Music is a bunch of sounds made by exerting human vocal cords, blowing through tubes, scraping on strings or banging on any object at hand. These sounds have been extolled as embodying the glorious structure of the cosmos and denounced as meaningless if not downright devilish. Is the power attributed to music merely a delusion, or is its power real? That the experience of music has raised human passions to very high levels suggests that these sounds require attention and that trying to understand their role in our lives is a worth-while endeavor.

Raising the question of meaning in music immediately brings us up against the relationship between music and language. Language is considered a vehicle of expressing meaning through various means such as designating objects and concepts. Language conveys information and ideas. Information and ideas have meaning, either by designating what is physically under our noses or what is true about the universe and what we should do and not do. Music does none of these things. Music does not tell us such things such as there is a flamingo in the back yard, or Justice should be applied equally to all human beings. If music doesn't tell us anything, does that mean that music doesn't mean anything?

There are matters of information that language can say about music, such as: Beethoven's Fifth Symphony begins with a
four-note motif consisting of three eighth notes on G coming in on the offbeat and then landing on the minor third, E-flat,
immediately followed by three offbeat eighth notes on F landing on D. The fourth movement of this symphony begins with a blazing theme built on a C-Major triad. This information means nothing to a person who does not know the terminology, but the actual music is likely that have a strong impact on this uninformed hearer nonetheless. For that matter, there is the same huge gap between the impact of the words and the music for a trained musicologist. So what does this four-note motif mean?

It has been suggested that the opening motif means that Fate knocking is knocking on the door. It is true that a descending minor third played loudly in unison by a full orchestra has an ominous sound to it. The growing intensity in the first movement conveys a certain grimness, but also defiance. The major triad that launches the finale, on the other hand, conveys a powerful, affirmative feeling. Perhaps the music is suggesting that Fate has been defeated by human strength or God's grace, or something. This classic account of the music's emotional impact seems rather pompous, and it doesn't do justice to the emotional trajectory one experiences while listening to the symphony, whether trained musically or not. Still, this pompous description is much less incongruent to the music than saying that the first movement suggests a walk through a flower garden and the finale suggests a lover weeping over a grave.

It is important to note two things about the above description of Beethoven's fifth symphony. First, it is questionable as to whether or not the symphony is about Fate knocking on the door. Beethoven hasn't told us that Fate is knocking on the door. He has only written out a four-note motif meant to be played by a full orchestra. Presumably, if Beethoven had wanted to tell us that Fate knocks on the door of every life but that we can triumph over fate by strength of will, he would have written a treatise to convey this information, or this opinion. Presumably, Beethoven would have given arguments to convince us of his point of view. The logic of the arguments might be good, bad or indifferent. The point is, language makes it possible to construct a line of reasoning concerning the way life is or could be or ought to be. Music, however, doesn't offer any arguments, good or bad. There is no logic in music.

Another way to attempt to find meaning in music is to point to its internal consistencies or inconsistencies, which often called its syntax. Even the uneducated listener can usually hear a congruent movement in a symphony that starts off in a minor key with a short, intense motif and ends with a movement featuring a broad, majestic theme in the corresponding major key. Theorists can explain that the reason for this coherence is that among the many symmetries in the structure of Western tonal music, is the symmetry between the major and minor versions of the same key. C Minor and C Major go well together. It happens that C Minor and E-flat Major are also closely related. The middle two movements hold up the coherent pattern with a slow movement whose main theme is based on an upward moving major scale and a scherzo back in C Minor whose theme captures the basic rhythm of the first movement. However, if Beethoven had started off with his four-note motif in C-Minor and then brought in a trumpet playing a theme in F-Sharp Major, one might find the music rather incoherent. Maybe. One of the great adventures in music development is the quest on the part of composers to make seemingly incoherent musical juxtapositions more coherent than one thinks they can be. They often succeed with marvelous results. However, the basic point remains that the musical sounds, in themselves, have a certain logic to their pattern, or sometimes lack this sense of logic.

I suggest that there are two fundamental ways by which music is intelligible, although neither is captured very well by language. One is by its organized pattern of sounds and the other is by the emotional content. These two elements can be distinguished in thought (in language) but in music they make a unified package. Try conceiving of a piece of music being all design with no emotional content or being all emotion with no design. Chances are that neither extreme can be conceived as music.

This partnership of design and emotional content is, of course, shared with language and with the visual arts for that matter. Language is intelligible only if it is shaped by a recognizable syntax, and one's interest in the content of what is being said is usually heightened by an appeal to the emotions. But there are important differences in the ways these elements work in language and in music.

The patterns in music don't mean anything in terms that can be expressed in language any more than the patterns in Islamic art, but the patterns bear a shape that can be perceived to be beautiful, or at least interesting. The patterns in visual art and in music manifest themselves directly without the intermediary of language. For example, explaining that a song is in a major key and is built stepwise from the tonic note does not make as simple a tune as "Row, Row, Row your Boat" intelligible, but a small child can grasp the shape of the melody itself.

There is much poetry that expresses emotion through images and even makes sounds that are called "musical." However, the number of adjectives available for describing emotional states is rather small. In applying these adjectives to musical works, we find ourselves using words such as "sad" and "joyous" and "calm" for an incredible variety of works. It is something like the Eskimos having a dictionary's worth of words for the one English word "snow." Just as there are an infinite number of shades of colors in the color spectrum, so there are an infinite number of shades of emotion in music. In neither the color spectrum nor music is language capable of naming every possible shade. In fact, the term "emotion" itself is highly inadequate for what I am saying about music. Perhaps an expression like "organic energy" is somewhat better. This expression only works, however, if we remember there can be energy at an infinite variety of levels ranging from extremely volatile to almost totally inert. Another important difference between language and music is that the organic energy of music affects the listener's body with a directness that language equals only when it is most "musical," that is eschewing propositional and informational content for the organic. It is easy to use language extensively without being much aware of living inside a physical body. Music, no matter how transcendent it can sound, makes it impossible to forget the physical body one lives in.

Music then embodies two fundamental human endeavors: 1) the need to perceive and/or create patterns, and 2) shaping and managing our emotions. I have just pointed out how music accomplishes these two tasks in ways that differ from those of language. If these qualities are indeed important, then the more ways of dealing with them the better and music's contribution should be welcomed. Another major difference is that patterning and expressing emotional content in language is bundled up with language's ability to convey information and make propositions, neither of which can be done by music. This lack often causes music to be denigrated. However, I suggest that it just could be, in fact almost certainly is, a good thing for humans to have alternate methods of patterning and expressing emotion that are not connected with information and propositions.

Music, then, is potentially subversive of language. There is nothing like subversion to nibble at the evil of idolatry until the idol crumbles and falls. Language gives us control over reality through its property of ordering information and propositions, but we all know by experience that much reality escapes through the nets of language. Music offers a spectrum of counter-patterns expressed with an infinite variety of emotional powers. In fact, so powerful is the expression in music that it also has been made into an idol by humans. But then we have language to break down that idol. The relationship between language and music need not be antagonistic. Indeed, the two create unique packages of expression when music is sung to words. Together, music and language create a dynamic tension that allows order to reform itself constantly in such a way that there is always more room for unknown realities and, most important, room for God.