But, can music be art? (must music be strictly concordant...?)
You get the idea, then... lol
Answering catty's questions, I believe music
is art. I don't know if you could say art = music, but I have seen pieces of art that make noise, so it could be that art = music, too. Of course, if you have
Synesthesia, the question
could be moot. (My wife has this. I should ask more about it, as she's a sax and clarinet player and math teacher.)
Music doesn't have to be strictly anything. I'm just stating my opinion of that "Lizard" piece. To my ear, a lot of the music of the 20th century that tried to break the mold of "traditional" music styles start to sound about the same and I just don't care for it. That's me, though. I've got no problem if someone else has a different opinion. Also note that I do like a bunch of "20th century" composers and compositions, including some of Philip Glass' stuff: Gandalfe turned me on to
this piece, which I find very nice.
Even if you talk about "pop" music, I rather like Cake, where the lead singer
doesn't necessarily sing (or "rap"), such as in
this number.
Another way of looking at, say, 12-tone system music and computer-generated pieces, is that they have an inherent mathematical beauty. You could also argue about this mathematical beauty in works as old as JS Bach's or older. Hey, he had a template for most of his stuff. He was just really good at using those templates.
However, I take kevgermany's comment to heart. I do think that some "art pieces" of "music" are either over-complicated for the sake of being over-complicated -- "Lizard" may or may not be an example of that; Rascher's
24 Intermezzi with the key signatures with several double-sharps and soul-crushingly hard to finger passages were made that way to exercise sax players and thus have a reason -- or aren't exactly "music" in the sense of the Oxford English Dictionary sense: "Vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) combined in such a way as to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion." Easy example: John Cage's
4'33" (this version is transcribed for full orchestra and the announcer tells you a bit about the piece before it's performed. Ideally,
4'33" should be performed before an audience that has never heard of the piece before). Most people thought Cage was joking -- until he copyrighted the piece.