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Incredibly insightful
Victoria Lansford
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Willow Pearson
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Philip Rubinov Jacobson
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Stuart Davis
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M a t t h e w D a l l m a n
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THE EMBRACE OF SOUND
An Integral Music
Part I Part II
PART I: SENTIENCE & SOUND
The pitch of the sound generated by the black hole translates into the note of B flat. But, a human would have no chance of hearing this cosmic performance because the note is 57 octaves lower than middle-C....At a frequency over a million billion times deeper than the limits of human hearing, this is the deepest note ever detected from an object in the Universe.
NASA press release, Sept, 2003
"The composer reveals the innermost nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake."
Arthur Schopenhauer
It is not altogther uncommon these days for musicians to comment that while differences between music from disparate cultures most certainly exist, nonetheless 'it is all just music'. This statement is at turns maddeningly simplistic or radically profound. In truth, it is both. No matter what traditional or contemporary association a form of music might have, and no matter in what culture the music calls home, all music shares deep commonality, or deep features. There are the deep features of sound, expressed in time.
As the walls between the world's musical cultures continue to render more transparent, the surface features of music (emergent in culture according to different expressions of rhythm, tone, form, color, etc.) appear as beautiful curtains. These curtains decorate a window through which we glimpse, feel, and hear the deepest sentience in full shine. Music, at its essence, is a Sea. According to Hazrat Inayat Khan, Music (capital M) is the vibration of the subtlest strings of existance. Humans, in their earliest evolution may well have been undifferentiated from the world of sound around them. Thus archaic humans in one sense were sound, though completely unconscious of that relationship.
Only as humans have become more self-aware in the millions of years since the emergence of the 'archaic' worldview have we even begun to see 'sentience' as something distinct from 'pure sound'. Indeed, in many ways human life and music are distinct, and require different kinds of knowing, being, and doing. Yet we need not dissociate or radically cut the cord between sentience and sound.
What does this mean? It means that if washing the dishes is distinct from listening to a string quartet, a deeper current of energetic aural motion can still connect the two. If sound is vibration, and humans are likewise vibrations at our most basic level, then indeed for all of our thought otherwise, we nonetheless share something utterly inseparable with music. We are sound. We are Music. And our lives, through the living of them, express Music.
Do you not believe me? You do not need to. We all have our own relationships with sound, and our own relationships with music. But you might listen to the sound of your own breathing, and tell me honestly -- is there not something of bare music in it? And are your best moments of your life are altogether different than the best moments of your favorite song or composition? What is the emotional distance between the two? And what does it mean when two people groove deeply to the same song at the exact same time? How do many become one via music?
Conversing About Music
The seeds of music have been planted in all cultures that we know of. We know this because we can hear music in every culture. Find for a culture in today's world, or a culture from our history, and most likely there will be some form of music that lives and grows. You'll know it when you hear it. If you put on the right set of ears, you can hear the music as you hear your own native music. The more perspectives you can take, or the more sets of ears you have, the more beauty you are apt to discover.
The world's cultures give life and animation to sound in innumerable ways, almost too many for language. It is simply astonishing to contemplate the sheer vastness of diversity in the music world. Take a couple notes, a couple rhythms -- and what is born are a thousand songs. It is breathtaking to realize what few things are needed to make a wave that thousands can surf, over and over again.
In the contemporary age, technology has brought access to the world's cultures to a previously unattained degree. Walk into a good music store, and the recordings within take you to nearly any corner of the Earth. One effect is the excitement at being able to listen to such wonderful music from so many different cultures. As composer W.A. Mathieu writes, no culture has the corner on Music (capital M). For people who get off on finding music from cultures different from their own, this is an amazing age to be alive.
On the other hand, there is a sense that it is more difficult to find one's identity and solid footing amidst the parade of the world's music. The sheer bulk of the contemporary library presents an imposing mountain to climb. Many contemporary musicians already climb and camp on this mountain, and each and every one are heroic in their journeys.
Living in ignorance of all of the world's musical treasures, in all of the nooks and crannies, feels intuitively like the wrong thing to do. Putting our heads in the sand and not listening to what is out there feels like a missed opportunity to grow, as if we turn our backs on the world. Yet the sheer immensity of music in the world is enough to bring about just that kind of isolation, for it is difficult to process it all. It ain't easy being worldcentric.
This planet-centric mountain of music, so to speak, (with innumerable lakes, rivers, streams, and oceans) presents certain new issues for the musicians of today. One of those is the question, 'How do we talk about it all?' With the existance of so much music here and now, what is the best langauge we have that we all can use for these discussions? With an effective language in place, it would appear to follow that we can then have more enriching experiences with the wealth of the world's music. So I ask: given the span of music from around the world, what will an appropriate language sound like? What are the concepts and understanding that a worldcentric music language will evoke? In what ways can we talk a relatively common tongue about music?
Of course we can always just listen. Music, at its core, is meant to be listened to, and experienced as an aural art, with its energetic aural motion. New music, as in music we have never heard before, brings a space for a new kind of embrace, consciousness, and language. Usually we listen to music alone, and talk about with with others. The agency of listening mixes with the communion of sharing those experiences. Both aspects can be explored and practiced at the fullest capacities. Instead of priviledging one at the expense of the other, I suggest that we honor the truths and possibilities of both.
Integral Music is able to provide the model for just this sort of agency + communion aural mix. Integral Music provides the tools and cultures for a fully integrated and comprehensive experience of music. Integral Music emerges by taking as much into account, and then acknowledging the patterns that emerge as deep framework for all of music. Just as cultural general centers of gravity grow beyond our national borders, and thus grow trans-cultural, our music will likewise has grown trans-cultural, and will likely continue to do so. Music, as one of the most discreet arts, flows like water around obstacles. Music is beyond container, though we are prone to think otherwise. Or as American composer Keith Jarrett said, music has the power to rearrange the brain cells of the listener.
As we note and irrigate aural-energy flows, we can make some very basic assumptions to help orient a large amount of information, cultures, and kinds of music. Fundamentally, music sounds. That is, music is primarily sonic. Likewise, discussion about music is primarily linguistic. We talk with logic and poetry. Of course sometimes we talk musically, and sometimes our music talks. But essentially, music is about sound and music discussion is about words.
There is a saying amongst practioners of Indian music that theory is "the words and principles which describe and prescribe musical practice". In other words, there is the music we play, and there is the manner in which we talk about playing. Both go hand in hand. We listen, and then we talk about what we heard. Or we play, and we talk about what we have played. We cannot have one without the other, in either case.
Thus the distinction is captured as practice and theory. More poetically, the terms are praxis and theoria. Praxis and theoria are fundamental to Integral Music. Praxis is performing and listening to music, first-hand -- there is a praxis of performing, composing, and singing music, and there is a praxis of listening, appreciating, and contemplating music. Theoria is talking about music, in books or conversation, in 2nd or 3rd person. 'Music theory' has generally meant the logical/mathematical aspects of music's structural principles (scales, chord progression, etc). Theoria includes all of that in a more general embrace, as any aspect of music that isn't first-hand music.
In truth, music tends to run ahead of our ability to talk about it. The is little doubt that the first plainchant of Hildegard von Bingen brought forth the same barely-verbal 'oohs and aahs' that Indian raga did when it first hit Indian ears. Likewise for West African drumming, Renaissance vocal polyphony, American jazz, Brazilian tango, and all music. Music, as sound, comes first, and our conversation about that music comes second.
So while the music of the future is still only barely audible in the ears of our musicians, and barely make a hum in their bodies, what exists today is a span of music from every country and every land on the planet. The world has music. We play it, and we listen to it. We can put records from around the world on our shelves, and attend music performances as much as we can. But then how do we talk about this span? Where do we begin?
An Integral Model for Music
What would happen if we took everything relavant to music, in terms of praxis and theoria, put it on the table without preference or priviledge to one tradition or culture? What would happen if we honored the beauty and value of this span, and then honestly gauge what deeper patterns arise within the inevitable depth of this diversity? What would happen if, for example, we put African polyrhythms next to Indian raga and European polyphony? Can we honor the diversity, distill the deeper features of each, and coordinate those deeper features with those of all of the world's music?
That is exactly what Integral Music aims to accomplish. As best as we can understand music from cultures of the past as well as cultures of the present, we give clear ears to all of it, and open-minded look at how music manifests in its culture, as well as a formal 'whole'. Thus music from all continents, all countries, and all regions of each country can be honored as the beautiful music that it is, AND we can have a model to begin to more intimately grasp it all. That is the aim of Integral Music.
So, yes! it's all music, so let's continue listening, dancing, celebrating, and contemplating. Yes! it's all music, and let us listen with those 'it's all music' ears. Yes! it's all music, so let's not allow national and cultural boundaries keep us from deeper exchanges across physical and mental boundaries.
And while we listen with our 'it's all music' ears, let us also build the languages and social structures to further allow us to gain deeper meaning and relationships with music, not only in agency but in communion with other people, around us and from other cultures. Integral Music aims to allow the praxis of music and the theoria of music to flourish side by side without undue hinderance upon one another.
To Know, To Do, To Be
Integral Music can be thought of as having three modes. There is a mode of knowing, a mode of doing, and a mode of being. Thus Integral Music includes epistemology (to know), methodology (to do), and ontology (to be). What all of these means in basic terms is that there is a conceptual mode, practical mode, and spontaneous mode of music.
Integral Music takes all of these modes, and all of the truths for forms of validity of each, into account. Take any one of those modes away, and Integral Music is markedly less inclusive. These modes represent the three main ways that we deal with music in the world. Each mode operates in enormously different and unique ways. It is the aim of Integral Music to take all modes into account, to form an Integral Map to bring forth the fullest energy of each in the music we create.
You might see that the methodology of music is praxis, discussed above. The different kinds of behavior we employ in our experience with music -- including the spectrum of factors involved in playing music and listening to music -- are referred to as the methodology of Integral Music. Exercises, games, strategies, methods, procedures, experiments and more are included here, in the playing of music and the listening to music. Integral Music, instead of suggesting a few kinds of methodologies, in fact aims to coordinate all methodologies relevant to the praxis (as other sections of this paper will begin to demonstrate). One area of Integral Music, then, is a Integral map of possible methodologies of music praxis. Methodology is the 'do' aspect of Integral Music, and the integration of 'doing' is fundamental to Integral Music.
Likewise, you might see that the theoria described above is more generally called the epistemology of Integral Music. Any discussion about a means of knowing, and knowledge proper, about music becomes a discussion about epistemology. Music theory, expanded as theoria, to include knowledge from sensorimotor to mental to spiritual realms, informs the epistemology of Integral Music. Integral Music, then, offers a coordinated map of the various epistemological schools that exist or have existed in the discipline of music. It is specifically from here where a large portion of a worldcentric language of music can emerge. Epistemology is the 'know' aspect of Integral Music, which aims to integrate all major forms of 'knowing'.
Interdependent on both the methodology and epistemology of Integral Music is its ontology. Here, we study the 'being' aspect of music. For example through our best poetry (Hazrat Khan's Mysticism of Sound and Music is a prime exemplar) we can study, in W.A. Mathieu's words, the musical life. How is it that musicians experience the world (interior and exterior)? What does it mean to have a musical appreciation, that reflects consciousness and awareness of all of one's activities and endeavors? What are the natures of lifestyle that a musical life suggests? Integral Music provides a general guide to map out the possibilities of being, as musician as well as lover of music. Ontology is the 'be' aspect of Integral Music. The spectrum of 'being', in possibilities and present actuality, can be integrated, it appears, by Integral Music.
Thus the three spokes to the Integral Music wheel are maps for methodology, epistemology, and ontology. These maps -- as points of departure and multifaceted touchstones -- take into account both span and depth of all relevant accounts from any musical culture, tradition, interpretive language, or aural form. These maps honor the truths and validity inherant in any kind of music, and coordinate a integrated framework for a wider, deeper, and more resonant embrace of music as potential reality, glimpsed right now. As a model that can incorporate whatever new forms of methodology, epistemology, or ontology that emerge or are uncovered, Integral Music can grow into a highly relevant tool for the emergence of a radically avant garde music. Integral Music is ever-growing, as well as heuristic. This music can be Integral, both in its creation by musicians, but in the nature of the sonorous image of the music itself.
An Integral Musician
The term Integral Musician is less a term to impose standards upon people. There is no concrete test one must pass to receive the title of 'integral musician'. The term is more to recognize the spectrums of knowing, being, and doing available to contemporary musicians. An Integral Musician is a person who can know, do, and be in comprehensive, informed, and embracing ways.
Thus a musician with reasonable capacity to function across and along the spectrums currently available is thus an Integral Musician. One's music does not have to sound a certain way, be formed in a certain pattern, or follow a preordained structure. It is possible that contemporary cultures won't be able to adequately talk about and interpret an integral musician's music for quite sometime, even after the passing of the musician. At the emergence of a new music, in small or large scale, there is always a difficulty, even impossibility, to interpret that music in any interesting way.
One of the hypothesis of Integral Music is that the Integral maps of knowing, doing, and being can facilitate the increased emergence of leading-edge music by leading-edge musicians. Thus Integral music education aims to faciliate avant-garde music. The tools provided by the Integral model aim to offer aid to those musicians with interest, need, or impulse to deepen, widen, and expand consciousness, and tools to reflect that deepened consciousness in what Aaron Copland calls a sonorous image.
Anne Barclay Morgan, in writing about Integral Art, specifically painting and sculpture, wrote that "the term 'Integral Artist' seems preferable to 'visionary artist' or 'spiritual artist', since these terms can be limited by the viewer's expectations of what a visionary or spiritual artist should be making." I suggest we apply the same idea to the term Integral Musician. Freedom emerges for Integral Musicians to compose and perform music anywhere along the spectrum from popular to conceptual to sacred. What an Integral Musician can perhaps provide is a more resonant impact upon listeners, no matter what structure or system used in the music.
Ken Wilber writes that the Integral model does suggest an elitism, but it is a form of elitism to which everyone is invited. Integral Music does not priviledge one tradition of music, one culture of music interpretation, one kind of musician, or a certain kind of aural motion. What Integral Music invites is a deeper, wider, and more resonant embrace by all of us of the truths of our own existance, the evidence for which lay in the music around and within. Integral Music is a clarion call to transcendence, to quite literally bring transcendence via our singing, playing, dancing, and listening. Integral Music invites us to acknowledge the different forms of truth and validity that constitute sentience. And Integral Music invites us to reflect deeper sentience in the sound we make. With a deeper, wider, and more embracing sentience, our sonorous images can sing volumes.
The Nature of Music Theory
Music theory, as part of an epistemology of Integral Music, is thus distinct from ontology and methodology. 'Music theory' is the set of principles and language we use to discuss music; music theory is not music itself. Again, while music is sonic (vibrating sounds based in rhythm, tone, lyric, and so on), theory is linguistic (spoken/written words and concepts). Most everything we can talk about with regard to music is theory of some sort.
The usefulness of this distinction is to clarify theory and thus not restrict theory to its often notated, mathematical qualities. This manner of music theory has been developed and emphasized in the West and specifically European classical traditions starting in large part around the 19th century. The mathematical abstractions common to Western music theory certainly form an important aspect of theory. Of course Integral Music takes into account the grand traditions of Western music theory. But theory--as any nature of discussion about music that isn't music itself--can thus be a great deal more inclusive.
An Integral Music Theory integrates the knowledge and languages we use to discuss music from all known perspectives. 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person perspectives, for example, are gathered and catalogued to assemble a model. Additionally, the Integral model includes music theory as reflected on body, mind, and spirit levels. The depth of body, mind, spirit integates with the span of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person experience to form a broad template for Integral Music.
Sound like a lot? In truth it is, which is in part what makes the prospect of a genuinely authentic Integral Music Theory truly enticing. An Integral Music Theory expands upon the nature of 'music theory' common to music education in the West to gather and joins the forms of music theory from African, Asiatic, and all other tradition to create, for the first time, a truly inclusive model of epistemology which incorporates theory from sensorimotor to spiritual.
An Example: Voice-leading
Let's take the area of voice-leading. This area forms a truly fundamental aspect of Western music theory. The organ chorales by J.S. Bach, specifically, are the musical basis for an enormous amount of scholarship about the nature, construction, and potential of 'voice-leading'. Voice-leading refers to the ways in which two or more melodic lines, or 'voices' interact and form a coherant sonorous image. Most Western music theory textbooks use the various angles of voice-leading as the foundation of the entire theory of music.
Oftentimes, music students are taught voice-leading primarily through written expression (pencil and staff paper). In some instances, music students have to perform the rudimentary voice-leading on a piano. At least in this way, the aural qualities of voice-leading are heard, and not just looked at on paper, or a chalkboard -- thus exclusively a mental recognition. An Integral Theory of Music would suggest that voice-leading, and by extension all common chord progressions, can be experienced in ways beyond an exclusively mental grasp.
Integral Music, through coordination of a wider methodological embrace, can suggest one or more procedures to expand the mental recognition of voice-leading to other manners of recognition and comprehension. For example, Integral Music coordinates the literature that describes the ways that a bodily recognition of music can emerge. This bodily (or somatic) recognition can be triggered not only by writing chord progressions (one procedure), or perfoming them on a piano (another procedure), but also singing the progressions. The act of singing represents one procedure that brings forth perhaps the the most embodied manner in which to feel and express the qualities music. Or as Mathieu writes, 'sea meets shore' in the act of singing. Even people who aren't especially talented at singing can use this procedure to experience the power of music in a more engaged way. Again Mathieu: "Everyone, no exceptions, can learn to sing in tune."
A Spiritual Recognition
So we have a sketch of a bodily and mental recognition of music. Through this very brief example, we have exercises for somatic and mental recognition of music. In a rudimentary conception of body-mind-spirit, I name procedures for the first two. So that leaves a 'spiritual recognition' of music. How might a such a recognition, in the essence of aural motion, be brought forth via exercises?
A spiritual capacity of the common Western voice-leading emerges as music itself often emerges, spontaneously. What does this mean? It means that music is an outpouring of a musician's interior life and deepest connection to music via an aural representation of that connection. A spiritual recognition emerges when the boundary between musical intention and musical attention is erased.
In the context of basic voice-leading, a polyphony of voices can grow organically, in the moment, according in large part to the spiritual temperment of the particular musician. What are the procedures for this sort of emergence? One of the gifts that W.A. Mathieu offers is a rather simple 5-step plan for learning the Western chord progressions on the piano. His steps are quite similar to what I have outlined so far, yet appear to go one step further. That is, his steps appear to enter into spiritual realms. The steps are:
1) Learn the progression, in a strict sense, in strict rhythm
2) Sing the progression, one voice at a time, and filling in the other voices on the piano
3) Arpegiate the progression, using different rhythms for each voice
4) Expand the progression, by playing the voices in different registers
5) Improvise with the progression, using as much of the span of the piano as desired
From there, one can proceed to the composition, either by recording or by notation. The space opened by these steps allows a great deal of music to flow. The musician not only deeply experiences the power of the primary Western chords, but through singing, also gains an intuitive/bodily knowledge of the feeling evoked, deep in one's gut and bones. Thus music, as spirit, can both be earned by discipline, and spontaneous in playing.
And it is the aspect of spontaneous flow that I suggest where one kind of spiritual recognition of music emerges. In an improvised music, spontaneous in its birth, the intention of the musician aligns with attention. Sea matches with Shore. The thoughts of the musician become the actual sound of music.
A Cadence, An Expansion
And what have I done here? I have talked music theory! Does it sound like the kind of music theory found in most Western classical textbooks? Sadly, no, although Mathieu's seminal book, Harmonic Experience, profoundly bucks that trend, and establishes, in my opinion, a standard never before set in the history of music.
But I have talked theory, just not the kind of theory that is mental/rational. The kind of theory I have talked is also sensorimotor as well as a theory that is spiritual. The mental level is where most Western music textbooks center. The poetic spiritual level is where pointing-out instructions occur, where the student-to-student or teacher-to-student discussions are around topics nearly ineffable or discreet, but nonetheless quite real amongst musicians of similar experience. The sensorimotor level is where we feel music in our bones, gut, spine, and throat.
An Integral Music gathers all major languages about music, from all major music cultures, and can harness the power of each given the truths of each coordinated in a larger, Integral framework. Music theory is unavoidable, because to talk about music is unavoidable. Integral Music provides distinct yet related maps of methodology, epistemology, and ontology, or map of 'doing, knowing, and being'. Integral Musicians can compose and perform music informed by all three. And through sound, Integral Musicians can give us all new and more informed ways to touch, taste, view, and hear the manifest and radically unmanifest world.
READ PART II
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