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“Die fröhliche Wissenschaft”- Rethinking Music Aesthetics and Analysis

Lee Mi-Kyung 1

1한국교육개발원

Candidate

ABSTRACT

Music serves quite various functions in human societies. Music can make us fall in the mental state of ecstasy, so it has served to communicate with the gods during the ritual in many cultures. Or music binds people in ones, or it functions as a therapy. The mental state of ecstasy through the musical activities or biological responses like tapping foot are not the conscious thinking-products, but pre-conscious process, based on the nervous system, the endocrine system and other biological constellations. This ‘happens’ in the reality, at the moment we are trying to listen to music structurally, critically, or with ‘disinterested-aesthetic attitude’. The important thing is that these kinds of biological responses or non-aesthetic effects on our body and mind by the music appear together with the aesthetic critics in our consciousness, mix together, so we can not distinguish the pure aesthetic critics and non-aesthetic effects. At the very moment we are talking about the aesthetic critics or social meaning of that music, our aesthetic critics can be dominated by the biological responses in the level of under-consciousness. I am wondering about the causal pathway between the particular musical facts or structure, and the nervous system. Can we describe this pathway? This paper attempts to use the results of neuroscientific and evolutionary-psychological researches to understand music and musical behavior, and examine how deeply this new, emerging field of evolutionary psychology can influence the traditional field of music aesthetics and music analysis. All of human mental and bodily activities are conceived, played and perceived through the brain. Thus it can not be free from the constraints of our neural systems. Music analysis is concerned about ‘what one hears’ from the music, so consideration of the nature of musical perception should be of central concern to the music-analysis. But most analytical and theoretical literature have devoted more attention to the theoritical sturucture or analytical methode itself, which makes music analysis far from the music hearing. In this paper, I demand the music analytic activity to expand, beyond the structural ahalysing of musical piece, to analysing of contact point between mind and musical sound. Perhaps, we should analyse the biological, psychological phenomena in music performance, because it appear more in music performance than score-reading. The traditional music analysis must have the ecological perspectives, because the biological responses and non-aesthetic effects of music in the level of under-consciousness as we mentioned are more decisive in the music of non-western societies or recent multi-media arts dominated environment.

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