The starting point is energy. 

All of music reaches us initially through our ears, which modify complex physical vibrations into analogous streams of electrochemical energy that pass into the brain. The transformation of vibration into energy is first a physical, mechanical phenomenon, and the further into the brain it gets, the more it becomes a psychological phenomenon.  Thus there is a direct, albeit complex, process whereby sound energy becomes mental/psychological/bodily energy.

Much processing that occurs is for our physical well being, utilizing processes that took eons to develop, many of which we share with other mammals, vertebrates, even invertebrates. We recognize danger via sound, family via sound, etc. It is impossible to think that any sort of sound entering our brain does not pass through these systems of recognition, and that the energy they produce in the mind and body does not influence our reception of music.

A good deal of the thought put into understanding music is focused on pitch perception, and for good reason.  A central reason is that pitch is a vibration, and everything we encounter in life is composed of vibration right down to the quantum level. The depth of our perception of vibration is yet unknown, but we know from our musical experience that those vibrations bring out reactions, responses that surprise us, and that by focusing our attention on working with those vibrations, we trend deeper and deeper into the mysteries of consciousness. 

What is the relationship between electromagnetic vibration and musical vibration? How related is our daily perception of light and dark, departure and return, to the vibration of pitch, or the creation of musical form? It seems that virtually everything in reality is cyclical, and maybe that’s a clue to understanding more fully music’s effect on us.

I propose that we start there, at a place free from cultural ownership of any kind, a place experienced by every human, as a foundation for music theory. The vibrations that constitute music are what they are. It is nothing short of amazing that complex waves of compressed and rarefied air could transmit something as important as a warning of imminent danger on the one hand and ecstatically comforting musical pleasure on the other.

What I propose as the basis of music theory is a framework for holding any observations about music that can be expressed in terms of energy. That energy is first of all outside one’s body, and its various components can be described in terms of energy. Having once entered the body, passing through processes that detect the familiar and the unfamiliar, desirable and undesirable, high and low, loud and soft… the sound becomes a bodily or mental energy of some kind: an urge to run, to relax, to laugh or cry, to think of a time and place, of words to say, etc.

Much work has been done on music cognition, what happens in our minds as we process music, and much of that has been done using music that very much belongs to a specific culture. Virtually all of that work has been put to the task of deciphering the impact of pitch and rhythm, which of course makes sense. Intuitively, we seem to have known for millennia that pitch reaches us deeply — witness the common features of infant-directed speech across all cultures, the incredibly lengthy focus on teaching and learning pitch and rhythm in all the great musical traditions.

Much less attention has been brought to the remainder of important aspects of music that strongly impact our perception of musical energy.  Those features — I’ll call them parameters — include things like volume (dynamic), register (high or low), articulation (how sounds are begun and ended), and sound quality (timbre), none of which are the “property” of any single musical tradition, but all are used in every musical tradition to alter the impact of those two most central, culture-specific parameters, pitch and rhythm.

The thing that might be the least well attended in all of musical thinking is the persistence of relationship and its incredible importance. The relationship of the succession of high and low in pitches is rather the beginning of melody.  Melody would be quite impoverished without a relationship to rhythm. Harmony would never have developed without working on the relationship of pitches sounding together. Something played very loudly and later very softly creates a relationship and begins to create meaning. Much like spoken words, a melody delivered in short, separate bursts invokes a very different energy than the same melody delivered in a steady, undifferentiated stream.

All the examples in the last paragraph do not identify a particular culture, they are features that show up everywhere. By including all of the energy-producing aspects of music, we can devise a manner of considering all the world’s music using similar means.  Each culture has its highly developed approaches to certain things, especially pitch, and those require long and deep study to fully operate for a person, but there remain a number of shared factors that create musical energy.

The one great aspect of music not yet “owned” by a culture that is coming into its own in our time, is sound itself. Sound itself includes all audible factors, what many have called sonic materiality, and it is one of the great shared elements that binds all the world’s musical cultures together. We might call that feature timbre (quality of sound) or we might want to call it texture (how all elements present relate to each other), but one way or the other, that wholeness of sound, the importance of the sound itself, regardless of any hierarchical organization of other elements, is the shared driving force of all music.  Always has been, but we are at the point of comprehending, accepting and making use of sound itself.