Do you think your answer to that question will be the same as that of the person sitting next to you ? How about the answer a parent or grandparent might give?
Would their definition of music be different from yours? What about someone who lived a hundred years ago, or even a thousand years ago?
No doubt the music from past eras sounded different because the instruments used in earlier times were not the same as those used today. But what about the music itself? What about the things that make music meaningful for us? The things that touch us on a level and in a way that no other form of communication can?
Are those things really so different today than they were a hundred or a thousand years ago?
What about music from other countries? Do people from other cultures listen to music for the same reasons we do? Do they listen for the same things in the music? Do they react the same as we do to different types of music?
Our experience of music is linked to the time and place from which the music comes and our own time and place during which it is heard. When we hear music today that was written a hundred years ago it is helpful to understand the time during which it was written, what the accepted norms were for music of that time, and how people of that time might have experienced the music. For even though the sounds from different historical eras and different cultures may be unusual for us listening to them today, they were the norm for the time and place from which they originated.
But back to our original question. What is music? We know music is sound. On that we can probably all agree. But beyond that we run into problems defining music. The words we use to define and describe music include terms like melody, harmony, rhythm, form, texture, and timbre (tim’bar).
Some of these words are probably familiar to you in reference to music, such as melody, harmony, and rhythm. Form and texture are words you most likely know but are unsure how they refer to music.
