Q&A: A Question About How Music Affects Experience
A Question About How Music Affects Experience
Question
Hello Rabbi Michael,
Is there any explanation you can offer for the way music acts upon experience?
How do a harp, trumpet, and violin, producing sound in harmony (mutual complementarity), create an experience?
I asked a psychology lecturer, and she gave me a worthless answer. She told me, “Because it speaks directly to emotion and not to the intellect” (which I already knew…).
Do you have an idea how music influences mood?
Of course, I’m not talking about songs like “Toy” or “I’m Crazy About You, Doll,” but about dramatic music of the kind also used in Hollywood to arouse emotions, for example:
For me, strangely enough, this music arouses religious experiences…
Answer
It seems to me that this can and/or should be explained on two different levels. On the neurological level, this is a matter of stimulating neurons, and apparently our neural structure receives harmonious music as input, which arouses emotions and excitement in it (like other kinds of auditory stimulation). At the same time, on the psychological level, one could say that it speaks to emotion rather than to the intellect, or something along those lines.
Incidentally, I’m not sure that it speaks to emotion and not to the intellect. It may be that it has some kind of meaning in terms of intuition and not only emotion. For someone who is knowledgeable about music, these structures seem to say more. In fact, music is one level of abstraction beyond song. Song is an abstraction of the words that appear in it, and when you strip away the words, only the music remains. By the way, when you strip away the musical harmonies as well, only the sound remains, and perhaps that is the meaning of the sounding of the shofar (see my article on the shofar).
At the margins of my remarks, one can ask about the connection between the levels, which ties together the three paragraphs above. In my view, if that lecturer is indeed right and it speaks to emotion, then the explanation on the first level is sufficient. It is a reaction of my neural system to the input it received, and this is expressed in my emotions. Emotions are not under control, but arise somehow from within (apparently from the neurons). But if this is something that speaks to the intellect—that is, if I have control over or influence on what is awakened in me when I hear the music—then perhaps it is not enough to analyze the neural response, because it represents only the autonomous activity of my body without the cognitive-spiritual dimension.
Discussion on Answer
There is a discussion about music in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. He argues that there is something barbaric about music because it does not appeal to reason but to the emotions, and it activates them.
That’s also possible, but that’s not what I meant. In a few places I’ve explained that intuition is a faculty of cognition and not pure thought. Intuition “sees” ideas in music (not necessarily formulated ones).
Regarding Bloom’s point, I would say primitive (= primordial), not barbaric. And I once wrote that “primordial” has a double meaning: 1. Ancient, simple, and undeveloped. 2. Deep and unformulated. Take careful note.
Music definitely includes ideas within it (or positions), and not only emotional arousal.
(It is not by chance that Stalin and other dictators persecuted composers who wrote music that did not accord with totalitarian communism.)
Music can contain nonconformism, belief in human freedom, an intellectual approach to courage, audacity, submissiveness, etc. etc., even if it is not formulated in words (courage, audacity, and submissiveness are not only emotions; they are approaches, attitudes toward reality. They are determinations of how one ought to relate to reality. Incidentally, in fact there are no human emotions that do not also have behind them attitudes and conceptions of reality, of how one ought to relate to reality, of what matters, and of what the human being is).
These are abstract approaches that can be conceptualized verbally and intellectually, and also can fail to be.
Thank you.
It’s important to me to make sure I understood the hypothesis that this is an intuitive process: do you mean that the music brings to consciousness something I already know, from within myself? (“recollection,” in Plato’s term)