Hi Diveeja, I am sending some sample essays for *How far do you agree with the notion that wordless music is meaningless?* Pls follow the steps to complete your assignment. Step 1: Read these articles quickly Step 2: Understand what the question meant by Step 3: Underline 6 to 7 For and 4 to 5 Against Points Step 4: Put them in 5 Finger Planning Step 5: Reorder the content Step 6: Write your essay How far do you agree with the notion that ‘wordless music is meaningless’? ‘In the production of food, animal welfare should be a higher priority than cost.’ To what extent do you agree? Hooking: Bring a situation like something happened Use statistics Personal experience A quick story A great quote Transition: To get into the topic How: o Use question? o Quote o Or statistics Thesis Statement: What do you want to say? Your clear stand--- for or against o Three or four points you want to prove in your essay How far do you agree with the capital punishment? Celebrating the revolution, French citizens sent King Louie XVI to the guillotine. Every Halloween day in ancient Rome, criminals were executed in the city square. In the 1880s, in an effort to prevent crime in the US, hundreds of bank robbers, horse thieves, and murderers were hanged in front of the public. However, in the last half of the 20th century, the death penalty has faced increasing opposition. Many people, especially members of churches, are against capital punishment, and most advanced countries have eliminated the death penalty. While it is true that the death penalty has some negative points, it is still a powerful and useful tool. Therefore, our society should keep the death penalty to deter crime, to give fairness to victims and their families, and to punish inhumane criminals. Animals are suffering. o Mentally and physically News channel: In Cows farm, they are being slaughtered. How many cows like this? What other animals suffer? o Pigs for meat o Goats for wool Other ways Kept in small spaces Hundreds of Hens kept in small area o 68% in US – Source? o Any number or data? Not enough food given Hens again… for why to cut cost Excess medicine are given for quick growth o Quick growth and quick profits Data? Unethical for business o Animals have their own rights o Who is fighting – animal activists o Any specific law to be included o Livestock may carry diseases o Why: Long term storage o What diseases: Example 1 Music Without Words is Meaningless “Let us all stand up for the national anthem”. The numerous people, creating a large crowd in the huge football stadium, stand up. The players of both the teams line up in the centre of the field in a rigid stance. The anthem begins. The camera focuses on all the team members of the country whose anthem is being played, tears streaming down the cheeks of a few players in great love, respect and patriotism for their beloved country. The anthem surely made them emotional and triggered the love for their nation. But wait…nobody is singing the national anthem, it is only an instrumental. If music without words is meaningless, then how come those players were so touched by it? How did they receive the message and the sensation of patriotism through only the sounds coming from a number of instruments? A better question; how did they even RECOGNIZE that it is their country’s national anthem and not their opposing team’s? The answer to all these questions is that music without words is not meaningless, and it would be quite a sweeping statement to say so. Yes, music can be meaningless without words if it created that way, just a mixture of random notes and intervals without any harmony, but why would anyone waste their time creating something like that? Even if words are added to such a piece of music, it would not be effective. Music can also be meaningless with words (if you are a musician, please don’t try recreating the following example); imagine a “gangsta’ rap” song, with the rapper rapping over a soft and mellow 3 by 4 piano ballad. The lyrics alone will have meaning, and the music alone will have its meaning too, but mixing them together will cause a terrible confusion and resulting in the listener to think “Does the artist want me to listen to a story of one of his amazing gang fights and feel the intensity of the situation, or he wants me to stand up and perform a slow couple dance with my beau?”. Music is a lot like chemistry; you create a wrong mixture and it will either result in a disastrous solution or will neutralize the effect. So saying that words give meaning to music is quite absurd, but yes it is to be admitted that words sometimes do enhance the meaning of music and support it, excluding the above mentioned example though… Music itself is believed to be another language. It is spoken through instruments and voice by using notes, written and read on a staff paper using musical notation, with intervals, rests, time signatures, tempo, scales and chords as its grammar, and its accents as…well…accents. When voices and instruments change the pitch of the notes in a harmonious and melodic fashion, they create their own “words”, with the feeling and message the musician wants to convey to the listener. The length of these musical words and words of any language, lets say English, are often not the same; the word “anger” takes less than a second to speak, almost a second to write and a millisecond to understand, but when translated this word in music, it can take several pages of staff paper and minutes of playing time. Music contains its own meaning. It does not depend on the existence of words but sadly, not all understand this language. Words are needed to support the music and convey the message faster and more effectively to the listener. Sometimes, even the musician himself does not master this language well enough to understand it, and thus he has to create a piece of music known as a “song” which he and the listener comprehend to. It is like watching a foreign movie with English dubbing so it can be easily be understood. The dubbing will never be the same as the real dialogues and the feelings which reside in the original won’t be present in the dubbed version. Music is the foreign language here, and words are the dubbing. Most of music enthusiasts are so used to listening to the “dubbed” version of music that they begin to find the music in its pure sense as peculiar and strange. The dubbed version of the movie in the foreign language is so popular that the producer has now begun to create movies in English, but to make sure that the feeling of originality is not lost he has decided to use the same foreign actors who trying their best to speak a language they are not supposed to speak, only because the audience wants it. Luckily there are artists which have preserved music in its original form. Beethovan and Bach are in the list, but lets take a look at current artists. Yanni; A self taught pianist and music composer from Greece. His music consists of pure instruments, sometimes voices, but no words, and yet the meaning of the music is conveyed to the listener. As an example, one of his songs, Reflections of Passion, triggers the emotion of love and passion so quickly, and the rhythm of the song makes one dance with his/her partner, alone if they are single. Another one known as Nostalgia will take one down the memory lane and awaken nostalgic feelings to a place, a person or an object; a song named perfectly with respect to its feeling. There are several other melodies which comprise of no words but still they inject their contained feeling into the listener. Even though this particular professional musician was mentioned here to support the statement that there are musicians who create songs without words and they are still understood and appreciated, one does not always have to be a pure musician to create music with meaning and without words and understand such form of music. On a hot summer day when the children are playing in their yard and hear an alluring music fading in. They stop and listen. In a few seconds they run inside, empty their piggy banks, and run back outside to the “ice-cream man” who is humming the music coming from the speakers of his icecream wagon as he presents the children with their treats. It was the distinguishable, upbeat and exciting music from which the children realized that the ice-cream wagon is approaching. In the same way, when a cell phone rings, it is instantly realized that someone is calling and the phone needs to be answered. How unusual it would be if all cell phones do not play a specific tone as the ring but instead a voice from its speaker yelling, “I am your phone! Someone is calling! Attend the call!” Recognized cell phone models and service providers have their own signature ring tones, and one can easily figure out which brand and which cell phone connection an individual is using when his/her cell phone rings. More pieces of music that all computer users are familiar with is the welcoming melody one hears when the renowned operating system Windows XP is booted, the short and annoying jingle when there is an error message on the screen, and the tune that is played when it is turned off. Words are completely absent and even unnecessary for this purpose. That is the most fascinating thing about music; it is not limited to any specific language, like stated before that music itself is a language everyone understands….partially… Therefore, the conclusion is that music is not meaningless without words. Yes, words support music, and words make the understanding of the message conveyed more effective, but music will not be left incomplete if words are missing from it. In fact, words without music won’t have much effect. Do not confuse words with voices, as there is a difference between voices changing their pitches in rhythm and voices changing their pitches in rhythm and carrying words from a language with them. Neither would be meaningless with or without any of them. If music was meaningless without words, cell phones ringtones, movie intros and alarm or reminder tones would have never been understood, and if words were meaningless without music then you will definitely need some singing skills to understand this essay. Example 2 Music without Words is meaningless. Is it true? The Oxford dictionary itself justifies that music is ‘art of combining sounds for reproduction by voice or instrument(s) in rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic form.’ From a pre-school kid to an old-retired man, every age group of people, love to listen to music in one form or the other. A pre-school kid gets the first taste of music when his teacher plays a nursery rhyme to teach him the basic numbers and the letters of alphabets, whereas, an old-retired man enjoys his final days of life by meditating to soothing music or listening and singing religious hymns; “Bhajans”. The development of music occurred with the developed of human civilization in the past. In those days music was used as a language to communicate as no proper languages were developed for communication. One used a branch of a tree as a musical instrument by shaking it, which produced scratching sound and notified everyone around about the danger. These music or sound didn’t have words but they did have a meaning. Similarly, many other music without words such as PaancheBaja were created in the past but have been continued to play in many of the special festivals and ceremonies till date as they have meaning and also have historical and cultural significance in Nepalese societies. There are many musical theatres in various countries which lure huge number of audiences who buy tickets to hear the soothing music of various instruments such as piano, violin, guitar and orchestras by famous instrumentalists. In some of the international theatres, the ancient music without words such as Beethoven and Mozart are played and are liked by many. This music injects their contained feelings into the listeners and provides relaxation to the tired once. Every person has his own taste of music. Some prefer music words whereas some prefer music with words. To some extent we can agree that words do clarify the meaning of music but this does not mean that music without words are meaningless. Music touches the heart and expresses the hidden feeling inside an individual. Though they may or may not contain words, they are music to our ears. Hence, we should very much appreciate and well respect each and every type of music. Example 3 Why is wordless music meaningful? To answer that question you must first define “meaning”, and that is a philosophical question that has been around for…well, since the beginning of time. But for the present argument, let us say that “meaning” is a construct people create within their minds that unites perceptions, thoughts, emotions, associations, and spirit. At the physical level, music is sound, and sounds are vibrations. These vibrations in and of themselves are capable of stimulating, for they not only strike our eardrums but can also reach the nervous center at a deeper—and ofttimes pleasurable—level. Musical tones can sound pleasant together or discordant. Musical rhythms can be gentle or frenetic. Tempos can be fast or slow. Each of these affects the perception of the music, and hence the thoughts and imagery that music evokes. Emotions can flow accordingly—even Plato knew that. Sometimes we can control our reactions to music, sometimes we cannot. Why, for instance does a section of the Blue Danube Waltz always evoke a remembrance of a girl I crushed on in high school, even though we never dated, and she was not a dancer? Why does a portion of Beethoven’s 9th evoke images of Tolkein’s Shire to me, when it is certain that Beethoven never heard of a Hobbit? Some composers direct our thinking and imagery by giving descriptive titles to their compositions. This is called “program music” and examples include such works as “The Lark Ascending”, “Siegfried's Rhine Journey”, “Pines of Rome”, “Orpheus and Euridici”, “Stranger On The Shore”. Others are just titles for their form, such as “Etude (Study)”, “Sonata”, “Overture”, “Duet”, “Canon”. Whatever the situation, the thoughts, emotions, or imagery that occur listening to instrumental music are personal to the listener; each listener will have their own reaction. They can sometimes be verbalized and shared in that manner, but that would be at best a second-hand experience. Sadly, much of music—not just today’s—is considered meaningless, and only the words matter. Yet the vibration is still there, and the thoughts and images still come, and emotions are still evoked. And when that combination is demeaning and crude, both the listener and society suffer. Example 4 Firstly, wordless music, in their own way, excite the neurons in the brain through association (similar to learning by a neural network) which makes it meaningful for us. Secondly, the other aspect is our inability to understand (in an orthodox sense) wordless music, which in view of the above quotation by Neils Bohr lends to an understanding that while we through our learning are not able to understand it, the brain is able to understand it through its complex neural network (as is shown by the success of artificial neural network in varied use cases). The above reasoning seems to suggest that there are two levels of understanding one which is more direct like we see an apple and recognize it as an apple. The other is more subtle and probably, manifests itself as instinct or intuition. Edit: Given below is an extract from the book “The Serpent and The Rope” by Raja Rao. It can work as a more metaphysical answer but somehow it just seems to be the “right” answer.
