History, Background: Composing, Contemplating, and Theorizing
I have always considered my composing to be, in academia, my “research”. However, a long and growing interest in a manner of accounting for music’s impact on us has developed out of what was originally an aspect of my compositional process into a theory of music whose tenets I now am researching.
What is now known as the Sound-Energy Aggregate emerged out of my fascination with the concept that sound itself creates musical energy. This is, of course, pretty obvious. What led me to deeper realizations was the insight that a sound has all the musical elements in it already (pitch, timbre, rhythm, texture, etc.), and that each of these elements may not only be traced for their technical existence in the music, but that each produces an energy contour that operates in counterpoint to the energies created by other parameters (elements), and that the total musical energy is the outcome of that interaction. So for a long time, I just composed with significant attention to those features.
At a certain point, I realized that what I was working with could very easily go in the opposite direction. That is, it could be used to analyze music. After that, I began using SEA analysis in courses, and wrote a couple of papers and presented them at conferences. SEA was now a research initiative. As I deepened my perspective, I had many realizations about the nature of the approach, and embedded them in an unpublished paper that I have made available online.
The most significant of the new realizations was that some parameters are likely global in their impact and require no training to understand (volume, articulation, etc.), while others are the province of culture (the many aspects of pitch), and require training to fully comprehend. Since I am aware that the modern mind is convinced by empirical research, I have now moved into a more active phase of my research, and it takes two distinct forms.
The more traditional direction the research follows is in an experiment I ran with a class at the Longy School of Music of Bard College. Investigating Musical Affect ran in spring 2018, and the class members and I devised the experiment that one can find (and still participate in!) by following this link. The experiment seeks to establish that the interaction of musical parameters creates a somewhat predictable (or at least statistically significant) impact on the energy perceived to be produced by the music. It is already widely accepted, and easily demonstrated, that a single parameter changes perceived musical energy, but no one has yet shown that adding a second parameter does so as well. Again, to me, patently obvious, but it hasn’t been shown. At this writing (summer 2018), I have not yet processed the data generated by our experiment, but I am confident that we will be able to verify the hypothesis. And of course, once the data is processed, I will report the outcome here and in a paper.
The second form this research takes is from a very different side of the equation, one addressed in the paper already linked. The SEA is, to my mind, a contemplative practice when applied to listening (as opposed to score study). One must attempt to listen completely and fully, without being drawn into judgments, evaluations, and the like until after the listening is complete in order to do a SEA analysis, and that is pretty much the same sort of process as doing Shikantaza, the Zen meditation technique known as Just Sitting.
What I have observed – and this is the “research” that grew out of many years using the analytical technique in a variety of class settings and continues in a workshop I have created called Just Listening – is that when people are encouraged to simply listen together, report the most obvious things they hear in a musical selection, discuss them, listen again, a kind of engaged joy emerges in the group, and the fundamental truths about the music always ends up well understood by participants, regardless of how much musical training they have in their background. This outcome rather proves the tenets of the SEA, and allows people who might have been afraid of new music, or musical analysis in general, to engage with it, theorize for themselves. As I carry this workshop to more and different audiences, I learn more all the time about how people listen, what creates the most impact, how form is perceived, etc.
So, my research grows out of long experience composing, teaching, and thinking. I like that fact, because it means to me that I am following something organic, deep, and real. As I have said so many times to students when exposing the analytical method, “the obvious is in control... expose it!” Pondering the obvious is the path to deep truth, it seems to me, and I’m going to keep on doing that.