The Meta-Mystery of the Mystery of Music
The mystery of whether or not music is a mystery, and whether the people who are meant to be solving the mystery even think about whether or not it is a mystery.
What is music?
Nobody knows.
Why should a thing like music exist at all?
Nobody knows.
Music is a human activity, and humans are living organisms.
So we should also ask - what is the biological function of music? How does music contribute to the long-term reproductive success of people who create music and people who listen to music? (People who create music can derive economic or social benefit because other people like listening to their music, but we still have to explain what the benefit is to the listeners.)
Or is music just a side-effect of something else, and it’s the something else that has the biological function?
If so, what is that something else? Music has a lot of very specific properties, and any explanation of music as a side-effect of something else has to include an explanation of why music has all of those specific properties.
Most of us are very familiar with the subjective experience of music, but subjective familiarity is not the same thing as knowing scientifically what something is.
The very existence of music is one of the great unsolved mysteries.
Or is it?
Some people think that music is a mystery, and some people think that it is not a mystery.
And with some people it’s hard to tell. For example, the American Musicological Society.
Their What is musicology? page contains a list of all the different ways that musicologists study music, and I quote:
as part of history (analogous to art history), organized by
chronological era or period ("the Renaissance")
nation or region (American music, South Asian music)
musical style ("art music," "popular music")
the people involved (composers, performers, audiences)
the performance forces involved (symphony orchestra, soloists)
as part of society (sociology or anthropology of music)
with respect to its structure (music theory, music analysis)
with respect to how it functions as art (music aesthetics, philosophy of music)
with respect to how it is perceived (music perception and cognition)
with respect to the means of performance (the study of musical instruments, acoustics, physiology of voice)
Does anyone in the American Musicological Society think that the very existence of music is an unsolved mystery? I can’t tell from reading that list.
How many people believe that music is a mystery? How many people don’t believe that it is a mystery? How many people have never even thought about whether or not it is a mystery?
And what about the musicologists?
How many musicologists believe that music is a mystery? How many musicologists don’t believe that music is a mystery? How many musicologists even think about whether or not music is a mystery?
And that, dear reader, is the mystery of the mystery of music.
What do you think? Do you consider yourself to be a musicologist? Do you think that music is a mystery? Are you interested in trying to solve that mystery? Should we all be spending more time and effort talking about the mystery and trying to solve it?