Music is a part of everyone's life. We all live in an environment filled with it, a great many of us at least find something we like and take enjoyment in it, some latch on to a specific subset and culture and establish part of an identity through it, and a minority devote themselves heavily to formal training in creating, performing, and understanding some type of music. As someone who studied music in college for four years, I belong to that last category.
On one hand, it is kind of nice to think of myself as a trained expert in the field, but on the other, the vast majority of my training focused on studying and preparing me to deal with music written a long time ago by people in Europe and the United States, a small sampling when compared to the totality of music. It is definitely an amazing collection, filled with many great works of completely divergent styles, but still a tiny sliver of what music as a whole offers us.
More to the point though, it isn't such narrow training that really makes anyone a musician or musical expert. Understanding music is first and foremost about listening to it. It is a medium that is meant to be heard. And one doesn't need any training or expertise at all. Anyone can understand music. All it takes is the willingness to pay attention and listen. Instead of making music a backdrop against which we live our lives, we have to bring it to the forefront, give it careful attention. Then, we begin to notice things. We hear things we didn't notice before. And we can begin to ask ourselves: what makes the music we listen to what it is?
Formal training is by no means useless. It provides ways to quantify and normalize, exposes us to ideas that we probably wouldn't come up with in a vacuum. It gives us a context in which to understand how the music we listen to in a sort of abstract did or would have been expected to fit into the world around it.
Still, everyone's understanding and valuation of music is ultimately going to be a bit different. Of course, that is what makes music, as well as the rest of the world, so diverse and interesting.
So, this is where the idea of "The Three Musics" comes in. The concept dates back to the medieval ages and is associated with a philosopher, mathematician, and musician named Boethius. He specified three branches of music. Musica Universalis was the music of the spheres. It was a theoretical music created by the perfect proportions formed by the various heavenly bodies(at this time a very conveniently proportioned geocentric universe was very much the belief). Musica Humana was the music of humans. It referred to the music of the human body. Finally, Musica Instrumentalis was music as we think of it: the sounds produced by singers and musical instruments.
This model seems bizarre to us today, but at the core is an interesting concept: music existing in relation to the world around it. This isn't quite how medievalists would have looked at it, but it is how I plan to approach this blog. Primarily, I'm going to be exploring music and musical topics, but I know I will get into other things as well. I have a few listening projects for myself that I plan to write about in the near future.
I hope the experience is enjoyable and enriching for both myself and those of you who decide to read on. I'll always be interested and appreciative of feedback, ideas, and suggestions, so if you have something to say, post a comment.
-Matt
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