Music is the single most important thing in my life. It’s been the source of unquantifiable joy, connection, and meaning, and my relationship to it feels as fundamental as my relationship to myself. I spend the bulk of every day playing it, recording it, listening to it, practicing it, talking about it, and explaining it, and when I’m not doing one of those things, I’m still thinking about it.
But what… is it? If you’d asked me, say, fifteen years ago, my definition would have been confident and incomplete. I might have said, well, it’s a collection of pitches and rhythms that humans arrange into an order they find pleasing, or at least interesting. I might have thrown a music theory book at you and said, basically, idk it’s that.
I simmered the question down to just such a reduction in a 2020 bonus episode of Strong Songs: “Rhythm + Harmony = Music.” And sure, that’s an accurate technical definition, particularly as it pertains to written music. Though I’ve lately realized my error in leaving out timbre, that most human of musical elements.
So okay, Rhythm + Harmony + Timbre = Music… is that any closer? Eh. Music is love, music is life; music is far more than its quantifiable elements. In fact, the more years I spend with it, listening and learning and teaching and performing, the more questions I find myself asking about what it actually is, and how it works.
All that is to say, "What is music?” is a huge question with countless answers, many of which are intensely personal and wholly subjective. I decided it would be fun, or at least interesting, to return to the question every so often here in my newsletter. Not always directly; it’s likely that most of the things I write about here will engage with it in some fashion or other. But the question will always be there, in the background.
Music vs. Recorded Music
I do want to raise one important distinction in today’s newsletter: the distinction between music and recorded music. It’s a distinction I’ve lately felt growing blurry, despite (or maybe because of!) its relevance to the larger question of music itself.
For all my skepticism about the often overstated impacts of new technology on music, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph and Thomas Edison’s subsequent breakthrough 1877 phonograph recording did change music’s meaning forever, even if they didn’t change music itself. Rather, they added a new dimension to what music could mean by changing music’s relationship with time. It was now possible to capture a musical performance and preserve it, and, in short order, reproduce, commoditize, and sell it.
A century and a half later, it’s common for people to use “music” and “recorded music” interchangeably, without thinking too much about the distinction between them. The need for “live music” as a separate category indicates how much our conception of music has changed in a relatively short amount of time.
After all, music has existed for tens of thousands of years. Across countless cultures and generations, it’s been at the root of some of the deepest, most profound connections that humans can experience. Recorded music has existed for less than 200 years. And because recorded music is also beautiful, fascinating, and, in our culture, ubiquitous, I find it helpful to remind myself that it remains a second-order category.
So when you think about your own relationship with music, bear that distinction in mind. You might find that your relationship with music and your relationship with recorded music are actually two different things.
Recorded Music vs. Tech
On a related note, here are three of the many things that, in 2025, have me thinking about music in a new way:
The rise of generative AI has led to a whole new genre of bold, provocative (and/or ludicrous, inane) proclamations about how a given product will reinvent/democratize/revolutionize/etc. the creation of music. For all the significant threats AI-generated music presents to working musicians, its increasing ubiquity also raises some vital questions about what music actually is. In fact, those concerns, and those questions, are likely directly related.
The increasing availability of powerful software tools, machine-learning-based and otherwise, has made a variety of new musical production and performance feats possible. Those tools, of which I have sampled a tiny fraction, substantially change my role as a composer without removing me from the process, while making it possible for me to generate far more music in a much shorter timeframe. Using them is an empowering and, yes, unnerving experience, and each tool raises questions about both the resultant music and the process of making it.
Music streaming apps, with Spotify first among them, have broken down and rebuilt the meaning, or at least the purpose, of recorded music. Which is to say they’ve rendered recorded music almost worthless, while generating revenue for just about everyone except the people who actually make music. Spotify’s current incentives indicate that they’ll continue moving away from promoting human-made (and thus independently owned) music and toward anonymous first-party (and, inevitably, AI-generated) background music. As the most widely used music streaming platform gradually transforms into an AI white noise company, where does that leave recorded music made as art, by humans?
Those three things—the rise of generative music AI, the slightly crazy possibilities afforded by cutting-edge production tools, and streaming’s apparent shift away from artist-made music—all raise questions about what music even is in the first place. (And not for nothing, all three primarily concern recorded music.) In addition to the professional and, more often lately, ethical challenges those types of technological advances present, I find myself chewing on the creative questions they raise, which can help me revise and solidify my own understanding of what music is, or at least what it means to me.
Those seem like the sorts of topics that’ll come up in as I write about this kind of thing, always approached with the goal of finding a new way of thinking about music itself. For today, though, I mostly just want to raise the question, and get all of you thinking about it.
What is music, to you? Like, really, what does the word mean? And how do you experience music, both in your own mind and in the world around you?
Onward
That’ll do it for now. I’ll have some music recommendations here for you all soon, and I’m excited for the second episode of Strong Songs Season Seven, which launches March 7 on Patreon, same day as the first ep hits the main feed. You’ve still got a week to get your first Patreon month for 80% off, if you want! Discount code at signup is STRONG.
As always, you can find me on Instagram and now on Bluesky. Social media is kind of a mess, though, so you can also just read me here.
I’ll leave you with this photo of Appa, as she firmly informed me that she was not interested in going on a walk as long as Emily was at home and not coming with. Considering that she can’t speak, she is often a very clear communicator.
~KH2/28/2025