Krishnamurti, SEA, Analysis

I have come across some quotes by J. Krishnamurti, on the subjects of listening and analysis. The thoughts push me to come up with a new word for the sort of holistic musical analysis enacted by my workshop, Just Listening, which I call by the rather technical name, the Sound-Energy Aggregate (SEA). I invite you to help in this naming process, please read on to find out how.

What began as a recognition of the unity of sound – of the phenomenon that contains virtually every musical component and creates what we describe variously as energy, affect, or emotion – I used for years as a compositional tool, and then realized it could be used as an analytical method.  

Eventually I realized that the way one must listen in the early stages of SEA analysis — which posits that each musical element can contribute an energy contour of its own that we perceive as part of a greater whole, or aggregate — is very similar to how one sits in Zen meditation, or Shikantaza, “just sitting”. I have thus created a workshop to carry that open-eared, pure listening to as many people and communities as possible through the Just Listening workshop. The following quote I came across from Krishnamurti references the kind of listening I’m interested in:

“When you give your whole attention to something, you listen to the totality of the thing. When you attend, there are no borders of attention. When you so intensely listen, you are listening to the birds, the wind, the breeze among the leaves, the slightest whisper. In the same way, the very act of listening brings about total attention in which you see the totality and the whole significance and structure of what is being said. Not only what the speaker is saying but also when you are listening to your wife or husband, to your children, to the politician or priest, to everything about you. Then there is no choice, only clarity. There is no confusion but right perception.”

It is pretty clear from this statement that in the mind of a listener giving full attention to listening, there is not a place for analysis, for the taking apart of constituent elements that we consider to be the heart of analysis. Another quote from Krishnamurti addresses analysis in a meaningful way, as follows: 

“The process of analysis is the process of evaluation and censoring: this is right, this is wrong; this should be, this should not be, which is the very nature of conflict.”

This statement rather casts shade on the process of analysis as currently understood, as a process that necessarily limits what one gives attention, that produces conflict from such differential treatment. Just Listening is an excellent antidote, in its use of non-discriminatory listening leading to awareness of where to put further, more conventional analysis when one desires that outcome. But the true value of the Just Listening approach is in how it honors, places immense value upon that first stage, the initial perception, and in its reliance on stating the obvious about what we have heard. In consideration of the statement about analysis by Krishnamurti, one might say that Just Listening is aimed at understanding how music comes together, not how we take it apart.

We need a term for that. Maybe what I’m really aiming for is something that would not be called analysis by the definition Krishnamurti offers. The urge is toward something more like synthesis, bringing elements together not to create something new but rather to account for how music works.  We are coming into an age where multiple causality is more and more recognized, with the old claims of single-cause thinking more and more discredited, so that accounting for what makes music work needs to adapt. I see the Just Listening / Sound-Energy Aggregate approach as just that, but I’d like to call it something other than analysis.

So I come to this moment: I ask for your suggestions of what to call this approach to the accounting of music’s impact on us.  Please comment below to help move this thought forward, this urge to account for the way music works, and suggest some word or phrase that points to a fundamentally holistic experience remaining so.  The kind of analysis the Just Listening experience achieves and that the Sound-Energy Aggregate is rather founded upon is an open-source, crowdsourced model, collecting the many realities of impact on a group to illuminate musical reality, so allowing the same process to help me arrive at a name for the pursuit makes total sense to me.  If it does to you as well, send me your thoughts on a name!