- christyczx
- 16 minutes ago
- 2 min read
“The division is between understanding and experiencing, and many people think that art has to do with understanding, but it doesn’t.” ------ John Cage
This statement unsettles us because it unsettles us from within. For decades, Western thought has long privileged understanding—equating knowledge with dissection, mastery, and reason. When it comes to music, it relates to interpretation, feelings, analysis, and ideology ------ art's value lives in the meaning.
At the moment the sound begins, the other side of the coin emerges. Music seizes us before it explains. It arrives not as any concept, but as pulse, as trembling air, as presence that enfolds us.
The warmth that our body experiences, the intellect cannot yet name. From here, art has its ideological frame. Once sound becomes something to be named, categorized, or taught, ideology enters.
Art acquires its ideological frame: in classrooms, we learned which repertoires are "important", scholars and critics publish multiple articles and comments on their interpretations, and cultures that shape music into different identities. All these frameworks tell us to listen for meanings. Yet, no matter how carefully constructed, the experience of sound always resists them.
A theory class may present a chord as a function, but what the ear first perceives is its color, its weight, its unexpected pull. A concert review may assign a performance as “authentic” or “expressive,” but what lingers for the listener is the shiver of a single note hanging in the air. A popular song may be marketed as carefree entertainment, yet what someone remembers is how it carried them through heartbreak on a late-night walk.
To experience music is to stand in that untranslatable space. It is to realize that meaning is not the end of art but its excess—the surplus that resists capture. Where understanding seeks closure, experience opens. Where ideology constrains, art insists on its remainder, that “something” which cannot be reduced to knowledge but continues to move us.
Perhaps the deepest philosophical task is not to ask what art means, but what art does to us. To think through music not as a text to be decoded, but as an event that transforms.
So when I play, when I listen, when I write for Music and Ideology, I try to remember: Perhaps art’s greatest gift is precisely this—its refusal to be fully understood, its insistence on being lived.
