What is Music

Theres this great story about a piano player once that goes like this. So its his big opening night and the theatre is filled with patrons. The pianist comes on stage, sits down at the piano, cracks his fingers and proceeds to do nothing for the next 49 minutes. Nothing in the fact that he doesnt touch a single key or produce a single note. The whole theatre is just filled with noise of the somewhat bewildered audience. But nobody gets up the entire 49 minutes and when the pianist leaves the stage, the whole theatre fills up with the noise of clapping of the audience. The pianist may have note played his piano but what he created was music.

Some people may not call that music but in reality this pianist was pushing the boundries of music and was trying to define music as much as possible in his work. Music is really a relationship between sound and silence that gives us an emotional response. Sometimes it will have a defined rhythym like most music you will hear on the radio, other times it will have no rhythym like avant grade music. Sometimes it will be very structure, other times it will be freeforming. Any sound or lack of sound can be music.