off switch.

This self-installs when you get older, though it’s more auto than manual mode.

[James W]

Of course music is a language! Music has been a part of cultural histories, telling stories, marking important events. Often the same music is used throughout generations to tell the story of its people.

Notated, it is a guidebook through the world the composer intends the listener to move in. I can look at notated music and hear it in my inner ear, with all of the performance markings intact. Just like reading a book.

Language has organization, rules, meaning.

As does music, written or otherwise.

Great! Now tell me everything you just wrote in the form of music.

[ragman1]

Does thinking about music ruin it a bit?


Not necessarily.

I don't know what you mean by thinking about music. You mean music as an art form? Music as a social-cultural phenomenon? Music as a drug?

Obviously those who play music have to think about what they're doing, like any other skill or activity. Even if it's random, they've thought about it.

In fact, what does thinking mean? Knowledge? Our thinking is limited to what we know, there's no thought outside knowledge.

And what can thought do? All it can do is compare, judge, analyse, that's all. It can't create, creation comes from a deeper source.

[Jimmy blue note]

Great! Now tell me everything you just wrote in the form of music.

Music is the use of pitch, dynamics, space, inflection, order of statement, dialogue, cooperative interaction, individual statement in a form of human expression over time.
Now when someone says something to me and I didn't hear them clearly, I might look at them and say hmmmm? This is not a word I needed to be taught and it's not something that is proprietary to the English language. It's pure expression and it is also a musical, temporal statement that uses the sound medium to convey something that would otherwise be a concrete thought that stays within me.
How does this thought become externalized? What is the function of this utterance? Is it something I'd externalize but for the expression of a thought from one person to another? Is there an aspect of articulate thought conveyed through an understood and internalized shared coordination of verbalization (whether it be called a grunt, a song, a word), that is very specific in the purpose of packaging information FROM one person TO another.
Sure, it's not the same formal structure as "Could you please pick that up?". But let's look at that.
Could you please pick that up?
Could you PLEASE pick that up?
Could YOU please pick that up?
Could you PLEASE PICK THAT UP!!!!
COULD you PLEASE pick that up?!
Couldyoupleasepickthatup (pause, NOW?)
All of these are formal words, in English of course, but the message could be understood by another human who does not read nor even speak, for that matter, the lexicon of our virtual webster's dictionary we have structured our particular version of language through. But the words alone are not sufficient to create language. There is the element of inflection, time, speed, breath, dynamics...all extrinsic to what we are taught is language, but let's face it, it's just a string of words without these elements. These are musical elements; the same melodic aspects that inform emotion in a string of words, when taken from the formality of words and extended into anything from utterance to a mother humming to a baby, to a nonsense song sung by kids, to a song that blues is based on, to a vocalese, to conversational scat... THAT's the pure nature of music. Expressive language in a formal sense is the word informed by the elements we call musical. Music we know can be a language (system of rules) that is dedicated to something purposed to something besides "Could you please pick that up?"

Language is a code of words informed by music. Languages have different dialects that impart very different community spirits to those same words, they are the enculturated elements of dynamics, nuance, space, pitch...that we can label 'musical elements'.
There are languages that are specialized for function. Look at a specialized work force, for example. There may be a shorthand that sounds like "dirty water", "motor oil", a term that expresses the thought of NOW, and it's linguistically functional. No you wouldn't speak that to teach a class in sociology, but it IS a metalanguage.
Music as we know it, improvisation or real time creative composition is a very pure specialized and formalized language of expression. That's its function. It CAN even be adapted to convey the urgency of a cup of coffee to a greasy spoon cook.

It's just the way I see it of course, but I see the music I study and play as a very real branch of the linguistic phylogenic tree of our need for human connection through sound. The song is me. The song is you.


Two instruments and musical inflection, dialect and conversation (start about 30:30)

Conversation through music. A language that happens to fit a musical form too.

[mr. beaumont]

Truth be told, you have to do an awful lot of thinking about music to get to the place where you don't have to think about music.