Why Music Is a Form of Knowledge

Creative music is a name that artists use to talk about this area of music that involves creativity at the center of performance — meaning we’re not just executing pre-existing music, but making it new each time, so that there are elements of each performance that aren’t repeatable. That idea is very important to me, and I think it should be better understood on its own terms: as a source of knowledge, as a site of innovation, invention, exchange, dialogue. That’s a sensibility we can carry into anything we do.

Amiri Baraka tells a story about how he came to write Blues People. When he was in college at Howard University, he asked his mentor, Sterling Brown: how come there’s no history of our people? And Professor Brown pointed at his record collection and said: that’s your history. So what if we take that provocation at its word — that this is actually an archive of the history of a people? What can we learn from that history — not just about them, but from them, about the world?

Muhal Richard Abrams said to me: you know how it is — we play a concert, you go out and speak to five different people afterwards, and they all say something different. The purpose of music is to excite all these different experiences. That struck me as such a radical proposition — that there’s no singular way to decode a piece of music. We all bring something individual and personal to it. That’s not to say we have nothing in common, but we can also honor each other’s individuality in the course of it.

I remind people that a record is not just this object on the shelf. It’s a document — a record of what happened in the studio that day. A document of human actions and interactions, exploding with meaning. When we sit together and experience the same piece of music, we find ourselves moving to it, breathing a certain way conditioned by what we’re hearing. And that’s meaningful. It means you are connecting with what those people on the other side of that microphone were doing. What is it to start a class at 9:45 in the morning with a gesture like that — where we sit with our bodies and our feelings and our movements, together in time, and understand that as a site of collective knowledge-making?

What music is made of, first and foremost, is human action. What we call music is the sounds of bodies in motion. Even electronic music is constructed in a way that imitates human action. Music comes from people. It’s really that simple — but in a way, it had to be said.

Among especially elder Black musicians, there is a sense of interconnectedness — a way of calling ancestors into the room by referring to their work, by playing their pieces or incorporating them into their own music. It can be at the level of a gesture: a reference to Thelonious Monk in the way you play one chord. This idea that your creative forebears are in the room with you. You call them back into the room so that they’re cradling you, actually.

Music brings us back to our bodies — not just the body, but bodies. It’s not just sound transmitted on speakers; it’s bodies and vibrations in a room, people among each other. Music is made by and for and among people. Grounding ourselves in that simple fact is an antidote to the corporate forced diet of AI we are having to live through right now. Music-making, and musicality — how we relate to each other through sound — is the solution. It’s about us listening to each other. And that’s one of the most foundational human and ethical things we can do together.