I decided to delve into Karl Popper’s three worlds and try to place music in them. According to his theory, the first world is the physical world, the second is the mental world, and the third (roughly speaking) is the “world of language products”.
My instincts failed me a bit, because I cannot directly insert the language of music in place of the language of abstraction. K. Popper stated that language became necessary to produce tools that became an extension of biological evolution. Music, on the other hand, does not produce these tools.
The common element for language and music is that they build a world common to many people, but in different meaning. Language, by eliminating errors, builds a world of victorious abstractions (to put it poetically), while music builds a world… well, I don’t know what kind…
In “I don’t understand music, Part 4” I wrote that I do not find an anthropological justification of music. However, I will try to “defend” the evolutionary meaning of music:
1 The world of mathematics, 2 The world of chaos and 3 The psyche. And what connects these three worlds is music, which is chaotic mathematics, meaning breaking the rules embedded in forms and harmony in order to create a sense of security.
For man is not only language and logic, but also suffering, pleasure, certainty and fear. Evolution must have clearly responded to the formation of abstract memory in man and the associated more frequent sense of threat.