Understanding All I Know About That: We’ll begin by reviewing our discovery learning assignment. Let’s share together what we wrote down from each of the three listenings we did of the same instrumental piece of music.

Where did music come from? Would there be music if there weren’t people? Certainly there would be, in the natural generic sense. Birds, wind and waves, the coordination of the planets and seasons, all have a certain sound or poetry to them. Beyond that, we find that there was music before creation (mentioned in Job) and music in heaven (mentioned in Revelation). So, music exists, in a sense, with or without the intentional invention of people controlling it.

However, such a broad definition or description of music is not very helpful for our purposes. We are trying a more specific in discovering ‘what is music.’
We might say that music is intentional pitches, set by humans to communicate an abstract expression. Music has “meaning,” which is determined mostly by cultural expectations. Psychologically, it could be said to be a series of expectations and fulfillments, or else expectations and surprises.

NOTE: for the purposes of this course, we use the term “Western music” often. That refers to music of the western European and American tradition. (We are NOT referring to “country and western music,” or any such sub-genre within the Western musical tradition.) There are many musics in the world, and each has some sort of established “theory” to it. For the purposes of this course, we will only explore the music of the Western musical tradition, though a few different sub-genre styles might be included.

Discovery Learning Assignment: Let’s try some experiments to see if music has some sort of meaning. For each of the attached examples, answer the questions: What is it saying? How did it unfold? What did the ending say?

• Shave and a haircut. Two bits. (example 01-01)
• Blues to a turnaround on V.
• Saber dance.
• Ragtime with Alice’s restaurant tag.
• Whole tone dream harp scale. (example 01-02)
• Schmaltz with a deceptive cadence.
• Triple leading tone cadence. VII-I.