"Beginning with the logical mind, music is organized sound."

As a freshman majoring in music, I remember my music theory teacher defining music as "organized sound." This definition led to some strange questions.

"Any sounds?"

"Organized how?"

Someone proposed a twenty-one-gun salute as music. We would all fire rifles into the air on the count of three. These sounds would be organized, but would it be music? The answer came back in the form of a revision; organized musical sounds.

What makes a sound musical? We were told the musical sounds have more orderly vibrations than non-musical ones. In what way are they more orderly? I got the feeling we were going in circles. Strangely enough, these evasive answers seemed to mollify the class.

The following year we were studying Arnold Schoenberg's dodecaphonic serialism. He used traditional musical sounds: orchestra, piano, voice. He certainly imposed order. We sat with his scores numbering the pitches and identifying the patterns. We diagrammed matrices showing the row, its inversion, and retrograde and retrograde inversion in all transpositions. We wrote reports detailing the order found in his compositions, yet, most of us did not feel this music was all that great, much less superior to other simpler pieces just because it was more highly organized. The professor snootily told us that we did not know enough about music yet to pass judgment on Mr. Schoenberg. Apparently, music is an esoteric art apprehensible only by the educated elite.

At the end of the year, I wrote a dodecaphonic composition for brass quintet and percussion. "It sounds like they are trying to tune," I was told. I supplied the professor with the score and a detailed analysis. Suddenly I was brilliant and the composition won honors. It was better than it sounded, as they say.

My composition was being judged by the academy of the mind. The intellect rules academe. All things are understood objectively and empirically. Music has fallen under that spell. The piece lacked toe-tapping rhythms, memorable melodies, or pleasing harmonies for the hedonist. There were no hidden messages or mystical spiritual meanings in this mathematical piece. (I suppose a numerologist could have found some.) Finally, brass and percussion is on the fringe for most scholastic music pedagogues; strings, piano, or voice would have been better. Only in a community of minds could a piece of little else but mental manipulation be so exulted. Organized sound indeed!