Opening Night at the Music Room

Back on 4/13/18 the Rapidan Orchestra played to a full house at the Music Room. It was the first time the Music Room was open to the public, and there were a lot of "old Orange" people (that I've known since being a child) who came to hear the music, but also to see what's happening with the old Gill Hardware building there on Main Street. Even before the music started there was a pleasant buzz of energy in the room as people greeted old and new friends and looked around to see how the inside of the building has been transformed.

That night and in the days following, the most heard comments from the audience were the wonderment of hearing live music like this in Orange and how well played it was. The most frequent comment from the musicians was the incredible sense of connection between us and the audience - I used the word "electric" and our conductor used the word "palpable".

For me the empirical indicator of that connection was when and how the applause began after each piece. Between the conductor and the players there's a sense of the exact moment a piece ends, and sometimes audiences will applaud a bit before or after that moment. That night it felt to me the applause began in the nanosecond the music ended. 

And the applause felt as though it was erupting from the audience, that they'd been so connected to the music, when it ended they were responding in a way that was in part non-conscious and very enthusiastic. Sometimes applause can sound duty driven, but there was none of that I could hear. I have to say the only times before this I've performed and felt audiences that revved up and connected to the music was when I was playing banjo.

Some of the variables that contributed to all this:

1 - Set and setting - a lot of people there were very happy to see the old building put to new use for the community and were in a good frame of mind to begin with.

2 - The Rapidan Orchestra has come a long way, and our current conductor Benjamin Bergey has done a splendid job of helping us mature.

3 - Robert Carlson the piano soloist, though only a sophomore(!) in college, absolutely wowed the crowd and orchestra with his playing of the Beethoven.

4 - The acoustics of the space are really good. There's a real clarity to the sound, and you can hear everything going on very well (which is one reason Rapidan is playing better - we can hear each other so well in the Music Room). 

5 - Though it's a fairly large space, the audience sits very close to the musicians, and I think that enhances the connection - the audience essentially shares the same space as the musicians, as opposed to being off in the distance, with the musicians up on a stage.

6 - We haven't done anything to the lighting, so the whole room was fully lit, rather that the orchestra under bright lights and the audience sitting in the dark. My sense is that amplified the feeling of us all being together enjoying each other's company, and not the us/them feeling large halls and theatric lighting fosters.

Roger Sessions on Gesture

Around the time I wrote this post on some audience members telling me they were deeply moved by music I've written, I came across this post of Elaine Fine's over on her blog Musical Assumptions In Sessions' book The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener he writes:

I believe that music "expresses" something very definite, and that it expresses it in the most precise way. In embodying movement, in the most subtle and most delicate manner possible, it communicates the attitudes inherent in, and implied by, that movement; its speed, its energy, its élan or impulse, its tenseness or relaxation, its agitation or its tranquility, its decisiveness or its hesitation. It communicates in a marvelously vivid and exact way the dynamics and the abstract qualities of emotion, but any specific emotional content the composer wishes to give to it must be furnished, as it were, from without, by means of an associative program. Music not only "expresses" movement, but embodies, defines, and qualifies it. Each musical phrase is a unique gesture and through the cumulative effect of such gestures we gain a clear sense of a quality of feeling behind them. But unless the composer directs our associations along definite lines, as composers of all times, to be sure, have frequently done, it will be the individual imagination of the listener, and not the music itself, which defines the emotion. What the music does is to animate the emotion; the music, in other words, develops and moves on a level that is essentially below the level of conscious emotion. Its realm is that of emotional energy rather than that of emotion in the specific sense.

I've always thought that one way music "touches" us is that it is in part physical gesture made audible. Sessions' point elaborates this in a way I hadn't really thought of. The way I take it is that a successful musical gesture is a sort of mini-archetype of an emotion that allows the listener to re-experience and/or to more fully experience an emotion in the moment the music is made, and in such a way that the feeling lingers. 

This goes a good way towards explaining how others feel emotions in my music I didn't consciously put there. If the music is well made, the gestures in it will elicit emotions in audience members that are specific to each person; and the better made the gestures are, the stronger the emotions.

One way of thinking about it is that a piece of music is like the script to a play, and each audience member casts and directs his/her own production of that play in their imagination, and no two of those productions will be exactly alike. In Swafford's new biography of Beethoven he mentions that Beethoven often had a plot line of his own for pieces of his music, but he never shared them with others, so that they could imagine/feel their own.

Great Neuroscience Article

This article in Nautilus pulls together things in the neuroscience of music and takes us another conceptual step toward more fully understanding the ways music affects us. 

The main idea is that music can be, and usually is, a social activity, even when you're listening alone - which is a great way to think about mirror neurons and how important they are. This is the first time I've seen someone say just listening to music, without seeing it performed, can trigger mirror neurons. Given my idea that music is in part physical gesture made audible, it's great validation.

Something else that I think is helpful is the use of "pre-cognitive" in the explanation, which may be a better term than "non-conscious", a term I've used to say the same thing.

There's also a wonderful working definition of what music is. 

Here is a long snip from the article:

Music is as much a part of human evolution as language, tool-making, and cognitive development, Schulkin and Raglan tell us. It’s a bridge. “Music is typically something shared, something social; we may sing in the shower or on a solitary walk, but music is most of the time social, communicative, expressive, and oriented toward others,” Schulkin and Raglan write.

Molnar-Szakacs explains the brain’s mirror-neuron system provides the neural basis of music’s social powers. The properties of the human mirror-neuron system are based on research showing that the same regions in our brain are active when we perform, see, or hear an action. The “mirror” regions of our brains fire whether we’re playing the guitar or listening to Pete Townshend play it.

The mirror-neuron system, Molnar-Szakacs says, “allows someone to identify with another by providing an automatic, pre-cognitive mechanism by which to understand their actions by mapping them onto our own neural representations of those actions. In addition, it represents the intention behind those actions.”

The moment you hear a sequence of hierarchically organized abstract sounds we call music, a multitude of associations are activated in your brain. These can include memories, emotions, and even motor programs for playing music. Together they can imply a sense of human agency. That sensation is what sets music apart from other types of sounds. “The brain interprets the structure of the music as intentionality that is coming from a human agent,” Molnar-Szakacs says. “This, combined with all the associations evoked by the music, is what makes the experience social.”

There's more to the article, it's all interesting, and it's all worth reading. 

Proprioception and Emotions

I've posted on proprioception in the sense of one's awareness of the physical aspects of music making. There can also be an emotional component, as sometimes the physical gesture used to create the sound can mimic a gesture that can communicate emotion non-musically, e.g. caressing the piano keys to suggest a physical caress.

This article about Jesse Prinz says this about one of his books:

His 2004 book, Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (Oxford University Press), follows William James in arguing that emotions are perceptions of bodily responses to cues in our environment, which they follow rather than precede.

If this is to any degree part of what's going on (and I've never heard of this being something James talked about), it means that we are both sending and receiving emotional cues at the proprioceptive level, both consciously and non-consciously. 

Dance Gestures

This article is brief, but the animations are worth a thousand words. The title of the article is, What women want on the dance floor, according to science. Some dance gestures are more attractive than others. My sense is that this is also the case for gestures made while making music, some of which are embedded aurally in the music. And when watching a music performance we don't generally spend all our time trying to logically deduce the meanings of gestures - we simply react to them as we do watching these animations.

Spider Silk Music

Here's a fascinating story out of MIT about using music to better understand the protein structure of spider silk.

. . . When the music was played, the least successful fibres — those consisting of strong protein molecules which didn’t stick together as a thread — created an aggressive and harsh composition. Weaker molecules which actually generated usable fibres led to much softer and more fluid compositions.

“There might be an underlying structural expression in music that tells us more about the proteins that make up our bodies,” said Buehler. “After all, our organs — including the brain — are made from these building blocks, and humans’ expression of music may inadvertently include more information that we are aware of.” . . .