For some years, I have been arguing that music is a form of thinking. (See prior posts
here, published in 2011, and here, 2010.) I realize that this statement would likely be obvious to most musicians, but I still receive push-back to it from those people (especially many philosophers) who believe that thinking requires words. In this belief, they are mistaken. Even with other forms of thinking (geometric, visual, musical, kinetic, etc), though, we may still need words to explain our thinking to others.

For a listener to music, especially for large-scale works, there are at least two threads of cognition operating as they listen: One we might call intellectual, since it involves the thread listening to and identifying the development of the musical ideas, for example, the use of key relationships, scales, harmonic sequences, rhythmic patterns, and structural forms such as fugues, Sonata form, or leitmotifs, etc. Even when there is no development of musical ideas, just repetition and stasis, listening with attention and identifying the absence of development is a cognitive activity.

Another thread we might call emotional, since it involves experiencing and identifying the emotional content and force of the music at each moment, and how this changes over time. Indeed, the pianist Roberto Prosseda has argued that listening to music can teach us to become aware of our own emotions and our own interiority. Both these threads contain many fibres, so (as VN pointed out to me) it be more useful to construe each of them as lattices or similar structures rather than as single dimensions. Of course (and I thank AD for this insight), these two are not the only possible cognitive threads by which to apprehend a work of music unfolding through time, and nor are they necessarily or easily separable.

If this be the case for listeners of a work of music, how much more so for performers! In learning a work and in preparing to perform it, a musician (or an ensemble) – at least, any performer who is not merely an unintelligent machine – will need to make multiple decisions on how to play every note, and will need to make these micro-level decisions in such a way that they are consistent, both synchronicly and across time, and so that they all combine into a coherent interpretation of the work, as a whole, and within its parts (from phrases up to movements). All this learning effort requires a great deal of thinking, as the performer is choosing specific intellectual and emotional threads from the vast multitude that are possible. That is thinking – cognitive effort – of a very high order.

Moreover, the intellectual and emotional cognitive journeys in the mind of the performer do not stop when he or she or they has learnt the music. Each performance of it is an enactment of the intellectual and emotional cognitive journeys of the performer, as they unfurl the work through time. In playing the work for an audience, no matter how small that audience, the performer is repeating those mental journeys.

I have often wondered why any performer plays music for others. Apart from needing to earn money, the usual answer is that musicians wish to communicate to the audience. Communicate what? The standard answer in western art music is: to communicate the intended message of the composer of the work. This answer has always troubled me, as in the extreme case, it removes any autonomous agency from the performer. By what right does a composer assert his or her authority over performers of their music? To give just one example, JS Bach’s music has been played on many different instruments, some not even invented during his life, and in many different styles. Would Bach have approved of Jacques Loussier’s Play Bach Trio? To which I respond: Who cares? It is not up to Bach to control the performers of his music, particularly after his death.

Viewing a musical performer as enacting threads of thinking gives a different answer to the question of why anyone would play for others, an answer which requires the full agency of the performer: To share with the audience the thinking done by the performer in the very act of performing. This brings to mind the argument of the amateur painter Marion Milner (aka Joanna Field), that, for her, painting was not normally the expression of any prior feelings, feelings she as the artist had before she began painting which she sought to convey through painting, but an expression of her mental state, including her feelings, experienced while doing the act of painting itself.

Sharing a private cognitive journey with others is what mathematicians do whenever they talk about their work with students or others. Mathematical objects arguably exist only in the minds of the mathematicians who think about them. Teaching mathematics or talking about it involves sharing those mental objects and the interior reasoning undertaken over them (cognition about them) with an audience. That sharing of private mental cognition is what I believe musicians are doing when they perform for others. One could imagine a performer saying at the start of a performance:

Playing this work of music (and programme) here and now entails a private intellectual and emotional (or other) journey in my mind, which I want to share with you. I will do so by playing the work and so enacting this private mental journey within your hearing. Please listen as I do, and I hope you will also experience similar cognitive journeys to those which I will experience as I play.”

This is why listening to music, especially major works, is an intellectual and emotional adventure.

ACK: These ideas have been provoked and enhanced by discussions I have had with Mr Vincent Neeb and Mr Alexandr Doronin, and I am very grateful to them both for our respective conversations. Responsibility for any errors or infelicities is mine alone, however.