In What Makes Music Great the discussion is about the opening notes of a song. They discuss how Gerschwin’s Rhapsody in Blue puts you right in the middle of the piece in 15 seconds. I would like to add that James Joyce, in his 1939 Finnegan’s Wake, incorporates a similar exposition by expressing the entire book in the first two paragraphs; arguably, the whole book in the first word. Richard Strauss’ performance of Don Juan “puts you right in the middle of that world [Don Juan’s]… again, in the first few seconds.” Of Copland’s Appalachian Spring: “It’s just a few simple notes, and you hear the sun rising… you’re right there.” Beethoven’s Sonata No. 30, Op. 109 takes the “audience on a journey that they were not prepared to take.” Music has this quality of experience to it, of conjuring images and stories in people’s minds. While other information mediums share this capacity, as demonstrated in Austin Osman Spare’s self-portrait, music bares a uniquely intimate relationship with human experience.
Dr. Hans Jenny demonstrated in the 1960s that different sound vibrations cause matter to arrange itself in particular morphologies. This phenomenon, the study of which is known as cymatics, is an empirical and visual example of the intimacy music has not only to human experience, but to the composition of atomic structures. Deciphered in this light, saying that one is “moved” by music is much more literal. The forms that music imposes upon matter are known as Chladni patterns, which could be considered as diagrams or maps of sound that are specific to the relationship between the material and the vibration. It is nothing new to say that music has equally traceable relationships to human experience, there’s just an alteration in the modes of interpreting. Although music has visual diagrams, music is far simpler to understand in the ways we describe our experience. As expressed earlier, and as per casual conversations, music is described as enacting or appointing an entire world on the stage of the theater in one’s mind.
Music is a means of extracting a world within the musician and exhibiting it in the world around them. Music in part is a means of communicating this internal experience, and even in transferring experience. For example, please bear with me in considering the Canadian avant-garde metal band Unexpect’s The Quantum Symphony. Whether or not you find a hook to catch, a note to taste, or a rhythm to bob to, you find yourself in an experience that could be described as discord, discomfort, or even as maddening. Despite any acquired means of interpretation, the music imparts a noticeable impact on one’s experience. I had the pleasure of contrasting The Quantum Symphony with the symphony of robins, wind, and automobiles in my backyard. I noticed that my chest became heavier and my heart rate rose while listening to Unexpect compared to the birds and the wind. The world of discord and hyperstylistic coagulations immediately takes effect on my experience, the song effectively acting as a means of not only communicating experience, but of transferring or sharing direct experience to some degree (based on how well I comprehend the sound).
This transfer of experience accounts for “hearing the sun rise,” as it was stated above. This is not a typical way of speaking about experience, yet it is readily understood when talking in terms of music. Such connection between sound and sight is typical when talking about music, yet it seems irrational to inquire as to what green smells like, or what pessimism tastes like. Boundaries exist between our senses, and these boundaries are expressed in our grammar. Yet, our grammar is limiting our senses. Consider Billy Collin’s Introduction to Poetry:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to water-ski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
Thinking about poetry in this way, one is given a plethora of interrelating sensual information. Art is a means of creating and sharing subjective experience, but the definition and intensity of this experience has been restricted for one reason or another. Avant-garde, through juxtapositions and reassociations, is a means of exploiting this complacency or diminished threshold for interrelation. To borrow from my experience as a personal trainer, it is similar to the development of one’s muscular system. When one starts exercising there is a low tolerance for pain and a short capacity for endurance. Over time these both progress, but one’s pain tolerance and endurance capacity may plateau if the same exercises are repeated without variation; in other words, without shocking the system there is no progress or development – there is no life to the activity. The hook in a song works in a similar way. A hook, according to Monaco and Riordan, is “a musical or lyrical phrase that stands out and is easily remembered.” The hook is ‘a bit of music or words so compelling that it worms its way into one’s memory and won’t go away… A radio listener, passing by, so to speak, is caught or trapped by ‘a “catch” phrase or melody line’ and may become hooked in the addictive sense as a result of the hook’s memorability and recurrence.’ The hook’s attractiveness, its repetition, is powerless without its opposite: change. As a musical piece may become uninteresting by lack of change or by too much change, and as the muscular system plateaus in response to stasis, one’s sensual manifolds are susceptible to weathering and require calibration and attunements.
Claude Debussy once said that “music is the space between the notes.” That is, the arrangement of notes is what makes the music. Consider The Quantum Symphony again. Within this piece there are examples of a number of musical genres or styles, from classical and jazz to circus and folk music, but one would not categorize the song under any of these labels. This in fact is the problem for Avant-garde art: it is transdefinite. Avant-garde art, as exemplified in The Quantum Symphony, transcends or dissolves the linguistic boundaries between “forms” of art and experience. Dada, Surrealism, Cubism, and Merz all coincide in this matter – on purpose. The people behind this artwork recognize art's ability to rearrange the machinery of perception and, in a manner according to Isaac Newton’s 3rd law, reacted with equal and opposite force to the historical momentum of the conventional perception of art. The artists associated with these movements saw art as being so far pushed into this form and that form, so far removed from the sensual interrelations that defined their experience of art and reacted in equal force to rebalance the scales in the art and human community.
While basically any art form has the potential to calibrate and attune one’s perceptual boundaries, music stands out above the rest. Again, this is due to the intimacy shared between it and the structure which matter assumes. Music’s potential, power, or ability to incorporate aspects of the other senses demonstrates the potential that the human mind has for synesthetic understanding. Synesthesia is defined as a sensation “produced at a point other than or remote from the point of stimulation, as of a color from hearing a certain sound.” Synesthetes see their thoughts projected in three-dimensional space, they taste sounds, they hear light, they feel scent, and they smell emotion. While this sounds profound and even mystical, it is not; everyone experiences this transboundary interrelation, just with little if any notice. Take for instance the common phrase “I see what you mean.” This is used in conversations with no explicit visual aids, yet the expression still seems valid. Why? Because there is an implicit imagery that the individual perceives through what has been called the third eye: the pineal gland.
Writing is similarly a form of art, lost in academia due to its strict delineation between scientific prose and poetic verse. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche states: “A noble education has to include dancing in every form, being able to dance with your feet, with concepts, with words; do I still have to say that you need to be able to do it with a pen too – that you need to learn to write?” All forms of art are just that – forms, morphs, facades, surface ornamentation. The common cord beneath them is human experience; each is capable of evoking imagery, olfaction, taste, sound, tactile sensations, and all in relation to an undercurrent of emotion. There are many directions by which to approach teaching and by which to come to understanding; the typical approach to understanding and teaching human experience is by separating and categorizing objects of experience in their related sense domain.
Music subtly bridges these boundaries that we subconsciously impose within and between ourselves. If the practice of education may institute anything from the practice of music, be it the understanding that red is not just red – it is also the color of the swastika, that the swastika is not just a Nazi psychosocial device, but a Hindu visual instrument for self-transformation; be it the rudimentary focus on posture during practice; be it the ability to adapt to multiple modalities of expression (genre of music/points of view); be it the lively and energetic atmosphere (aura) generated by music. If education may learn anything from music, be it the relationship between form and funk; the way matter interacts with sound to manifest structure. If music is the space in between the notes, and notes are pitched sounds, then music is life; music is an encapsulated microcosm, reflective of the macrocosmic sphere of relationships around it. There is music in word, in gesture, in walking, in breathing; there is music in silence. Meaningful music is music which “moves” you not physically, but internally – emotionally; this may then transduce into kinesthetic resonance, or vice versa. Think about being told no when you want something, you are moved from an emotional state of anticipation to disappointment (physiologically, from bouncing up and down to crying and yelling) and your experience, your world, is altered in accord with that movement; just like my world was altered with the aural movements of The Quantum Symphony.
This capacity to regulate internal movements is rather simple to achieve. A simple suggestion may serve to influence someone's mental state and or the focus of attention. Saying something as simple and unintentional as “think of your toes”, automatically diverts some level of your awareness and energy to your toes. By a simple acoustic representation, an auditory reference to some thing, attention and energy have been diverted and your mind has been unwillingly influenced, remotely controlled. In this case the representation, the medium of reference, is pictorial symbolism - visual stimuli; psychoactive abstractions of thought. Is it any wonder, then, how music produces the powerful ‘hooks’ so definitive of “pop” music? It is because the content is arranged to do so. There is an inherent experience programmed right into the music – and I am not talking about subliminal messaging, but that multiple people may listen to Copland’s Appalachian Spring and independently experience similar imagery and storylines. Music as experience transfer. I sent the following poem to a friend a few weeks ago:
a shallow wind passing over the mountain
the tiger eyes the moon
blossoms billow...
beyond the mountain lay the village
where children laugh and play
where music and dance conjoin
together, the skies rain and the people sing
together, the tides shift and the sun beams
entirety, in consecrated thusness
veiled, or unveiled
the crane flies west
towards snowcapped peaks
a river flowing, cradling the stars
the tiger comes to drink
I wrote the poem immediately in response to her challenge for me to put into words a key I found in my basement. The conversation (through facebook) that immediately followed shows the transference:
Her: Carefully chosen, poetic words. I'm impressed, but why those words?
Me: That’s the key filtered through me. I didn’t really choose. I just observed. Could you see any imagery?
Her: Yeah I can. It's interesting.
Me: What is the color of the sky?
Her: I want to say, orange.
Me: Why do you want to say that? Say what it is, not what you want.
Her: I feel like it should be orange, but it's really dark blue.
In my mind, the color of the sky was dark blue. Everyone shares this capacity, but artists are more readily capable of applying and adapting it. I myself am an instructor in the martial arts Jeet Kune Do and Qi Gong, my friend is an aspiring actress and vocalist. The factors that play into the sharing of experience are the projecting artist’s capacity to render and share a coherent virtual reality in their own mind in relation to the screening artist’s ability to suspend their want and thereby to see, not look; to see both their want and the thing itself in perspective of where each belongs. To share experience like this is essentially to dissolve a boundary between minds, a function that spoken language has played since the utterance of the first word.
We experience not in 3 dimensions, but in 5: sight, taste, touch, smell, and hearing. The three-dimensional model of length, width, and depth are particular to sight; sweet, sour, bitter, salty, and umami are particular to taste; pressure, vibrations, texture, temperature, and spatial relations are particular to touch; odors and fragrances, particular to smell; and amplitude, frequency, and cadence are particular to sound. We experience meaning when there is a connection made between these boundaries, like connecting a word with a concept, or a concept like engineering with the activity of constructing. Education is about the development of the synesthetic mind, the human being integrated in their capacity to interpret and alter their experience and their environment. Educators may do this by first studying their own music; that is, listening to the beat they play on the instrument of their history. Vivian Paley provides an example: "apparently I needed classroom after classroom of young children demanding to be heard before I could identify my own voice and imagine my own questions."
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