August 25, 2023
It comes as a surprise to me that in two years of this weekly newsletter I have not yet written anything about music, especially given how deeply important both listening to music and playing it have been in my life. In some ways, music has meant as much to me as literature. On a more sophisticated level, the same was true of my mentor, Northrop Frye, a classically trained amateur pianist whose musical sensibility profoundly influenced his theory of literature. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957), arguably the most famous work of literary theory in the 20th century, Frye located literature, the art of words, between the musical and visual arts. Using terms from Aristotle’s Poetics, he said that lexis is situated between melos and opsis. The language of literature shares characteristics with music on the one hand, with painting and sculpture on the other. The musical aspect of literature is narrative, the movement of words in time, on various levels from syntax to plot. The visual aspect of literature clearest in poetry, is imagery.
The essential element uniting all three modes of art is pattern. The imagination is the faculty that perceives, creates, and recreates pattern. The question is, why? Ordinary experience is (as regular readers of this newsletter know) that of a conscious subject perceiving a world outside and objective to itself. Starting with Aristotle, art has been justified according to its faculty of mimesis, or imitation. It teaches us something of the external, objective world by reflecting it, holding the mirror up to nature, as Hamlet put it, a function clear in the realistic novel. On the other hand, especially since the Romantic era, art has sometimes been justified as expressive rather than mimetic: that is it evokes an inner, subjective world of feelings and intuitions. Both types of theory have their value, but there is a third kind of theory, one that identifies the central function of art with the patterns themselves rather than what they may reflect of subjective or objective reality. In the Anatomy, Frye calls the reflective capacity “centrifugal,” moving outward towards the subject-object world, in contrast to a “centripetal” focus on verbal patterns in themselves. This accords with the definition of the famous linguist Roman Jakobson, one of the founders of stylistics, who spoke of the “poetic function” of language as attention to the signifiers themselves rather than to their content or message. These are theorists, but some practitioners agree. In an interview response that I always used to read to my creative writing students, Dylan Thomas said that the mark of a real future poet was not a burning desire to express deep thoughts or deep feelings, but rather a fascination with the shapes, rhythms, sounds, and textures of words, words, words.
The centrality of pattern is always problematic to a certain kind of theorist. Apparently, the founding principle of evolutionary psychology is that every human trait has to have some kind of Darwinian survival value. Art in general is a problem for such a theory: what kind of practical value could a deep pleasure in the perception and making of patterns possibly have? Surely such a frivolous activity would rather be a temptation, distracting early humanity from the harsh necessities of foraging and survival. If all human activity is utilitarian, art is at best useless, at worst a kind of neurotic escapism. In his book on Blake, Frye quotes Tom Paine in The Age of Reason as saying “I had some turn, and I believe some talent for poetry; but this I rather repressed than encouraged, as leading too much into the field of imagination” (72), sounding unfortunately like the conservatives of the Cold War era who rolled their eyes at those hippies who thought the world could be saved by making music. Music is the most purely non-representational, non-mimetic form of art. The visual and verbal arts can be adapted to look outward, centrifugally, and thereby to teach by both telling and showing; they can reinforce, or subvert, an ideology or belief system. Music does not do this. It has no “message,” but consists entirely, in its “pure” instrumental form, of pattern. This also makes it a problem to Marxist and other cultural theories that assert that everything is ideological. And yet when Walter Pater said that all art aspires to the condition of music, he was looking forward to the Modernist revolution in which much art indeed did at least experiment with turning away from representationalism. “All art is quite useless,” said Oscar Wilde. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” said W.H. Auden. Cultural criticism of the late 20th century turned against this attitude, rejecting it as bourgeois formalism, an attempt to escape the realities of history and power systems. Frye was often condemned for saying that the power of words to reflect “reality” is limited: that what words do most naturally is to hang together—to form patterns.
No doubt a stronger case can be made for music as expressive rather than representational: it does not reflect external reality but expresses inward feelings. But I doubt that many composers and musicians would be satisfied with the idea of music as a cri de coeur. Of course some music can be deeply emotional. In the book that inspired the present newsletter, Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time (2022), violinist Natalie Hodges speaks of Bach’s Chaconne, the fifth and final movement of his Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin. There is a legend attached to the Chaconne that it is inspired by the sudden death of Bach’s first wife: “In a frenzy of rage and grief, he composed the Chaconne as a memorial and attached it to the end of the second partita” (114). Musicologists have discredited this legend of its origins, and yet Hodges says, “I know of no piece more beautiful or more full of suffering” (118). She devotes an entire chapter of her book to the Chaconne, which Yehudi Menuhin called “the greatest structure for solo violin that exists” (116). However, at the same time, she speaks of Bach’s “preoccupation with structure and form rather than overt expressivity” (126). “He didn’t write melodies,” she goes on to say, and melody is the most expressive aspect of music, but rather “themes, snippets of phrases or harmonic movements that can be deconstructed and reconstructed, contracted and augmented, layered on top of one another” (126-27), so that the performer is “doing the musical carpentry, the humble work of building those structures, right along with Bach” (127). If Bach’s music is expressive, it is at any rate not self-expressive. “Bach is a master of self-effacement” (124). “Bach’s music is self-effacing because it contains so little trace of him. He doesn’t micromanage the performer’s interpretation: rarely, if ever, does he specify dynamics, articulation, bow stroke, timing for his scores. He leaves all these for the performer to decide” (125). There is a remarkable resemblance here to Shakespeare, possibly the most self-effacing craftsman in Western literature. Shakespeare’s performance directions are as minimal as Bach’s, rarely more than something like [Dies]. In his book on Shakespearean comedy and romance, Frye says, “We may therefore see in the romances the end of the steady growth of Shakespeare’s technical interest in the structure of drama. The romances are to Shakespeare what The Art of Fugue and The Musical Offering are to Bach: not retreats into pedantry, but final articulations of craftsmanship” (133).
Natalie Hodges spent 20 years of her life trying to become a concert violinist, trying to reach the top level of soloist. She recounts the unrelenting discipline that aspirants undergo, starting at the age of four—later is too late: you will never be good enough. She details the endless hours of practice, sometimes not stopping until she collapsed of exhaustion, the bloody fingernails. All for nothing: crippling performance anxiety finally forced her to give it up. Uncommon Measure is not a confessional or self-pitying book, but it began from a need to understand why she dedicated half of her life, with much effort and much grief, to the patterns of sound that we call music. Why do they matter so much?
Music may be pure pattern, but there is little in human life that is pure, and the production of music arises from some very impure human motives and social practices. Some of the motives are personal. Whatever may have been true of Bach, for some musicians and composers, music can become not an escape from ego but an expression of the ego’s mastery. One manifestation of this is the cult of virtuosity, of which Hodges’ example is Paganini: “Even if there weren’t historical accounts of women swooning in the audience when he performed, you could tell he was a total diva by the music he wrote for himself….Most of Paganini’s pieces are borderline impossible to play, at least if your hands are of a typical size. (It’s now believed that he had Marfan syndrome, a genetic condition that distends connective tissue and can result in arms and fingers of exceptional length)” (20). The ability to play extremely difficult or extremely fast music becomes a kind of competitive elitism, a proof of some sort of superiority. The cult of virtuosity is by no means confined to classical music. One sees it also in metal guitarists, who have developed special techniques such as shredding and sweep picking to gain superhuman speed; in bluegrass bands who play so nervewrackingly fast that any musicality is lost; in bebop of the sort that seems to regard it as a point of honor not to include anything that an average person could actually enjoy listening to. There are parallel phenomena in literature. The Modernist movement of the first half of the 20th century set up “difficulty” as an ideal. There is no way to appreciate Pound’s Cantos or Joyce’s Finnegans Wake without background knowledge and a great deal of mental work. The same is true of a great deal of music of that period. Some of the compositions of Schoenberg and Webern simply sound like noise to an untrained ear. The intricate patterns of 12-tone or serial composition may be more evident in a score than in performance. In such works, personal elitism has passed over into cultural elitism, a rejection of any kind of broad appeal, an ethos of “fit audience, though few.” Philosophy and literary theory in the later 20th century developed a prose style of sometimes nearly impenetrable obscurity, laden with jargon and in-group references.
This is not anti-intellectual axe-grinding: I am an academic trained to understand and appreciate Modernist and postmodernist difficulty, and the early poems of Dylan Thomas on which I wrote my doctoral dissertation are as hermetic as it gets. A poem of Yeats speaks of “the fascination of what’s difficult,” and such a fascination can have its own validity. The point is that while love of pattern may be an innate human trait, the social adaptations of art entangle it in all sorts of human, all-too-human motivations, one of which is the “many are called but few are chosen” attitude that structures the world of classical musical performance. In Hodges’ case, the pressures of a kind of musical perfectionism were compounded by the issue of race. Her mother, Korean and herself musically trained, dedicated herself to the task of mentoring her children in musical performance as a means of cultural assimilation, a means of being accepted into a white and racist world, forcing that world’s recognition by sheer excellence of performance. Unfortunately, Hodges’ family was caught up in a culture-wars backlash triggered by the publication of the book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, “excerpted in The Wall Street Journal the previous year [2011] under the headline WHY CHINESE MOTHERS ARE SUPERIOR. My mother is Korean, but by then the book’s central term, Tiger Mother, had already made its way into common parlance, swallowing up any mom who looked like mine: an Asian woman who raises her children to excel in academics and classical music, essentially by forcing them to practice well and study hard” (88). A debate, sometimes angry, ensued over whether Tiger Mother child-raising was admirable, encouraging high standards that put to shame the comfortable mediocrity so common in American society, or a kind of cruel and inhuman perfectionism. To make matters worse, Hodges’ father came from a family of New England WASP’s. When he left the family, he accused his former wife of being mentally ill. “The illness he accused her of, in his words, was ‘being a perfectionist mother.’ He had always hated our involvement in music in particular; he thought it smacked of ‘middle-class’ immigrant striving” (97). Ugly as this is, was there an element of truth in the accusation? Did the perfectionism of the music world, mediated through family conditioning, lead to the performance anxiety that eventually ended Hodge’s career?
What reviews I have read of Uncommon Measure revolve entirely around these issues. Reading them, you would not know that the personal and social conflicts are tangential to the book’s real purpose, reflected in its subtitle about “the science of time.” What is it about music that compelled Hodge’s love and dedication despite all the heartbreak that her dedication entailed? Perhaps it had something to do with music not as an expression of self but as an escape from the limitations of self, from the prison of the socially-conditioned ego. Escape into what? Into another mode of reality, a reality that has something to do with a different relationship to time. Music, she says, "itself embodies time, shaping our sense of its passage through patterns of rhythm and harmony, melody and form….Surely, I thought, there must be a scientific reason behind that innately human sense of embodied time, a way of grounding our musical intuition in physics and biology” (15). Whatever her abilities as a musician, Hodge has a first-rate intellect and is a superb writer. What she is looking for through her research in physics and neuroscience is scientific evidence that the subject-object reality of ordinary experience is epiphenomenal, a fancy word for an appearance created by something that underlies it.
The controlling narrative of her book is a Creation myth—counting Prelude and Coda, the book has 7 sections, the number of Creation—a descent into a dark, mysterious realm that may seem to be Chaos, a realm in which the ordinary rules break down, but out of which comes new or renewed order, patterns that are both meaningful and moving. Hodge seems conscious of this controlling myth. The chapter titled “A Sixth Sense: Notes on Improvisation” begins with an epigraph from Genesis: “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.” The chapter concerns “Gabriela Montero, the Venezuelan artist and activist known for her spontaneous, classical-style improvisations in concert—that is to say, her performances which are really acts of composition, unfolding in real time” (47). Montero’s neurological activity has actually been monitored while she improvises. What happens is that “an aspect of the brain called the default-mode network (DMN), a sprawling system of functional connectivity between regions of the brain” (61) that “working together, represent a unified sense of self” (62) is temporarily deactivated when she shifts into improvisational mode. But while the self is temporarily dormant, a deeper level of the mind comes into play: “Improvisation, then, can be seen as an uncanny manifestation of deep memory itself: the creation of order out of disorder, a deep up-pouring from some dormant part of the soul; a confirmation that ‘the mind knows things it does not know it knows’” (65). However, Hodge’s quest continues to descend below the level of neurology to that of quantum mechanics, the deepest patterns out of which phenomenal nature springs. In the 1940’s, the physicist Richard Feynman discovered what he called the “path integral,” in which “a wave-particle intuits all the possible paths it could take through space and time…and then chooses one that is based on the sum of all those paths” (66):
Feynman himself admitted that he didn’t understand why the path integral works, and I don’t think it’s lost on physicists that any description of the path integral necessarily ascribes not only a kind of consciousness but a prescience to the particles themselves. It implies that they know, instinctively, which path they must take in order to connect past with future, transgress the boundary of the present and link time into one chain of continuity. Similarly, when Montero improvises, it seems almost as though she is remembering the future, entraining to something that doesn’t yet exist. (67-68)
Hodges speaks of it as “leaning into the predestiny of form” (68). She sums up:
Thus improvisation, or at least Montero’s improvisations, may serve as a metaphor for time in the quantum universe, where reality and possibility exist simultaneously and where past, present, and future are one—even though on the level of concrete, lived experience time seems to slip away, to vanish, without the possibility of return. (74-75)
In terms of physics, the lived experience is entropy, the increase of disorder described by the second law of thermodynamics. Entropy is death, the return to the original Chaos. The implication is that what is most dramatically true in improvisation is true of all music, of all art. It is a descent to an underworld, like that of the mythical archetype of the musician, Orpheus, who tried and nearly succeeded in triumphing over time and therefore over death.
Hodges is too young to remember the first time that some people drew some radical conclusions about reality from the strange paradoxes of quantum mechanics—“all that Wu Li Masters New Age crap,” as some scientists more or less put it, a reference to The Dancing Wu Li Masters, a 1979 book by Gary Zukav.
Well, okay. Zukav, not a physicist but a journalist, began by trying to explain quantum mechanics to a general audience, but ended by turning into a guru figure, founder of a Soul Institute, predicting a new phase of evolution transcending the reality of the five senses, a prediction that landed him a repeated guest spot on Oprah Winfrey. But the fact remains that the implications of quantum mechanics are paradoxical and do call into question the subject-object paradigm not only of ordinary consciousness but of ordinary science. Hodges is not preaching any new gospel. But she has a right to investigate questions that the common-sense model of materialistic science has no answers for, such as the relationship of mind to body, consciousness to matter.
Her book begins, in its first chapter, where music begins, with rhythm, quoting Aniruddh D. Patel, a researcher in music cognition. Patel claims that “Every human culture…has some form of music with a beat” (28). But we don’t just hear a beat with our ears. We feel it with our whole body, and by what is called “entrainment,” we synchronize body and beat, which is why we end up tapping our foot to a rhythm. Musical rhythm and the body form a feedback loop: “In other words, our motor coordination affects our ability to keep in time as much as our sense of time affects our motor coordination. Rhythm engenders movement, and movement in turn becomes rhythm” (29). A passage in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot refers to “music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music / While the music lasts.” You do not play a musical instrument with your mind, at least not if you are playing it competently. I do not think about what I am playing when I play guitar unless I am learning the piece. My fingers play, and that is especially true of my right hand, the one that keeps the rhythm. I often have no idea what my right hand is doing. The music, the instrument, and the body are part of one complex phenomenon. This is no doubt even more true in dance, where the body is the instrument, so to speak. In a famous line of Yeats, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” There are critical treatments that criticize that line as indicating a dangerous longing for an impossible perfection, a superhuman condition. Hodge is not advocating any kind of extremism, but she is suggesting that music is a transformative power: “It is through entrainment at all temporal levels that music allows us to break out of the quotidian rhythms of day-to-day time—our routine alternations between anxiety and boredom, thought and action—and thus to break out of ourselves” (30).
This is the “use” of the arts, to break out of ourselves. And in doing so we may transform our relationship to others. Not all of Uncommon Measure is about the solo activity of playing the violin. One chapter is about taking a class on dancing the tango. What Hodges learned is that partners in that dance, perhaps in all dances performed by couples, have to learn to develop a connection whereby they anticipate and match their partner’s moves: “Somehow, without applying any force or having any physical contact with your dance partner, you match each other’s movements through instinct and intuition” (152). She is told that there is “a specific point just below the hollow of your partner’s throat, toward which you are supposed to focus all your energy and from which you draw your partner’s energy….you focus with all your might toward that hollow, that still point which remains a center of gravity as the rest of you revolves” (146). The chapter is titled “The Still Point of the Turning World,” a phrase from Eliot’s Four Quartets that is followed by the statement “There the dance is.” What Hodges learned from the class was “how responsive the mind and body could be when in such proximity to another human being” (147). Each dancer knows without thinking, without signaling, without touch, what the other is going to do and responds to it, in a way that seems to be without explanation. The scientific parallel is what is known as “quantum entanglement.” When two photons are entangled, polarizing one of them polarizes the other in the same direction even when there is no connection between them. Entanglement can act across vast distances, even light years: “the two particles act as though they are one” (150). When Hodges speaks of “the unpredictable synchronicity of two beings in time” (151), she uses a word made famous by Jung. Such synchronicity is not confined to dance, but may occur in any ensemble performance. She quotes a blues saxophonist about “the ability to know a split second in advance what the other members of the band are going to do” (158).
On the surface level of reality, the universe is caught up in time as we ordinarily experience it, as entropy, a constant decrease of order that will ultimately end in “the heat death of the universe.” But the Coda of Uncommon Measure cites an article co-authored by Stephen Hawking which concludes that “there is no ultimate way of knowing whether reality is what we perceive it to be because ‘according to quantum physics, the past, like the future, is indefinite and exists only as a spectrum of possibilities. Even the universe as a whole has no single past or history’” (179). On the surface, then, the determinism of entropy, in which tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day. But creation, whether it is musical composition or performance or the writing of a memoir, may break through that surface into a “spectrum of possibilities.” You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs: new order is created only by the breaking of an old order. “Only through time is time conquered,” in the words of Four Quartets: “When we seek to become something or someone else, to change our lives and leave the past behind, we necessarily abandon ourselves to entropy: We scatter old pieces of ourselves, willfully smudge our edges and make a mess of things, strive to break free of old symmetries that we feel can no longer contain us” (109).
The arts are a form of symbolic meditation that teach us to descend below the common world of subjects and objects into a realm in which reality is pattern, as it is in quantum mechanics. It is a breakthrough into a new experience of time, in which everything is everywhere all at once, a return to the original moment of Creation, an ecstasy in the root sense of being outside of oneself or beyond oneself, impelling Hodges into an extraordinary moment of rhapsodic language:
To create is indeed to remember; to remember is to involve oneself in a universe of feeling, to fold time in on itself until it can contain itself no longer. That first suddenness, and the ensuing flow; river of fire, mouth of ecstasy, the singular moment of fission and rapture. Was it some higher plan, or else the great dice-throw of the cosmos: the creation of form like the breaking of silence, a big bang emanating out into space over the face of the deep, just as in the beginning was the song. (77-78).
Twenty years of sacrifice and heartache did not gain Hodges a career. But it gave her an intuition of the mystery that all music expresses. Sometimes the gifts we are given are not those we asked for, or thought we wanted, but they are nonetheless gifts for all that.
References
Frye, Northrop. Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake. Edited by Nicholas Halmi. Volume 14 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2004.
Frye, Northrop. A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance. In Northrop Frye’s Writings on Shakespeare and the Renaissance. Edited by Troni Y. Grande and Garry Sherbert. Volume 28 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Hodges, Natalie. Uncommon Measure: A Journey Through Music, Performance, and the Science of Time. Bellevue Literary Press, 2022. See www.nataliehodges.com. Thanks to Stacey Clemence for recommending this book.