I have a saying that I inflict upon my students, mostly directed towards musical analysis, but widely applicable: “The obvious is in control… expose it!” The statement points toward a lot of important realities, and is at the very foundation of my workshop, Just Listening, which is in turn founded upon principles embedded in an analytical method I’ve worked on for the past 20+ years. That approach is known as the Sound-Energy Aggregate (SEA), which I’ll explore here in the future. For now, let me linger at the starting place, the obvious.
The way I explain the statement is to point to something obvious yet not fully explained by the most brilliant minds humanity has produced: gravity. Gravity operates all the time, silently, unobtrusively. It is powerful, a force that one must never forget, but that few think of actively. In control? Almost no one would disagree that gravity is pretty much in control! Newton set out to study gravity but could not do so directly, which led him to lay out the fundamental effects it has on us, explaining acceleration, diminishing attraction with distance, and much more. Gravitational force is a constant in the equations of physics, a dependable fact still not explained. Einstein attempted to forge an explanation of gravity, and moved us closer to a real explanation but left the phenomenon still not completely accounted for.
So what’s the point in saying the obvious is in control in music and why do I emphasize it in my workshop? In the first place, I do so because we have told people for years that they have to know a lot to understand modern music, that they need to have a level of expertise to comprehend this complicated stuff, to the virtual exclusion of obvious factors that everyone can use to quickly explain the impact of a piece or passage of music. These things are so obvious – “it gets loud”, “the trumpet played really high and that was very exciting”, e.g. – that people don’t realize they capture something important and real. Furthermore, taking something obvious in music, like gravity in physical reality, and seeking to discover how that obvious factor is influencing the perception of musical reality will yield results over a long period of exploration. Consider the outcomes of sticking with the attempt to explain gravity, and how it has pushed us toward deeper and deeper realizations about the nature of the universe: the same kind of outcome awaits us in music. For one thing, the old concept of music as a universal language has rather crashed on the realization that cultures strongly shape the subtleties of pitch usage (think melody) to the point of ownership, but seemingly all musical cultures use the more obvious factors (volume, speed, etc.) in quite similar ways to generate excitement, relaxation, and a host of important impacts. So maybe the universal has to be pretty obvious.
In my workshop, Just Listening, I ask participants simply to tell me what they hear, what they remember after listening to a musical selection. At some point, I end up encouraging those who are afraid to speak their truth, and the result is pretty predictable in delivering something really essential about that music, something seemingly too obvious to share. When people share those things, they typically point to places where more learned analysis will yield technical insights into the music. That leads to another of my sayings, a slogan if you will, that appears on my Just Listening business card: “Music meets us where we are.” Music is a multi-dimensional phenomenon, whose various layers of information deliver a unified experience that can be understood by people at any level of expertise. This is not to say a person with no background in the music of another culture, for example, gets the same experience as an expert, but that they clearly hear and process the musical energies transmitted by compressions and rarefactions of air.
On the other hand, expertise can get in the way of truly and accurately absorbing experience in the first place, and stating the obvious, paying attention to the obvious, is one of the most powerful ways to dispel mythical concepts widely accepted in the field of experts! All one has to do is think of the emperor and his new clothes. I know this through my own experience: many times, in analyzing a piece of music on paper, from notation, I get excited about something I find, and then when I listen again (a little dose of the obvious, the truth) I find that the thing I’m so excited about is actually hardly audible. We who consider ourselves expert at music, or new music, or anything, await the impact of the obvious truth to correct our habitual thoughts, favorite tendencies, and misguided notions.
This phenomenon – the inability to process input that negates one’s prejudices – is at the very heart of cultural snobbery, and is a driving force behind my urge to issue a corrective for music theory, to shift it to a full consideration of all active factors in the attempt to understand music’s impact. Deep knowledge and experience in a tradition is essential to any musician, but to use the tenets and practices of one’s own culture to malign a musical style that doesn’t employ them is flat-out wrong. And to weaken that tendency in music, to open one’s awareness to other musical truths, is an excellent first step in dispelling other sorts of prejudice and exclusion.
Paying attention to the obvious is a good way to set musical cultures on the same footing. I founded Just Listening because I want to pursue this path with others by listening to music we don’t know, don’t understand, as well as to music we think we already know.