The title of this topic is stolen from a lovely term coined by Sacred Synthesis, who doesn't think this is the place for a philosophical discussion. But I think it sounds fun.
What is music, anyway?
(The big dark relativistic pit is pitch black. We're likely to be eaten by a grue....)
I'll start. My favorite definition is from John Cage invoking Edgard Varèse. "Music is organized sound."
Well I'll jump in here with 2 methodological tools I have found useful in my past philosophizing:
1.) E-prime (or V-prime): E-prime consists of forming statemtents and arguments in English (or any Vernacular) that avoid the use of the existential predicate, which consists of the verb "to be" and it's conjugations (am, are, were, was, will be etc). Using E-prime tends to cause us to express our ideas in ways that avoid dogmatic generalizations which we cannot prove beyond doubt; often we tend to include in our statements more externally or other-verifiable descriptions of our experience. These tendencies then seem to yield more productive conversations, since we avoid the various infinite regresses that open up when people start off with saying how things "are".
2.) Nominalizations: Verbs frozen into nouns, which we then talk about as if they're physical objects. We can counter this with the phrase, "There's no such thing...", which you can test by imagining whether you can put that noun in a wheelbarrow. If someone says "Music is...", you would counter "There's no such *thing* as music", meaning that music doesn't exist as a thing out in the world, it exists as a *process* that people do, composed of various subprocesses like playing, recording, listening, feeling, interpreting. So you can keep in mind more spefically what someone means when they use a particular nominalizatin (frozen verb, ie Truth, Beauty, Justice, Music, Love), instead of your previous private interpratation.
Both of these tools tend to demystify our language by making it less relativistic; they require or lean towards some potentially shared sensory experience that anyone can verify and validate if they so choose. As a result, we can often cut right to the heart of where our ideas and understandings with someone else diverge, and can mutually investigate them from common ground.
So in response to Cage, I would start by clearing the decks, stating that "There is no such thing as music", until we agree that music consists of processes rather than a fixed thing, and then asking about the various processes required and the people involved. Who organizes it? Where does it get organized? What counts as sufficiently organized, and who gets to decide this? If I listen to birds and crickets chirping at sunset, and intentionally organize my listening attention alternating first to my left, then to my right, have I created music? Or did the birds and crickets create it? (given 4'33", I would guess his answer as the former, ie me) If no one else would ever hear it as it all occured in my head, does it count as music, or does it need to exist in the outside world so that another person (or animal or whatever) could theoretically hear it? If the birds and crickets didn't intend to create those sounds *as music*, but rather just as speaking to each other, does that disqualify it as music, or does my choice to organize it in my mind and consider it music take priority over the intentions of those who created the sound?
Et cetera, et cetera.
The flip side to this, IS that when you want to create worlds - when you want to associate things that may not have any necessary or causal connection outside of your mind and those you seek to impact - you can USE nominalizations and the existential predicates, ie "Love is a battlefield", "The truth is out there", "Disobedience is aggression", etc.
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