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Music

Classical, jazz, rock, etc.

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Music is an art form and cultural activity whose medium is sound organized in time. In general, definitions of music will include common elements such as pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, articulation, dynamics (loudness and softness) and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture (which are sometimes termed the "color" of a musical sound). Different styles or types of music may emphasize, de-emphasize or omit some of these elements. Music is performed with a vast range of instruments and vocal techniques ranging from singing to rapping; there are solely instrumental pieces, solely vocal pieces (such as songs without instrumental accompaniment) and pieces that combine singing and instruments. The word derives from the Greek μουσική (mousike; "art of the Muses").

Notable Topics

Songs - Brief vocal and musical compositions

Web Pages

Music With An Ayn Rand Connection
Lengthy selection of songs and other musical pieces together with short explanations of their relation to Ayn Rand and recordings (in RealAudio format), plus pictures of various New York City buildings (Rand admired the city's skyline)

When I was in my early 20s I discovered and became an admirer of the writings of Ayn Rand - the author of the philosophically provoking best selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. A few years later, I was amused to learn that Rand enjoyed a type of turn of the century popular music that she called 'Tiddlywink Music.' Of course, there is no such formally recognized musical genre. 'Tiddlywink' seems to have been the name that Ayn Rand gave to music that she responded to in a certain way.

Articles

4 Things You Probably Never Knew About John Stuart Mill, 20 May 2016
Brief introduction to Mill followed by four interesting facts about his life and thought

When Mill would listen to a piece of music, he would be struck by how limited the patterns of chords were. What if there was a finite number of ways to compose music? What if composers stopped creating original sounds? And, applying that to utilitarian thinking, what if the human race did someday achieve universal happiness? What would be left to strive for? Would life be worth living? These thoughts profoundly disturbed Mill, culminating in a nervous breakdown when he was in his 20s.

H. L. Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian, by Murray N. Rothbard, New Individualist Review, 1962
Examines the themes and style in Mencken's writings, mainly from selected pieces in A Mencken Chrestomathy

[Mencken's positive values] included a life-long passion for music ... Mencken's pervasive individualist Weltanschauung gave an unappreciated consistency to his views on many different subjects ... Let us take, for example, such a supposedly "non-political" field as folk-music. It is not accidental that both the Socialist Left and the Nationalist Right—those twin enemies of individualism—in our century have made a virtual fetish of the "people's" folk-song. Mencken cut to the heart of the matter in his inimitable review of Dr. Louise Pound's Poetic Origins and the Ballad ...

The introductory paragraph uses material from the Wikipedia article "Music" as of 3 Oct 2018, which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.