ASMR

I just came across this story on "Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response" and want to put up a link because it fits into something I've been thinking about a lot lately. It's my feeling that people are communicating in more ways than we are aware of, and in ways science has yet to adequately describe.

Several years ago I had a go around with frequent commenter Jonathan West over how to talk about the way we sometimes feel so fully engaged with other music makers, particularly during "flow" experiences, and that that feeling can extend to and include audiences as well. I came up with the phrase "enhanced awareness" so as to avoid the negative baggage of ESP.

According to people who feel they can have this experience, ASMR can be triggered by a whole series of videos with boring content delivered in a whispering voice. One of the makers of these videos, which have an established internet audience, says, 

“I think it has to do with childhood,” she said. “Whenever your mother would treat you delicately, or your doctor or teacher would talk to you gently… The caring touch is the biggest trigger.”

The physical response in susceptible people is said to be:

a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine. It’s a shortcut to a blissed-out meditative state that allows you to watch long videos that for someone who doesn’t have ASMR are mind-meltingly dull.

Wikipedia has kicked off pages trying to talk about this, so it's definitely fringe territory. Should there be something to it, though, I can't imagine there's not some kind of an overlap with some kinds of music.

TT Quote

Here's a snip from Terry Teachout's latest post:

Neville Cardus, the English music critic, spent World War II in Australia. Most Aussies then were well behind the cultural curve, and Cardus learned to his dismay that the centerpiece of the first concert he was to review for the Sydney Morning Herald was Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the "Mona Lisa" of classical music. What could he possibly say about a warhorse he'd heard at least a hundred times?

That night, though, he glanced around the concert hall and realized that at least half ot the audience had never before heard a performance of Beethoven's Fifth. "To those Australians, in the Sydney Town Hall, the Fifth Symphony was a revelation," he later recalled. "I found this a tremendous inspiration....the concert was for me an illumination and living proof that there are no hackneyed masterpieces, only hackneyed critics."

Want to save it because it gets at the issue of specialists losing view of what I've started calling the "common touch" elements of music. There's more to it than just this, but part of it is that specialists have rewired their brains in so well that they perceive music and its effects differently than the hoi polloi, and often seem unaware of the unintended consequences of that situation.

Empowering Players

Just this afternoon got word from Jonathan that the St Clements Wind Ensemble has, after two (more than just reading through) rehearsals, decided to go forward with performing Timepiece at the Fringe festival in Edinburgh in August.  I. Am. Over. The. Moon.

Part of it has to do with why I write music. I think the error of the 20th century modernists was assuming radical change was needed to refresh the repertoire. There's all kinds of stuff yet to be written in what I'm going to start calling "common touch" harmonies and rhythms that the modernists flew right past in their quest to be ever so much cooler than the plebes. I use rhythms that are more complex than simple 3 or 4 to the measure, but which still have a recognizable bounce and shape. My harmonies are all tonal, but "modal" gets used as a descriptor, and I do love Gesualdo. 

Also, I'm not sure I completely buy into the whole cartharsis thing. There are times it can work wonderfully, but there are other times that's not what I'm looking for. I do not need music to feel the negative emotions like anxiety, depression and anger. I most of the time want music to reinforce positive emotions in fresh ways. My sense of audiences who've heard my music is that I'm at least partly successful.

But this I why I'm so happy. Below, Jonathan comments:

When rehearsing a new piece, particularly a newly-composed piece where you haven't had any opportunity to listen to recordings, the music emerges only gradually. Initially, you are just concentrating on counting and getting the right notes in the right places. Only after that do you have time to give attention to balance, phrasing and eventually structure and overall interpretation.

And the interesting thing about this process in chamber music is that it is a collaborative process. All the participants have something to contribute to the interpretation, we are not just ciphers working according to the controlling mind and interpretation of the conductor.

That my music can be used for this level of music making - and that it engages the players enough to want to continue working to see what they can make of it - is a whole new level of validation, both in terms of my notions of where music can go and of my notion that small ensembles are part of the answer to lot of Greg Sandow's questions. All the small ensembles (regular and irregular) keeping the culture of homemade music making alive need fresh material, and the latest twitch out of the twelve tone enclave ensconced in the academy isn't very helpful.

And maybe it's because we just went through the Fourth, but this really struck a chord with me:

. . . we are not just ciphers working according to the controlling mind and interpretation of the conductor.

This made me realize I'm more of the democratic/republican way of thinking than the authoritarian/totalitarian when it comes to music making. I've always had trouble with authority figures for whom I could deduce no really good reason for their having authority other than the quirks of samsara. To my mind, it would be a sign of a more vibrant music making culture if what Jonathan is talking about here were simply assumed, and it was the surrender of liberty involved playing for an autocrat that needed explaining.

photo - yard violets, which our Vermont readership (who asked me to write a wind quintet in the first place) insists are flowers and not weeds.