Music vs Sound

What is music? To some, it would be a series of pitches, forming a coherent melody. Duke Ellington would have said “it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing!” And yet to others, music could simply be sound itself. In this article we discuss music of the 20th century and today and how it pushes the boundaries of how we define music.

With the invention of the tape recorder, music no longer was required to be experienced live. Composers began to experiment with tape; cutting up sounds and gluing them back together in a sort of collage. One of the most influential of these experiments is a piece by Edgar Varèse titled Poème électronique, heard here.

Another type of music that developed in the early 20th century was 12-tone, or atonal music. These pieces used the twelve pitches of the diatonic scale but scrambled them using a mathematical matrix (usually called a ‘row’). The resultant sound is very unique and perhaps an acquired taste. Since the pitches do not follow traditional harmonic rules (i.e. roman numeral analysis) the sound is said to be without a key center, or atonal. Here is Arnold Schoenberg’s Three Piano Pieces, No. 1, performed by Glenn Gould.

In the later half of the 20th century a composer named John Cage attempted to push the boundaries of music even further. He focused on sounds; for example, he would perform a vocal piece that consisted of only consonants (no notes), such as ‘k’ or ‘b’ etc. Another piece titled 4’33’’ is complete silence for the whole piece, which really challenges the listener as to what truly is music. Is it the silence or is it the ambient sounds in your environment that create the piece? Other pieces are for prepared piano, in which a piano is altered by drilling screws and other devices into the body to create different sounds when a key is pressed. Here is an example.