Perhaps the form of art that presents the most philosophical puzzles while, simultaneously, being the form that the majority have a level of knowledge in that outstrips the general knowledge of painting or literature, music is a work of interpretation. Despite its lack of obvious semantic content, the interpretative possibilities of a composition, or performance of a composition, illustrate an ability of music to abstract and express thought and emotion.
The line between noise and music has blurred with studies in instrumental timbre and tonal interplay. So, composers abandoned the relationships of orchestral elements and the motions between these elements. Propelled by the advent of electronics, the definition of music has been pushed further towards all perceivable sounds and the organised relationship between these sounds.
At its most basic, the experience of music is the experience of tones. That is, a sound is heard and given relation to other sounds, with regards to its pitch, duration, intensity and timbre. It is by these shifts in tone that the sounds create the narrative of the composition but it is the aesthetic skills of the audience that determine the interpretation of this narrative. So, it is the development of these aesthetic skills that dictates the ability of the artist to elicit an emotional or thoughtful response.
The aesthetic skills of an individual correlate to their knowledge of the form and its conventions, the language of the art. These conventions dictate the grammar of the form, the rules regarding phonology, syntax and semantics necessary to produce all acceptable phrases. Combined with their cultural knowledge and beliefs, the knowledge of this grammar allows the listener to decipher the sounds of a composition, and so, the message of the composer.
Following the conventions reduces the message of the artist to the level of banal platitude. So, it is necessary for the artist to innovate by breaking these conventions and changing the language to suit the message. Innovation alone renders the message meaningless. It is the synthesis of convention and innovation, the restructuring of language, that determines the poignancy of a work
The artist must have the ability and autonomy to integrate content and form, tying the work to the specific conditions of society, so as to invite critical judgment within the created truth of the artwork. The artist so creates a dialectic that challenges, yet preserves, the nature of the society, or world.

Music, like all art, has become an ideologically-driven business, the justification for their deluge of little more than sludge. These businesses, and those interested, or fooled, parties claim that the standards of its goods are based on the needs of its consumers. Yet all branches of art follow the same formula, regardless of their medium or content, of crude adaptation.
Any trace of originality in a performer is controlled and absorbed by the professionals of industry. The eagerness of the performer to escape the field of amateur twists to an eagerness to fit within the structures of the industry.
The industry caters to the public with an emphatically hierarchical range of products. Each consumer acts in accordance with his determined type, buying the product marketed to his group.
As the procedure is formulated, the differences between products became more superficial and, in the end, illusory. These apparent points of product separation sustain a diminishing semblance of choice between the expensive and discount model. Quality and meaning become synonymous with the magnitude of the production budget.
Today art is dressed in the garb of the political slogan, biographical introduction or included commentary and assessment. So, the price and meaning of the art is reduced in exchange for the advertisement. The industry relies on the supposed satisfaction of the sheer number of the works to be seen and heard yet it seeks to pierce this wall of the nameless with advertising and publicity.
Cyclic recurrence of performer types and interchangeable clichés provide the scientifically-determined level of consumer classification. The clarity, for the consumer, of what follows from the beginning serves as a flattering reward.
Style absorbs the expressed thought or emotion of the artist into the language of itself and the more general language of the medium. Style promises truth through a new permutation of the conventional, as if it is contained within and must be derived from style. So, the claim of art is always ideology. However, it is this conflict with style that allows expression in art. The ability of art to transcend reality stems from its discrepancies with the tradition, in the striving of the artist for identity.
The specialist, where perhaps a splinter of independence resides, irritatingly, conflicts with the business of the industry. For the style of the industry, by its nature of superficial difference, becomes the absence of style. The tension between the following and breaking of stylistic rules slackens as the two become a meaningless whole. So, the ability of art to express and transcend reality dissipates as uniformity becomes absolute.

You are free to think as you will, and everything of yours shall remain yours but, from this day on, you are one apart from the many.

To rebel is to be rendered spiritually and socially powerless. Excluded, the outsider is accused of inefficiency and uselessness. It is perhaps the greatest crime of a member of the capitalist society.

Absolute uniformity governs the relationship of production and reproduction. The risk of the untried reduces the potential sales and is removed. Yet there is a constant talk of movement and dynamics. It is the equivalent of running in stasis. The forms of the comedy sketch, the novel, song and film are the standardised average, ossified and immutable.