Is Music a Type of Fiction?

            On Friday December 2^nd I opened the front door of my building to take my bike out but I had to wait as a middle-aged woman passed slowly by. She was walking slowly, I assumed, because she was barefoot, but I saw her a couple of days later with a walker and with sneakers on. She said “Hi” to me in a shy voice as she passed.

            The lecture theatre was full when I arrived with people attending some one-shot lecture or seminar. I went to one of the rooms across the hall where one young woman was sitting with her laptop. She looked up and said, “Hi!” I said “Hi” back and asked if she would mind if I stole a chair. When I sat down in the hall it occurred to me that the young woman looked familiar. I think she might have been in the same Short Story class with me last year and that her name was maybe Madeline. I thought that maybe she’d remembered me before I did her and that was perhaps why her greeting seemed more enthusiastic than one that would be given to a stranger. I felt guilty for not recognizing her and thought about going back in to say hello again but that seemed awkward.

            When Matt got there he sat down to chat with me while eating some soggy looking shrimp chow mein from one of the food trucks on St George. I thanked him for telling me about Gen Library, because it helped me download the proper edition of the companion textbook for our course. He said it’s a great site for textbooks but for literature there’s another site. He said he’d message me on Facebook to give me the link.

            Professor Russell came and stood in the hall waiting with us. He expressed regret about there being another class in our room because he’d planned on playing some special music to fit the theme of our final lecture. He said it was all music from films, like Star Wars and the Clint Mansell soundtrack for Requiem for a Dream.

            Matt and Devlin spent most of the time talking video games. The professor said that there are only two video games that he considers to be masterpieces: “Braid” and “Myst”. He said that the ending for Braid blew his mind. He said that Braid draws on Mario but that there’s a new game called The Witness that draws on Myst.

            Matt said that there’s a theory that the girl being searched for in Braid is really the atomic bomb.

            As the other class was clearing out, I found my seat and as the instructor was clearing out, she gave me the eye.

            Devlin managed to fit in a few minutes of music before starting. He played the Star Wars theme, and then a second piece, informing me as it started playing that it was Requiem for a Dream.

            I asked Devlin if the expression he’d used in relation to photography, that it was “fictionally deficient” was his own idea. He said it was. I told him it was brilliant and poetic and that it was my favourite phrase that I’d heard in the course. I said I was going to use it when I wanted to tell someone that what they were saying was true. I would say, “What you’re saying is fictionally deficient and they would say, “It is not!”

            We started with a review question. What type of functional beauty would a scarf with a lot of orange and red be? Most of us answered Adherent Beauty, but we were wrong because with Adherent Beauty it is the complexity that contributes to the function. It was not Functional Elegance because colours do not assist the function of the scarf. The answer was Apparent Fitness because the colours make the scarf look warmer.

            We returned to Music. Last time we found that one thing that is special about music is that it has syntax without semantics. The syntax is a structure outside of which the notes are off-key. Music has no semantics because the notes do not represent meaning.

            What is also special about music is that it expresses emotion. What does it mean that music expresses emotion? A person expresses emotion in an obvious way but music does not.

            Expressiveness as Association

            The expression of emotion in music may be a manifestation of the emotions of the composer. But it is not plausible that a composer would have been sad during the entire time that they wrote a sad piece of music. Maybe when the composer writes they choose musical properties to express the emotion.

            Expressiveness as Arousal

            The expression of emotion in music may be to arouse the emotion in the listener. But one can recognize that a piece of music sounds sad without being sad. But maybe on one occasion it might not evoke that emotion yet it is the kind of music that tends to evoke that kind of emotion. People feel a certain way because the music expresses certain emotion prior to composition.

            Expressiveness as Hypothetical Persona

            To express emotion may be to proscribe imagining that someone has the emotion. We can imagine that the music is an emotional living thing. Are we imagining the music alive or as some kind of disembodied creature? Does music in a minor scale sound sad and does music in a major scale sound happy?

            I suggested that whether music is sad or happy is just associative in the same way that the sounds of words became associated in different languages with different meanings. We’ve become used to the associations and so we just accept them as being universal.

            Appreciating music may just be a type of emotional pretending. There is a hypothetical persona disembodied behind the music and we imagine that person is sad. So when we listen to music we are empathizing with that persona. Music’s fiction is pure syntax. Literature is mediated while literature is not. Music does not take up a proposition.

            When we introspect, this is not what we are doing. What we are imagining could be anything. We do not think we are making believe. This defies our self-understanding.

            Compare music to an abstract painting by Pollock. Is it expressing emotion? Is it a frenzied emotion? Does fictional analysis work there?

            Expressiveness as Resemblance

            The expression of emotion in music may be a resemblance of the behavioural characteristics of human emotion. A slow tempo and a low pitch may simply resemble sadness. This puts the emotion in the music. The immediate process is empathizing with the music.

            That was the end of our last lecture and so everyone applauded. Afterward, Nancy looked puzzled and asked, “Do we usually applaud at the end of a lecture?” Devlin explained to her that it was because it was the last one. She said she’d been wondering if she’d missed something that usually happens.

            I shook Devlin’s hand and told him that I enjoyed the course. I told him truthfully that it was my second favourite Philosophy course, next to “The Philosophy of Sex”. He admitted, “It’s hard to compete with that!”

            On the way home I made sure I stopped at a Bank of Montreal to take out my rent money. After that I went to Freshco, where the bicycle racks are slowly filling up once again with dusty and rusty abandoned bikes. The last time the derelict population of velocipedes didn’t get thinned out until I complained, so I may have to do so again. What am I, the only cyclist in the city who notices these things? I walked past the railed in area where the shopping carts are usually kept but which now emits the raspy green fragrance of dying Christmas trees. I had my No Frills flyer with me and I was already to get some deals by price matching, but all of the Freshco prices for the items I wanted were the same as those at No Frills.