This blog is called Contemplating Music for very specific reasons, the primary one being that it urges the adoption of an approach to knowing that differs from the paradigm of learning and knowing that pervades our culture. It’s hard to pin down in just a few words what that paradigm is, but I’ll make an attempt.
The insistence on single-cause answers, of absolute correct vs. incorrect answers – and the subsequent seeming need to prove oneself right no matter what – creates significant problems in our more laudable quest to find truth. Some fields of course need exacting answers, and errors are dangerous in many ventures. There are even right and wrong answers in music theory! But life in music is clouded and made lesser by such exacting attitudes. Many of us, myself included, feel that emphasis on competition in music is destructive, and that cooperation, coming together is more suited to the nature of music. One quickly gets into matters of subjective opinion in music – a world of creation, performance, and listening – where seeming errors are turned into attributes due to a composer’s or performer’s wiles.
When I first began thinking of the Sound-Energy Aggregate as a theory, it became clear that what I was offering was a way of reckoning musical energy by any existing or yet-to-be-devised means of analysis. The first paper I wrote on the topic, published in the SEAMUS journal in 2002 (you can find a copy here) offered the approach as an open vessel, able to receive input from any method that could generate an energy account from its application. I hadn’t realized then that the basis of this attitude was mostly an attitude I carried, one that was growing over the years as I put more and more emphasis on meditation in my life.
Openness to reasoning, impressions, reactions outside one’s realm of experience is a natural outcome of sitting for long periods, observing the mind and having unexpected insights and connections just pop up. Over time, one sees that these insights don’t always align with what one previously thought, and the ability to accept such arisings from others grows in parallel. One comes to accept the lived experience of others as simply their truth, not something that has to cancel or contradict one’s own truth but simply a different reaction. That is to say, one’s reaction is one’s reaction, no need to argue over who is right.
Directly connected to that thought is this one: by releasing one’s tight grasp on the need to be right always, one can begin to see that often people are simply stating a similar point using different terminology. This acceptance of difference offers the teaching and learning process a number of benefits. One is the opportunity to expose and develop shared terminology that aligns with widely-shared vocabulary. Another is the possibility then to talk about what it is in the music that causes our different reactions, which, in the realm of music theory, is to begin the process of really theorizing about factors that have such impact. (Most music theory as taught in schools today would be better described as musical fact, or the materials of music.)
Perhaps the most important contribution of being able to accept thoughts and reactions that differ from my own is that on regular occasion, I find that someone is pointing out something that I had missed, not taken seriously, or didn’t even know existed. When the uninitiated encounter something familiar to an expert, this often happens, and Zen meditation in particular has a term for it, beginner’s mind. Real beginners of course have beginner’s mind! The most significant group of people who have to work toward that state of mind are the existing experts. The state of mind that values “not knowing”, that accepts difference first of all in order to examine the lessons it offers, I would call a contemplative path of learning.
Rather than start out on defense, arguing to prove ourselves right, what if we asked first what this difference might offer to improve our thinking? This is where Contemplative Music Theory offers a path ahead, a path that begins from an embrace of not knowing, allowing the accumulation of factual knowledge to form the foundation of a process built to facilitate insight arising.