Hi Ram,
Music, for me, is a reflection of a world, a geography, a time and of individuals. I see it as a tool of expression, a language in which certain things are better said than in another. Schumann, for example, wrote beautiful texts on music and in one of them he says that only were he a painter would he attempt to explain a particular piece of music he had heard.

Maybe it’s a world of its own in the sense that you can’t always translate it into words, even when you are as great a poet as Schumann. In general though, I feel that composers very much lived their life under the influence of their country, city, traditions and politics and this is also a big part of what they wanted to express through their music. You can’t see more clearly the siècle des lumières than through a Mozart sonata or the Noces de Figaro for example. The rebellious and powerful music of Beethoven is for me a natural outcome of 1789. Beethoven wants to be an independent composer who composes what he believes in and is not following a musical fashion and the taste of the aristocrats of whom he is the servant.

There are different ways of understanding a language, its subtleties and meaning and some can achieve that only by speaking it a lot, some by speaking and immersing themselves in the culture and some need to actually write in it. For the last method, I had the example of an amazing teacher and musician, who was working on a particular Bach fugue. He analysed it thoroughly, had written a few pages of a lecture on it, but still didn’t feel he understood fully what Bach had done there. Finally, he decided to take the theme and compose about 75 different fugues with it, and that was the best way for him to understanding Bach’s meaning.

Hi Ram, Edna,

I liked very much your answer Edna. To see art as a conversation in a new language which is constructed at the same time as being talked in. It's a very pretty description.

To reply more particularly to your question Ram, would you say painting is a representation of the "real" world? This was a serious discussion at the beginning of the century. When a kid paints a green horse is it a representation of the real world any more? There used to be a discussion on whether abstract art equals non-representative art, or is for instance space represented there. For instance when you look at a Pollock, or a Rothko, is nothing represented, or maybe space and motion are?
I think by now the philosophy of art doesn't think any more in those terms and tries to define art in different ways. Sorry but am not adapt enough with it to actually say how they describe it now, but I think the idea of art as representational seems childish to them. And I'm still talking about painting, music is even more complicated here.

You could maybe say that what is represented in music is exactly the emotional world, similar to space and movement in painting, the movement of emotions in music. I like though how Edna put it as to think of it as speaking. When I paint a painting, personally, I don't try to exactly say something, but I speak.
I don't try to represent something in the world, but maybe you can say I represent something in me, like you would whenever I speak, no?

As to the whole question of physical or metaphysical explanation - what does it matter. They can't be separated, and wasting time thinking whether the chicken comes before the egg or vice-versa seems silly to me, but to each their own as they say. There will be physical events caused by enjoying music. Does that mean they caused it? And if by injecting some material you can make the mind think it has just enjoyed a symphony by Bach (joke intended) so what does that tell us? It's a stupid endeavor by stupid people if you ask me and I wouldn't spend time thinking about it.
   

Music does not depict the world. It doesn't depict anything. It is a man-made enhancement of our world and of our experience. Its effectiveness, its power, to broaden our experience varies with the expertise, capabilities, and gifts of the people who create it and perform it.

Leonard Bernstein, in a lecture in the late 1950s, adamantly stated and illustrated this point:
MUSIC HAS NO MEANING.

It is what it is. Does it tell a story? No. Bernstein illustrated this by telling an improvised, off-the-cuff sorta science fiction story, and set it to a well-known symphonic piece - I believe it might have been Peter and the Wolf, or maybe Petrushka. The music made a workable accompaniment to his story - but it wasn't the story itself; in fact, as he revealed to his audience, it was intended by its composer to provide the auditory enhancement of a completely different story than Bernstein's sci-fi invention. It worked equally well for both; therefore, it must be an entity unto itself, something apart from any "story."

In my experience, when I have listened to a piece of music that really reaches me in a powerful way, my experience has been unrelated to anything else in my life. When I first became familiar with Stravinsky's Firebird, I had found what was to become one of my lifelong favorite pieces. When I discovered later that the music is sometimes used in a storytelling context, I was disappointed. The music is too powerful to be limited by a utilization of some kind. It stands much more elegantly, and truthfully, as a performance/concert experience, than as some kind of set of aural Crayolas.

The one hole (as I see it) in my viewpoint - I, too, think now and then about the nature of music, since it means so much to all of us - comes up when I think about somebody like, say, Woody Guthrie. Because, something tells me, if he was asked the question What Does Music Mean, he'd probably have had some kind of answer, some kind of Meaning of Music. His music certainly seemed to be drenched with...something like "meaning." And some of it was, of course, damn good music. But, getting back to your question, I kinda feel like Woody was probably astute enough to go with the notion that music is closer to being a "world of its own" (that is, a free-standing entity) than a "representation of the 'real' world." He'd have said, sure, his lyrics had depictions of people, places, events, etc., but maybe he'd allow the idea that his songs' effectiveness in resonating with people listening lay somewhere in their intrinsic musical properties - melodies, guitar chords, etc. Otherwise, he might not have seen any necessity for luggin that guitar around with him...and just been a "poet."