Silence

 Silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by Cage in his wonderful 4’33’’. Thus, it should make more sense to talk about silences, in plural, avoiding the common reification of a concept that usually expresses an indefinite absence and metaphysically grows to express a final and pervasive state of the cosmos.

 In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. Furthermore, as we read in Berlioz (Treatise on Orchestration), silence can be obtained through orchestration: With the view of expressinig a lugubrious silence, I have in a cantata divided the double-basses into four parts ; causing them thus to sustain long pianissimo chords, beneath a decrescendo of all the rest of the orchestra. In fact, if Berlioz’s treatise is to be taken as relevant to traditional orchestration, we find several places in the work where the concept of silence plays a clear and conscious orchestrational function.

 There are also contrapuntal silences, related to texture as well, but performing a more basic determination of lines. These are silences which give time location and shape the musical discourse.

  A third type of silence is the harmonic absence, which, like the orchestrational silence, can only be understood as a choice for no action. For instance, a plagal cadence could be understood as the absence of a tonic chord, and in general, any play with harmonic sequences which frustrates expectations is the construction of a silence. This kind of silence is even easier to notice than the orchestrational, for in tonal music we expect particular cadences in particular locations of the piece, while the orchestrational choices of color have a wider range of possibilities. In serial music the silence-absence occurs in relation to the structure of the given series of the piece and its traditional transformations.

 Silence is also a religious concept, complementing and making meaningful the myth of the primordial sound, a favorite myth among musicians. Sound and silence together have given a rich spectra of metaphors for the expression of life’s persistent mystery, furthermore, they conform a full mythology in which the musician can express a wide variety of cognitive and social emotions. Toru Takemitsu has put it in terms of the modern musical religious experience: Confronting silence by uttering a sound is nothing but verifying one’s own existence.

 There is a further dimension of musical silence which can be extended to any epistemological experience. Through the action of memory (Mnemosine), silence extends and transforms sound on the inner dimension of the listener-composer. The piece of music extends beyond its sound parameters into the realm of the listener particular connections. The semantics of the piece build upon basic emotions and memories, complexifying the original input. Silence is needed to make the piece intelligible, to give it a meaning. Silence becomes a receptacle for musical reverberation both of the physical sound and of the psychological process initiated by the music. There are a number of Bach pieces (see the Ricercare of The Art of the Fugue, or the Contrapuntus X of the Musical Offering, etc.), (also Brahms, Mahler, and many others) which include this kind of silence. For instance, he writes at the end of the piece a white note and right after a silence of white (instead of writing a whole note) in which the piece gains an extra time for its processing, both at the acoustic and the psychological level. When not in the score, this kind of silence is spontaneously produced at the end of a performance, sometimes unfortunately broken by an insensitive rush for thunderous applause.

The Originality Paradox

We value originality in a work of art, we demand it. By original work, we mean one which is different from the average and from the mode, a unique way of expressing something, better if it is new, ahead of its time, etc. We want such an expression to be something unique and very particular, but at the same time, something universal. However, the more particular, the less universal, and viceversa.

The aporia is part of a basic linguistic paradox of individuation:

1. I cannot think or express my individuation without a language.

2. Languages are group constructions, never individual.

    Therefore, I cannot think or express my individuation using my own terms, I have to use the language of the group, the concepts which define my individuation are concepts developed by the group.

     On the other hand, when I think or express my individuation, the group does not articulate my particular thinking.

      What do we mean then by originality of a work of art?

The Foundation of Musical Action Cannot be Music Theory

1. We consider that A is the conceptual ground or foundation of B when the cognition of B is impossible without the cognition of A, and A is immediately certain for our intuition. We say that A gives a semantical self-image, for it does not need further explanation, but B cannot produce a semantical self-image.

2. Music Theory has developed since Antiquity with the aid of mathematics, reaching today a fully mathematical status.

3. Mathematics is a formalized symbolic language.

4. Tarski’s theorem states that a formalized language cannot produce a semantical self-image.

Therefore, music theory could not be the ground of musical action or of anything else.

In fact, music theory -as well as musical action- are based on the social life of the human group, which in turn are based on the homeostatic protocols for survival: emotions. 

Emotional Origin of Music

 According to contemporary affective neuroscience, basic human emotions are protocols for survival and adaptation that we share with other higher apes and mammals [Panksepp, 1998]. Our basic emotions are processed in our brains in seven specific subcortical neural systems, although their interaction is mediated at the cortical level by other cognitive functions (attention, working memory, representation and planning of goals, etc.). As we all have experienced, there is only top down control of the emotions when the organism is not under stress [Panksepp, 1998]. Emotions are directly linked with the homeostasis of the individual and the social organism, for they deal with answers to vital problems, and in this sense, they are the result of successful  actions of survival which express what we call intelligence. Emotions are cognitive actions which follow very clear goals for the organism, so the separation between emotion and intelligence is basically a theological myth, for there is a process of continuous rationality among all living beings in increasing complexification. (I have treated this more extensively somewhere else[1])

   Emotions give the general semantics for human (and animal) communication, i.e. human language grew out of the social communication needed for the group homeostasis, and developed itself into ever more complex symbolical constructions which were useful answers to life problems. Theories of an emotional origin of language were already given by Epicenus, Lucretius, and in the modern world by Vico, Rousseau or Darwin, although their concept of emotion was not exactly the one that today uses neuroscience.

  Emotions gave also the condition of possibility for musical communication, and we can picture the origin of music as a complexification of human (emotional) communication through sound, gesture and dance which conveyed socially relevant information, maternal, sexual, hunting, etc., contributing to the development of the group identity when enacted in mythico-ritual axes. The progressive complexification of music runs parallel to the complexification of our emotions, in fact, music and poetry became the fundamental symbolical tools for the n-aryzation (making n-ary, using the mathematical terminology) of our basic animal emotions, defining the identities of the group and the individual.

For more on music and affective neuroscience see:

Blood, A.J., Zatorre, R.J., 2001. Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98, 11818_/11823.

Panksepp, Jaak, [1998]Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Oxford University Press. New York 1998.

Panksepp, Jaak and Bernatzky, Günther. [2002]Emotional sounds and the brain: the neuro-affective foundations of musical appreciation. Behavioural Processes 60 (2002) 133_/155

---

[1] Oscar E. Muñoz. Mitopoética: la construcción simbólica de la identidad humana. Mandala Ediciones. Madrid. 2013. English translation of the first part Mythopoetics: Mythic Domain. Mandala Ediciones. Madrid. 2014. On line at: Mythopoetics Review.

Music Material and Music Idea

A persistent discussion that I used to have with Morton Feldman when I studied composition with him at Buffalo was about the relationship between the music sonic material of a piece and the musical idea for the organization of the work. Feldman always thought that it is the material what determines and conditions a composition, what makes it work for a specific time-span and not for other. His orientation was mainly orchestrational and harmonic, so the material choices would have to do with the right chord orchestration, the appropriate and careful choice of progressions, registers and timbres. My answer was that such choices of orchestration had a double foundation, empirical and conceptual, and that if we separate them we only obtain an incomplete picture of the composition. In fact, I insisted, it is the conceptual part in the choice of the material what gives a link between the microharmony of the chordal progressions and the general structure of the piece (as much in tonal as in atonal music). My arguments never convinced him and he kept composing in his wonderful Bergsonian way, but the discussion has helped me, through the years, to better understand my own expectations about the compositional action.

The tension between the sonic-perceptual and the structural-conceptual part of a composition is better understood in a general epistemological frame. Put in Kantian terms (First Critique. A51): our conceptions and musical ideas without music material are empty, and our sonic constructions without a conceptual frame are blind.

What kind of morphisms can we establish between ideas and sonic materials? The most common are those given by our traditions: instrumental sounds and contrapuntal and harmonic structures to organize them according to different theoretical principles, going from the empirical to the conceptual. But also, there have been morphisms which gave a sonic material to a particular conceptual structure, going from the conceptual to the empirical. These morphisms make our concepts audible, they give an aural intuition to something which is not perceptible through the senses. Examples of these morphisms are found in Dufay’s Nuper Rosarum Flores, which reproduces the form of the Cathedral of Florence in the structure of the piece, or the adaptation that Lejaren Hiller made for computer of a piece of Johannes Kepler based on the proportions of the planets of the solar system, or, say, a piece that would use the pattern of reproduction of cells and bacteria and assign them to two durational patterns for a percussion duet. In this second category of pieces, we obtain new perceptual objects which render abstract ideas into intuitions expanding the world of sonic materials beyond our more spontaneous ways of creating them. Another question is the aesthetical interest of those new objects.