Three Elements of Music

As far as I can remember music fascinated me. I've been told that as soon as I was tall enough to reach the top of my parent's record player I played my mom's old 45s.
Throughout my childhood and adolescence I would listen to music, learn instruments and play with others.

Apparently I was pretty good at math in high school. Many people told me they were not surprised that I would be good at both disciplines, math and music since they had so much in common. But do they?

In my twenties I went to college to study guitar and music. But what was music? That question always stuck with me and I even wrote half my thesis about it. I guess that's where my analytical skills come in. At this point I could translate my thesis and copy and paste it here but that would take up days and way too much space.

What brought all this up? Two friends of mine sparked my interest last week by touching on this topic. Ed, one of my favorite internet radio DJ's confronted me with his 4 elements of music and Pete, a fellow guitar player who wrote a blog about phrasing. I went back into the darkest corners of my brain to drag out those old theories I had and had to re-think them. Maybe this can lead to an interesting discussion.

The three elements of music
At the source, music consists of three basic elements:
Melody, the horizontal movement of notes over time.
Harmony, the vertical movement of notes over time.
Rhythm, the rhythmical order of the movement.

No matter how hard I thought about this, I still feel the same way about it today. Even though melodies, harmonies and rhythms require even smaller particles like notes and frequencies, we need these three basic elements to make music.

At this point music is pretty much still basic math that can be displayed in vectors, graphs and notation. What does it sound like...that depends. There are children's songs that sound good to the human ear and there are also pieces of modern composers that test everyone's patience (because of the form of graphical/mathematical notation).

In any kind of music, it takes a lot more than the three basic elements to make music interesting, good, bad, fun, intriguing or any other adjective possible.
Once a basic song or piece of music has been established, another set of elements comes along to "bring the music to life". These are mainly:
Groove, transforming the rhythm from the notation and infusing a human beat or pulse. Music has a groove when it makes you want to move.
Phrasing, mainly applies to the melody but also sometimes comping. You can compare this to the flow and accentuation of a sentence. Phrasing is the unique interpretation of a melody by the player. No matter how I look at it, phrasing is a personal touch and is added to the listening experience by the player.
Dynamics are the differences in volume within a piece of music.
These elements give the music color and allow the musician to express their emotions.

Of course there are a few more elements that add flavor to the music like slowing down, speeding up and all kinds of ways of influencing the tone of an instrument. I could probably write a book about this topic. For now I will leave you with the statement I made above and encourage you to think about the elements of music.