What is sound? What is music? What is noise? Sound is mechanical radiant energy transmitted by longitudinal pressure waves in a material medium, or this energy as perceived by your sense of hearing. It seems obvious that both music and noise are sound. But is this necessarily true? Music may be continuous sound or a sequence of sounds divided by brief absences of sound, but might it also be continuous absence of sound? The late avant-garde composer John Cage (1912-1992) wrote a piece called 4'33'', which is four minutes and thirty three seconds where the performer doesn't strike any of the keys on the piano but simply opens and closes the cover. Is that music? Must it be possible for us to hear the performance to call it music? Must the performance of music be defined as such simply by including anything we might hear during the performance even if what we hear is not planned as part of the performance?

Even if you wish the performance to be heard, can you call all planned sound music? If you fill a metal trash can with broken glass and roll it down the stairs, is the resulting planned sound music? For someone who hears it but does not know it is planned sound it probably won't sound like music. Even if the listeners know the sound is planned they will most likely call the sound noise.

Noise, however, can be a component of planned sound that most people will recognize as music. An interesting example is the Beatles' tune Helter Skelter. Most everyone will recognize it as music, but it includes elements which if taken separately tend to fall into the noise category defined as any sound that is loud, confused, indistinct or disagreeable. Some people of course will say that because some so-called music is loud, confused, indistinct or disagreeable, it really is noise and not music.

The question over what is music vs. what is not music is the same as the never-ending battle over what is art vs. what is not art. This gets into the time-honored challenge of exceeding the bounds of convention, a tactic which visionaries and megalomaniacs have employed since antiquity to effect significant change. It required both vision and ego on the part of musicians to push forward in musical history.

Music comes in many genres. Some of these are:

• Folk (This is music stemming from or associated with rural living and originally not written down but passed down through the oral tradition.)



• Blues (This is related to Folk and Jazz, associated with both rural and urban living in the early 20th century in America. Originating in African American culture and adopted freely around the world.)
  
  
• Rock (A very wide-ranging term, but generally popular music characterized by a strong beat and electric amplification. Elements borrowed from Jazz, Blues, Folk, Classical, et al.)



• Jazz (Originally an American musical form, drawn primarily from African American culture from the early 20th century. Adopted substantially in Europe, also in Africa and South America and mixing with indigenous styles.)



• Classical (All formalized art and sacred music starting from European roots in the Middle Ages up to the present day, or to include Asia, all formalized art and sacred music starting from any cultural roots from antiquity up to the present day.)
  
  
• Avant-Garde (Essentially anything new or experimental that can be called music goes here. Frequently controversial.)

Personally, I am most often drawn to classical music. Looking at the categories above it clearly covers the widest range of material and offers the widest range of expression.

It is worth noting at this point that the term "classical" has a dual purpose. As a specific period, it is the style of music centered around Vienna from the late 18th to the early 19th century. In a much looser sense of the word it refers to any formalized art or sacred music not from folk or popular sources.

The pundits presently break down classical music as follows:

• Ars Antiqua: 1160 to 1320
• Ars Nova: 1316 to 1377
• Ars Subtilior: Late 14th century
• Renaissance: 1430 to 1600
• Baroque: 1570 to 1750
• Classical: 1750 to 1825
• Romantic: 1790 to 1910
• Modern: 1910 onward

These dates are for convenience. To a certain extent they are arbitrary and imprecise, but musical scholars generally agree on them. The periods all overlap more or less. There was never a New Year's eve where everyone writing music agreed the next period shall begin at midnight.

The Ars periods constitute the music of the Middle Ages, specifically in France where art music appears to have been more formalized than elsewhere at the time. Detailed information about these periods is not substantial owing to their relative antiquity. Although the Middle Ages is generally thought of as going back to the fall of the Roman Empire around 476, documented music before the 12th century generally is anonymous plainchant, sacred music but not art music. Before that the musical record gets rather sparse. Basic notation before the 9th century is not much in evidence, and documented pitch representation seems to have come into use only in the 10th or 11th centuries. In spite of this some recent reconstructions have been done of music from ancient Greece and Rome, some of which has been performed and recorded.

Ars Antiqua (Ancient Art) is identified primarily with the French composers Leonin (c.1163-1201) and Perotin (c.1160-1201).

Ars Nova (New Art) is identified primarily with the French composer Guillaume de Machaut (c.1300-1377).

Ars Subtilior (More Subtle Art) is identified primarily with the French composer Johannes Cuvelier (fl.1372-1387).

The Renaissance is much better documented than the Ars periods. Significant composers of this period include Guillaume Dufay (c.1398-1474), Josquin Desprez (c.1440-1521), Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (c.1525-1594), Orlande Lassus (c.1530-1594), and William Byrd (c.1543-1623).

The Baroque musical literature is beautifully demonstrated by the generous efforts of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), Georg Philipp Telemann (1681-1767) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741), to name a few.

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) dominate the Classical period although it must be noted that Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) was a Classicist who became an early Romantic. I should note that "Classical period" really refers to the age called Neoclassicism which was the 18th century revival of classical taste and style as exemplified by the peaks of cultural development in ancient Greece (5th to 4th centuries BCE) and in Rome (1st century BCE to 1st century).

Toward the late 18th century it was a reaction against Neoclassicism and the Age of Reason that spawned Romanticism. Romanticism developed very slowly and variably in different places. Romanticism supplanted Neoclassicism only gradually, going through a series of transitional stages.

The Romantic period gave rise to an unprecedented level of individuality and emotion in music. This is when composers were freed from the uniformity of style that characterizes the Classical and earlier periods. I have selected several composers from this period I believe demonstrated a special voice that stands apart. Most of my choices here are often regarded as secondary or tertiary in importance but their individuality and unmistakable style give them a noble status.

• Frédéric Chopin (Poland, 1810-1849) A relatively short life taken by tuberculosis and an output limited almost entirely to the solo piano nonetheless produced some of the most profound, original, innovative and expressive music ever. The Nocturnes and the Mazurkas are sublime. His famous affair with the writer George Sand (Aurore Dudevant) coincided with one of his most creative periods.



• Max Bruch (Germany, 1838-1920) Living a long life, he composed operas, choral works, chamber music, concertos and symphonic music. In spite of his enduring career only four of his works are performed with any frequency but these are gems of romantic craftsmanship. His Concerto # 1 for Violin and Orchestra, the Scottish Fantasy for violin and orchestra, and Kol Nidrei for cello and orchestra are among the best of this genre.



• Antonin Dvorak (Bohemia, 1841-1904) He wrote a wealth of symphonic and chamber music as well as several operas and choral works. His unique voice comes partly from the way he incorporates the folk and dance music of his Czech heritage. He spent some time in the U.S. where he composed his famous Symphony # 9, From the New World. Lush and well-crafted orchestration with a rich melodic sense gives his music an enduring appeal.



• Jean Sibelius (Finland, 1865-1957) In spite of his life span his compositional period was relatively short, starting around 1890 and virtually stopping forever in 1926 with his bleak and haunting Tapiola, a tone poem for orchestra. He wrote mostly symphonic music but also choral music, chamber pieces, incidental theater music, songs, and piano music. His music can be frankly evocative and pictorial with works such as The Swan of Tuonela and A Lonely Ski Trail. Unabashedly romantic in his Symphony # 1 (1899) and the Violin Concerto (1903), the austere and spacious quality of Symphony # 4 (1911) is decidedly modern.



• Alexander Skryabin (Russia, 1872-1915) Influenced by Chopin, he wrote for solo piano in the same forms but increasingly living very much on the edge of ordinary reality, he envisioned a mystic universe which he felt he could capture in music. To a large extent he succeeded. Listen to his piano Sonata # 5 (1907) and his Poem of Ecstasy (1908), music quite unlike anything before it. He developed a chord he called the "Mystic Chord" (C - F# - Bb - E - A - D).

Romantic music continued to be written after 1910 with its purveyors often called post- or neo-romantics. But music continued to move forward. As with the Classical to Romantic transition there was a Romantic to Modern transition. Of special interest to me are these transitional composers. A few examples follow.

• Claude Debussy (France, 1862-1918) While developing great scorn for the bombastic efforts of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) he took music in a very different direction, dipping below the surface and employing subtlety and symbolism along with radically new harmonies and instrumental coloring. He wrote symphonic scores, piano music, chamber music, songs, ballets, a mystery play, a piece for solo flute, and an opera (Pelléas et Mélisande, 1902) that was entirely new in style but evidently the first and last of its kind. Debussy did not care for the labeling of his music as impressionist, however this label has survived his protestations.



• Maurice Ravel (France, 1875-1937) A younger contemporary of Debussy, accused of imitating the elder composer, he defined his own musical character with extraordinary forays into virtuoso piano works, dreamy ballets, shimmering chamber works and energetic piano concertos. He scored a brilliant orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, the version most often heard today.



• Heitor Villa-Lobos (Brazil, 1887-1959) The only non-European in this grouping, he was a prolific composer starting with popular music in Rio de Janeiro. He did much to advance the cause of musical education in Brazil and wrote a cycle of inventive pieces called Bachianas brasileiras where he blended the spirit of Brazilian folk music with that of Bach.



• Igor Stravinsky (Russia, 1882-1971) A groundbreaker, he went from lush romanticism with the Firebird in 1910 to rapidly developed modernism with Petrushka in 1911. With Vesna svyashchennaya, also known as Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) in 1913 he created a controversy with its intensely and irregularly rhythmic and dissonant score, which combined with dancers leaping about the stage caused many philistines in the audience to loudly protest during the performance. He explored a wide variety of instrumentations and styles throughout his life, touching variously on Neoclassicism, sacred music, concertos, an opera and the serial technique.



• Sergey Prokofiev (Russia, 1891-1953) A child prodigy, he became an ultra-modernist confusing audiences of the day much to his delight. He composed in many different traditional forms such as symphonies, operas, concertos, ballets, chamber works and a great deal of solo piano work. He collaborated with the filmmaker Sergey Eisenstein (1898-1948) on film scores for Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. His desire to stay in the Soviet Union while artists were suffering an increasing level of creative frostbite compromised the quality of his work after 1948. In a perverse irony he died the very same day as Stalin.

Below are a few composers who were contemporaries of those above but some of whose music can still make some people uneasy. Their music may be atonal or harshly percussive or rapturously devotional or just wild. There is some exquisite music here if you can get your ears around it.

• Charles Ives (United States, 1874-1954) He was an insurance man who dabbled in nostalgic Americana, atonality and the wildly unconventional. Examples are The Unanswered Question and Central Park in the Dark.



• Arnold Schoenberg (Germany, 1874-1951) A German cabaret musician early on, he worked on and off in atonality and serialism, developing a style known as musical expressionism. Listen to Pierrot lunaire.



• Alban Berg (Germany, 1885-1935) He was a protégé of Schoenberg. A good starting point is his Sonata for Piano, Op. 1. Later he wrote the mostly atonal and nihilistic opera Wozzeck. A concert suite from the also dark and disturbing opera Lulu is a good summary of the work that his death prevented him from finishing.



• Olivier Messiaen (France, 1908-1992) He was alternately religious, meditative, wild, systematic, erotic. From 1950 to 1960 he concentrated on bird songs. A mystic chamber work is Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps (Quartet for the End of Time).



• Iannis Xenakis (Greece, 1922-2001) An engineer and architect, he used a Gaussian distribution to write some of his music. An entertaining work for piano is Eonta.

The following books were used for research or verification of the material in the foregoing article.

• The Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music, Edited by Stanley Sadie, W.W. Norton & Company, 1991


• Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia, Edited by Bruce Murphy, Harper Collins, 1996


• The Lives of the Great Composers, Harold Schonberg, W.W. Norton & Company, 1970


• The New Columbia Encyclopedia, Edited by William Harris and Judith Levey, Columbia University Press, 1975


• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Edited by William Morris, American Heritage Publishing Co. / Houghton Mifflin, 1969


• Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, Edited by Henry Woolf, G. & C. Merriam Co., 1980

The electronic reproduction of music done well is a laudable art as well as a science. The recording of music is characterized ideally by a flat frequency response that covers the range generally audible to the human ear usually given as 20 - 20kHz and combined with an infinite sampling rate so you miss nothing.

Analog sound reproduction by its very nature is infinite or continuous sampling in the manner that we pick up sounds with our ears. Sound waves are propagated through a medium, usually air, and those waves are "heard" by microphones (electro-mechanical ears) which transform the sound waves to electrical waves.

These electrical waves go through a number of processes which can include being transformed to magnetic impressions (such as on audio tape for static storage) and physical impressions (such as on vinyl records, also for static storage). During playback these impressions get changed back into electrical waves so the audio signals can be moved around between various components (such as recorders, amplifiers and speakers). The speakers give you the end product which is the audible sound first picked up by the microphones.

Digital does the same process as analog with a very significant difference. The electrical waves stay in the analog domain only after they are first "heard" by the microphones. Then the analog waves go into an A/D (Analog to Digital) converter that changes the analog waves (of varying frequency and amplitude) into arrangements of digital bits. This is the same process as with a personal computer with a microphone.

Analog, if done with the greatest of care and the finest of equipment, produces beautiful results. The problems with analog include less than the greatest care, less than the finest equipment, and the process of copying a recording. Since analog by its nature is always an approximation, there will always be some deviation from the original.

Most of us are familiar with copy machines that do a visual analog of the original. The copy can be really good, but try copying the copy and then copy the second copy and so on. What happens? The image deteriorates. The more you do it the worse it gets. The same thing happens with audio. Any value can "slip" slightly this way or that. Any sloppiness such as a crumpled original or dirty glass or other problems inside the copier simply accelerates the deterioration. Analog "slippage" in audio can be kept to a tiny minimum when every step of the way great care is taken with the quality of capture, transfer, processing and delivery. But great care in analog audio is the same as with wine, furniture, and home construction - this requires premium materials and true craftsmanship, neither of which is cheap. Components such as cartridges (for vinyl records) are especially sensitive to this.

With digital the audio "image" is not another image. It is a written description of the image using numbers. These numbers, to use a visual metaphor, are pure black or pure white (or as the computer sees them, 00000000 or FFFFFFFF in hexadecimal). In the digital description there is no chance to drift off even slightly, no 00000001 or FFFFFFFE, no slippage. It is 100% correct or 100% wrong. You can copy digital information an infinite number of times and there is no degradation such as with analog.

However, our ears operate only in the analog domain. We can't hear digital. That's why we have DACs, or Digital to Analog Converters. The audio signal can remain in the digital domain all the way to the speakers but at some point the signal must become analog again to cause the speakers to make sounds we can hear.

Back to main page...