What is Musicality?

Is it the sound that makes us like music or the emotions that music creates that's the key?

I think the latter which makes it impossible to quantify what is musical or not.

I seem to recall even Vulcans with no emotions on Star Trek employed music. Most illogical! :-)

I recently acquired a recording of Healing Tibetian Bell "music". I use quotes because its more of sounds than any music I am familiar with it. I will give it a play over the weekend and see if it draws me in. If so, then I suppose it is "musical"

Mapman, one answer to your question might be that emotions, while a part of music, are not all of it. Otherwise, we wouldn't talk about "musicality" as something separate from "emotion." Sometimes a composer wants a completely non-emotional effect, and there are many different types and ways to create them. The ability to create these effects would also be considered pre-requisite for having good musicality. So while the latter part of your question is a big part of the initial attraction to any given piece of music, ultimately I think the former part of the question is actually closer to what constitutes musicality.

I didn't go back and reread the rest of this thread, by the way, so this may have been already mentioned, but generally when musicians use the word musicality they are referring to phrasing, or one's ability to make nice musical phrases - again, not necessarily an emotional thing, though of course it often is.

Having a good sense of rhythm would also be a very obvious pre-requisite for musicality. Ultimately, music is the organization of sound in time. Just some thoughts on your question. By the way, most certainly the bells would be considered music, and musical.

I think Mapman is right, when he says, that it is impossible to quantify musicality. That is also the reason that psychology generally shies away from this problem.

Learsfool, I think, makes several excellent points, although I disagree, that "emotions are part of the music".
Humans, also higher forms of mammals have emotions. Music per se has not. It is sound, which however composers as well as their interpreters can shape cleverly, if they so chose, to arrange in such a way, that they can evoke all sorts of feelings, images and emotions in the listener. Maler and Richard Strauss were masters in this about 200 years ago, Prokofiev and Shostakovich in the last century just to mention a few. Strauss in fact was famous for saying, that if need be, he could put a glass of beer into music. There is a whole bag of tricks, as musicologists will point out, which by clevery arranging notes and the voicing and combination of instruments, by which you can evoke almost any state of mind you wish for in the listener. You might say, that music is able to manipulate us, as for example Stalin and Hitler very well knew.
However, it seems to me,that there is more to it: Bach's music is basically pure mathematics and with a bit of a jump in time also Schoenberg's. But they can and do evoke deep emotions in a listener, if he has the ear for their music.

I also fully agree with Learsfool, that what we call PraT and phrasing, are used to evoke something in the listener, who then, listening to a given piece, if he likes it would probably call "musical".

Bascially though, I think that Mapman has hit the nail on the head: As little as you can quantify what makes up a human being, you cannot quantify what makes for musicality.
You can certainly identify parts, as we try to do here, you can examine the question through musical education, historically, aesthetically, sociologically, psychologically, musicologically, but the whole is always more than all the parts and at least for me it remains a mystery.

Detlof,

I am not very inclined to make this into an intellectual thing. Music is perceived by the brain in a special way, thankfully. We can try to dissect the whole matter but it does not change the perceptions.