How’s it going? It’s a simple question that needs a more complicated answer than “fine”. The more I live in this world, the more I realize that my life is full of opposites, and that both “fine” and “not so well” are credible answers to that familiar question on a given day. And I’m coming to believe that musical experience of many types prepares us to live among our contradictions.
As listeners, music carries contradictory energy to our ears all the time, even in the same piece at the same time. The energy of one parameter might be rising (the music is going higher and higher!) while simultaneously falling in another (but it’s getting softer and softer at the same time!), so we can imagine quite a complex situation already, without even considering that other factors may contradict or complement things further. One person may respond that the energy is rising, another that it is falling, because they are paying attention to different things.
In seeking contemplative practices to use in my course, Contemplating Music, I found a practice outlined by Arthur Zajonc designed to train students in holding contradiction. As Arthur states, much of the drama of life comes to us through the coincidence of opposites, and fundamental contradictions such as the wave-particle dilemma in physics drive us to explore more deeply in order to resolve them.
Recently at the composition seminar at my school, we had a guest, Amy Williams, who spoke of exploring musical treasure to be found in the gap between controlling and not controlling what players do. This is clearly a contradictory setting, and has been a significant divide in the new-music world for some time, with composers ordinarily choosing one or the other path most of the time. Finding ways to stay in that space, to hold the contradiction, allows Amy to produce fresh music that can sound quite normal in some ways, while providing other sonic information that would be called abnormal by some listeners. This compositional pursuit takes great patience, and the reward is that listeners are drawn back to the music because they want to figure it out by further listening or study.
Music carries these opposites with ease, all we have to do is set the air molecules in vibration. One thing this means is that music sometimes brings us things we like at the same time it brings things we don’t like, and one of the fundamental attributes of Zen practice is setting aside likes and dislikes. What? Really? Yes! Not to say we can simply abandon likes and dislikes, but that we set them aside. Either reaction points to a remarkable event in the music that we might examine more deeply: what in the music causes it?
Of course, this very phenomenon – like and don’t-like – can cause us to stop listening and drift into a reverie of happy thoughts, or it might cause us to stop listening altogether. This is where the practice of setting aside reactions comes in. We can train ourselves to keep listening, to stay engaged with the stream of sound coming to us whether we like it or not. Sitting meditation is an excellent way to practice allowing thoughts to enter our minds and not get involved with them, let them be and drift away.
Listening to music is perhaps an even better, more easily accessible means of developing this skill, and there’s no better way to facilitate that development than to listen with a group and talk about what is heard. Hearing others voice opposite reactions to the exact same music can be a liberating experience. Gone are the days of telling someone their reaction is wrong! We understand too much now of how set and setting, background and experience influence our emotional reactions to music to violate another’s lived musical experience with such a statement.
Zen aims to liberate all beings. Let’s liberate some with musical experience!
I dig what I am hearing, reading this. The senses are subjective. This is what makes life interesting and worthwhile living. But it doesn’t change the unwritten compact that all composers should have with listeners – which is to show up and be real. A concert hall is a living, breathing space – not some sci-fi laboratory where bad things are done to good people.
I attended a free-admission modern music concert last night, at Brandeis; 10 people showed up; all…friends or colleagues. I was astounded by the lack of anything that altered my experience of this life. Serious music (as it now exists) has no role in America except as a soundtrack for composers who feel it is their right to be paid to create pure, unadulterated dreck. And for whom? A super-slim intellectual minority clad in ivory! We desperately need a post-modernist movement which is humanistic, down-to-earth, sensual, emotional, rich in overtones to which “real people” can relate. And that is especially difficult with the genre of contemporary serious music because it is primarily a one-sense organism which wishes to remain chaste of all the other senses. (If nothing else, John, open a concession stand at these “so called” music concerts; allow customers to swallow popcorn, milk duds…Coca Cola “during” the show so that they can, at least, make an emotional connection – feel something that can help to convey the substance of music into their bodies.)