Is Music a Science?
For anyone with even the slightest involvement in the arts — even as a listener or spectator alone — the answer is simple. And it is "no."
Art is art. It is not science — it neither claims to be, nor does it need to be.
Art has its own standing; it has no need for "rebranding" or intermediaries.
It has functioned and flourished for millennia without the help of scientists — let alone their
patronizing oversight.
So how do universities award degrees in "Music Science"?
The answer is that the term "music science" is an academic invention.
No such concept exists.
They invented it either because their minds cannot grasp the difference, or because they are advancing their own interests — namely, to dominate this field as well. ("either... or" means that one does not exclude the other.)
The academic mind cannot bear the thought of a domain in which it does not hold primacy. Academics take for granted that they are always "at the top of the pyramid."
And they will do everything in their power to defend that position.
With the support of a state that is also govern by their likes and thus thinks in exactly the same way. They cannot tolerate the fact that, in the world of the arts, academics are not the central figures. Their contribution is supplementary.
In the fields of applied art and education alike.
Artists come first. Scholars, researchers, analysts, critics follow.
Not merely follow - they do not exist without artists. They have no subject matter.
Artists, on the other hand, manage perfectly well without their analysts. One might say that analysts are even a burden, with the conceit that leads them to consider themselves all-important.
Not only are the arts not sciences, but they hold a fundamentally different understanding of the world.
Art is free expression; it is a constant striving toward beauty.
Not that it has no rules - it does, and very demanding ones at that. It requires systematic practice, dedication, and enormous effort.
But the goal is always to surpass itself, to change forms, to change the world and ourselves.
Science, by contrast, is grounded in the stability of demonstrative process. Experiment, repetition, same result (the natural sciences). Analysis of behaviors, predictive models, a guide to the future (the humanities).
Of course, science too strives to surpass itself and discover new aspects of the world. Sometimes it even foregrounds its aesthetic dimension - like architecture, for example - and then, proudly, scientists consider themselves artists as well.
But the sciences' goal remains the discovery of new constants.
As for he arts, the more predictable they are, the more fixed their parameters, the more their value diminishes. They seek change, multiplicity, and are forever generating new currents, some of which fade quickly and others of which live for a long time, or forever.
Art does not wish to be science. It is a high and self-sufficient form of human action. Why would it want to be identified via another field terms?
The academic community, from both university and government positions, faces a great challenge: to admit that it has no understanding of the arts.
That the comprehension of art is beyond their capacities.
However many Schools they found, however many laws they pass, however many artists' positions they occupy, the core of art will always be somewhere else. And it will keep gracefully slipping away from them.
I was recently reading an article by Professor and former Minister of Education K. Gavroglou, in which he wondered (referring to the new Higher School of Performing Arts): "how will we have university professors who have not themselves attended university?"
But... they will not be university professors, man! They will be teachers of the arts. Is that really so difficult to understand?
The School of Fine Arts - a higher institution for decades - may have been administratively attached to the Polytechnic School, but it was never a typical university. And those who taught there were, above all, artists. Not "university professors."
That title, which for you represents the ultimate validation, is entirely indifferent to us.
We want and rejoice when our students call us "teacher." Not "Professor, Sir".
It must be that difficult for you, after all...
Whatever you devise, the core of the birth of arts and artists will always reside in specialist schools - or wherever else artists act and teach: in the street, in the studios, in collaboration, in the shared labor with their students.
It will never be the lecture delivered from a podium or the reading of textbooks.
(Are there, anywhere in your universities, teachers of musical practice who trained not at a conservatoire but at a university? Now that won't happen.)
However much you insist that artistic education is inferior to academic education, reality will mock you.
However hard you try to attach the word "science" to "art", supposedly to lend it prestige, art will wash it away back at you.
It is very simple: neither you have any surplus of prestige to give us, nor we any such deficit that would have us accept it.
Nikos Panagiotidis
http://panagiotidistar.wordpress.com/
April 2026
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