Musica Humana and Musica Instrumentalis

In classical music, accent was always on composing, and not interpretation. But despite this, classical music was risen from interpretation, as any other traditional form. Therefore composers wrote music with certain instrument and playing technique on mind. A composer must find a way to express oneself within the limitations that a playing technique and sound capabilities of certain instruments imposes on him. Music was bound with means of production, so pieces are identified as being for violin and piano, for oboe and orchestra, for soprano and orchestra etc. Music for piano is like it is largely because of the way piano is built. What is more, much of it is really interesting in the context of what it does with a piano. Traditional composer doesn’t think in terms of pure sound and expression, since human physical movement was the immediate cause of the sound and music consequently was thought of down these lines.

But despite we need concrete instruments to produce music – be it our natural instrument, our voice, or an artificial musical instrument -- our sense of music is purely inner and independent from any concrete means. We will now introduce one mystic sounding therm. Medieval philosophers had a system dividing music on three realms: musica humana, instrumentalis and universalis. This was precised by Boethius (the leading authority on music in the middle ages) in his De Instituzione Musica (The Fundamentals of Music), written in the first years of the 6th century, a compendium of music with similar texts on arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy complied from Greek sources. In the opening chapters, Boethius divides music into three kinds. The first is musica mundana (or Musica Universalis, or Cosmic music) the orderly numerical relations seen in the movements of the spheres, the changing of the seasons, and the elements. The second is musica humana, which controls the union of the body and the soul and their parts. Last is musica instrumentalis, audible music produced by instruments, including the human voice, which exemplifies the same principles of order, especially in the numerical ratios of musical intervals. (From A HISTORY OF WESTERN MUSIC, FIFTH EDITION by Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca. Copyright © 1996, 1988, 1980, 1973, 1960 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.).

We will here use these same terms for different, simpler meanings. We will call musica humana music whichs form and shape are reflection of construction and natural impulses of our body, which is shaped by construction and inspired by impulses of human body. It is in tight relationship with our natural feeling for dancing and singing, which among common people always was synonymous with music. By dancing we create rhythm, and by singing the melody and by singing together harmony and that is the prototype of our notion of all music.

From the other side, music shaped by the construction of an instrument, or a given set of instruments, we will call musica instrumentalis. As musica humana in its construction is spitting image of our body, so is this instrumental music spitting image of a construction of a particular instrument. It is not only played, but also motivated, inspired with a construction of an instrument.

Yet in traditional music it was not possible to produce more serious music without human performer, regardless of whether instruments are used or not. All instruments are an extension of a human body and are moved by human motoric will, so musica instrumentalis was, to a degree, also musica humana.

But with electronic instruments it was for the first time possible an instrument to be programed to play sophisticated music by itself, so suddenly musica instrumentalis was possible in its pure form, with no presence of musica humana -- music that a machine, an instrument, plays on its own. This music from a synthesizer was not only played by a synthesizer, but also composed in accordance with its construction; it was a spitting image of those instruments even more then violin music was of a violin or piano music of a piano, because a man doesn’t play anymore. Listening to Kraftwerk, or some of the pieces of Jean Michel Jarre, one has the incredible feeling that these machines started by themselves to play some music of theirs own – for example Jean Michel Jarre’s sweet electronic waltz Equinoxe 3 has a melody which with its clockwork logic leaves an impression that this melody was invented by a machine on the first place. This was as much mystical and artistic, as it caused upset and even disgust. Can something that is not anymore a trace of immediate movements of human will be acknowledged as music?

This however only amplified what was already there since always – controversy of a cult of musical instruments. While in mosque or orthodox church one is forbidden to use anything but human voice, because a voice is from God and instrument merely from a man, musicians always created a cult of musical instruments. XX-century rock musicians had a cult of electric guitar, and what would classical music be without its cult of a symphonic orchestra? People tend to love theirs machines and have with them more intimate relationship than would be expected.

And in music, synthesizer is one such machine. Automated music – regardless of aesthetic qualities of music produced -- has its charms. It is exhilarating in a way to listen to music played by a machine controlled by a human being, rather than music directly played by a human being. A composer is like a conductor of machines, a human manipulating automated functions of the machine. Identifying with him while listening to the music is a feeling like driving or flying; a compelling, soothing, powerful feeling, that stems for example from listening to something like Magnetic Fields 1 of Jean Michel Jarre; the feeling of machine-drive mixed with master-minded structures. Many people like programmed music exactly because of this.

The essence of joy of machines is in boosting our freedom – in giving more options to our will. However, the question always remains how much we unwillingly also become entangled within all that machinery. Does synthesizer comes to us, or we come to it?