A good friend of mine (not a musician but an avid music lover and one of the more careful listeners I know) recently wrote me the following e-mail as he was listening to Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata (I’ve edited it slightly for this post):

You could arrange this succession of frequencies over time for cell phone beeps and it would still be aching and melancholy. Even the most virtuosic performer can only make a good piece better or make a shitty piece suck less; the composition is the thing.

I think that it’s true (and not trivial) to say that glucose is sweet because we like glucose, we don’t like glucose because it’s sweet.   In other words, because there is something our body has evolved to need, the sensation of getting that thing has evolved to be pleasurable. My hunch is that if one were raised by wolves from birth, hearing a human baby cry would indicate to that feral person that the baby needed attention.  It’s important to have the idea that sound is a signal of other nearby events ingrained very deeply in our consciousness. As an example, think about how sudden, loud noises are startling: if something big enough to cause that sound is going on nearby, the likelihood that it’s dangerous is high enough that we have evolved a reaction in which we take our attention away from whatever it was we were doing until we are either calmed enough to return to what we were doing or frightened/alerted enough to take action.

Music may in many ways be a way of taking advantage of our built-in tendency to react to sound; at this point, it’s complex and abstract enough to have moved away from being just some atavistic “me scared big thunder” caveman thing (though that’s certainly there in the cannon of the 1812 overture).

So what is the fucking deal with the Moonlight Sonata?  Why in the world am I so sure that this abstract succession of frequencies over time would elicit a strong emotional response even when rendered in simple electronic beeps? This is not to discount the importance of performance; I would probably prefer the sound of a well-played piano to the simple beeps’ sounds whenever given the choice, but the “meaning” of the piece would come through even if crudely played.

I knew I knew the answer to my friend’s question, but it took some thinking to articulate it.  I think I eventually did, though.  Here’s my response:

on “successions of frequencies over time”:

It’s an interesting thought, and I definitely agree with your assessment that the composition is “the thing”, as opposed to the performance.  It seems, though, that you’re going further than that, saying that a shitty arrangement of the sonata (say, for cell phones) will still be transporting, thanks to something inherent in the “succession of frequencies over time”, which brings up the question of just what it is we mean when we refer to “the composition” (or perhaps, what it is about the composition that makes it “the thing”).  Your analysis works reasonably well for classical music of the so-called “common practice era” (roughly 1600-1900), and for much popular music.  Piano pieces can be orchestrated, piano reductions can be made of orchestral pieces, rock and folk songs can be covered, and so on.  With perhaps a little transposition, some slight tempo adjustments, and various practical measures to take into account the idiosyncrasies of the instrument(s) being arranged for (wind players need to breathe, nylon-stringed guitars can’t sustain a pitch, etc), all such compositions are capable of being abstracted as pitch relationships arranged according to time relationships.  Think of a score.  Now take away all the words on the page, leaving just the notes and other markings. Actually, go ahead and get rid of the other markings, as well as the key signatures, and even the clefs, leaving just the noteheads and stems.  What you have left is pitch relationships (intervals) and time relationships (rhythm), capable of being stretched or squeezed to fit any given amount of time, and transposable to any key and/or any octave.  You essentially have a bare-bones standard MIDI file.  And I could be wrong, but I think that’s what you mean by “the thing”.  “The thing” is that about a composition which remains the same no matter the arrangement.  It’s the reason we have Switched-On Bach, orchestral arrangements of Metallica, and this.  Depending how far you’re willing to go, “the composition” is something even less specific than particular time and pitch relationships, which is why different singers sometimes have wildly different interpretations of the same song.  It’s why some arrangements “swing“, and it’s why from time to time you hear minor versions of songs originally written in major. I have some friends who founded a band called alice, and what they do is take popular songs, strip them of everything but the melody & lyrics (even the chords) and create new pieces with them, using their own mood, their own chords, their own instrumentation, their own tempo, their own key, etc.  I don’t think you can rightly call what they do arranging – they go so far in their re-imagining of the song that it becomes something entirely new.  The fact that it has the same melody and lyrics as another song winds up being as incidental as a Mozart string quartet having the same instrumentation and form as one by Haydn.  They’re just parameters which the pieces happen to share, like any others.  In other words, there’s a limit to how much you can distill a composition and still retain its essential qualities.  (I guess homeopathy doesn’t work in music, either.)

But composers don’t write MIDI files.  They write all the stuff on the page (well, at least since the 18th century they do).  As time has gone on, in fact, they’ve written more and more and more stuff on the page, to the point of articulating (and even orchestrating) every part of every note’s spectral envelope (as you might imagine, this led in some cases to fewer notes [yes, that's all 6 movements in 4:12]).  By the mid-20th century, some composers were dispensing with the abstraction (the score) altogether and sculpting sound directly with electronic tape and synthesizers.  In those cases, “the thing” is the whole damn piece.  A version for cell phone just doesn’t make any sense.  But even among composers dedicated to writing instrumental music, there was (and is) a substantial movement shifting its attention away from melody, harmony, and counterpoint (the stuff of MIDI files) and towards timbre and texture.  If you want to re-imagine Ligeti’s Atmospheres, for example, for an ensemble other than full orchestra (good luck with those 55 individual string parts), the last thing you’re going to be thinking about is preserving the precise pitch and rhythm information.  Or, take an earlier piece like Pierrot Lunaire, which does rely for its emotional impact on discrete melodic gestures and has few enough parts that it could more readily be MIDI-fied (more readily, but not readily).  Again, though for different reasons than with Atmospheres, cell phone beeps will not work to convey it.  Even if you take a brilliant performance, replacing the instrumental timbres with cell phones but preserving every other aspect, the piece will be lost because the drama and wonder of the piece is so intrinsically tied up with the distinct sound colors of the instruments it was composed for, particularly the vocal part.  Is it because the succession of frequencies over time is inherently less moving?  Well, maybe it is.  But the piece isn’t.  What does that say about the fidelity of abstraction, at least as we’ve defined it here?  It may be that for some pieces the abstraction is something other than a series of frequencies over time, for example an array of behaviors or a succession of timbres.

on the interplay between music and primitive instincts:

None of this is to dispute your idea that the crudest arrangement of the Moonlight Sonata would still convey something essential about the piece.  I agree, it probably would.  I agree, too, that we have evolutionarily-programmed responses to sound.  However, there’s an inherent disconnect between those two ideas, which goes to the heart of your question: the abstract pitches and rhythms are not the sound of the piece.  The sound involves everything Beethoven put on the page, including the articulations, the note durations, the pedal markings, and the word “Piano” to the left of the grand staff.  The “succession of frequencies over time” is an intellectual abstraction, and does not interface with the “loud thunder me run away” area of our reptilian brains.  It interfaces with the highest-order functions of our human brains, the parts that are in charge of pattern recognition, problem solving, memory, and narrative.  These are of course survival-related as well, but are entirely separate from our fit-to-survive responses to sound.  The reason you would respond to Nokia Beethoven is that music acts on the intellect, and the intellect then in turn acts on the emotions, taking into account all the caveman stuff, but also all our cultural conditioning, our own personal histories, our current state of mind, the whole thing.  Music does not act on the emotions directly, like sound does, but only through the medium of the intellect.  You would prefer the original piano because it conveys more information.  But you still appreciate the cell phone because the abstract pitches and rhythms do convey some.