Music as Universal Language

Is the art of music an universal language? My experience as a musically completely uneducated and unexperienced five year old child, listening to music from throughout the world – from Japanese traditional, over classical, to modern – says it essentially is. While not everyone understands French, we can presume everyone understands the sound of French. Music is seen by many as the meta-language, the basic means of direct spiritual communication.

However, the fact that two different persons do not always react on the same way on the same piece, seemingly relativizes this. There was always the problem of establishing values in art. This subjectivity always bothered musicians. Berlioz speaks:

It is horrible when a man has to admit to oneself: what delights me, what draws my tears, that, maybe, at my best friend produces only impatience. How can God allow that?

In his ‘Lives of Great Composers’ Harold C. Schonberg on one place asserts:

Don’t believe when politician say music is universal language. It isn’t’.

But beauty is universal; not only on the level of human race, but also on the level of everything that exists. The art of music is by nature tied for inner human sense of music. And our insides are in great degree the same, and essentials of the mind especially, as Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks:

Time and space are below the sphere of mind. It considers things according to their’s intrinsic attributes. It observes their’s essence in which can be seen that what they could create. It is present in all people, even in the worst, and makes them people. It is dormant in evil people, and active in good people. But it is perfect and same in everyone, beyond particularities, shortcomings and errors of an individual. Ralf Waldo Emerson

Being by nature abstract, subliminal art, music concentrates on what is common to all people. Inclusiveness, a feature of speaking to all people, is essentially the same as depth. The only way to touch everyone is to deal with what is buried within everyone, that is, being deep. If we take inclusiveness, that core of idea of a symphony, as an identifying factor of more “serious” music, we are not wrong. More ambitious composers always strive for what is common to all when the very subject of music is concerned. Beethoven was choosing all-human subjects, Wagner was dealing with myth of his people, John Williams speaks of archetypes, and Jean Michel Jarre is primarily interested in global natural phenomenons, such as the sea or the sun. And as one goes for more depth, he will end up on that ultimate universal station -- logic, mathematics, to which best music comes close. Music is not exactly mathematics, but same as it it is based on inner constructions of our minds, that are largely unison between all races, nations, social groups. I've seen once on National Geographics TV a scientific popular show about Altamira caves, and the mystery of its drawings. The drawings contained strange spots, and these same spots were found in completely unrelated ancient drawings in Africa. These are the same spots that are sometimes seen under the influence of psychedelic drugs. These ancient painters were probably working under the state of trance, and it is then concluded that these spots are not accidental, but are a part of a painters vision, and the spots appear because the artist actually saw them in his hallucinations. These spots are the same because people are the same. When we hallucinate, we see same geometrical shapes, regardless of culture to which we belong to. They come from inside; they are patterns of our mind. We can presume music functions thanks to such patterns of our mind that we grasp through sound, and that correlate to our senses, emotions and minds, and that prove to be universally human, unified to a high degree between members of humankind.

Music that aspires to this highest universality, we can assume, would be very geometrized, abstract, and in the same time deeply psychological, often also “surreal”, connected with dreams, and also going to our primal instincts. We can clearly spot such tendentions in more ambitious XX century music.

Todays world seems diverse, inclusiveness seems lost and therefore modern music - all current sorts of it - shallowed. Yet some of classical and ethnic music remains universal in this new global conditions, which only proves the power of art to overcome the soil on which it was originally created. What is more, it is exactly this power to reach outside of its soil which is a proof of artistic nature of a musical piece.