Some thoughts after reading another critical survey of 20th-century music

Dear composers:

In this season of "Ten-Best" lists, and year-end rankings, having recently read another taste-making book that sums up a whole century of music-making by lionizing a few "heroic geniuses," I offer a few thoughts:

If we read the histories or the newspapers, we might be forgiven for thinking that the most important thing for us to do is to get to be the one in the history book, in the newspaper, or on tv. We might be forgiven for thinking sometimes that what we are really supposed to be making is not meaning, but successes of ourselves.

All too often, it may come to seem that only by raising ourselves up above the people around us can we gain entry into the small group of artists who actually matter to our cultural institutions. Somehow our critical surveys and our peer reviews and our competitions make us believe that our true value will come to be known only when the determination is made about who gets listed in the biographical dictionary, the reference work, or the certified results of 100 years of critic’s-choice selections. It may seem that the best way to “matter” is to busy ourselves with becoming famous now. We make the mistake of trying to justify ourselves to institutions, instead of writing our music for people in a one-to-one exchange.

We might be forgiven this sin, the sin of constantly measuring ourselves and our work against some kind of projected external judgment, because the very premise of much of our interaction with institutions, and indeed of all criticism and scholarship is to tell us about which artists matter, which ones don’t, and why. Determining what is of enduring substance and what is faddish and empty, what is good and what is bad, what is worthy of our attention, and what is not, and then cobbling those conclusions together into a hierarchical belief system is the unstated project of much of our thinking, writing, and talking about art. I say we are deciding what is worthy, but when it comes down to it, we are really talking about who is worthy and who is not, since it seems to me that in both our elitist and our mass culture we lack the ability to distinguish between artists and their work. We may be asked what music we like, but we usually respond with a list of proper names: “I like Beethoven, I like Björk, I like Berio…”

In fact, so much of what surrounds any act of creation, (once one bites the apple and seeks to share one’s creations with others) seems to be geared toward coercing us to participate in the race to the top of some imaginary heap. I have come to believe that the rock-bottom core-belief vibrating beneath that heap (and behind much of American culture) is that nothing matters unless it is validated with fame, prestige, money or marketing numbers.

If it can be made true that Art only matters if it is discovered and validated by the mechanisms of our commercial institutions (even the very marginal ones of the symphony orchestra, the critical survey, or the academy), then we will find that to follow out the logic of those institutions leads to a kind of dystopia where only the one or two most famous practitioners of any art are of any significance at all, since they have all the fame, prestige, and money that makes art important.

But consider, though, that if we allow the sick world of our own “official” values to hold sway, then the local folksinger whose heart-breakingly sad songs you overhear for free in out-of-the way places and who regularly moves you to tears would not count, and neither would your tears, since they are not money, and they can’t take the place of fame.

This is not what we aspire to in our hearts. One sincere tear must certainly be priceless.

According to the worldview of the New York Times, American Idol, or our Universities, your mother’s quietly wavering voice singing as she empties the dishwasher also would not matter, as she is not a professional singer, and we cannot buy her songs nor even find them on YouTube, nor will she ever receive a major award from the American Academy of Dishwasher Singing.

Yet we know that intimacy and vulnerability, even a certain kind of peace itself are learned from those unself-conscious songs, and spiritual poverty is the result of ignoring or devaluing them.

Similarly, the kids belting out “Down by the Riverside” in protest as bombs fall once more on the children of a foreign country would not matter by our perverse institutional logic either; not the local high-school band playing their hearts out, nor the regional orchestra, nor the amateur chamber musician. By our own clearly articulated institutional values, most of our absolutely essential expressions would be evaluated as insignificant.

The fact that we are implicitly encouraged to think such heresies ought to break our hearts.

I admit that I labor the point, but I believe that the point is an important one: if we follow the logic of the market or the institutions that presume to evaluate our musical offerings and rank them in terms of importance, then some of the most essential musical utterances around us are judged worthless. I am reminded again of something I learned from Salinger’s Franny and Zooey: that another word for what we call "worthless" is in fact "priceless": things that exist beyond exchange value are free from a limit on their value, and therefore can have a value that transcends marketplaces.

So when the institutional book of “Which Music Matters” gets written, (and it is written again and again in our press and our institutional lives) it can come to seem to us more like St. Peter’s book than anything else. But though the great ones listed in its pages do indeed get to enter into some kind of constructed pantheon, I believe that it will not be any kind of heaven.

That’s why my heart and mind are with the countless inspired people who spend their lives giving full voice to their humanity by taking the weight of feeling within themselves and breaking open into sound, helping us to enter the kingdom of heaven right here on this earth.

So let’s throw away the checklist of who matters, and find another way. Look, we can gather around in a circle, and sing our songs together. We’ve been doing it a long, long time as a species–I think we can remember how.

Paternal Teachers

I saw my old composer friend Dan Worley a good while ago, and he reminded of a conversation we’d had about the word “paternal” applied to composition teachers. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.

His use of the word “paternal” in describing a composition teacher had outraged a student of his—I believe because it came too close to “paternalistic,” which has such a negative connotation, as “patronizing” seems to be lurking in there too close-by for comfort.

If we choose instead to speak of “fatherly” teachers, then that will mean (for some) "domineering and controlling", maybe even "abusive and violent." If you choose to speak of “motherly” teachers, then that will mean (for some) "smothering and overly protective" (and for others it might mean "domineering and controlling," maybe even "abusive and violent.")

“Parental” seems like an uncontroversial choice for an adjective to describe our caring older teachers, but why do we want to describe the student-teacher relationship in terms of generational family relationships anyway? The age difference between teachers and their charges often makes brother-sister parallels a stretch, and of course I’ve had students who were older than me too—am I then the son?

I think the answer lies in the operative truth that we all show up for our music lessons with pretty deeply ingrained reaction patterns to authority stemming directly from our relationships with our parents.

I saw another former student recently who wanted to apologize to me for some of his past behavior, explaining that it had more to do with his parents pushing on him as a child than it did to my teaching. I told him that this was par for the course, and that no apology was necessary, because while I could tell he was struggling in the lessons, and I certainly had to try to work with and around his resistances, he at least wasn’t rude. All the rest can be forgiven as normative.

I think it’s inescapable: many of us just need to work out some issues from our early lives that may be related very closely to our reasons for composing and making music in general. These motivations can be very sensitive to the ways in which we relate to authority however it may be expressed, and those sore points definitely come up in composition lessons. Sometimes I think that finding ways to modulate those relationships might be the real content of our study with a teacher, and that all the tips on how to develop craft might be secondary.

I simply don’t see any way for the process of teaching composition or performance to be a merely technical interchange. Feelings and reaction patterns are inherently involved. It may be that one of the main roles of a creative mentor is to help us break free from the way we were parented by offering a similar but safely different and less crucial relationship that is limited to our musical lives.

While its true that many of us could frankly use a little re-parenting, or perhaps a little continued parenting, there are others of us who might really need instead to enter the vast loneliness of ourselves to try to find something that can’t be coaxed forward with a parent, (even a supportive metaphorical one) standing there watching. (As a teacher, allowing this to happen could also be seen as helping to renegotiate an ingrained parental dynamic, of course...)

But once that something been discovered and coaxed out into the open, we could all use some help and support in creating a shape for that vision from a sympathetic and knowledgeable elder. Every one of us does truly live and work and make music in community, in relationship with others, and not solely in the isolation of the smithy of our souls…even if we might sometimes want to tell ourselves otherwise…

Amateur Blessings

My wife teaches piano—this fact is a great blessing on our house. Our home is already blessed by a lot of music, since between the three of us who live here we have two song writers, a classical composer, two violinists, a fiddle player, and two pianists; the list of additional instruments we play goes on to include accordion, tin whistle, banjo, guitar, and bodhran. There also is a great deal of unrestrained singing of all kinds.

So we have no lack of musical joys.

And to cap it all off, most weekday afternoons there are children here for lessons, all between five and eighteen years old, all of whom are growing up with music as a companion.

My wife’s main goal as a teacher is not to turn out future soloists, or formidable technicians, or hot-shots of any kind; her teaching is aimed at helping people who want to make music for the love of it: true amateur musicians. She concentrates on developing a relationship between her students and music, between new musicians and the piano, working toward building a lifetime of love in making music with their own hands. It’s an entirely non-professional endeavor. Yes, she is being paid to teach, but she’s doing it for the love, and she’s passing that love on to her students.

I think that increasing love might be the most important thing that music offers us. I don’t mean that we should make ourselves more desirable or marriageable by being schooled in the finer points of cultured life, as in Elizabethan England. If music does make us more attractive, then it’s a side benefit achieved by making us kinder and more tender. There’s also a huge difference between love and monomania—an obsessive focus on music-making isn’t the same thing as cultivating through music a heart that softens and fills with emotion. Music can bring us into contact with our urge to share, to participate, and to open to those around us. Regularly engaging in music-love can help us learn to let the fire of enthusiasm rise up in us, to follow it into concentration, and then further into the disciplined abandon through which we can burst into sound.

That’s why I feel blessed by all those little ones tromping through my house and interrupting my workdays—it’s the fact that through the practice of music, love is being nurtured in our house, spread like seeds, and grown like a crop.

Tradition All Over Again

It's in the air, I guess--composer Ben Broening sent me Washington Post critic Anne Midgette's thoughts on tradition today; she's writing about opera singers, but I think the thought applies very well to music-making in a general sense:

"Tradition isn’t something to which you mold yourself. It’s something that you absorb in order to be able to express yourself more individually. It’s like a rhyme scheme for a poet: a framework, an organizing principle, or an inspiration rather than a straitjacket. Too often, I fear, the straitjacket is what ends up coming across..."

Tradition is a Metaphor...

"Tradition is a guide and not a jailer."
- W. Somerset Maugham

A traditional musician I know (Jim Perkins, of Finvarra's Wren) has this quotation as his email signature; it identifies a burning issue for those who undertake to learn a tradition and to inflect it by carrying it forward into the present moment, and of course into the future. It's something to think about for composers as well: how much of what we take as given do we let imprison us? This question applies not only to those assumptions that seem to be actively imposed on us by authoritative sources, but also to the places in our minds in which we bend to common custom without reflection. We can be true to the singularities of our particular historical moment and also honor our cultural origins without overtuning them, or being imprisoned by them.

It made me think: What if tradition is a companion, so we don’t have to be all alone, and so that we can stand with our ancestors as we face the future? Can we come to see tradition also as the ground we stand on? We may choose to lie down on it in order to be in as close contact with it as possible, or we may try to leap off of it, but everything we do is launched from that soil, and we always come back down to it in the end.

Calling for a Post-Capitalist Orchestra

In January of 2010, The University of Michigan hosted the American Orchestras Summit. I was a panelist on a session titled “Re-conceptualizing the Symphony.” Here are some of my thoughts, delivered as remarks to the group of orchestra administrators, musicians, and students in attendance:

A video is available here.

Calling for a Post-Capitalist Orchestra

When we ask questions like “what is the orchestra, and how will it survive in the 21st century” we have a tendency to frame the questions in terms of what we believe is given: most notably the repertoire, and economic problems. When we do so, we are very prone to search for solutions that fit neatly within the frame of a capitalist model and its cycles of boom and bust and its insistence that what matters most is what people want most to pay for. What matters most to me, on a cultural level is not the economic exchange value of the orchestra, but rather what an orchestra makes possible. An orchestra is a working model to teach how we can make many bodies come together to make one, to make a tremendous animal that can burst into synchronized sound. It’s a miracle, is what it is, and we ought to be treating it as such. I fear that our efforts to save the institution of the orchestra might focus on saving the organizations and kill the animal.

We look, in short for economic solutions that confuse means and ends. The true end is not merely financial survival, but more importantly a deep relevance to society while being true to core values. As long as we are framing our entire discussion with the marketplace and how to survive in it, we will be chasing a standard by which all things are turned into products. To paraphrase the great writer Wendell Berry, markets and products cannot be true, unless we make them so. The only way we can make a market true to our place and our selves is to make them subject to our values, rather than subjecting ourselves to the market. I think we should properly frame the question of the survival of the orchestra in political, spiritual, and ethical terms.

I’d like to exercise my artist’s prerogative to be both unreasonable and impractical and urge us to choose the means first, and then follow them to where they lead us. I’d like to encourage the imagination of a post-capitalist, post-corporate orchestra. Another way to look at this is to try to give people what they need and not what they want, and to strive to figure out what an orchestra could and should be, what social and spiritual needs it might meet, instead of simply how to get people to come to concerts in larger numbers, or how best to pursue the cold, dead perfection of execution that is constantly referred to under the euphemism “artistic excellence.”

If I imagine an orchestra of the future in the US, what I see is a handful of key shifts that would be desirable:

I: Regionalism should be a driving force. I would call for a divorce from the internationalist aesthetics and idealized Europeanism that characterize both the aesthetic and organizational focus of most organizations, and favor a move to fully embrace regional cultural and musical variations. Instrumentation would change from place to place, and local ethnic and regional music styles should be incorporated into the performances. If this were so, the style of playing would change from region to region, and we would gauge our programming and our performances as to how they related to our actual place…not only the imagined European cultural origins of our place. Allowing regional variation in instrumentation and repertoire would permit the creation of something that would reach beyond regional economies of scale and donor corporations, and into regional economies of meaning. Local environments, local issues, local people, local food, and local soil would be considered as part and parcel with the music that the orchestra was a purveyor of. A simple equation to implement as a start toward this goal would be to reverse the ratio of European to American content offered during the season, as well as reversing the ratio of historical works to modern ones.

II: I wonder about a more political approach to the role and justification of the orchestra. I do not mean that the orchestra should participate in partisan politics, but rather that it should be recognized as part of a community, and a full participant in the broadest notion of politics, in the search to define and achieve what is good for us as a people. We have seen a massive disassembly of civil society over the last thirty years; economic Darwinism and the values of unfettered supercharged capitalism have bred an overriding disrespect for the common good. I like to think of the orchestra as if it had the status of Central Park in Manhattan—no one who lives there wants to see that park abandoned or turned into apartments, even though it’s prime real estate, it is expensive to maintain, it makes no profit, and is very costly in material terms, useless as a profit-generator. Even so, no one advocates its destruction, and no one is suggesting that Central Park should be parceled up and sold, because we need it. Central Park is valuable and necessary because without it we would be less human and the city itself would be too completely inhospitable. We couldn’t live quite as fully as humans in Manhattan without Central Park, and the status of the orchestra in our society is not entirely dissimilar. Orchestras are a civic good, one that should belong to us all like Central Park, and as such they have no business behaving like corporations or seeking to dominate markets.

III: I believe that orchestras should directly address spiritual concerns. The orchestra is important not because it can behave like a corporation; its value does not lie in the ability to make money or move fast in order to glom on to the next lucrative trend. We’ve heard too many times that our citizens and our institutions are compelled to play the game of figuring out where the puck is going and get there first, but why on earth should classical music as a discipline aspire to chasing after the illusory trends and fads when we have so often seen that they lead nowhere? I am saddened when I see orchestras caving in to of cashing in on short-term cultural capital, of cash in on short-term cultural capital: Brand-name celebrities and the next hot thing have little to offer us beyond the short-lived thrill we get from being near the glow of fame or a gift shop transaction. This is not the road to true relevance.
Instead I have a desire to see the powerful ritual of the orchestra concert recognized as a ritual, to bend it toward liturgy and away from product and profit. This powerful ritual order could be used to address any number of serious cultural problems, to take on environmental issues, or to embrace an educational mission that reaches far beyond the standard “music appreciation” mission–that is–merely teaching our children and our audiences why the great masters are so very wonderful. This ritual could be used to deal instead with the real issues of life and death and how to be a human in these times. We can make music the veins and arteries and blood and connective tissue that ties together our understandings of the world, that takes our science, our sociology, our stories and our knowledge and wisdom and ties them together into coherent worldviews and then performs them for us, making manifest our deepest beliefs about life through time and gesture, bringing our understandings to life in the present moment so that we can be filled with and altered by them. (In more simply practical terms, community partnerships with the orchestra as a prominent local institution strike me as being widely under-imagined.) My wish for the orchestra is that it would become a purveyor of urgent meaning, not merely a storied re-imagining of cultural origins, or a parade of highly packaged products, but rather a burning inquiry into what it means to be alive.

Three Things

Earlier this year I appeared on Michigan Radio’s “Three Things” series, in which people offer three ideas to help our state in this time of crisis. Here is a rough approximation of what I said: my “Three Things We Can Do to Help Michigan” (or any other place, for that matter…)

You can hear the broadcast here

1. Michigan is defined by its waters, so one thing we can do is find out where our drinking water comes from and go visit it. Every single one of us lives in a watershed, so go find the headwaters of your nearest river, go Kayaking or canoeing, go for a walk along a nearby stream—if you do you’re sure to fall in love with it, and if we love the water we won’t want to pollute it.

When we come to understand that our lives are utterly dependent on the waters, we can begin to see that the rivers and streams are everywhere—not just between the banks and shorelines, but in the gutters and sewers under the street, in our sinks, and literally flowing through our veins. We can each immediately improve the heath of our waters by limiting our use of home toxics and not using fertilizers—if you live in an apartment complex or condominium talk to the management about cancelling the pesticide and fertilizer applications.

2. Keep art local: I’m a musician, so I often think about local art the way many people are starting to think about local food—it should be as fresh and locally grown as possible. We want our art it to taste like our own soil. One of the really great things about our state is the incredible number of local arts organizations that we have—for example there are so many regional orchestras in Michigan—this is something quite unusual about our state that we have to find a way to maintain. We can participate as performers, audience members, donors--Think about going to a live concert or play instead of renting a video, or join your local civic band. We all have the opportunity not only support local art, but also to make it ourselves. If we are all working together to build community organizations at the same time we are striving to make beauty out of everything around us, that cannot fail to improve our lives.

3. In these tough times you’ll hear politicians talking a lot about making Michigan competitive again, but I believe one of the most important things we can do is to think ourselves to a new metaphor that we can use to understand our relationship to each other. Maybe we could replace the idea of competition with collaboration. When we compete, someone always loses, someone is always suffering, even if we win. The truth is, we competed ourselves into this recession; we might have to do something else to get out. Competition is the game that led us to this catastrophe, so setting our determination to play the same game only harder is a nonsensical response. Competition tempts us to engage in a kind of ruthless self-interest that denies our responsibilities to each other.

If we can focus on stewardship of the natural beauties that surround us, and look to the arts as a model for how to cooperate to make meaning in our own communities and out of the stuff of our own lives, we might look around and see friends and neighbors instead of winners and losers. We might come to see the project of participating in the life of our state as a creative and cooperative one.

What Are Orchestras Going to Do?

And the answer is....retrenchment. At least the big organizations. After the University of Michigan orchestra summit, it sounded to me like the large urban orchestras are retreating to "core audience" values, which is another way of saying that they are responding to the fiscal crisis by reverting to the most conservative repertoire, 19th century and European music. "Special projects" such as partnerships with civic arts initiatives and commissions are out of the question for them in light of huge deficits.

The word from the medium and smaller orchestras was that they are making moves to become relevant to their communities as a nexus for K-12 music education, private lessons, and "community enrichment" activities.

The music is not the notes...

The music is not the notes. The lattice-work of dots is only a set of instructions for creating the music, which itself carries the fluid substrate of feeling intention and gestural energy instilled by the composer and performers.

We composers work by being truly open to experience (cultural, personal, physical, emotional, spiritual) and reflecting upon it, then distilling that field of experience, thought and feeling into understanding, and finally translating all of it back into an experience for the musicians and the audience through music.

We work by drawing music into what we think, into our worldview, into our understanding and our personal wisdom experience, and letting it steep there, not by pushing what we think and feel out into sound.

The true material we composers work with is all that knowledge, sensation, and feeling–not the notes. The notes merely carry the music, and the music carries this distilled understanding-life-energy-experience as communication...as living, immediate and urgent action.

Sound of Life

I was asked recently "What is the sound of life?" I noticed that the questioner did not say "human life."

One truth is that we live surrounded by countless non-human presences and the sounds of their beingness.
(please read The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram.)

I've often wondered if bees can hear the sound of their own buzzing–the constant thrum and disturbance that accompanies their activity. It makes me wonder if we have our own buzzing noise imprint that accompanies our going and our doing in the same way–a disruption of the sonic world we might be too engaged in pollen-seeking to notice, to perceive. At least, there are the vast buzzing sounds of the technology we've extended ourselves into. But below that there are the patterns of energy in space that we make with our activities (doing email, rushing to appointments, driving). The flashes of electrical energy in our brains are also similar energy-traces, of course, and by acting on them and perceiving, we both create and are affected by their shapes and vibrations in the world. We make patterns of energy in space just by being–and of course, that is exactly what sounds are: patterns of energy in space.

If we can still ourselves, stop croaking our names like Emily Dickenson's famous frogs, and quiet our external buzzing, we can begin to attend to the many other kinds of non-human being-energy around us: the foxes in the woods over there, the deer and hawks and the milkweed–they all have their pattern of energy in space. Even each place along the earth has its own rate of vibration, resonance, and being-texture.

If we can still ourselves, and quiet our pollen-gathering buzz, we can become attuned to the sound of life and being of the natural world in our own place, that which we are part of. And one of the oldest human activities is to fill ourselves with the wonder of that experience, then open our mouths and hearts and bravely sing our own song.

One Small Thing

A poem can take a very small thing and show you how it resonates through an entire world of experience. I’ve always thought music should do the same thing: to have as its goal making everything radiant, and to take the light that is focused on that one small thing in a poem, and to make it shine everywhere in our attention.

Inviting the gods

After yet another night of very accomplished music that was utterly free from yearning, I find myself thinking about Bali. I was taught that in that part of Indonesia the gods are the true audience for music, not people. I learned that musical ceremonies exist to invite the gods to be present, and to call forth and satisfy the needs of invisible powers.

I go to a lot of concerts, so I listen to a lot of live music that is well-made and beautifully played, but I find that there are far more crowd-pleasers than god-pleasers. So much music seems to be made merely for the people, and I become convinced of one thing: for me, music that doesn’t somehow strive to invite a sacred presence just isn’t enough. All the technique and titillation aimed at garnering a standing ovation just seems empty without a sense of courting the sacred—it could be hilariously sacred, dark cathedral sacred, ecstatic sacred, deep-in-the-woods sacred, oddly sacred, but geeze-louise, so often it seems like not only was the music not written for the gods, but they aren’t even invited to come listen. So often it seems as if no one on stage wants anything from the music but their own mastery and our admiration.

So here is what I’m asking: what if we all agree not to waste our wild and precious lifetimes with the blank nonsense of merely desirable, semi-automatic, or even technically perfect-but-safe art? Could we musicians individually or collectively decide to reject a culture that constantly tempts us to orient our whole expression toward empty accomplishment? Could we please just pause in our busy days of achievement to call the gods forth into our homes and our concert halls, and to beseech them with every breath of our music-making?

Emotion Permitted/Emotion Reduced

Some time ago I participated in a worthy musicological experiment undertaken by Judith Becker titled Emotion permitted/Emotion reduced. Subjects were chosen who self-reported strong emotional responses to music; they were asked to pick out two recordings they found especially moving and listen to them while having their galvanic skin response monitored. This is like taking a lie detector test, only there are no grilling questions, and you get to listen to music. Subjects were asked to let their emotions flow in one listening, and to try to turn off their emotional responses in a second instance.

I love listening to music, and was happy to do so, even with electrodes placed on my fingertips. But I was nervous.

I was pretty sure I could manage the emotion permitted part. I believe that I am extremely fluent in permitting feeling to arise; as a creative artist it is my stock-in-trade to preserve the outlines of emotional experience within myself in order to call them up again and again over the long course of creating a work. I am a composer, and I have come to believe that the emotional play of forces created by sound is the real content of music, and that this play of emotional energies is (even more than sound) the material that I am working with. I subscribe to the idea that musical art is indeed the act of “creating magic through emotion.” (Damasio 1999: 50).

Capturing a feeling and exploring the dimensions of it over time requires a level of skill with emotive experience that does require a certain distance, but I was absolutely convinced that I was not equipped to complete the second part of the experiment: emotion reduced. Reflection upon an experienced emotional state is not the same thing as willful reduction of it by any means.

Even though I wasn’t sure I could do it, I had little doubt that it would be easy to find many subjects with tremendous expertise in the reduction of emotional response.

Can you do it?

When emotion arises in you, can you shut it off? Can you tell your skin not to become charged and hot when you see the child mangled on TV? Or feel no sense of dread when you sense the explosion approaching because the ominous underscoring comes up in the war movie?

I began to wonder:

Haven’t we as a society all been preparing for the second half of this experiment for decades by learning how to shut ourselves off from emotionally-charged stimuli? Popular music presents us with an aggressive wall of sound that we practice ignoring—anything that requires engaged attention hasn’t got a chance of generating a spark of feeling in the vast majority of us Americans. (A rap song I heard on network television once describes a brutally murdered dismembered female body in the trunk of a car; it seems we are not horrified enough by this to recognize and reject a play to our most odious violent impulses being used as a cheap thrill.) It is no surprise to me that we can make ourselves immune to the emotional pull of music if we practice not-responding so assiduously to murder, war, and all kinds of numbing violence every night as we watch TV.

No, no surprise there. We see all these horrible things happen to our fellow humans every day on television, and bathe ourselves in noisy environments that require us to tune out, a rigorous training in callousness and lack of feeling. Our senses have been dulled, our feeling blunted, and our compassion stunted by the onslaught of our cruel entertainments. I guess that is why classical music is useless to most of us now—it does not quite get up to the thrill level we expect; the dynamic range of its emotional life, (to say nothing of the sustained attention it requires) cannot begin to approximate the quick brutality of our cinema and the law-enforcement morality plays we daily ingest on television.

In a society where the routine exposure to graphic representations of murder, rape and violent death of all kinds is taken as the norm, it is abnormal to be sensitive. The quality of sensitivity becomes stigmatized as an intolerable weakness, especially in males, who above all are supposed to be “tough” (which translates as inured to all suffering). So according to this logic, anyone who is emotionally sensitive to another’s suffering is abnormal: sensitivity comes to be seen as un-American.

But without sensitivity, there can be no interoception: the ability to sense our own internal mental and physical states. And without interoception, there can be no compassion. In other words, we cannot feel for others unless we can feel for ourselves. If there is no compassion, we are lost in self-referential childish grabbing at rewards without any thought of our companions on this planet, or any regard for the consequences of our selfish or even violent actions.

Sometimes it seems that large swaths of our popular culture have come to constitute a kind of abuse we subject ourselves to in order to hold down natural emotional responses and “toughen ourselves up.” Over-exposure to media sex and violence doesn’t make us stronger or sexier, but it certainly does make us less sensitive and makes violence more present to us, more easily imaginable. By these means we are engaging in a mass exercise aimed at squashing our humanity. I believe that the collective weight of our suppressed emotional responses is beginning to come out as rage and disease, as violence expressed in so many ways as to be uncountable.

The Gesture of Meaning

When I was younger, I believed that the act of creating meaning would save us. There was relief in the movement toward beauty, and a sense of completeness in following the urge to voice longing and hurt. I had a physical sense of sacredness rising up behind those upwellings of emotion, illuminating the world around me. It seemed clear that by practicing that movement of release and rising beneficence in my creative work, I might be able to learn to live in accordance with it. I hoped others (someone, somewhere) could receive the beam I was sending out, and undertake to enact the gesture of meaning that had filled me by following the trace left in my music.

As I got older, though, I found a mercenary strain abiding in the professional music world working to convince me that it was more important to be eminent than to be honest, more important to have wide distribution than to communicate meaning, and far more important to generate measurable prestige than to reach for some kind of truth. Within that worldview, it follows that creating an image to push over on the crowd is primary, and connecting with individual human hearts is a secondary pursuit at best, something that has been devalued almost to the point of being worthless.

But in that worthlessness is another kind of salvation. To be worthless is to be beyond value, to exist outside of the system of economic objects, in which everything is collapsed down to its exchange value, it’s media fizz or institutional rank. We rank every single person at my university music school every year from most important to least, and let me assure you, those rankings are based almost exclusively on external validation and prestige. In such a climate, it starts to feel like a radical challenge to the prevailing moral landscape to believe in art as anything more than a means toward self-aggrandizement. Yet only if our art is born from compassion, from the recognition that every single soul is equally important will we be enlightening our society instead of putting it to sleep with illusions.

If moral values can be communicated through behavior, then they can be communicated through art, and artists can therefore influence us in our own moral convictions. It is by participating in the root assumptions presented in a work of art that we are altered–by tracing the source and the qualities of its gestures, and by turning our attention to that which it is gesturing toward. Every act, every attempt at communication is generated from a ground of assumptions about what matters. Every artistic statement puts forth a stream of actions and associations that flow from that field, and serve to represent it in the experience of the creator as well as the receiver. Meaning is something we do. The world invites us to burn up our attachment to our own importance and to dissolve into a state in which everyone and everything shines with sacredness. This is the gesture of meaning.

Pearl-Diving

I believe that musical art should be like poetry.

To make good poetry you have to go spelunking beneath habitual mind and seek out our treasure: the invisible connections between things. It's a practice of finding the hidden light that secretly illuminates the world.

We do not need more celebrations of ego to reflect back to us from their shiny surfaces the sad fact that our outward-manifesting lust is driven by money and prestige. For God's sake already, if we know one thing it is that ego will not save us. Not ours, and not anybody else's. All ego ever does is churn up the surface of the water like a motor boat.

What we do in fact desperately need is an art that can reach into our shadow places and show us what is hidden there. We need artists who go down deep, who are more like pearl divers than they are like media personalities or world-dominating corporations. We need artists who can offer us the wonder of touching those small, improbable by-products of irritation: the precious stone of hurt turned into beauty, brought up at great risk from the depths. A pearl-diver's art would say: see--this radiance is hidden in your dark waters too, down in the muck and in that hard, rough, unbeautiful shell. Just look: it is a beauty that might redeem us all if only we can find it.

What is music for? What does it mean to listen?

In defense of the feeling listener:
“Art is a hammer to shatter the frozen sea within us” Franz Kafka

What does it mean to really listen? To listen means to take sound into both your body and your mind. To internalize the shapes, the motion, the feeling, communication, and the intention carried with it. Music is so much more than a mere entertainment—even when it is supremely entertaining. It is almost as if we are caging it, restraining it, hiding it under frivolous uses to see it as mere entertainment.

I’m only interested in music that reaches for something, in which the effort to bridge the gap between humans, between pain and understanding is made audible. I want to take that effort, all the ache and feel of it into my body and learn it, let it ring, let it purify me and teach me to release. Our lives are an urgent matter here on this earth–I’m told that some Buddhist temples in Korea have large clock faces on the walls as a reminder of how fast and continuous is the flight of time. (be wise in time, eternity is near!)

Music that is not trying to break through into something emotionally true is useless to me. I cannot waste time on music that is self-aggrandizing, ego-driven, vapid, creepy, or bland. I need the messages from wisdom that we all have in us. I need to hear the voice of wisdom channeled through sound. I want to hear 2 seconds of the music and know (and I mean know) that the composer or the singer or the musicians have sat long and quietly, have stilled themselves and listened for the knowledge of the world to speak to them through their bodies about what is urgent, what is essential, what is in the interests of our very best selves. I want to know that having done so, they have then labored selflessly to realize their moment of clarity, however small or large, that they have struggled to make a poem of it, distilled and concentrated it down to pill form (or exploded it out to journey form) so that I can take it into my spiritual DNA and be transformed. It absolutely MUST have some urgent message other than “dig me!” It must not be ingratiating, slimy, manipulative, or pushy. It must not be merely artful—that will not suffice. The music has to find a way to edge into the cracks of my emotional life and break its way in, past the usual, constructed, defended consciousness that wants to be safe, to be closed off from feeling, separate.

There is an urgent need (on my part, and for our society at large, I believe) to get into those cracks we all have in everyday consciousness and to force them wider apart. As Leonard Cohen's song famously points out: “There’s a crack in everything/that’s where the light gets in.” We all need the light to get into our small, constricted selves, and open us up to the big mind, the shattered world in which we are as wide as the sea, and everything flows. The crust on us modern folks is something to behold, I tell you. Our culture has made a life’s work out of cultivating the frozen sea Kafka was so desperate to shatter, and you can bet it will be a life’s work for any single one of us to undo that making. We are all living with an unprecedented storehouse of unprocessed feeling these days, a direct result of the vast array of numbing strategies that have come to obscure the real work and presence of a human life. I’m not big on idealizing traditional societies, but we have at least come to understand that all those scruffy rituals came about in a search for efficacy, transformation, and as a way to deal with the terrible and joyous things that arise as a result of an human consciousness strapped to an animal corporeality. The extent to which we look away from the facts of those myriad arisings is the extent to which we are in denial, suffering from restriction, walled off from the true energies of our lives. If we ignore our feelings, they will surely kill us.

So the practice of sympathetic listening is one of feeling with. If we can attune our responses to the music, if we can internalize its state, and feel its movement, its tensions and releases, we are building the capacity for compassion. I believe in music that invites us to feel with it. Anything in our feeling lives that does not increase compassion is killing us a little bit. Anything that seals us up in our comfortable expectations and rewards us for being what we already are in isolation helps to close us off from others, from love, from the true nature of our interconnectedness and interdependence. In the end, this move even isolates us from ourselves, in that it helps us to keep walled off whole areas of our own denied emotional experience.

If art encourages us to rest in complacency by being itself so slick and polished as to be a product, if it organizes itself toward merely presenting attractive surfaces in order to manipulate us into an economic transaction, if it exists primarily as an egotistical foisting of Self onto the world, then it harms us, it isolates us, turns us into consumers, it shuts us down when we desperately need to be opened up. Art should open doors to understanding of the non-verbal ground of our existence, to the natural world, the big “what-is.” It's not sufficient for our art merely to open the door to the gift shop or the record store. Listen to the music and ask yourself: what door is this person trying to open? Like as not you’ll find it is usually the door to fame and fortune, to approval, to some sentimentalized posture, or the pose of profundity. All too often what we hear in the depths of our musical art is the sound of the desire for personal gain on the part of the composer. This idea of gaining will kill us. Let us substitute the idea of opening: to wisdom, to joy, to compassion, to peace, to free feeling, to release.

What is music [not] for?

I believe we can trust our emotions. I believe music has the power to release the flow of emotional experience, to restore the natural flow of feeling that our lives by necessity restrict. We have practiced the halt of feeling so long that the reaction-chemicals provided by media entertainments come to substitute for true feeling.

We say we “feel” excited upon watching the brutal murder in the suspense thriller on TV, but it would be more accurate to say we're registering the chemical responses that precede fear—activations of our fight or flight response that do not constitute emotion. This is the same reactive state we enter on roller-coaster rides: our instincts are engaged to make us sense that we are in danger, and our conscious mind constantly overrides this cascade of chemical reactions, intervening to stay our conditioned flight. A kind of feed back loop is created that leaves us buzzing, charged, and giddy.

If we engaged with the emotional tenor of such violence, however, we would be crushed, horrified, and traumatized. Our emotional self experiences the representation of violence as real violence—if you were to shake loose emotion, it would be overwhelming. Writers and directors of action movies are smart: instead of engaging with the emotional consequences of violence, they give us one or two short bursts of fight-or-flight chemicals every seven minutes or so. They push our buttons with short blasts of violence and keep emotional reactions marginalized so as to keep us thrilled, without the consequences of violence becoming real to us.

This is no substitute for what art provides. Ideally, art would offer us opportunities for genuine feeling, it would offer us a hammer with which to shatter our frozen sea.