A note is a space for writing down fragments of thoughts that arise spontaneously.
Music has undergone a different developmental trajectory in aesthetic theory than the visual arts. If we consider the origins of auditory art as lying in religion or recreation (such as passing time during labor), then the earliest aesthetics of music can be interpreted in teleological terms. This is clearly distinct from the earliest aesthetic theory of the visual arts, namely mimesis, since music cannot imitate anything in nature. Plato regarded music as mimetic, insofar as it was believed to carry meaning; yet, in his time music primarily functioned as an accompaniment to literature. This suggests that such mimetic qualities arose only because music was combined with language, which exists conceptually and conventionally. In itself, as pure auditory information, music seems incapable of imitation.
The second stage of aesthetic development in music can be understood as the rise of formalism. From the Renaissance through the Classical period, music was created as a beautiful form, enabled by the development of instruments and the resulting flourishing of purely instrumental works.
By the Romantic era, music evolved into the aesthetics of expression. This marks the first real convergence with the aesthetic history of the visual arts. Composers developed new systems of harmony and orchestration in order to express their emotions or to elicit particular feelings in audiences, and in doing so, they began to break away from the rigid formalism of the Classical age.
Throughout music history, composers have established conventions and rules, only to later dismantle them in pursuit of further development. This dynamic continued into the late nineteenth century, beginning most prominently with Wagner. The music of the Romantic period, stabilized and explosively expanded, seemed nearly perfect. Yet the Western musical world soon split between the Brahmsians, who sought to preserve this form, and the Wagnerians, who aimed to destroy and renew it. Wagner, through innovations in opera and symphonic form, began to dismantle existing musical structures once again, a process that culminated in Schoenberg’s complete dissolution of tonality.
With the arrival of modernism in music history, a multitude of innovations appeared. Composers broke apart the staff notation, abandoned tonality, and even redefined the very nature of instruments, thereby creating new forms of music. They began to regard music not as a matter of form but as an assemblage of timbres, moving beyond conventions once considered foundational.
Yet modernist composers, still bound to the score and to instruments, soon faced criticism. In response, postmodernists emerged, turning toward an exploration of sound itself. They created not result-oriented music but process-oriented music, and some even attempted to abolish the very notion of sound as a compositional result. At the same time, the invention of electronic instruments and electronic methods of sound construction opened new worlds through computers and electronic devices.
When John Cage composed and presented “4’33”, the culture of music was overturned. Until then, sound had been expected to exist as a predetermined outcome. Cage’s work revealed that sound need no longer be result-oriented, and instruments ceased to be indispensable. Composers began to record, manipulate, and incorporate the diverse sounds of the world into their music. An interesting parallel arises here with Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, which upended the art world of visual culture in the same era. Duchamp’s urinal, in its bare existence, could not be classified as art—it was indistinguishable from an ordinary urinal. Contemporary musicians, however, who directly used birdsong or the sound of car horns, appear different. They did not use these sounds in a purely unaltered way; rather, they manipulated and transformed them, reinitiating composition in their own terms. What they expanded was not the abandonment of form, but the range of sounds permissible within composition. If they had truly sought to produce non-art through music, it would have sounded no different to us than the everyday noises of the world.