Great art thinks with its heart and feels with its brains.
That's an old cliche, precisely the sort that great art avoids, but the point is that art is not unlike any other human necessity. You have to simultaneously use your heart to guard against the dangers of charlatanism and use your brain to guard against the dangers of emotional entanglements from which escape is impossible. But more elementally, there is no difference between thinking and feeling - you feel your thoughts, you think your feelings, and so the least advisable thing you can do - whether it's an intellectual decision or an emotional one, is to believe too deeply that you're right.
Being human is more than thoughts or emotions, it's, quite literally, the cross-section between the two. The idea that intellect and emotions exist independently is a pernicious myth. The thoughts we're aware of are only a speck of what's going on in our brains at any given moment, which themselves are connected directly to the nervous and circulatory systems and all the activity beneath. 'Thinking' is just a part of 'being' and 'being' only comes in one package. Entire civilizations have killed each other over whether the ultimate package is the body or the soul, but whatever we are, whatever is out there that we become, we're just a grain of dust within a much, much larger package.
What all that intellectual bullshitry means is that music is not an end in itself. Good music isn't an intellectual exercise, but it's not a direct emotional release either. Great music is, quite literally, a process. There's no such thing as music unless its heard by human ears who send the sounds to the brain for processing into some sub-linguistic meaning. Music is, perhaps literally, the process of how our instincts direct energy through our body before we can articulate what our instincts are telling us to do.
And so music is not intellect or emotion, it is, at least as best I can explain it, the intellectual process of how emotions transition from one state to another. And so when you hear music, a meaningful experience is not particularly meaningful when you perceive just one or two flat primary emotions, even if those emotions are rendered in a state of one basic emotion at a time (opera lovers take note). A really meaningful musical experience will take you through every imaginable emotional state and navigate the transitions between them.
This is why the overseriousness and grandiosity of much classical music can be deeply unsatisfying and land people in an emotional rut of which they're not even aware they're in until years have passed.... it's not entirely unlike addiction... It's also why the frivolity of so much popular music is equally unsatisfying. If life is complicated, what's the point of music that lies to you about that? There are, of course, hundreds if not thousands of exceptions on both sides of the ledger, but while I could be wrong, I have to imagine it's a lot easier to be frivolous from a base of seriousness than it is to be serious from a base of frivolity.
Now this leads to a further complication, because, god knows, and a lot of popular music is meant to be serious, and a lot of classical music is frivolous - some of it's even meant to be....
The point is not to stereotype any form of music, or to disregard any great artist working in any less prestigious medium who can elevate what used to be garbage into unmistakable sublimity. The point is merely to prefer the artforms that best let artists capture whatever it is that allows them to express what it means to be fully human. That's fundamentally why I particularly love orchestral music and symphonies - because they require the composer to incorporate an almost infinite diversity of expressive modes in a way that opera generally does not.
But there are a lot of crappy symphonies too, many of which come from great composers, and some are even well regarded.... And there are certainly rock and R&B albums which rise to the level of great art, some of which come from some really crappy artists - 'crappy' meaning artists who don't think deeply about what they do and basically make art in a way that exploits their public to maximize their financial gain; but making art is very very hard, and no matter how hard you work, so much of it is luck.
The best thing music can give us is deeper than what we generally think of as either intellect or emotion - we need to literally hear human connection. We need music that tells us what it's like to be native to every emotional state, and navigates us securely in a journey between them all. That is what will fortify us best for whatever life throws at us.
Half a dozen Mediocre Symphonies thought Great:
Mahler Symphony of a Thousand
Saint-Saens Organ Symphony
Bruckner 3
Liszt Faust Symphony
Rachmaninov 2 (I said it)
Mendelssohn's Italian Symphony (I said what I said)
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