post from Feb 17, 2014.
I always think of music as having three layers.
The three layers are Literal, Emotional, and Aesthetic.
I use “Literal” in the sense of semantics — the literal and metaphorical meaning of the words. This is the realm of description, wordplay, story telling, and concepts. The stuff on Rap Genius.
The second layer is the Emotional. This is how the song makes you feel. Music is very good at recreating an emotional state. A chord itself can sound happy or sad.
This is the layer where a lot of people stop. I’ve heard people say, “I want the lyrics to mean something, otherwise I won’t enjoy the song.”
People focus their attention on this level, in my opinion, because it is the most accessible. It is the easiest to talk about because we have the language to talk about it.
When asked to explain why you like a song, it’s most easy and direct to say “I liked it because it told me a story” or “I liked what it was trying to say” and then go on and describe what it was trying to say. Since we have the language to talk about it, we talk about it the most, and subsequently many people take it as the most important aspect.
A lot of music ignores this first layer and only concerns itself with the second and third. A good example is classical music. Why is the piece called piano concerto no. X or symphony no. Y? It’s because it doesn’t matter what the song is about. It stands on it’s own. The melodies, harmonies, instrumentation are enjoyed for their own sake.
Words and language refer to things that will make you feel an emotion but the words themselves are abstract symbols — the emotional content comes from the experiences and feelings they conjure up. The beautiful thing about music is that the music itself conveys emotion.
It is not very hard to talk about emotions in music at a superficial level. We have the pump-up song in the gym, the chill song, the club banger, a patriotic national anthem, the nostalgic folk song, the sublime religious piece. These are all words to describe various emotional states. It is not hard to talk about because these emotions are so common we’ve developed words for them! That’s what language is for after all.
HOWEVER, what is difficult to talk about are the emotional nuances after digging a little bit deeper into how a song makes you feel. This level takes a more artistic sensibility, although to an extent is understood by everyone. How much of a “banger” is it? Does something feel corny? What part? The artistic process of crafting a song to make you feel a certain way, to isolate a melody or a chord change in a song that creates this emotion, becomes more and more challenging as it becomes subtler and more subjective. It’s the job of the artist and the audience to be able to tell the difference and appreciate these different emotional levels even when there are no good words to describe them!
If you noticed a trend, it might be that each layer becomes less accessible and more subjective. Part of the goal in writing this post is to remind us how important and intrinsic the deeper layers are.
The last is the Aesthetic layer. What is this layer? It’s all the qualities of music that are about music IN AND OF ITSELF. It’s kind of like the second layer as in it makes you feel something, but I would not call that feeling an emotion. It’s the feeling when you look at the color green with the color orange, or some other random combination. There is not a conventional emotion such as happiness or sadness, but there is definitely an aesthetic impression.
This is an amazing layer for me because the aesthetics of music penetrate so much more than the aesthetics of anything else — visual art, poetry, etc. (This is just me though! I am not saying this is everyone. I’m sure if you a visual artist, you will say the same thing about visual art). When you hear some type of chord change or melody, even without changing my concepts (first layer) or my emotional state (second layer), it will still affect me and strike me deeply if it is amazing. A lot of academics in music study this and try to create a language for it. They call it Form and study harmony and modulation. My opinion is that it might be entertaining to create a language for all of this and try to describe interesting relationships and patterns and innovations that come out of it, but the real meat of aesthetics is the ineffable AESTHETIC feeling you get when you hear it. I think understanding theory and form will help allow you to point out when something beautiful or aesthetic happens, but it won’t explain why it’s beautiful, AND it won’t explain what it is, since what it is only understood by hearing it and nothing else. There is really nothing more talk about here. I’ve gone off the deep end trying to put this layer into words.
That’s it. Three layers.
