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By Root 951 0

OK Computer featured twelve highly inventive and original takes on the concept of a rock song, Kid A saw Radiohead producing tracks that not only defied categorization as rock music but that, on occasion, also challenged per-ceived notions of ‘song’.”12 First, if a song requires lyrics, then many tracks on their various albums are not songs; for instance, “Treefingers” and “Hunting Bears,” would not be songs since they have no lyrics. But, many of Radiohead’s greatest “songs” also have important sections that likewise do not present any words, such as, to take but one example, the “Pyramid Song,” whose powerful, and wordless, last section brings together and develops much of the musical material in the song. This outro section is hardly a cute coda of the kind you sometimes find in the purely instrumental conclusions of classical songs. In “Pyramid song,” it’s perhaps the song’s most important moment.

What Is Music?

A good way to think about philosophy is that it is an attempt to answer the deepest and most fundamental questions about any given subject. Therefore, probably the deepest question you can ask about music is “What is it?”13 One response often given is that music is organized or structured sound. Yet, a lawnmower makes organized sound: so, is the sound of a lawnmower music? Many modern classical composers and music fans would say “yes,” since the revolution in modern art has greatly expanded the category of art across the board. For example, many people have seen paintings in art galleries or museums that look like just a blotch of different colors splashed across a canvas with no discernable shape or intention. It seems as though the colors don’t represent anything. And, of course, those creations are paintings, or so the art gallery owners would tell you!

The twentieth century practically admitted everything into the ranks of art, and that includes music, of course, although many philosophers and music-lovers might complain. John Cage, the famous twentieth-century American composer, created a work entitled, 4′ 33″, which comprises, essentially, a pianist sitting at a piano and doing nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds—it’s strange to say that he “composed” the work, but I guess he did. Cage didn’t intend the silence to be the music, but he wanted to draw people’s attention to the sounds that were occurring during the “performance” (and it’s also strange to say that it was a performance, but I guess it is as well). A performance of 4′ 33″ thereby challenges our definition that music is structured sound, since most of the sounds occurring during the performance are probably random and unorganized (such as people coughing, people squirming in their seats, and all the other things that you would hear when a lot of people are uncomfortably having to sit together in silence). Some of Radiohead’s songs also sound like unorganized sounds, like “Treefingers.” After many listens, however, it is clear that there actually are themes and musical structure in this work.

Music may be the most puzzling of all the arts, philosophically speaking, because it is difficult to point to—more so than painting or sculpture. We know what a painting or sculpture is: a painting is that rectangular thing hanging on the wall with colors on it. But what object is music? Where do we point to? This is a problem in the ontology—the being or existence—of music. Is it a sequence of vibrations in the air? Or is it a series of written markings on a musical staff, or an electronic code on a CD? In traditional classical music, which is written down to be performed by many musicians, this may seem a bigger problem than for recorded pop music. A rock song, such as “Like Spinning Plates” from Amnesiac, is a studio recording of individual performances by the band’s members, and thus it would seem that there is only one thing (or a combined collection of things) to which we can point to when trying to locate that piece of music in the world, although that performance has been reproduced on countless CDs. But what about the live