Does music describe things?

The blog Cognitive Daily has conducted an experiment to find out something that musicians and composers have always known: music is ineffectual at describing things in the external world.

Of course, a lot of music is meant to accompany extra-musical images or stories. There are tone poems, movie soundtracks, the Fantasia movies, Peter and the Wolf, and for that matter, song lyrics in general.

But you need to be explicitly shown or told what the music is supposed to evoke -- which means the music on its own doesn't evoke specific things.

Here's how Cognitive Daily did the experiment: they conducted a survey of their blog readers, in which they embedded audio clips from supposedly descriptive pieces of music and asked the readers to say what the music described. For instance, the survey included

a selection from Claude Debussy's La Mer, from the movement intended to represent the wind and the sea. Only 36 of 357 respondents answered correctly. Even when I gave half-credit for mentioning either the wind, or a storm, or waves, or a boat, only an additional 90 got it. Most respondents -- over 200, in fact, got it completely wrong.

I picked seven different clips like this, from seven different works that were all intended by their composers to represent specific things, not just emotions or adjectives. I tried to pick pieces that seemed relatively obvious, based on the composer's initial intentions. I scored each response on a scale of 0 to 2, with 2 being perfect, and 1 meaning some portion of the response was correct. The average score was a mere 0.38, and 72 percent of the time people got the answer completely wrong.

Respondents with musical training did better than those without it, but "not much better."

I'm reminded of an anecdote about a critic who was writing a review of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3, the "Scottish" Symphony (sometimes awkwardly called the "Scotch" Symphony) when it first came out. The critic exulted that Mendelssohn had perfectly captured the essence of Scotland. He had inadvertently listened to Mendelssohn's Fourth, the "Italian" Symphony, which, as you might have guessed, was supposed to evoke Italy, not Scotland.

I do think music is meaningful and important, but for other reasons (which I'll go into in a future blog post). It's not important because it "describes" or "depicts" nature, or a city, or a person. Music doesn't "describe" or "depict" anything.

The famous composer Aaron Copland wrote, in his book What to Listen for in Music (1939):

My own belief is that all music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning behind the notes and that the meaning behind the notes constitutes, after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is about.

This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No."

Therein lies the difficulty. Simple-minded souls will never be satisfied with the answer to the second of these questions.

They always want music to have a meaning, and the more concrete it is the better they like it. The more the music reminds them of a train, a storm, a funeral, or any other familiar conception the more expressive it appears to them.

This popular idea of music's meaning -- stimulated and abetted by the usual run of musical commentator -- should be discouraged wherever and whenever it is met.

One timid lady once confessed to me that she suspected something seriously lacking in her appreciation of music because of her inability to connect it with anything definite. That is getting the whole thing backward, of course.*

Copland said more about this question, based on intuition and experience, than any scientific experiment could.



(That's the movement from Debussy's La Mer that the Cognitive Daily survey had readers listen to, "Dialogue du vent et de la mer," conducted by Herbert von Karajan.)

* Line breaks added for readability.