I’ve long talked of how anything that helps can also hinder, or some variation of the thought. A point of view, an approach, a way of being, virtually everything, can do harm or good to oneself, one’s cause, society or the world. I’m coming to realize, amid so much rejection of science and the scientific method in popular thought, that indeed the scientific method itself falls into that problematic territory as well. Our information-driven world has a real problem, among so many, and that is reductionism.
Science has made tremendous discoveries by limiting study to a single variable so that changes in that variable show clearly its role in the subject under study. But we have grown lazy in accepting reports based on such studies as “the cause”. My first objection is that single causes are almost always fiction, that multiple factors are always at play on some level. (Scientists of course realize this fact!) Even a baseball hit by a bat will go a certain distance in a certain direction based on a few factors, not just one. Those are factors we can know and that create certainty.
In the social sphere — and that would include music — context always includes factors beyond our ability to measure, making “certainty” of prediction out of the question. In a study that I’ll write about here one of these days, I conducted (with a class from the Longy School of Music) a study to prove the tenets of my Sound-Energy Aggregate theory. One path to proof in our world is the ability to predict outcomes. The main premise of the theory is that changes of energy in one parameter affect our perception of feeling/affect/energy in music, and that making successive changes in other factors determines the cumulative impact. It’s actually a patently obvious assertion: just think of how differently a melody played loud and fast impacts us compared to the same melody played soft and slow! The obvious is not always so easy to prove: it turns out that so much is at play after one or two changes that you simply can’t predict beyond probability of impact, never certainty. (That’s what my theory holds to be true anyway!)
Realistically speaking, I know on a deep level that this sort of proof is not quite possible. Incredibly advanced math is necessary to predict something that has so many variables as musical energy, and some of them are deeply personal. (Harmony, melody, rhythm, dynamic, texture, register, listener experience, taste, setting… the list and sublists go on and on!) This is the assertion of chaos theory as well: unless one knows the state of the several variables at play, one cannot predict an outcome with certainty, but when all values are known, the outcome is predictable.
Back to reduction: it is highly unfortunate that when we attempt to address one problem, our eagerness to bring focus to a central cause of that problem will often lead us to reduce the much larger issue (one clearly with multiple causes) to the single issue we care about. Such is the case in music theory. We have been so fascinated by the impact of notes in melody and harmony that we forget to include all the other stuff in our educational process, in our studies. The remainder of these items do surface in lessons or other parts of a musician’s lived experience, however. Violinists, pianists, rock bands: all practice, advise each other, work to achieve those subtle nuances that bring the music alive at just the right moment.
In the academic world of music theory study, though, reduction is the rule. When one studies music theory in most places, one studies pitch in melody, pitch in harmony — notes, notes, notes — to the point that it excludes a tremendous amount of what makes music beautiful or terrifying. One day I will locate again the statement by a critic of Debussy at the end of the nineteenth century who stated that the impact of L’après-midi d’un faune was due entirely to “surface effect”…
(…don’t get me started! Critics used this slur to suggest that female composers were of lesser quality as well. They might be surprised to know that now, some of the most advanced mathematics is applied to understanding surfaces. I suppose there is an imbedded realization that in truth, understanding deep complexity in people or music was beyond them, and maybe still is beyond us.)
We now have the means to understand the operation of multiple variables, but it isn’t really necessary to utilize the math to realize that our fixed view of problems gets in our way. Especially when dealing with vexing problems, we are often too eager to reduce issues to single causes so we can go after them with more vigor, more anger. Honesty would go a long way toward real solutions, admitting that our emotions might push us to oversell a solution, and realizing that others may be able to show us that the solution we propose might actually harm our ability to solve the problems we address.
Allowing other voices in, voices which bring attention to other variables, other experiences, is essential in order to fully deal with an issue, whether it’s a social problem or just a piece of music we want to understand better. I’ve been working on that for a long time, rather quietly, in my traveling workshop, Just Listening. I like it, I promote it, but I am under no illusions that it is the answer to fixing music theory. Even the theory that it’s based on, the SEA, is designed to allow all manner of input from all kinds of voices, and aims toward a theory that includes all of sound.
Accepting all input, pointing forward rather than at each other. I’d call that a starting point to address a lot of concerns.