In my writing here, and in my teaching of composition and theory, I have learned to embrace and celebrate not knowing. Having a desire to understand more deeply this phenomenon, knowing it as I do mostly from an experiential perspective, and arriving at it from several angles, I have been reading Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg, whose name will forever be connected to the uncertainty principle. Heisenberg discusses the impact on western philosophy of uncertainty, which is to undermine the potential for certainty that we humans so desire.
The influence on human activity of that desire is vast, it seems, with impacts on musical taste, politics, relationships with others, and much more. My interest in sound as the fundamental stuff of music has led me to a theory that facilitates an accounting of musical energy by examining many factors, leading to insight into why people vary so much in their reactions to music. Much comes down to probabilities, not certainty, in musical taste as in so much of what we encounter in the modern world.
I find it very interesting, in fact extraordinarily meaningful, that voices of musicians reflect the rising influence of uncertainty during the course of the twentieth century. I am preparing for a course I’ll teach this spring, Contemplating Music, for which this year’s topic is the music and thinking of John Cage and Pauline Oliveros. Uncertainty is a key element in the output of both, famously. Cage’s 4’33” allows whatever sounds during that time frame to be the music, and Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice urges us toward what she calls global listening. Both were strongly influenced by Zen and meditative practices generally.
What arises when we listen openly, globally? This practice is at the base of my Just Listening workshop as well, in which I urge people to embrace not knowing. From the other side of the coin, focused listening, or focal listening in the Oliveros world, develops the ability to move closer to certainty, toward the ability to write down what we hear. The words of my great solfège teacher, Marianne Ploger, resonate here: Marianne said that when students come to her for help, they typically “hear too much”, and their task is to develop that kind of focus.
From my perspective, I advocate for balance, the middle way. Global listening balanced with focal listening, each as needed, when needed. In classes where I employ the Just Listening paradigm, we first listen globally, repeatedly, to discover where to put focused listening and traditional musical analysis. Simply stating what one hears, recognizing that what is, is, becomes a starting point for wider acceptance of music that one is not familiar with. And more modern styles simply require that we pay attention to the whole musical experience, the “too much” that confounds those seeking to hear deeply into traditional tonal music.
I rather think that the music theory that grew in what we call the common-practice period sought to enshrine a degree of certainty in listening, as a theory that extracts from musical practice a framework of musical goals widely enough shared to create expectations in the listener. Composers of that period (ca. 1650-1900) very much learned to navigate and manipulate those expectations, situated as they are at the root of surprise, frustration, and other human emotions evoked by listening to music. Listeners very committed to that musical literature find themselves upset when they really don’t know what to expect. Starting from musical premises outside the norm produces a much higher level of uncertainty, and requires a different mindset for appreciating the outcome, one which embraces uncertainty (or at least a different set of expectations!)
A historical example will underscore this point: in Debussy’s Critics, Alexandra Kieffer goes into great detail describing how contemporaneous writers attempted to explain Debussy’s music — which sounded revolutionary to many at the time — in terms of existing theory, specifically his practice of extending traditional chords by adding more thirds. It took a number of years for the realization to settle that Debussy had in fact liberated the chord from traditional strictures, treating chords as simply another sound rather than hierarchically-bound entities.
In liberating the chord from the need to follow rules of progression, Debussy turns our focus to the acoustical energy of the sound, and brings increased focus on musical elements that have always been with us but find greater importance in creating the aggregate of sound energy. Those factors — things like direction of line, whether sounds are high or low, the overall quality of the sound, whether change happens quickly or hardly at all — require a broader type of listening, one that embraces uncertainty, ready for whatever comes.
The development of science has long influenced art and music, and the growth of uncertainty in life deeply affects the development of music: how we listen to it, how we create it, and of great interest to me, how we account for its impact.