1.1 Dancing About Architecture

How can we approach speaking about music? And why it even matters? Martin Mull, a comedian famously said: “Talking about music is like singing about economics” Elvis Costello in turn paraphrased it by saying: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. And Robert Christgau, an influential music critic himself, commented on it:

“One of the many foolish things about the fools who compare writing about music to dancing about architecture is that dancing usually is about architecture. When bodies move in relation to a designed space, be it stage or ballroom or living room or gymnasium or agora or Congo Square, they comment on that space whether they mean to or not.”

In fact, people do speak about music all the time: both inside and outside of an academic environment. But noticeably in two very different styles. They usually approach music through one of two linguistic techniques — which can be generalised as personal (experience) and objective (knowledge). The former, or subjective approach tells something about my own experience of listening to music. Usually it is all about “how it makes me feel” or “how it resonates with events in my personal life”. This approach, despite its indisputable meaningfulness for the subject, has little to offer in academic or any professional musical context — precisely because of its subjectivism, which is by nature not transferable. My own experience of a musical work might be strongly meaningful and even transformative in my own life, but in such experience there is nothing I could transfer onto another person, except telling my story. But my personal story reveals little to none objective information, it doesn’t add anything to the objective knowledge about any given musical piece. In order to produce such knowledge we have to use a whole different (one might say: professional) set of tools, which helps us to discover things about musical works, that are indeed transferable and objective. Such as information about its inner structure or about particular elements it incorporates, and also about dynamics such elements might produce through their interactions. While being useful in generating knowledge and deeper insights into the formal intricacies, such approach has little to offer for my personal encounter and relationship with any given piece of music.

1.2 Harman, Eddington and the 3rd Table

Graham Harman often uses following anecdote about Arthur Stanley Eddington (Britischer Astrophysiker) in order to illustrate his own point, which might be also useful for us. It goes something like this:

Edington: “I’m sitting at a table. I can feel its texture with my hands, I can put my pens and books on its hard surface, I can see its form and smell the painted wood it is made of. But in reality there is another table (the one which is even more real!) - it is made of microscopic particles and subatomic elements dashing through an empty space. It is pure force and it’s mostly empty. All sensible qualities are actually an illusion that I perceive as a stable and formed piece of wood. The real table is more of an indescribable void and unimaginable small particles interacting with each other.”

While Eddington himself is convinced, that the second table is the real one, Harman makes a statement that both tables are actually an illusion in exactly the same proportion. But the real table does exist. It’s the object itself. But unfortunately the very nature of any real object is such, that - according to Harman - it withdraws itself from any direct contact. It is the Kantian “thing-in-itself”, which is neither knowable nor describable. Nevertheless, Harman himself — as well as other members of the so called Speculative Realism school of thought — proposes that we can and indeed need to speak about it. It is just the matter of finding the appropriate way of doing it!

But first: what are the un-appropriate ways of speaking about objects, about the table, or about music for that matter? We actually already touched on that. According to Harman, and many others, there are basically two ways of speaking — two ways of generating knowledge about anything. We can whether say what something is made of or what this something does. Consider our question of how to speak about music: in the most cases we have the choice (or obligation) whether to focus on what it is made of (structural and formal analysis), or what it does — or: what place and role it has in a network of its relations. Interesting enough, even the phenomena of sound itself had been approach exactly in those two was from the very beginning of philosophical thought:

1.3 A brief excursus: Pneuma and Resonance

• Plato: Represents the emergence and process of sound as the displacement of a single, homogeneous substance, which, so to speak, passes through a person—and the person then begins to vibrate. “The impulse generated by the air reaches the brain and the blood through the ears (note that blood had a different meaning back then), and then reaches the soul itself —while the movement caused by this impulse, originating from the head and ending in the liver, is itself the sound.” Thus, sound is a movement inside of a person, some kind of air draft that moves and shifts. A person experiences this displacement as sound. This constantly changing substance is called pneuma in Plato's terms (breath, air). Incidentally, directly derived from pneuma is another important musical term—namely, the Neume and neume-notation, which became widespread from the 9th century onward and was used to capture melodic gestures and movements.

• Aristotle (represents a hybrid model, a mix of pneuma and resonance): Often comments on the nature of sound, which also takes the form of pneumatology in his philosophy. He defines pneuma as an organ or instrument or also as the ultimative driving force behind all movement in the world. At the same time, the first traces of resonance theory emerge in Aristotle's work. He intuited that there is a vibrating membrane in the ear and that the sounds we perceive can be understood as a relationship between the internal and external. The membrane receives these signals and transmits them — or mediates them — to the brain.

• René Descartes: Speaks about sound exclusively from the perspective of resonance theory: "The human voice sounds more pleasant to us because it relates most directly to our soul.” And he supplements this statement with a peculiar pair of claims: "The voice of a friend is more pleasant to us than the voice of an enemy, because there are poles of sympathy and antipathy concerning feelings (...). A drum stretched with sheepskin will not produce any sound if the stretched skin of a wolf on another nearby drum vibrates in its proximity.”

Here, resonance clearly involves a kind of relationship or communication. It is not really about what the sound IS, but rather what it DOES..

• Next Stop: Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck (French botanist and zoologist, 1799). After Descartes spoke about resonance as the relationship between the internal and the external — Lamarck revived the pneumatic concept, asserting that sound is an independent substance. It is neither air, nor water, nor any other fluid; it is indeed an autonomous zone of matter.

a) Pneuma corresponds with the question “What sound is made of” — its matter.

b) Resonance theory corresponds with the network theory and deals with effects within a relationist network (B.Latour).

1.4 Back to Harman

While there is nothing wrong about them per se, both presented strategies become problematic when considered as being capable of producing true and finit statements: The first approach cannot explain the emergence and durability of the object. If we, let’s say, exchange one atom, one part or even a substantial quantity of pieces an object consists of, to certain extend it still remains the same object. So the object can't be reduced just to a certain constellation of its elementary parts (atoms or notes in a musical composition). The second approach (Relationism) in turn cannot explain the change. If objects are reducible to their effects and relations in a network, then how can we explain their change? For example, if we reduce let’s say Vivaldi’s Four Seasons just to its historical significancy as a product of certain personal and sociological circumstances of its time, then how can we explain its existential persistence 300 years later in times of streaming, global warming and neoclassical reworks? But is there even an alternative approach?

2.1 Non-direct approach

Not as long as we claim to have direct and exhaustible access to things. As long as we only employ one or the other strategy mentioned above, what we basically do is — we paraphrase the object of our attention. Perhaps this is the real danger of speaking about music and dancing about architecture: it becomes grotesque, when we think, we could translate the one into another completely — without a remainder. But such attempts have been made throughout the history: To name just a few examples:

• David Hume and the school of empiricism. Their statement is (oversimplified): there are no objects at all, just bundles of qualities, which we label as objects just for convenience sake. Luckily, the next step in Philosophical thought — the school of Phenomenology — brought the object back. Husserl places the object prior to its qualities. Although it gets complicated: Heidegger, Husserl’s student still places the object prior to its qualities, but the object itself disappears — is not even visible until it breaks, and this is where Harman gets his main philosophical insight (that the objects withdraw not only from us — humans, but also from each other). Here, the theory of backgrounds is born (a place where objects dwell, while hiding from us). And speaking about backgrounds, here comes my second example:

• S. Freud’s techniques of dream interpretation is based on a very curious and even dangerous premiss: namely, that the dreams can — and in fact should be — explained away. According to Freud dreams are manifestations of the repressed, we can work with them, and as soon as we have exhausted the dream, there is no more need for it and just disappears. So the explanation/interpretation can replace the object, so to say. (Luckily, alternative and less colonialist approaches have been developed after Freud — for one of them one might turn to James Hillman)

What Harman proposes instead, is to surrender and to admit, that there is no direct access to reality at all. Any attempt of direct access is a question of knowledge (what something is made of or what it does), and all knowledge seems to seek to paraphrase — or to translate things, which can never get you closer to the object itself. That is not to say, that such approach is not useful — quite in contrary: this is precisely why many knowledge-based enterprises become very successful while applying these strategies: This is why and how science works for instance. But if we speak about getting to the object itself — which is a quest for artists, philosophers and alike — we might consider alternative approaches.

When Harman makes his statement, that the objects are not approachable in any direct way, he basically leads our focus to a whole bunch of examples for non-direct ways of how objects can be approached, and actually we do it all the time: jokes, metaphors, poetic language, magic tricks… art and philosophy.

Let’s consider some examples: Jokes: In order to perceive them in an adequate way (to be as close as possible to them), one must precisely not understand them (that is, remain at a distance). A joke that is understood — that is, translated into a chain of logical statements, or what’s even worse: explained — is no longer funny. Similarly, a magic trick that is understood takes us far away from the trick itself; we almost don't see it anymore. Same for poetic metaphor. Or coincidences in real life: They cannot be explained; their significance lies precisely in the fact that their meaning cannot be explained — and if we try to grasp their meaning, we immediately loose their significance. It seems, that precisely such gaps, interruptions, gestures of disjointness, play an essential role in communication with real objects, — while, on the other hand, non-tolerable and even contra-productive for knowledge production. As Harman puts it himself: objects can’t be known, instead they should be loved. Which means, that we find ourselves in a domain of intelligibility made possible through aesthetic. And here we have to turn our attention to Aphrodite — not out of a redundant artistic caprice, but rather out of epistemological necessity.

2.2 Beauty

Harman himself makes the following statement: the enantiodromia — or simply: the opposite — of beauty is not the ugly, but the literal. Which means: that which has been explained away. J. Hillman, whom I’ve already mentioned, speaks extensively about the Beauty in his Essay “The Practice of Beauty”. He starts with the premise, that in our times, from the standpoint of psychology, what is the most significant unconscious, the factor that is most important, but completely unrecognised, the completely repressed is not what we usually suppose: violence, misogyny, childhood, emotions. No, the repressed today is Beauty. He actually goes as far, as saying, that what would make the world a more sustainable, prosperous and fair place is the following principle: beauty before love: “For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty”. But where is it to find? What makes things beautiful? And here is the trick he makes: He declares beauty as permanently given, as an intrinsic quality of the cosmos itself, it’s alway right there. Although: “The inherent radiance lights up more translucently, more intensively within certain events, particularly those events that aim to seize it and reveal it, such as artworks” And he uses Aphrodite as a mythological figure to help him make his point: “She was more than an aesthetic joy; she was an epistemological necessity, for without her, all the other Gods would remain hidden, like the abstractions of mathematics, but never palpable realities. Owing to her, the divine could be seen and heard, smelled, tasted and touched.” So Aphrodite could be seen as a principle of sensing and experiencing the Real.

Just To summarise before going further: So how should we speak about music? I propose to approach this precisely through

1) beauty and resonance — but also:

2) through affect and its forms.

3.1 Resonance

How can we work with resonances — with those peculiar moments of unexplainable but at the same time impossible to disregard Sympathies between two or more unrelated things? Let’s consider the following example (which I got from Phil Ford): Whitney Balliett — an influential Jazz-critic know for his somewhat abstract and poetic writing style — writes about Coleman Hawkins (Tenorsax):

“He used a great many staccato, slap-tongued notes. But these mannerisms eventually vanished, and by the mid-thirties he had entered his second and most famous phase. His heavy vibrato suggested the wingbeats of a big bird and his tone halls hung with dark velvet and lit by huge fires. His technique has become infallible.”

This is an example of a written style that can go very wrong very fast. Pretentiousness is a professional hazard of critics and poets. What does it even suppose to mean, we could ask: “His heavy vibrato suggested the wingbeats of a big bird and his tone halls hung with dark velvet and lit by huge fires”? Is it a report of a personal imaginative interpretation or is it suppose to reveal something objective about Coleman Hawkins’ sound?

We could easily dismiss many similar writings about music, art or… wine for that matter, as too self-absorbed, as too far of a stretch. But what to do with such rare occasions, when it actually does work? When we can’t dismiss the loud snapping sound inside of our head, when two things suddenly become connected in a mysterious but undeniable way and a whole spectrum of new meanings and perspectives emerges as a result of such resonance?

Let’s entertain for a moment the possibility, that in fact there is a weird, but very much real connection between Hawkins’ Tenor sound and a place hung with dark velvet and lit by huge fires. Not in a metaphorical way. Rather, it is an immanent connection which nature we do not understand, yet when we encounter it, we feel it deeply and unmistakably. Actually people have been obsessed with discovering such resonances between seemingly unrelated phenomena for a very long time: One such example could be find in the hermetic tradition with its tables of magical correspondences: Long lists of magical sympathies between items belonging to different categories, such as correspondences between heavenly bodies, plants, perfumes, stones etc. As the matter of fact, we encounter such unexplainable resonances all the time in films and music. And the most peculiar thing about them is the fact, that every time they occur, they indeed provide new possibilities for reading and interpretation — they reveal something unexpected and new.

What I propose is not some kind of a Neo-platonic transcendental form, that expresses itself through different emanations — in seemingly unrelated things. It is rather a horizontal model of pure immanence introduced by Deleuze (and perhaps pioneered long before by Giordano Bruno) — where all things and events share the same ontological plane, but some of them are related to each other in an unexplainable way (at least for us). And looking for such events of “magical sympathy” is one possible way of approaching musical or any artistic work.

3.2 Form and Affect

Another way, I want to propose here, has to do with the affect and its capacity to reveal forms. Or rather: the formalist approach to the affect itself. Here I draw heavily from the work of a brilliant scholar — Eugene Brinkema — who is associate Professor of Contemporary Literature and Media at the MIT in Cambridge. Basically, she is interested in a formalist analysis of the affect independent from the spectator. Her proposed view on a post-subject affect is very interesting in relation to what I previously have sketched out in regard to G. Harman’s philosophical project. In between of "what something is made of” (scientism) and “what something does” (effects, network theories) Harman places the real object. But Brinkema makes a slightly different move: she proposes instead to look at the “whatness” of the effect itself — as a pure non-relational quality of the form. It is in a way similar, to how Harman interprets the network theory (B. Latour) — viewing the object in terms of “what it does” — but here Brinkema interrupts him and does not say “to whomever”. She suspends the affect before it hits the spectator and reads its form as a non-relational quality. The affect, so to say, folds on itself, and its form becomes analysable — something, that demands to be read and interpreted as an objective quality, without the subjective investment of a spectator…