Huizinga

"In tackling the problem of music as a function of culture proper (...), we begin where biology and psychology leave off. In culture we find music as a given magnitude existing right from the moment culture itself existed, accompanying it and pervading it from the earliest beginnings right up to the phase of civilization we are now living in. We find music present everywhere as a well-defined quality of action which is different from 'ordinary' life. We can disregard the question of how far science has succeeded in reducing this quality to quantitative factors. In our opinion it has not. At all events it is precisely this quality, itself so characteristic of the form of life we call 'music', which matters. Music as a special form of activity, as a 'significant form' , as a social function - that is our subject. We shall not look for the natural impulses and habits conditioning music in general, but shall consider music in its manifold concrete forms as itself a social construction. We shall try to take music as man himself takes it: in its primary significance. (…) We shall (…) try to understand music as a cultural factor in life."

This is not me speaking. It is me paraphrasing a paragraph from the very beginning of Johan Huizinga's famous 1938 study Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture. To be sure, I deleted a couple of fragments which were not appropriate to my ends, and replaced 'play' by 'music'. And suddenly, Huizinga makes the point I try to make: music is not 'in reality' something else (an activity of the brain; a social activity; an aesthetic experience; or an whatever), music is itself. Yes, it is probably also brain activity; yes, it is often a very social activity; yes, it often is an aesthetic experience. But that is rather irrelevant, given the fact that music is music.

I wonder why that sometimes seems so hard to accept. We do not allow ourselves to be just the musical beings we are. We want to explain it as something else - maybe we find 'just music' to be too trivial, or maybe we feel that we need to convince others. So we soothe away our anxiety to lead a trivial life by claiming, for example, that music must have been important for the evolution of the human being (what a pity we weren't there). Or we claim that music is one of the most powerful socially binding media (which is true - just as the opposite is true when we consider the existence of e.g. neo-nazi rock). Or we hype up music by claiming - on too little evidence - that it is a unique braintraining activity, preferably defining 'the brain' purely in terms of grey matter and ignoring the fact that in spite of all their brain training professional musicians for some reason have not become the super-humans they should be on the basis of such claims.


What I would like: that, before we pimp up music by translating it into anything else, we "take music as man himself takes it: in its primary significance".


That's hard enough, as a project, and too little done nowadays.