How We Receive Music

     As we’ve gotten the Music Room up and running this year, what has struck me most has been the audience reactions. Because it’s a very comfortable space with sparkling acoustics, the audience experience is about as good as it gets aurally and socially. At intermission and after the music, people are physically and verbally animated; there are lots of wide eyes, hand gesturings and animated conversations. I always ask as many people as I can what it is they like, and the answers are all over the board. 

     Back in the 60’s I came across Karl Jung’s idea that there are four ways of experiencing the world around us - via thinking, via sensation, via feeling, and via intuition. A recent FaceBook conversation with Kyle Gann catalyzed my realizing those four modes are a great way to talk about how different people receive music, and that since we all have different combinations of these four modes of experiencing music, it goes a long way towards explaining why so may different kinds of music can have such ardent fans.

THINKING - “Theory mind” is the term I use for people who can distinguish instantly between major, minor, diminished and augmented chords and whether they have added pitches like 2nds, 4ths, 6ths, 9ths, 11ths and so on. Theory mind can also hear and name the chord functions in real time, such as the I chord leading to the IV chord, to the vi chord. When modulations occur, they can say what the new key is and how the chords in the previous key were manipulated to prepare the ear for that modulation. 

On many occasions I’ve had band directors and fellow brass players tell me that when you have the third of the chord it should be played slightly flatter than it would be in equal temperament, and I marvel that they can automatically know where in the chord the pitch they’re playing fits. 

Part of Kyle Gann’s FB comment that triggered this post illustrates theory mind:

The other day a cultured woman with a little musical knowledge asked me what I thought made Schumann's music so wonderful. I went into my spiel about his diagonal harmonies, how he'll hit a dissonant note and not resolve it until the chord meant to harmonize the resolution has already passed, and also about how unusual the spacings of his piano sonorities are.

SENSATION - I think one of the reasons the live performances at the Music Room so affect people is that they’re simply hearing the various timbres of the instruments much more fully than what recordings can ever capture, especially if those recordings are compressed down to mp3 levels. Even audience members sitting in the back are quite close to the performers, and the very good acoustics make the aural sensations immediate and fully textured. This means the fast/slow; high/low; and soft/loud parameters of the music are easily perceived. 

When playing the horn, I have to trust that my sensation is helping me play in tune, even though my weakness in “theory mind” means I don’t know where in the chord the pitch I’m playing fits.

FEELING - One way music “touches” us is that it often encodes physical gestures that trigger our emotions. Most straightforwardly, when we see a violinist caressing notes out of their instrument or a timpanist pounding out a martial rhythm, we feel the emotions we associate with those gestures. The neural pathway for this phenomenon employs mirror neurons. When we see someone making a physical gesture, our brain fires the neurons we’d use to make that same gesture (more here). I also think, with zero proof, that just hearing some gestures in music can trigger mirror neurons, even if we can't see the performer making the physical gesture. Less straightforwardly, while phrasings and articulations in music may not have direct physical cognates, they can evoke less specific feelings and moods.

Also, a piece of music can call up emotions we’ve come to associate with that particular piece because of when and where we’ve heard it before. 

INTUITION - Intuition is non-verbal and non-rational by nature, so it’s hard to talk about. I’ve been told professionally I’m more intuitive than most, and while it’s a great help to me as a group therapist, the problem is that I can’t know right away if my intuition about something is correct. With that caveat in mind, I’ll suggest that one way intuition may come into play is those of us without “theory mind” can still intuit the general structure of a piece. I think our intuitive side can also inform us as to how the performers are approaching the music and their connection to the audience.  

Our intuitive sides are probably also part of whatever it is that happens during “flow” experiences  when our normal ego fades, time flows differently, and we feel part of a larger whole (more here).

Small Town Classical Response

A year and a half ago, the Rapidan Orchestra came together here in Orange, and this past weekend we just had our third pair of concerts, one in the neighboring county of Madison and one here in Orange. Since I grew up here, I know a lot of people coming to the concerts, and besides speaking with some there, also see people around town in the days after and have more conversations.

I have been amazed by the response we're getting. I came very late to classical music and can't sight read at all well, but after many years being a psychiatric attendant, group therapist, and music therapist, reading the facial expressions and body language of people is second nature to me. In nearly all the conversations I've had about the Rapidan performances, people's eyes are wider than usual, and their body language is more fluid and expressive of positive emotions than usual - to a degree I find surprising and exceptional.

Two things come to mind to explain this effect we're having. One is the music itself - Beethoven, Brahms, Bizet, Fauré, Haydn, Sibelius - with a few newer (tonal) works in the mix. For some aficionados, the pieces we're doing are passé warhorses, but for a lot of our audience, it may well be the first time they've heard these pieces live, which is a totally different experience from recordings, which in this day and age are the norm. And there's a reason these pieces have stood the test of time. In a Jungian sense they must somehow express archetypes floating around in the collective unconscious. My read is that we're not just entertaining people, but that the music is touching them deeply.

The other thing is the intimate settings - usually churches - one of which has superb acoustics and very comfortable pews. We rarely have more than 100 people at the concerts, so everything is up close and personal. A lot of us musicians go out and say hello to people we know during intermission and after the performances, giving things a personalized feeling. My sense is that these small venues help the audience really feel they are a vital part of the triangle Britten talked so much about - the composer - the performer(s) - the audience; that all three are vital parts of the musical experience.

Flow and Something Else

In my most recent Horn Diary I mentioned how my playing in the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday induced an altered state during the performance which lasted for hours after the concert. In a comment, Jonathan West pointed out that that state of mind is described by "flow". In a subsequent comment he said that in the hundreds of times he's performed (and he's high level, not an amateur), he's experienced "flow" only a dozen or so times.

Judging one's own mental states is a dicey proposition at best, but my sense is that I've experienced "flow" hundreds of times - practicing, performing, composing, running group music sessions, etc. - so I'm pretty sure there's a semantic issue here.

I've been wandering down the foggy ruins of time trying to think of other times I might have had experiences like the one playing the horn in the Fauré on Palm Sunday, and the only one I can come up with is my having attended a teaching given by H. H. the Dalai Lama and having had the opportunity to shake his hand. 

I've also been trying to find words to describe both experiences and have come up with:

Exalted - in a state of extreme happiness, from the Latin exaltere from ex- 'outward, upward' + altus - 'high"

Exultation - show or feel elation or jubilation, esp. as a result of success, from the Latin exsultare, frequentive of exsilire 'leap up' from ex- 'out, upward '+ salire 'to leap'

Individuation -  a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious is brought into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination or free association to take some examples) to be assimilated into the whole personality.

I want to take this discussion further in a subsequent post and would welcome any further comments or emails on this subject, and I can't help thinking our Vermont readership might have something interesting to say on all of this.

Who's In Charge?

The elephant in the room, as far as all the new neuroscience is concerned, is that our conscious mind is not fully in charge of our behavior. Here's a paragraph from an article looking at how this new information might change our thinking about legal issues. 

The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.

Freud and Jung may have gotten various details wrong, but they were on the right track with their basic notion that the conscious mind is just one of many players creating our personalities and driving our behavior.

The Buddhist idea of "mind training" is also built in part on the idea that getting our conscious mind more in control of the situation is a tough thing to do, and that having a concept of what you're trying to do and how to go about it can be very helpful.

The previous post on the potentiating nature of dopamine, which can be released during music making, suggests it can be helpful in reinforcing positive aspects of the mind outside direct consciousness while quelling some of the negative stuff rattling around up there.

On a much more specific level, it seems to me that when we're helping someone make music, being open to non-verbal ways of transmitting information is the way to go, because we're probably already doing that whether we're aware of it or not.

Music Educators' Gated Community

Over the weekend I came across a post of Dave Wilken's from back last March which is a lacerating review of Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure. Before getting to the specifics of the disagreements, I want to do this post laying out what I think are the divergent world views which underlie them.

I think of music educators as a privileged elite living in a gated community. As children they were blessed by nature and/or nurture to have what it takes to pass the audition to get into their school's music program, which serves a minority of students and is often callous in its rejection of those viewed as unworthy. They benefited from a lot of money and attention spent on them the other students miss out on. 

As time went on, they excelled in the very Darwinian advancement process, which tends to favor technique (which is somewhat quantifiable) over musicality (which is much more subjective). By the time they reach the top of the heap, they've spent their entire career with folks just like themselves. They've never had to work with "regular" people. And sort of like the Harry Potter wizards, there's often an us versus them view of the "muggles."

For those admitted into the system it works very well, but I think it sets the members of that gated community up for not appreciating the issues associated with helping those outside it learn how to make music. Because they never think about those issues, my feeling is that certain biases creep into their framing of those issues.

I'm often reminded of the Victorians of the Industrial Revolution when reading music education materials. They're often based on Cartesian dualism, where the body is like a factory full of machines waiting for the brain to be the captain of industry laying out what has to be done. Apply industriousness and force of character to a correct understanding of the mechanisms involved and all can be achieved. 

The problem with that view is that it presumes the conscious mind is 100% in charge, but the new neuroscience suggests that's not the case at all, the work of Benjamin Libet being some of the earliest work on this subject.

As a side note I'd add that the "force of character" angle also helps those living outside the gated community understand the verbal abuse that educators veer into from time to time and that students (at least those not offended and quit) seem completely OK with. My guess is that students accept the verbal abuse as par for the course due to the combination of their agreeing with the notion that simply trying harder is often the answer to musical problems (they are an elite, after all), and the (perhaps unconscious) knowledge they can be expelled from the elite as easily as they were admitted.

As a therapist, the population I most want to serve are all those of us outside the gated community. As for Jeff Smiley, my sense is that years of mindfulness while teaching has led him to an approach very much at odds with that of most educators, and one that I find to be a great way to approach music making in general for "the rest of us". It really works for me, but I can see how someone who's spent a lifetime with another world view that has worked for them isn't going to appreciate how valuable it can be for someone with "beginners mind" when it comes to making music.

2/8/11 - When I put this post up I sent a note to Dave saying I'd be happy to put any response he had to it down at the bottom of it. Here's what he said down in the comment section (with slight editing):

Hi, Lyle. Interesting read and I look forward to reading more details. Thanks also for the link. I think Jonathan's summary of my opinions in his comment above is spot on.

The broad strokes you paint with in this post make it difficult for me to step back and objectively see how my teaching philosophy or review of BE mirror a "gated community." On the one hand, I do feel that the "ivory tower" culture of academia sometimes makes us miss where the metal meets the mouth. On the other, some people outside that culture could benefit from poking their head inside the tower and looking around once in a while. I think the idea of a lone genius with a personal lab of students revolutionizing brass pedagogy is largely a myth. Real progress is a collaborative effort, opposite a "gated community."

In the comment below Dave's I try to be more clear about what's meant by "gated community".

Dave has also done a second post on Jeff's work here. 

And as an example of what Jung would call synchronicity (and a skeptic mere coincidence), here is the latest post over on Scott (Mr. Dilbert) Adams' blog where he turns his "thinking out of the box" mind loose on education as we know it.

A few moments later - Here's a link that just popped up suggesting an effect of diet on education which I want to save for a future post on Dave's reservations about Jeff's talking about general health matters in his embouchure book.

2/9/11 - Here's another synchronous/coincidental link, this time from Pliable (another outside the box thinker). A snip from near the end of his post:

I looked in vain at last night's performance for any of the mainstream music journalists who repeatedly pronounce on the future of music education from nearby London.

Transmission

Over at On An Overgrown Path, Pliable has been doing a series of posts on his notion of "transmission". His idea is that for classical music to survive and thrive there has to be something going on between performers and audience more than the merely auditory, and that a lot of the new fangled attempts to bring in audiences actually interfere with "transmission".

He talks about that more in this post, mentioning music therapy, and then at the end giving a link to the CD over on the right I did with Lama Tashi. While that CD can be simply listened to, the main point was the insert which has all the chants notated for voice, guitar and keyboard so that practitioners might learn to do them themselves. Full transmission(?)

Anyway, here's the comment I just submitted:

As you might imagine, this post really struck a chord with me, even before the very pleasant surprise there at the end(!). Synchronicity being what it is, just got off the phone with Lama Tashi in Arunachal and he's doing well.

Another Jungian term you hint at with your title being so close to his "collective unconscious" is archetype. My feeling is that great music which is widely appreciated must somehow evoke something archetypal in most listeners.

I'm convinced of that in the non-classical folk realm in the case of minor blues tunes like "House of the Rising Sun", and "St. James Infirmary Blues", because performing those songs nearly always elicits a noticeably deep response from some listeners.

Your link to that old BBC story on the benefits of live music reminds me there hasn't been any follow up on that so far as I know.

One music therapy principle connected with your idea of transmission is that the first step is to play music which engages the client, which matches his/her mood as precisely as possible. Then once the connection (empathetic transmission?) is made, the therapist can use that connection to help the client get to different places.

My sense is that a lot of classical musicians present their work as take it or leave it. For them the canon trumps all, whereas for the therapist, connection/transmission trumps all.

Thanks so very much for putting music therapy in such a fine light for your very high level readership.

Is Music A Quasi-Spiritual Practice?

This article in the Guardian, in a fairly non-specific way, suggests that regular music making might be a substitute for spiritual practice. While I think that there are similarities between music practice and spiritual practice, I don't feel one can stand in for the other.

Both behaviors employ combinations of the Jungian categories of thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation as a way of entering and expressing non-quotidian mental states that are beyond the grasp of words. Music, though, is more a tool that can be used in various ways, depending on one's motivation. The first non-spiritual use of music that comes to mind are the drums, bagpipes, and bugles of war. There are also various trance states that can be induced by music making, which are not necessarily spiritual in the positive sense we usually associate with the word.

As a tool to help deepen and broaden spiritual experiences, I think making music can be at the top of the list. As a therapist, there's nothing I enjoy more than helping people use music in their spiritual practice. Music making can be tremendously rewarding on it's own as well. Suffusing one's brain in dopamine is a positive experience, with or without a framework of spiritual practice.

On down the line the neuroscientists are going to be able to compare and contrast what's going on in the brains of those making music and those pursuing spiritual paths and we'll know better then how to talk about the two. For now it's what works best for an individual that matters. My sense is, though, the benefits of making music are amplified when combined with other behaviors and interests of the music maker, especially those where the music is shared with people in some sort of social context.

Thanks to Jonathan West for finding this article and posting about it here. This post of mine is a first approximation of a response to the deep issues raised in connection to spirituality and music making. I hope in a later post to comment on the emotional aspects of music making Jonathan talks about in his post.

More on Improv

In an example of what Jung called synchronicity, after publishing the previous post I came across this video. On the Apollonian to Dionysian spectrum, Michael Hedges was over on the Dionysian side with a little shamanism thrown in. Before he died way too early in a car crash, he was making music like nobody else. It had to do with his wonderful connection with audiences, his using custom made guitars, tunings that made the guitar sound like some kind of other instrument, and a real familiarity of what was going on in the "classical" music world, having formally studied composition.

But what really set him apart for me was the improvisational feel his work has. He sounds like he could improvise for hours and not be boring, and that's the point of this post. My sense of his playing of this Bach piece is that it's informed by his improvisational skill. I think most people would put Bach more over on the Apollonian side of things, that his works are beautifully crafted works of art, nearly mathematical in structure. Hedges makes this piece sound like he's making it up as he goes along, expressing his feelings of the moment, using technique and a feel for the sound of his instrument that has to have come from his time put in improvising. 

On a music therapy note, his playing a calming piece at the end of a long concert is a wonderful example of using music to help people transition from one feeling/mental state to another.

Persona

The word persona comes from the Greek for mask, specifically the ones actors wore in dramas. Somewhere along the line I remember seeing that besides hiding the face, they somehow altered the voice of the actor as well.

 ~~~ Update - Just checked Wikipedia and found:

 

This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for a kind of mask made to resonate with the voice of the actor (per sonare meaning "to sound through").

The latin word derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and its meaning in the latter Roman period changed to indicate a "character" of a theatrical performance.~~~

In psychology, and I think Jung in particular, persona is the term to describe the face we present to others and how they perceive us. It seems as well a handy term to describe how musicians present themselves to their audience.

Jeffrey Agrell has two great posts up talking about the non-musical aspects of performance here and here that I've read several times and been meaning to post links to. 

Then today came across another of those botox inhibiting emotional intelligence stories here.

"Our facial expressions reveal social context by mirroring expressions of those around us, giving us insight into their emotions, states of mind and future actions," he says. The Botox study, he says, suggests that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret language.

The new findings fit with the increasingly accepted theory that aspects of higher thought, such as language, judgment and memory, are shaped by our bodily sensations and movements, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and a leading scholar on the role of the body in emotion. According to this "embodied" view of cognition, which has gained popularity over the last decade or so, the brain makes sense of the world at least partly by simulating action.

Connecting with an audience while making music means a lot more than simply getting the notes right, and Jeffrey's posts are a great survey of what's involved, and your persona as perceived by the audience is as important as the music itself. Part of what's going on has to do with mirror neurons.

One thing I've noticed recently in working with these ideas and trying to keep a more relaxed and personable face while performing (and practicing) is that my facial expression affects the tone and emotional content of my singing voice way more than I'd realized. It's obvious, really, but a lot about music making is obvious only when you give it some attention.

Ensemble Mix/Audio

One of the guiding principles for the part books I'm building is that they take into account that not everyone can be there all the time, either at rehearsals or performances. The idea is to create parts that suit the various instruments, but are generic enough that players can successfully jump around from playing lead to being accompaniment.

This past Sunday was the first time we've had just two treble instruments, trumpet and soprano sax, along with the two Eb tubas and percussion - and neither of our alto or tenor voices, the clarinet and trombone. 

I played horn on two numbers, which are four voice suites I've been working on. One strings together a Renaissance dance, a troubadour part song, and Lillibulero (Purcell/Beggar's Opera). The other strings together that famous Jeremiah Clarke Trumpet tune with one by Purcell. With the horn on the tenor line they worked well (when I played the right notes).

On everything else I played the new acoustic steel string guitar with the on board mic run through a small keyboard amp. It had much the same effect of the C'ville horns coming to play with the Orange concert band. It gave a middle to the sound that the tubas could plug into from below and the sax and trumpet from above. 

At our next little performance I'm thinking of putting mics in the bell of the tubas, so that like me on the guitar, they can work not so hard and yet get a better sound. At the last C'ville Municipal Band concert I was struck by how their three Bb tubas laid down this wonderful bass throughout all the numbers. They sort of created a primal river of sound that everyone else could float and swim along in.

I have an aversion to using amplification in our performances, because over the years, walking into events where there's amplification I've come to view amps as lethal weapons and to think that professional musicians using them are deaf (or that they're way more self involved than is healthy). Judicious use, though, can create a better ensemble mix than not using amplification (or sound reinforcement, which is a probably a better term).

The way I set the level for the guitar was to turn it up just enough so that what was coming out of the amp was about as loud as the guitar itself. I hardly noticed the amp was there, but for the other players it kept my sound steady whether I was facing them or facing out to the audience. This lets me move around as I always did doing music therapy sessions back in San Antonio. I can sing strongly enough to not need a mic in small scale performances like this one, and I much prefer it, as having the mic control where I am feels very constraining.

The deep lesson of what's been learned here has to do with balance. On all sorts of musical issues there's the forest/trees dynamic. Because of my focus on creating part books, that's what I was hearing. The way the guitar brought everything together made me realize I hadn't been hearing the forest. The part books are going to work best if there's a guitar, or rhythm keyboard, or an omnichord or autoharp to give that middle to the sound. You can get by without, but having one of them will make things much easier.

Another thing I was more reminded of than learned, was that rhythm guitar is my strong suit when it comes to music making. The new guitar is a joy to play, and the amplification makes it a whole new experience for me, and I had listened to a Michael Hedges CD here recently which led me to try some new textures. But mainly, I don't have to think about how I'm going to strum. There's a direct connection between the feeling I want and the strum just happening. Except for a few keyboard pieces I've been playing for decades, along with some Dylan songs I've been singing for 40 years, everything else I do musically requires a lot more "left brain" or conscious mental involvement. With rhythm guitar it's all intuition, feeling and sensation with very little thinking. 

John Williams - Jungian?

In today's post, Bruce Hembd has a quote from John Williams and a link to the article it's taken from:

>>  “When I’ve tried to analyze my lifelong love of the French horn, I’ve had to conclude that it’s mainly because of the horn’s capacity to stir memories of antiquity,” writes Williams, who has now composed several concertos, including for violin, cello, clarinet, flute, bassoon and tuba. “The very sound of the French horn conjures images stored in the collective psyche. It’s an instrument that invites us to ‘dream backward to the ancient time.’ “ <<

That sounds a lot like archetypes in the collective unconscious. 

The House of the Amazing Grace

The House of the Rising Sun was one of the first songs I ever learned to sing with guitar, and that was in New Orleans, working at a mental hospital next to Audubon Park, living in the Garden District and heading down to Preservation Hall as often as possible. These men's voices, especially that last wail, remind me of Sweet Emma the Bell Gal, who headlined the Preservation Hall band, and was well into her eighties or nineties. When she sang Just A Closer Walk With Thee it was such a powerful experience it bordered on shamanistic. It certainly got you over into what Jung called the collective unconscious. It wasn't just Sweet Emma you heard, but the "toils and snares" of generations before that brought that song to that point. Music was just the vehicle.

Amazing Grace is among the dozen or so musical touchstones of my musical life, particularly the Judy Collins version from the 70's with the massed folk choir singing all those harmonies. I've never understood why it was just a one off recording and they didn't go back and make a whole album like that. It's the one hymn nearly everyone knows. Just like House of the Rising Sun it seems to manifest some archetype that most people recognize on some level. Whenever I perform either song, there's usually someone coming up afterwards to thank me.

Enhanced Awareness

Using the phrase "ESP" triggers a range of reactions, so provisionally I'm going to use the phrase "enhanced awareness" through the four Jungian categories (of thinking, feeling, intuition and sensation) as a way to talk about whatever it is that can happen when making music. Here's a use of the phrase in a comment to Bruce Hembd's post "What makes a great performance?"

>>Bruce – Not being a high level player such as yourself and those who frequent this site, these points come from way back in the peanut gallery.

I prefer “Musicality” (from Jonathan West) and “Technique” – each being necessary but neither being sufficient for great performances.

“Talent” is sort of a vexed word for those of us not on a high level. It suggests either/or and that if you don’t have it, don’t even try. Saying someone is more or less a “natural” player allows for the possibility of achievement for all.

As to title of your post, I think the notion of “flow” (thanks for the link in suggested reading) or being “in the zone” comes into play. In a really great performance, my notion is that individual players, the ensemble as a whole, and the performers and the audience all enter into a kind of shared flow state – that all (or most) are to some degree in a state of enhanced awareness where the experience is one that is shared amongst all and the greater the performance, the greater the communion.<<

More Jung

For our Vermont readership especially, want to paste in a comment I made on Jonathan West's latest post on musicality:

Jonathan - Per usual, lots and lots to think about in these posts of yours on musicality. For right now, though, want to pull out this bit:

>>When playing in a large group doing well, all kinds of instantaneous feedback and adjustment is going on between and among the players, who are responding to each other and not merely to the conductor. And this happens far too fast and unconsciously for anybody to be able to describe in any kind of detail exactly what is going on, even after the event.<<

My personal working assumption about this is that it really is a kind of what they used to call ESP, extra sensory perception. Some time ago I did a post linking research showing that when musicians are playing together, it can induce brain wave entrainment amongst them. That, along with all the sensory cues pouring in, seems to be able to create an altered state where things can happen that go beyond our normal individual capacities. That's when egos can fade and the music is more channeled than made. Sort of a brief manifestation of what Jung called the collective unconscious.