Is music simply "auditory cheesecake"?

Critic Terry Teachout muses on the mystery of music.

It is possible for trained musicians to talk in fairly specific terms about what makes a piece of music beautiful—to them. I know what it is that I like about, say, Gabriel Fauré's bass lines, or the harmonies in the songs of Jimmy Van Heusen. Alas, I can't tell you why these things tickle my fancy. I can only apply Eddie Condon's empirical test of musical quality: "As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" And Condon's Law is as circular as Langer's definition of music: It sounds terrific, but in the end it gets you nowhere.

Enter the guys in the white coats, and it turns out that they don't agree, either. Daniel J. Levitin, a rock musician and record producer turned neuroscientist, has argued in "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" (Dutton) that current research into the psychology of musical perception and cognition proves that the human brain is biologically hardwired to find meaning in music. But many evolutionary psychologists believe no less firmly that music is nothing more than a fundamentally meaningless form of what Steven Pinker, writing in "How the Mind Works" (Norton) calls "auditory cheesecake."

I do have a sneaking suspicion that part of the charm of music lies in the fact that we don't know what it means, any more than we can explain the equally mysterious charm of a plotless ballet by George Balanchine or an abstract painting by Piet Mondrian. "We dare to go into the world where there are no names for anything," Balanchine once said to Jerome Robbins.

That's why it is so refreshing to enter into the presence of great art, and why the greatest works of art always contain an element of ambiguity. A masterpiece doesn't push you around. It lets you make up your own mind about what it means—and change it as often as you like.