Extending Ayn Rand’s Aesthetic Theory to Music

Editor’s Note: For those who prefer audio/video, some of these ideas were also discussed on The Savvy Street Show Episode 14, “Music and Objectivism.” This is Part I of a three-part essay: “Toward an Objective Aesthetics of Music.”

“…the great unanswered question [is]: why does music make us experience emotions?”

—Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” The Romantic Manifesto

Is there a real, factual basis for our experience of emotion in music—and if so, what is it?

And this unanswered question (the why and the how) has resulted in my ongoing, lifelong attempt to understand how classical and popular music evokes emotions in us listeners. Not all classical music is experienced as being “schmaltzy,” of course, nor is all popular music experienced as being “passionate,” but a good deal of each is. Is there a real, factual basis for our experience of emotion in music—and if so, what is it? This is the challenging issue that I will consider in this two-part essay: the source of music’s emotional power.

1: Introduction: Music—The Language of the Emotions?

As a young musician and a budding philosopher growing up in the Midwest during the mid-1960s, I was well aware of music’s ability to pluck at our heartstrings and was intrigued with what might be the explanation for it. By the fall of 1966, during my transition from high school to college, I had discovered the novels and philosophical essays of Ayn Rand and quickly saw the power and potential usefulness of Rand’s general theory of art.

As I worked my way through my university studies in music theory and composition, I read not only Rand’s 1971 essay “Art and Cognition” (published in the 1975 second edition of The Romantic Manifesto), with its fascinating hypothesis about meaning and emotion in music, but also the aesthetics writings of various non-Objectivist writers like Leonard B. Meyer, Arthur Koestler, and Suzanne Langer.[1] All of them had very illuminating things to say, but none of them satisfied my quest for an integrated, systematic view of music’s emotional power. I realized I would have to look elsewhere for an adequate explanation of emotion and meaning in music—perhaps even to formulate my own.^[2]

I then delved into various works on philosophy of art and aesthetics and got a deeper appreciation for the difficulty of the issue of emotion and meaning in music. Seeing how frequently music was touted as “the language of the emotions,” I took it as a challenge to identify how this could be so—to identify how music stirs emotions in us. At the same time, it struck me as somewhat odd to grant this title to music, when it was obvious to me—even as an ardent lover and practitioner of music—that the other forms of art also present and arouse emotions in the viewer. Despite music being my passion and chosen career, I was not willing to recognize music as having a monopoly on communicating emotions that it neither deserved nor possessed.

Literary and stage dramas were able to affect their readers and audiences in much the same way that dramatic music did.

In particular, it seemed clear to me that literary and stage dramas were able to affect their readers and audiences in much the same way that dramatic music did, the main difference being the means by which they did so. In drama—which, like music, is a temporal art, a process occurring through time and unfolding in real-time—emotions are symbolized by gestures, tone of voice, posture, attitude, and actions by the actors. The parallel in dramatic music is melody—the phrases, motifs, intervals, etc., that occur in a sequence and a manner that is analogous to the fortunes experienced by lead characters in a classical plot.

In dramatic music, something very similar happens in the unfolding of the progressions of harmonies.

Similarly (though without external performance), dramatic literature (including novels and short stories) draws us into the overall progression of actions and interactions between the characters and circumstances in such a way that we vicariously experience the expectations, frustrations, victories, or defeats of the characters. This, then, is another way in which emotions are symbolized and evoked by dramatic literature, in this case by the ebb and flow, and the twists and turns, of the plot of the story. And again, in dramatic music, something very similar happens in the unfolding of the progressions of harmonies. This has been so since at least the Renaissance, and markedly so since the beginning of the 19^th century, which marked the transition from Classical to Romantic music.

Now, it’s true that this similarity between melody and dramatic character is abstract. It’s a metaphor, not a one-to-one, literal parallel. Indeed, that is one of the chief objections to the attempt to analyze meaning in music. Academics and philosophers claim that the kinds of metaphors ascribed to music are arbitrary and culturally conditioned and have nothing in the real world to support them. They are not “objective,” it is said, but merely the product of subjective impression or social convention.

Each of these metaphors, however, has a deep physiological basis to it. Edward Lippman did an entire Ph.D. dissertation in the 1950s on the physiological basis of our experience of a sequence of increasingly higher pitches being “upward” motion in auditory space. Helmholtz wrote 150 years ago on the physiological basis of the emotional difference between major and minor tonality. It is not a big leap to see these physiological realities as the basis for a deep philosophical understanding of meaning and emotion in music.

Music and literature can be seen as functioning very similarly as dynamic forms of art. Furthermore, this broad metaphor appears to be hard-wired into human beings.

More generally, while it is true that there are no little sonic people running around and engaging in dramatic interplay in musical pieces, the musical-literary analogy or metaphor has a factual basis because there are significant real similarities between the features of music and the features of dramatic characters and their actions. Despite their many real differences, music and literature can be seen as functioning very similarly as dynamic forms of art. Furthermore, this broad metaphor is apparently inescapable. It appears to be hard-wired into human beings.

One fascinating and relevant example: As numerous experimental and theoretical psychologists have noted, human beings have a strong tendency to personify things. We interpret and react to anything that even resembles the behavior of a purposive being as though it actually were a real purposive being. (Warner Brothers, The Walt Disney Company, and Pixar Animation Studios made fortunes based on that principle.) Similarly, there is a physiological mechanism involved in our hearing musical tones as being aspects of a broader whole—i.e., not just as individual things, but as if they were parts of an entity and what it is doing. It’s a variant of what’s called the “phi phenomenon,” which enables viewers of movies, videos, and animated cartoons to see a succession of slightly different images as though they were one single, continuous, moving thing. As a result, people tend to project goal-directedness onto not only other people and animals, but even inanimate objects (e.g., the toys in Toy Story, which franchise has earned Disney over $3 billion). In 1944, Heider and Simmel showed that adults, children, and even toddlers respond to dots in an animated film as though they were characters in a story, one striving toward a goal, another trying to interfere with him, yet another trying to help the first.[3]

Human beings have a strong tendency to personify things. We identify empathetically with other apparent goal strivers.

This phenomenon also works with notes in a musical piece. We identify empathetically with other apparent goal strivers, and we respond as though we were engaged in that behavior or action. We listeners learn to take musical tones as being parts of a larger whole. We integrate them into what Rand referred to as an “auditory entity.” And further, we integrate them into an auditory “character,” a virtual purposeful being in virtual purposeful action. It is not an accident that melodic themes have been used to symbolize characters in movies or operas.

If Rand had possessed the musical knowledge of a college music graduate, she could have easily developed a superior explanation of music.

Now, one wonders: why didn’t Rand expand upon her idea of melody as an “auditory entity” and go all the way to the literary-musical analogy? One factor may be that the technical vocabulary of music is not common knowledge. I’ve long suspected that Instead, what she wrote about music was vague and misleading. This is unfortunate, because she was such a genius about literature and art in general, and her insights in these areas have great potential for an enhanced understanding of music, even while her comments specifically about music made it more of a cryptic outlier than it really is.

Another factor is that Rand’s understanding of emotion in literature was too cerebral, focusing on abstract identification with literary characters and overlooking the role of empathetic identification. If one “connects” with dramatic characters on stage because of a conceptually grasped similarity between their physical or personality traits and oneself as persons, one is not likely to realize that one is empathizing with and emotionally responding to the situation presented by a melody, which is conceptually not a person—and accordingly, one will not be likely to vicariously experience it as engaging in some sort of dramatic action, even metaphorically.

In this particular issue, Rand thus failed to challenge the mainstream way of dealing with meaning in music, which consists of carelessly using it or carelessly dismissing it. For the most part, for nearly two centuries, this literary-musical analogy has been dealt with only in a loose, casual, almost colloquial fashion, even by supporters of the parallels. Opponents, on the other hand, have often dismissed the analogy as an “extra-musical” distraction, irrelevant to understanding the specifically musical nature, value, and emotionality of music.

Because the problem of actually explaining emotion in music seems to be such a difficult issue, most books and lectures have aimed instead at helping us either to analyze or to appreciate music. Analysis is the more technical approach, applying the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic vocabulary that composers and performers use. Appreciation is more for the layman, focusing on historical and cultural and generally only quite simple musical aspects of the pieces examined. Thus, generally speaking, analysis aims at more of a technical, scientific understanding of a piece of music, while appreciation aims at a non-technical, humanistic understanding.

Each approach has the potential to provide some amount of insight into how emotions are conveyed in a piece of music. Sadly, however, because of the longstanding reason-emotion dichotomy that has driven a wedge between the sciences and the humanities, analysis avoids such issues as being non-objective and unscientific, while appreciation deals with emotions by wallowing around in a touchy-feely, subjective fashion, giving us impressionistic, poetic descriptions of the music rather than any real insight into its actual attributes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. It’s not either-or. Facts are facts, even facts about emotions, and we can and ought to understand emotionality in music, as we do in any other branch of art. We just have to identify how emotions work and what aspects of music do the job of portraying or suggesting those emotions. Thus, in exploring what makes music “tick” emotionally, we ought to take more of a hybrid approach, treating both the music and emotions as real, and looking for the actual root of the connection between them.

To get at the heart of emotion and meaning and music, we must carefully ask and explore these questions: Were we swept along in a compelling series of events, in which something interesting or even emotionally intense happened to people or melodies we were focusing on? If so, what was it about the literature or music, the literary or musical features, that swept us along in this way? If the questions can be intelligibly, objectively answered in literary and dramatic analysis, then (in principle) they can be in musical analysis, too.

Now, while the parallels between dramatic music and literature are probably most obvious on the scale of the symphony, the concerto, or the sonata, a good number of similar observations can be made on the level of the popular song and classical theme. Indeed, the longer forms are, to a great extent, an elaboration upon the shorter forms, both in literature and music. Thus, although short, popular forms don’t hold as much material or go into as much development as the more “serious,” long forms, a lot can be learned about how the longer forms work by looking at the shorter ones.

Like narrative literature, music that “tells a story” ranges from long-winded, “serious” art to relatively more bite-sized, “popular” art. It’s harder to pack a drama into 5 pages than into 500, or a musical drama into 32 measures than into 320, but it can be done, and this provides us a practical entry-level approach to analyzing and evaluating popular literature or music. For this reason, it seems most efficient to begin one’s quest to understand music’s emotional impact by examining popular songs and classical melodies, rather than symphonies, concertos, and the like.

Now, what popular songs and classical melodies shall we select, and with what methodology shall we examine them?

Here I must make a full disclosure: I do not have a computerized database from which, or a software program with which, to detect patterns and draw generalizations about melodies and their emotional qualities.[4] The examples I will draw upon here are from my own musical experience and repertoire (which is somewhere far north of 1,000 popular songs and classical themes), rather than from a comprehensive survey of the fields of popular and serious music.

Also, this essay will not be overly technical from the standpoint of music theory. Throughout, my task and challenge will lay down concepts and principles about music and meaning in music, and then apply them to actual musical examples, writing in such a way that readers think they are simply reading “common sense” about music. Some technical terminology will be unavoidable, in order to identify the musical devices which convey or evoke certain emotions, and to explain how they work. However, the data examined will not include a useless mountain of basically irrelevant details, such as how many times C-sharp appears in the melody or harmony of a given musical piece.

Instead, my analysis and discussion will focus on emotionally and philosophically relevant features of music, such as the harmonic mode of the piece, the melodic “contour,” the rhythmic patterns, etc. Specifically, I will be directing our attention specifically to the connotations of melodic contours (especially ascending and descending melodies), of major and minor tonalities, of faster and slower tempos, and of beginning- and end-accented rhythms. I consider these to be “objective indicators of emotion in music,”[5] and they will tell us a lot about the emotionality in both simple melodies and more complex melodies and musical themes—and, by extension, the emotionality in long-form musical pieces such as symphonies, concertos, and operas.

Songs with lyrics are particularly useful for this purpose. Their melodies are well-defined and easy to analyze. Unlike classical themes that often grow organically out of the preceding or following material (e.g., the slow movement theme of Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd Symphony), popular songs start and stop in a very well-behaved, clear-cut manner (like the 1970s pop song, “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again,” adapted by Eric Carmen from the above-mentioned Rachmaninoff theme, and not to be confused with the somewhat earlier “I’m Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” by Burt Bacharach and Hal David).

But there’s another virtue of songs with lyrics that is even more important. When those lyrics reflect a particular emotion or slant on life, we can examine different melodies with similar lyrics for recurring musical factors. If we can figure out what those factors are and how they support that feeling or view, then we can, with relative confidence, apply those insights to the emotional or philosophical meaning of melodies without words (e.g., the themes of classical and romantic sonatas, concertos, and symphonies).

I think we will find that the lyrics very often will serve reliably as analytical “training wheels” for the music aesthetician.^[6] The added benefit is that it allows us to build a theory from specific examples of words-plus-music, rather than merely guessing, idly or intelligently, from the music alone. We might be correctly using the latter approach, but people can and do differ on interpretating the emotionality of wordless music, and conceptual analysis of the words used in music can help eliminate such unnecessary confusion and unclarity. Using music with words as “lab samples” can help us achieve a strong confirmation of our impressions from hearing the music or our hypotheses from selective focus on musical details alone.

Now that I’ve laid out the approach I’ll be using in the conclusion of this essay, let’s go back to (philosophical) basics and lay down some definitions, so that we can then clarify just what kinds of music we will and will not be analyzing, and then proceed to do so.

2: Music as a Form of Art

It is often suggested that Rand’s aesthetic theory has a serious gap because she has not explained how music is actually a form of art, which she defines in The Romantic Manifesto as a “selective re-creation of reality according to the artist’s metaphysical value-judgments.” In particular, Rand has not shown how the composer has embodied basic abstractions about life and the world in a piece of music. She has not explained how such abstractions can be detected and responded to in music as one does for the other more easily understood forms of art (such as literature, painting, and sculpture).

It is often suggested that Rand’s aesthetic theory has a serious gap because she has not explained how music is actually a form of art.

This much is true, and it is a deficit that needs to be remedied. However, it is also true that while Rand has said that architecture is “in a category by itself,”[7] she firmly insists on including music with, and at least attempts to compare it to, the other principal forms of art—unlike the many commentators on music who claim that because music is sui generis, “in a category by itself,” and that comparisons of music to the other arts are not helpful. I couldn’t disagree more with these people. I don’t deny that there are features unique to music—just as there are to literature, painting, sculpture, etc.—but I think we can better understand music as an art by finding the things it has in common with the other arts.

Nonetheless, in their 2000 essay “Critical Neglect of Ayn Rand’s Theory of Art” (Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (vol. 2, no. 1), Michelle Marder Kamhi and Louis Torres said that my 1999 essay “Music and Perceptual Cognition” (same journal, vol. 1, no. 1) was an “attempt to preserve the unity of the arts [that tended] to blur their diversity,” i.e., a lopsided presentation in favor of the music-literary analogy. To be sure, that would be a shortcoming were I to attempt to do such a thing, but equally so would it be unhelpful were I to side with those who attempt to preserve the diversity of the arts in a way that tends to blur their unity (and to overlook the significant extent to which the music-literary analogy is true).

However, Torres and Kamhi unaccountably failed to cite my express warning (in that same 1999 essay) against taking the analogy too far: “The flip side of the seldom realized deep commonalities between music and the other arts is the more familiar fact that, in the final analysis, music is also, to a large degree, sui generis. Despite its significant commonalities with the other dramatic arts, it is also a realm of human expression with a considerable amount of autonomy.”[8] (And now—those of you who followed that debate from two decades ago—you know the rest of the story.)

What to listen for in music, then, boils down to being a special case of what to look for in art. In other words, in as fair-and-balanced a way as possible, I am suggesting that we approach music in the same way that we should approach each of the arts in particular, art in general, and reality most generally. So, raise your right hand and repeat after me: I solemnly swear to look at the relevant facts, all the relevant facts, and nothing but the relevant facts.

Most of the philosophical essentials that are required for explaining the meaning and emotional power of music are already present in Rand’s writings.

Now as to those facts: in this part of my essay, I’m going to argue that most of the philosophical essentials that are required for explaining the meaning and emotional power of music are already present in Rand’s writings. Her general insights about art, as well as her specific insights about literature, help us go a long way toward answering the question of the emotional meaning of music. In particular, despite Rand’s unfortunate failure to realize it, a great deal of her analysis of literature, in particular, applies more broadly to all dramatic, temporal art, which includes, specifically, a great deal of the music written during the past 400 years or more. To lay the groundwork for this claim, I will show how a number of general statements Rand makes about literature apply fully well to music, and that she thus did not over-generalize her aesthetics of literature or “subordinate her theory of art to her literary theory, and to her personal literary esthetics,” as Torres and Kamhi claimed in their 2000 book What Art Is.

Another way in which Torres and Kamhi throw up a barrier to the musical-literary analogy is that they question whether Rand’s ideas about the nature of literature are properly a part of the philosophy of art. In particular, they say in their 2000 essay that “the moral content of some literature should not be generalized to all works of art,” as though Rand’s view that Romanticism is essentially about pursuit of values is somehow illegitimate to use in analyzing and evaluating other forms of art.

Such a view grossly underestimates the depth of Rand’s intuition and insight. She was onto something, even though she didn’t take it far enough. Rand is not saying that all temporal art, in order to be valuable in a deeply philosophical way, must be plotted and thus Romantic (let alone conveying some moral message). She is saying that having a plot is a very important way in which some art is (or can be) better than other art that does not heavily employ this element. Why this is so will be explained in the conclusion of this essay, when we discuss the relation between the attributes of music and the basic philosophical views conveyed by music.

Nor, as Torres and Kamhi claim, did I confuse Rand’s philosophy of art with her literary aesthetic when I said in a 1996 essay (“Dialectical Objectivism?” in Reason Papers no. 21) that Rand’s Objectivism champions Romantic art. I also said there that Objectivism champions laissez-faire capitalism, but this doesn’t mean that I was confusing Rand’s philosophy of politico-economics with her preferred form of government and economy. It’s certainly possible to have a theory about what art or government is, as well as a theory about what art or government should be. Or values in general, of course. If you’re human, values are what you act to gain and/or keep. If you’re rational and objective, values are what you should act to gain and/or keep. You recognize the reality of the former, but you recognize and “champion” the propriety of the latter.

Also, while it’s true that the lion’s share of Rand’s writing on Romanticism is devoted to literary Romanticism, she and her associates in the pages of The Objectivist also discussed Romantic-era painting and sculpture in positive terms. Her relatively generous outpouring in regard to literature is in no way an indication that Rand’s literary aesthetic contains nothing that can readily be extended to aesthetics in general. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence! Instead, people should be reading between the lines for the clear and present parallels that can be drawn and used for fuller development of Rand’s aesthetics. This has been my approach throughout.

We can see this point more clearly, perhaps, if we compare Rand’s aesthetic book The Romantic Manifesto with her ethics book The Virtue of Selfishness. Just because Rand didn’t talk about child-rearing or marriage doesn’t mean that her ethics wouldn’t be applicable to it in very important ways—and further, it doesn’t mean that the areas she did talk about (mostly public conflict issues, such as public emergencies, political strife, violations of rights) couldn’t also potentially produce insights applicable to marriage or child-rearing. Rand was neither a mother nor a musician, but she was a deeply insightful thinker and so it is no surprise that her non-motherly and non-musical discoveries and conclusions could feed into both those areas as well as to her ethics and aesthetics in general.

For the record, I am in essential agreement with all of Rand’s key aesthetic ideas.

And just for the record, I am in essential agreement with all of Rand’s key aesthetic ideas, including virtually all of her general comments about literature. I see them as being pregnant with implications for music, and I build on them in my approach to music. So, I’ll start by borrowing from Rand’s definition of “art” and define “music” as: the selective re-creation of reality according to the composer’s metaphysical value-judgments and by means of the sounds produced by the periodic vibrations of a sonorous body. Or, more briefly, music is the form of art created by the use of sounds of a definite pitch and with a definite character.

Now, I have absolutely no doubt that music is one of the arts subsumed by Rand’s definition of art as “the selective re-creation of reality according to an artist’s metaphysical value-judgments,” and that her definition of “art” is valid. By my understanding of this definition, art presents an imaginary world of a certain kind. The imaginary world embodies a view of the world; that view is its meaning, and the subject and style are the carriers of that view of the world, so they are the carriers of the artwork’s meaning. Another word for the meaning of the artwork is the theme, which unites the subject and style. The theme or the meaning of the artwork is an emotionally tinged view of the world, a “sense of life,” as Rand calls it.[9]

But what intrigues me are several key statements in The Romantic Manifesto about art in general. Let me present each of them, and then pose the question of how they each pertain to music.

First, in “The Psycho-Epistemology of Art,” Rand says that “the crux of the Objectivist esthetics” is that “art brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts” (p. 20, TRM). She also says that “art is a concretization of metaphysics” (p. 20, TRM). And let us be clear here what abstractions or concepts she is talking about. She means the broadest concepts “of man’s nature and the nature of the universe in which he acts” (p. 18, TRM).^[10] Is the universe intelligible, or not? Is successful attainment of values and happiness possible to man, or not? Is man good, or not? Is choice and pursuit of values possible to man, or not? Rand gives numerous examples of how these basic ideas are embodied in various kinds of artworks. But how does music allow us to grasp these kinds of ideas directly, on the perceptual level? How does music embody these ideas?

Second, in “Art and Sense of Life,” Rand says that the emotion involved in art is “not an emotion in the ordinary sense of the term. It is experienced more as a ‘sense’ or ‘feel.’” What the artwork expresses, and the meaning of our response to it are the same: “This is life as I see it.” (p. 35, TRM) How is it possible that anything in music can be “life as one sees it”?

Third, in drama or fiction, for instance, Rand notes that we identify with a character, then identify something about the character’s situation or problems, then apply them to our own lives and respond accordingly. Now, you may think that this really only fully applies to literature—and possibly to some extent also to painting and sculpture—and that it would be over-generalizing to try to apply it to music. However, Rand says bluntly: “This is the way in which most people react to fiction and [emphasis added] to all other forms of art” (p. 37, TRM). Given this all-inclusive claim, we must ask: how is this so in music? With what are you identifying in music—and what about it can be applied to your own life?

All right, those are some interesting, challenging questions for Rand’s aesthetics as it might or might not apply specifically in regard to music. Let’s return to some of her fundamental ideas and see how they help to answer those questions. In particular, let’s recall the attributes of art and how they help us to identify parallels between literature and music.

Music is a dynamic art. It unfolds during a process that stretches across a period of time. This puts it in basic contrast with the static arts such as painting and sculpture, whose objects are completely formed at the time the viewer begins to contemplate them. Like literature, the other principal dynamic art, however, music involves both entities and their actions. Its attributes parallel those of literature, and those parallels have a natural basis. To see this in more detail, let’s first consider Rand’s presentation of the attributes of art in general and the attributes of literature in particular.

Most generally, Rand says, art is characterized by subject and style—the “what” and the “how” of art, what it’s about and how it is presented. The theme is what Rand calls the abstract meaning embodied in the subject by means of the style. (“Art and Sense of Life,” TRM, p. 40)

When talking specifically about literature—as Rand does in “Basic Principles of Literature”—she offers this assortment of attributes: theme, plot, characterization, and style. No mention of subject! (TRM, p. 80) It’s clear that this listing is incomplete, as we can verify by considering another statement she makes about literature.

Rand states in “The Goal of My Writing,” that the subject of literature, the story, is actually twofold: entities (i.e., people) engaging in action—i.e., characters and plot (TRM, p. 166). This makes perfect sense, because, like music, literature is not a static art, but a dynamic art, one involving entities and actions.

The important point to draw from this is that the subject of all dynamic arts is twofold: entity and action. This means that the subject of music, which is also a dynamic art, can be understood in the same way.

The entities in literature are the characters. The actions in literature are character behavior and their consequences (i.e., the plot—the progression of actions and outcomes leading to a climax). Together these constitute the subject of a piece of literature, the story.

What are the entities and actions in music? To explain this, I need to define some terms. The principal attributes of music are melody, harmony, and rhythm.

1. As a perceived object, a melody is an intelligible, coherent, sequential sounding of musical tones, and as an attribute of music, melody is the form in which music is perceived as a musical “entity” or structure.
2. As a perceived object, harmony (i.e., a chord) is the simultaneous sounding of three or more musical tones, and as an attribute of music, harmony is the aspect of a melody pertaining to the chords that accompany it (or can be implied to accompany it when someone sings or plays a melody one note at a time).
3. As a perceived object, a rhythm is a group of musical sounds, perceived as cohering together primarily because of duration and emphasis or “accent,” and as an attribute of music, rhythm is the aspect of a melody pertaining to the temporal groupings of its tones.

As Cooke says in The Language of Music, tensions between musical tones are the basis of emotional expression in music. These tensions are set up along three dimensions: pitch, rhythm, and volume^[11]—and they are modified by tone color and texture. Texture acts more in the background as a mood-setting factor, while tone color characterizes the tensions in the melody itself.

The vast majority of the time, melody, harmony, and rhythm exist together as an integrated unity. So, the entities in music, the melodies, are the harmonically and rhythmically characterized melodic structures that the composer creates, the performer performs, and the listener hears. These melodic structures or melodies are also referred to as musical themes.[12]

The actions in music are the more fine-grained, foreground aspect of melodic motion and the broader, background aspect of melodic-harmonic-rhythmic progression. By the latter, which can properly be referred to as the musical “plot,” I mean the rhythmic progression of harmonized melodic tones that lead to a climax. This is yet another indication of the strong analogy between dramatic literature and dramatic music.^[13]

Together the melodies and their motion, along with the unfolding harmonic progression accompanying the melodies, constitute the subject of a piece of music, the musical “story,” as it were. Although harmonic progression (aka “musical plot”) will be mentioned from time to time, our focus from here on will be primarily upon melody and melodic motion and the way melody is modified or characterized by chordal harmony and rhythmic groupings. This is because the popular song-forms and melodies we will be analyzing typically have less adventurous and philosophically relevant harmonic progressions than do their more long-winded cousins in the symphonic and operatic realms.

To be continued in Part II: A Post-Randian Analysis of Musical Meaning.

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Notes

[2] In 1971, while in graduate school, I was hired by an Iowa-based group, Equitarian Associates, to write a book on aesthetics, with a special focus on music. I presented several excerpts at conferences in the early 1970s, but the manuscript remains unpublished except for certain key sections appearing in Objectivity and The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies (both now defunct).

[3] See the discussion of Heider and Simmel’s research in my essays “Music and Perceptual Cognition” (1999) and “Art as Microcosm” (2004), as well as in Pinker’s How the Mind Works (1997); and Wegner’s The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002).

[4] If the approach of this essay seems promising to ambitious young researchers, I welcome their efforts in developing such a database and software.

[5] This is the subtitle of a talk I gave in San Francisco in March of 2003.

[6] It’s true that the face-value meaning of lyrics is not an infallible guide to what is going on in a particular song. First of all, there are melodies and lyrics that are not well suited to one another, whether they have conflicting emotional meanings or one is strongly emotional while the other is not. Secondly, there are songs with no apparent strong emotional meaning embodied in the melody per se. Thirdly, there is a significant role for irony in music.

[7] Apparently at her direction, she even had Harry Binswanger delete the entry for “architecture” from an early version of The Ayn Rand Lexicon, because (as he pointed out to her) while she explicitly included architecture as an art form, she also clearly stated that architecture does not re-create reality, thus disqualifying it as an artform according to her official definition of “art.” (See the contradiction in the discussion on the second page of Rand’s essay “Art and Cognition.”)

[8] For details of numerous other ways that Torres and Kamhi distorted my original essay, see my 2001 reply, “Critical Misinterpretations and Missed Opportunities: Errors and Omissions by Kamhi and Torres” (same journal, vol. 2, no. 2).

[9] This somewhat controversial interpretation of the view of art presented by Rand in her book The Romantic Manifesto is the gist of my essay “Art as Microcosm,” which was published in Journal of Ayn Rand Studies, Spring 2004.

[10] Rand calls these broad abstractions “metaphysical value-judgments.” Some find this to be an unacceptable use and application of the concept of “metaphysics” and that it should be limited to the very narrow, minimal sense pertaining to the Law of Identity, the nature of being, etc. However, in her discussions of the nature of man or of the world, Rand broadens the term “metaphysics” to mean the fundamental nature of whatever is being considered, whether “the metaphysical nature of man” as being rational, volitional, etc. or “metaphysical value-judgments,” which are broad views of the essence of reality that feed into one’s basic values in ethics and politics and aesthetics. This more robust sense of “metaphysics” goes far beyond bare ontology, and it is the meaning Rand intends in her discussion of the abstractions embodied in artworks.

[11] It’s interesting to note that pitch, rhythm, and volume are analogous to space, time, and mass in physics. Perhaps this is why melodies seem to be analogous to physical objects in motion and, in particular, to literary characters.

[12] This should not be confused with the abstract meaning of an artwork, which Rand calls its “theme.” A musical theme, then, is just another name for that melody(s) that serve as the melodic identity of a piece of music, while the theme of a piece of music, in the sense of its abstract meaning, is the emotional or philosophical message being conveyed by and embodied in the attributes of the music. One more note in relation to the theme of a piece of music: Rand’s literary concept of “plot-theme” has been applied to other arts and can be applied to music as well. Rand’s literary analytical concept of “plot-theme” has been fruitfully adapted to architecture and painting by Tore Boeckmann in The Objective Standard and in the anthology of readings on The Fountainhead. From this, it’s not difficult to see how it can also be extended to music. In music, the analogous device bridging the gap between the abstract theme and the subject, the melody, would be the melodic-harmonic progression-theme, the central musical conflict or “situation” of a piece of dramatic music, the core of the musical events. For example, in a sonata, the plot-theme would be the contrast or conflict between two melodic themes and the resolution of that conflict in terms of clashing harmonic goals. This device was used a lot during the Classical and Romantic eras.

[13] Melodic-harmonic-rhythmic progressions are analogous to a plot in literature, both because of the aspect of logical progression and the elements of climax and resolution. The physiological and cognitive basis for musical progressions being like progressions of human action is well-discussed in Helmholtz’s The Sensations of Tone (1863) and in Leonard B. Meyer’s Music, the Arts, and Ideas (1968). Expectations aroused by musical progressions are based on how we perceive and mentally process the musical overtone series, as well as the individual harmonies derived from it and the ways the harmonies relate to one another when heard in succession.

References

Binswanger, Harry, ed. 1986. The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z. New York: New American Library.

Bissell, Roger E. 1996. Dialectical Objectivism? A review of Ayn Rand: The Russian Radical by Chris M. Sciabarra. Reason Papers 21 (Fall): 82-87.

______. 1997. The essence of art. Objectivity 2, no. 5: 33-65.

______. 1998. Kamhi and Torres on meaning in Ayn Rand’s esthetics. Reason Papers 23 (Fall): 101-8.

______. 1999. Music and Perceptual Cognition. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 1, no. 1 (Fall): 61-86.

______. 2001. Critical misinterpretations and missed opportunities: Errors and omissions by Kamhi and Torres. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 2, no. 2 (Spring): 299-310.

______. 2003. Serious schmaltz and passionate pop: Objective indicators of emotion in music. Unpublished live presentation in San Francisco, March 2003.

______. 2004. Art as microcosm: The real meaning of the Objectivist concept of art. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 5, no 2. (Spring): 307-63.

Boeckmann, Tore. 2007. The Fountainhead as a Romantic novel. In Mayhew 2007, 119-53.

______. 2008. Caspar David Friedrich and visual romanticism. The Objective Standard 3, no. 1 (Spring): 83-107.

Helmholtz, Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von. 1950. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. First and fourth German editions: 1863, 1877, respectively. New York: Dover.

Kamhi, Michelle Marder and Louis Torres. 2000. Critical neglect of Ayn Rand’s theory of art. The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 2, no. 1 (Fall): 1-46.

Koestler, Arthur. 1964. The Act of Creation. New York: Macmillan.

Langer, Suzanne. 1953. Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

Lippman, Edward Arthur. 1952. Music and Space: A Study in the Philosophy of Music. Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University Microfilms.

Mayhew, Robert, ed. 2007. Essays on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books.

Meyer, Leonard B. 1968. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in 20^th Century Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Pinker, Steven. 1997. How the Mind Works. New York: W. W. Norton & Co.

Rand, Ayn. 1964. 1963. The goal of my writing. In Rand [1969] 1975, 162-72.

______. The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: New American Library.

______. 1965. The Psycho-Epistemology of Art. In Rand [1969] 1975, 15-24.

______. 1966. Art and sense of life. In Rand [1969] 1975, 34-44.

______. 1968. Basic principles of literature. In Rand [1969] 1975, 80-98.

______. 1971. Art and Cognition. In Rand [1969] 1975, 45-79.

______. [1969] 1975. The Romantic Manifesto: A Theory of Literature. 2^nd revised edition. New York: New American Library.

Torres, Louis and Michelle Marder Kamhi. 2000. What Art Is: The Esthetic Theory of Ayn Rand. Chicago: Open Court.

Wegner, Daniel M. 2002. The Illusion of Conscious Will. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

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About the Author: Roger E. Bissell

Roger E. Bissell is an independent scholar living in Dickson, Tennessee. A research associate with the Molinari Institute, co-host for The Savvy Street Show, and an editor of The Savvy Street, he has written numerous scholarly essays in philosophy and psychology as well as four books, including How the Martians Discovered Algebra: Explorations in Induction and the Philosophy of Mathematics (2014) and What’s in Your File Folder? Essays on the Nature and Logic of Propositions (2019). A lifelong professional musician, Roger has an M.A. in music performance and literature (University of Iowa, 1971) and a B.S. in music theory and composition (Iowa State University, 1970) and most recently co-authored with Vinay Kolhatkar Modernizing Aristotle's Ethics: Toward a New Art and Science of Self-Actualization (2023).