Is Music an Art?

What is the nature of art? For me I have often believed it to be something someone does with paint without following numbered spaces on a canvas with paint. Is creativity then the essential core value of art?

In recent years books such as The Art of Reasoning’ and ‘The Art of Cooking’ have appeared to add to the number of activities classified by some as artistic activities. What then are the parameters that make one activity an art and another non-artful?

Long ago mankind beat out rhythms on logs to gain a drumming effect creating a sort of amusement later known as music. Was that an activity of art originating in the Congo? If art were an activity punishable by death, few ‘artists’ would claim to be doing art, unless government grants appeared for relief.

In the Middle Ages before a middle class arose artisans and later guilds formed to produce works of skilled trades. Centuries later a book ‘Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ was written to acknowledge mechanics as an artisan’s activity. If art is not a paint by the numbers activity however, such as playing an instrument to make noise following a sheet music pattern, can mechanics be what is meant in modern art’s meaning as art?

Art today would seem to be a creative activity. Jimmi Hendrix’s guitar playing was art because of the innovative methods, while musicians replaying Hendrix songs without much creativity are simply mechanics producing an effect.

In fiction writing it is perhaps more difficult to discriminate art from not-art than in fields such as music. There are political components to music today that many aren’t aware of incidentally…

A reaction of some leftists to education and established political power following their failures in the 1960s unto the present to win the intellectual battle for social philosophical correctness was to utilize the mechanics of music to oppose human ideas and political ideology from being expressed. The method was fundamental extinction of thoughtful lyrics. Music for-itself as noise would be trustworthy because of its absence of intelligent and possibly deceiving political propaganda. The writer John Saul’s pointed out in his 1995 book ‘The Unconscious Civilization’ that the main consequent of that approach politically is to exterminate dissenting political thought and surrender ideation to the corporatist establishment. That was exemplified by a recent critic of mine that suggested that this blog should be a haven for artists without politics and just shut up, listen to the music and sneak into the polling booth to rubber stamp one of the corporatist party candidates. Musicians as mechanics may slavishly coddle up to corporatists, and be rebellious in meaningless non-political areas. Ignorance is cheaper to get than is intellectual capital anyway.