For a very extended, and musically informed discussion of your question, I would strongly recommend Roger Scruton's book The Aesthetics of Music. He develops a sophisticated account of the way that we use our imaginations to experience the notes as moving in dance-like ways.

Even if the chords are not presented in the context of a music piece, they are heard in the (more backgrounded) context of music one has heard. Our associations with those pieces of music prime us to hear major versus minor chords in particular ways.

There is also a physical reason for finding major chords to be more settled or stable than minor chords: the wavelengths of a major third match the overtones of the root of a chord more closely than do the wavelengths of a minor third . When we hear a C, for example, it is already producing secondary wavelengths that are those of an E (at a higher octave); the addition of a nearby E thus seems to fit in without added strain.

Your question is very interesting: it is, I think, an instance of a question that might generally be asked of any particular instance of any art: what is it that makes it the kind of work that it is?

To fix ideas, consider the following question, which Stephen Dedalus, the protagonist of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, says that he's written down in a book at home: "If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood...make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not?"

Your question, like Stephen's, has to do with the difference between a genuine artwork and an otherwise identical grouping of sounds, not, however, produced in the context of a work of art.

It therefore seems to me that brilliance alone is not enough for something to qualify as music; the birds outside my window sometimes produce a brilliant series of notes. But the sounds produced by the birds aren't music, even if they are musical, whereas the sounds heard on the soundtrack of The Birds are, it would seem an instance of music? The question, is, however, what makes the latter music and the former not? Is it that there was an artist in the one case and not in the other? Is it that the latter, but not the former, is the product of intention?

These and other answers have been given in work on aesthetics, which, long before Stephen Dedalus wrote in his notebook, was centrally concerned with defining the nature of art, and hence engaging, on even a more general level, the kind of questions that you and Stephen raise about particular arts. In the twentieth century, objections were raised to the very attempt to define the concept of art, on the grounds that the concept did not admit of a definition, but was instead, maybe, a 'family resemblance term', meant to capture a cluster of interrelated features, no one of which was essential or necessary to the concept, but which could overlap and criscross in all sorts of ways, and were nevertheless also not simply amenable to a disjunctive definition.

Might it be the case that individual arts are like that? Or are there criteria for determining what constitutes an instance of a particular art? If the latter, then does the concept of art admit, after all, of definition?

Treatments of music have long been a part of aesthetics: perhaps precisely because music is as abstract as it is--that is, it is not representational, or at least not obviously so--consideration of music raises questions about meaning, and human responses that are very different from those raised by representational arts such as painting or film. While there has been much written on the philosophy of music, I think that a very good place to start is with the work of the philosopher Peter Kivy, who has written on a wide range of topics in the aesthetics of music over the years.

Great questions. If by 'music' one means actual auditions (sounds), then it seems that the same reply works with the tree in the woods. There would be no sound and thus no music without auditions and thus without someone or thing to hear it. And the definition of music in terms of sound is an important one in the philosophy of music. Jerrold Levinson, for example, defines music as follows:

Sounds temporily organized by a person for the purpose of enriching or intensifying experience through active engagement (e.g. listening, dancing, performing) with the sounds regarded primarily, or in significant measure as sounds.

But if we change things a bit and think of musical composition, then your question about the musician seems very tempting. After all, imagine a musician composed a piece like the ninth symphony, perhaps writing out all the score, but the piece is never played. In that case, I think many of us would say the muscial composition exists even if there is no sound made at all based on the score. I would even say it is possible that all manner of musical compositions exist (or can exist) even if not written down, so long as someone simply composes the pieces in her head (so to speak!) and never tells a soul.

As for random versus purposive noise, Levinson's definition seems to rule out as music sounds produced by non-persons (e.g. birds) and mere noise (e.g. the wind's impact on trees). You may wish to challenge his position on that front. But one reason for thinking that persons and pursposiveness comes into play with music, is that most of us believe that music has expressive qualities or moods (joy, anger, sadness...) and it is difficult to think of noises that are non-purposive as possessing such expressive qualities. Making matters more complicated, however, is that some contemporary musicians make great use of random sound waves. For a philosopher who has done excellent work on the philosophy of music, check out Peter Kivy.

You've given some good reasons for not buying the album. And since it's hard to make the case that you need this particular album, the reasons seem pretty strong - strong enough to convince me, at least.

That said, there's a larger and harder issue here, and I'm guessing you may have it in the back of your mind. Many of us spend money at businesses whose practices we really wouldn't approve of if we let ourselves think about it. Perhaps they buy goods from sweat shops. Perhaps they have despicable labor practices.

Without pretending that this does justice to the matter, a couple of issues strike me. One has to do with thresholds and balances. At what point are the practices of a business "bad enough" or insufficiently offset by the value of what they provide (including employment) that I should stop patronizing them? And how strong are my obligations to inform myself? I may know that business X has some very nasty practices. I might decide to patronize business Y instead, but the only difference between X and Y may be that I happen to know the bad things about X and haven't dug deep enough to inform myself of the equally nasty facts about Y.

Those aren't just rhetorical questions, nor are they the only ones worth asking. But they do suggest that the relatively clear case you present is set against a backdrop of tricky questions.

The notion of "intellectual property" is fraught with difficulty, and my first reaction to this kind of argument is to question whether there is any such thing. Indeed, there are intelligent and thoughtful people who do precisely that. See, for example, this post by Richard Stallman.

But one does not have to go that far to think, as many more people do, that copyright (and especially patent) law has gotten completely out of hand. Most people seem to think that copyrights and patents exist to protect the rights of the creator of the work in question. This is questionable. One might hold instead that they exist to further society's interest in encouraging creativity and innovation, and that the laws governing so-called "intellectual property" ought to based upon an understanding that this is, indeed, the sole legitimate purpose of such laws.

So, if we value the creation and production of music and wish to encourage it, we would do well to think about what a sustainable and rational "business model" for musicians, composers, and the like might be, one that is compatible with the rights of the rest of us and that will, indeed, further the goals that matter to us. It seems clear that the model that was in place fifteen years ago is no longer workable, and many musicians have already shifted direction dramatically. For example, bands used to tour to promote records: Tickets were the loss-leader that drove record sales, which was where the money was. Now, bands release records to promote their tours: Tickets are more expensive, and that is where money is made. That, indeed, is the model that was in place seventy years ago or so, and it is the way the great majority of musicians make their money. (Composers and the like are a different matter. But I'll leave their plight to others to speculate about.)

It's worth appreciating, too, that the large record companies are really no friends to musicians, but on the contrary have been exceptionally exploitative of musicians, and they have sought to control music in ways that, so far as I can tell, serve no-one's interest at all.

Well, I'm not sure I've addressed the moral question, but I guess that's because I don't think there is a moral question here, unless you think there is some kind of "natural" right to intellectual property. And that's precisely what I don't think. I think property, in general, but especially intellectual property, is really a political and legal notion, rather than a moral one.

Any performance of a musical work will always differ in some ways from other performances. And universalist theorists know that. What's required is that the performance nonetheless have the characteristics that the relevant universal call for. (Or have enough of them; we'll set issues about imperfect performances aside.) So suppose the universalist would say something like this: there's something that makes a performance even of a work that allows for accident or improvisation a performance of one work rather than another. Whatever that is tells us which universal the work corresponds to. It may just be that in some cases, the pattern that the work "is" may be more abstract.

Whether that's fully adequate is harder to say. But it's the obvious way to deal with the sort of worry that you raise.

I think we have some pretty good discussion of this question already from earlier Questions 729, 1497, 1806, 2111. It's a fascinating question certain musicians and artists have raised through their work (just as you imagine), and all the more interesting for there being no compelling way of reaching an answer.

Thanks for your question. I can think of a couple ways of answering your question, we'll see if you think any of them are worthwhile.

It is often said in evolutionary accounts of human beings that music is a universal feature, because it served or still serves some survival function. If one could indeed map the 'need' for music against an evolved feature of the human brain, then that would prove music is not merely cultural (and thus whether there is music in a particular culture would be contingent). However, to evaluate this evolutionary account empirically, presumably one would have to rigorously define music, and distinguish it from language, poetry, noises, imitation, etc. And arriving at such a definition doesn't seem easy for precisely the reasons you raise.

Similarly, it is often pointed out that cultures in cold climates have many words for snow, while cultures from tropical climes have few or none. Many words are needed in the former case to indicate differences that culture finds significant among types of snow (dry, wet, hard, thin, whatever). A visitor from the tropics not only wouldn't know the names but very likely wouldn't be consciously aware of these subtle distinctions. Presumably, it's the same with musical styles. Music from a different culture tends to sound similar because you haven't been 'trained' or 'educated' to sense and perhaps also name the differences.

However, could one – given competent hearing, a competent trainer and enough time – learn to 'hear' music from any culture (anywhere in the world, that is, and from any historical period)? What would this mean? Would it mean just to sense and name differences, or would it mean to understand the music like a native. You would still be a cultural outsider, of course, albeit a knowledgeable one. There's a lovely short story by Borges called 'Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote'. It is about a man who recomposes (not copies, and not rewrites) the novel Don Quixote several centuries after the original. Borges has great fun describing how the two books are exactly the 'same' and yet mean something entirely different; how the later one is, at several points, much better because a phrase that was run-of-the-mill for Cervantes was strikingly original in Menard's day.