Harvard Professor Tries to Unravel Music’s Mystery

Where exactly are you when you're "lost in the music"? Music professor Christopher Hasty wants to find out.

In a March 2003 article in the Harvard Gazette, Hasty describes his quest to "put an intellectual finger on" the mystery of how we experience music. Why? "That understanding, I think, can teach us about the world and about who we are -- and what we are -- as human beings," says Hasty.

A music theorist, Hasty is not lost in the conventions of harmony & rhythm, nor in the minutiae of notation. He does acknowledge that there is a common feeling that "if you can't read music, if you can't label chords and don't know the rules of harmony and counterpoint, then there's something in music that will always be closed to you." And he believes that this is clearly wrong, because people are able to make a great deal of sense from music, starting at an early age, without the "toolbox" of music theory.

He goes on to remind us that even when classical musicians get together to play a written piece of music, their primary concerns are not what is explicitly "on the page," but what's not on the page - the phrasing, how the piece "breathes," etc.

Hasty's particular interest is how people get lost in the music, that is, the trance-like state of being totally absorbed in a piece of music. This fulfillment does not come from technical competence, but from somewhere else more complex and mysterious.

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