Just Listening, SEA, Analysis
18/12/19 15:45
I came across some quotes by J. Krishnamurti of late, on the subjects of listening and analysis. They fit right into my thinking about what the Just Listening paradigm offers, and bring me to probe more deeply what I call the Sound-Energy Aggregate (SEA). What began as a recognition of the unity of sound, of the phenomenon that contains virtually every musical component and creates what we describe variously as energy, affect, or emotion, I used for years as a compositional tool, and then realized it could be used as an analytical method.
Eventually I realized that the way one must listen in the early stages of SEA analysis — which posits that each musical parameter can contribute an energy contour of its own that we perceive as part of a greater whole, or aggregate — is very similar to how one sits in Zen meditation, or Shikantaza, “just sitting”. I have thus created a workshop to enact that open-eared, pure listening, which is the Just Listening workshop. The following quote I came across over summer from Krishnamurti references the kind of listening I’m interested in:
"When you give your whole attention to something, you listen to the totality of the thing. When you attend, there are no borders of attention. When you so intensely listen, you are listening to the birds, the wind, the breeze among the leaves, the slightest whisper. In the same way, the very act of listening brings about total attention in which you see the totality and the whole significance and structure of what is being said. Not only what the speaker is saying but also when you are listening to your wife or husband, to your children, to the politician or priest, to everything about you. Then there is no choice, only clarity. There is no confusion but right perception."
It is pretty clear from this statement that in the mind of a listener giving full attention to listening, there is not a place for analysis, for the taking apart of constituent elements that we consider to be the heart of analysis. And now I have come across another quote from Krishnamurti, as follows:
“The process of analysis is the process of evaluation and censoring: this is right, this is wrong; this should be, this should not be, which is the very nature of conflict.”
This makes me realize that the SEA can be used as an analytical tool, and is excellent as such, in its use of non-discriminatory listening that leads to awareness of where to put further, more conventional analysis. But its true value is how it honors, places immense value upon that first stage, the initial perception and its reliance on stating the obvious about what we have heard. Just Listening is exactly that, and I realize that, in distinction to the statement about analysis by Krishnamurti, Just Listening is aimed at understanding how music comes together, not how we take it apart.
Maybe we need a term for that.
Eventually I realized that the way one must listen in the early stages of SEA analysis — which posits that each musical parameter can contribute an energy contour of its own that we perceive as part of a greater whole, or aggregate — is very similar to how one sits in Zen meditation, or Shikantaza, “just sitting”. I have thus created a workshop to enact that open-eared, pure listening, which is the Just Listening workshop. The following quote I came across over summer from Krishnamurti references the kind of listening I’m interested in:
"When you give your whole attention to something, you listen to the totality of the thing. When you attend, there are no borders of attention. When you so intensely listen, you are listening to the birds, the wind, the breeze among the leaves, the slightest whisper. In the same way, the very act of listening brings about total attention in which you see the totality and the whole significance and structure of what is being said. Not only what the speaker is saying but also when you are listening to your wife or husband, to your children, to the politician or priest, to everything about you. Then there is no choice, only clarity. There is no confusion but right perception."
It is pretty clear from this statement that in the mind of a listener giving full attention to listening, there is not a place for analysis, for the taking apart of constituent elements that we consider to be the heart of analysis. And now I have come across another quote from Krishnamurti, as follows:
“The process of analysis is the process of evaluation and censoring: this is right, this is wrong; this should be, this should not be, which is the very nature of conflict.”
This makes me realize that the SEA can be used as an analytical tool, and is excellent as such, in its use of non-discriminatory listening that leads to awareness of where to put further, more conventional analysis. But its true value is how it honors, places immense value upon that first stage, the initial perception and its reliance on stating the obvious about what we have heard. Just Listening is exactly that, and I realize that, in distinction to the statement about analysis by Krishnamurti, Just Listening is aimed at understanding how music comes together, not how we take it apart.
Maybe we need a term for that.
From the Fringes
17/11/19 10:57
I recently did a Just Listening workshop at the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education annual conference. Enacting the workshop with mostly non-musicians in this way is always invigorating, since the natural state of their musical training is much closer to beginner’s mind, and there’s no worry about experts lapsing into typical expert mode. As is part of my point in the workshop, experts who desire to serve as educators — a group which would include, one imagines, any college or university professor — need to know how and when to hold back on their expertise, accessing the compassion that can be awakened by the workshop.
The workshop, in the context of the conference focus, “Radical Well-Being in Higher Education: Approaches for Renewal, Justice, and Sustainability”, was offered to demonstrate a pathway to utilizing that special state we call not knowing, and was thus called “Radical Renewal: Not Knowing”.
I closed the workshop with remarks about how not knowing, and the circumspection it brings, might be fostered within the academic environment. Certainly this could be accomplished by bringing in outsiders to expose topics that are not the course focus, or by encouraging those within the faculty or student body to do the same. But of what value might this be, and how could such experiences lead to the more laudable goal of meeting one’s field head-on with the same state of mind?
This train of thought leads me to the point I intended to make at the very close of my session, and forgot to do in the heat of the moment. What I want to say is this: operating from the fringes, encountering and utilizing one’s perceptive skills to penetrate something of no particular value in one’s field, especially in academia, can be the early glimmer of understanding the value of direct, unprejudiced experience. Coming to perceive the value of not knowing in agreeable pursuits can have tremendous value precisely because they do not ignite the controversies that flare up when we attempt to examine deeply-held points of view. With care, and a long-term view, this state of mind can be developed over time in a group, and eventually lead to honest examination of core principles within that group.
This “working from the fringes” approach, rather like addressing peripheral vision, can be well demonstrated by reference to music theory, and is in fact at the very heart of the analytical procedure (Sound-Energy Aggregate, or SEA) that stands as the intellectual backbone of Just Listening. In music theory, we deal with the incredible legacy of western classical music, and the truly amazing development of what we call tonality, or harmony and harmonic progression. This study of pitch is so deep, and takes so much experience to understand, that it becomes virtually the entirety of students’ theoretical study of music. Offering new ways of understanding or teaching this material will inevitably run into legions of entrenched opposition.
The Sound-Energy Aggregate theory posits that pitch (harmony-melody) is but one of many contributors of energy to the musical experience. When I ask in Just Listening, “what do you hear?”, I encourage people to simply state what they remember, what’s most obvious to them. What comes in is predominantly not pitch per se, certainly not references that are taught in conservatories and music schools, but observations of the factors overlooked in theory classes, felt to be too obvious for commentary by the cognoscenti, things like loudness, silence, new sounds, etc. The pursuit is enabled also by asking for comments on energy, which is a way of estimating impact on the musical flow. Continued use of such a concept allows a group to begin to address pitch in the same way. Before long, honest discussion of what is heard in the pitch realm becomes possible (not an easy place to arrive, given the fear residing in many musicians’ consciousness about being “wrong” in their hearing), and we have entered a really new realm of opportunity.
One more thought about working from the fringes: I call upon chaos theory in my account of the SEA, arguing that tracking multiple energy-producing factors produces a parallel to mathematics that can handle multiple variables, which is in essence chaos theory. And the piece I use most often in Just Listening produces something of a musical fractal, as it reproduces on a large scale the same shape as the small-scale generative idea in the piece. If you’ve ever seen a fractal in action, growing itself over and over in tiny and large places, you’ll know that where the fractal takes hold is very much in the fringes.
A fractal needs no nurturing, but we humans do. The potential for radical renewal in academia by embracing not knowing is probably greatest from the fringes, as it enters there hardly noticed, and creates no pushback from the deeply entrenched.
The workshop, in the context of the conference focus, “Radical Well-Being in Higher Education: Approaches for Renewal, Justice, and Sustainability”, was offered to demonstrate a pathway to utilizing that special state we call not knowing, and was thus called “Radical Renewal: Not Knowing”.
I closed the workshop with remarks about how not knowing, and the circumspection it brings, might be fostered within the academic environment. Certainly this could be accomplished by bringing in outsiders to expose topics that are not the course focus, or by encouraging those within the faculty or student body to do the same. But of what value might this be, and how could such experiences lead to the more laudable goal of meeting one’s field head-on with the same state of mind?
This train of thought leads me to the point I intended to make at the very close of my session, and forgot to do in the heat of the moment. What I want to say is this: operating from the fringes, encountering and utilizing one’s perceptive skills to penetrate something of no particular value in one’s field, especially in academia, can be the early glimmer of understanding the value of direct, unprejudiced experience. Coming to perceive the value of not knowing in agreeable pursuits can have tremendous value precisely because they do not ignite the controversies that flare up when we attempt to examine deeply-held points of view. With care, and a long-term view, this state of mind can be developed over time in a group, and eventually lead to honest examination of core principles within that group.
This “working from the fringes” approach, rather like addressing peripheral vision, can be well demonstrated by reference to music theory, and is in fact at the very heart of the analytical procedure (Sound-Energy Aggregate, or SEA) that stands as the intellectual backbone of Just Listening. In music theory, we deal with the incredible legacy of western classical music, and the truly amazing development of what we call tonality, or harmony and harmonic progression. This study of pitch is so deep, and takes so much experience to understand, that it becomes virtually the entirety of students’ theoretical study of music. Offering new ways of understanding or teaching this material will inevitably run into legions of entrenched opposition.
The Sound-Energy Aggregate theory posits that pitch (harmony-melody) is but one of many contributors of energy to the musical experience. When I ask in Just Listening, “what do you hear?”, I encourage people to simply state what they remember, what’s most obvious to them. What comes in is predominantly not pitch per se, certainly not references that are taught in conservatories and music schools, but observations of the factors overlooked in theory classes, felt to be too obvious for commentary by the cognoscenti, things like loudness, silence, new sounds, etc. The pursuit is enabled also by asking for comments on energy, which is a way of estimating impact on the musical flow. Continued use of such a concept allows a group to begin to address pitch in the same way. Before long, honest discussion of what is heard in the pitch realm becomes possible (not an easy place to arrive, given the fear residing in many musicians’ consciousness about being “wrong” in their hearing), and we have entered a really new realm of opportunity.
One more thought about working from the fringes: I call upon chaos theory in my account of the SEA, arguing that tracking multiple energy-producing factors produces a parallel to mathematics that can handle multiple variables, which is in essence chaos theory. And the piece I use most often in Just Listening produces something of a musical fractal, as it reproduces on a large scale the same shape as the small-scale generative idea in the piece. If you’ve ever seen a fractal in action, growing itself over and over in tiny and large places, you’ll know that where the fractal takes hold is very much in the fringes.
A fractal needs no nurturing, but we humans do. The potential for radical renewal in academia by embracing not knowing is probably greatest from the fringes, as it enters there hardly noticed, and creates no pushback from the deeply entrenched.
Just Listening and the Composing Process
02/11/19 11:32
At a recent Just Listening workshop, this one at my home institution, the Longy School of Music of Bard College, I was asked about the connection between Just Listening and composing. I gave a credible answer, but one that only began to turn up the most meaningful and important parts of the connection. And of course, when did the full realization hit me but during my daily meditation the next morning!
So, the crux: Just Listening and Just Sitting (Shikantaza) share the fundamental reality that thoughts just bubble up. One does not aim to suppress thoughts, squash them, remember them — only to recognize that yes, there’s a thought. What is also real, though, is that these thoughts are about what one engages with in life, and if something is already on your mind, the thoughts that bubble up are often related to that. And the very fact that the thoughts just appear means they often bring insight.
Insight is basically another way of knowing. It is distinctly different from the acquisition of knowledge, it is not acquired through thinking, following a thought, obsessing over “figuring it out.” Though much thinking and work precede it, one must simply wait for insight, it comes on its own time, and of course that means it’s not a good idea to meditate in order to find the answer to a question.
Another aspect of the insight-meditation connection is that we are so accustomed to holding onto a thought that we think is good, following its implications, etc., that the process consumes our minds, and crowds out anything that might follow. So here’s another connection to the Just Listening paradigm: the listening model of being totally aware, absorbing what comes, and not latching onto a favorite or unfavorite occurrence in the music or performance means that when such an event does come, we acknowledge it and return to listening. In so doing, we hear the next thing and the next thing, which we might easily have missed were we involved in our likes and dislikes, and that next thing might be the very turning point in our appreciation or understanding of the music. Likewise in composing, it is incredibly valuable to allow insights to pop up through a variety of means, and sitting meditation is one. (All seem to share the aspect of waiting, in one way or another.) When the insight comes, it is difficult not to obsessively try not to forget it, but when one is able to simply let it be, to risk losing it, it’s amazing how often another comes and another after that.
My response then, to the question of how the Just Listening approach to listening connects to composing is that the process of maintaining the state of beginner’s mind while listening, allowing insight to bubble up without our grasping onto it, exactly corresponds to loosening one’s grasp on the composing process enough to allow unsolicited insight to arise. Thoughts just arise without our direction. Learning to let that happen, learning to give up some of our desire to control the outcome, and let the materials and process more directly speak to us through insight, is an incredibly valuable lesson to learn, and a very worthwhile compositional tool.
So, the crux: Just Listening and Just Sitting (Shikantaza) share the fundamental reality that thoughts just bubble up. One does not aim to suppress thoughts, squash them, remember them — only to recognize that yes, there’s a thought. What is also real, though, is that these thoughts are about what one engages with in life, and if something is already on your mind, the thoughts that bubble up are often related to that. And the very fact that the thoughts just appear means they often bring insight.
Insight is basically another way of knowing. It is distinctly different from the acquisition of knowledge, it is not acquired through thinking, following a thought, obsessing over “figuring it out.” Though much thinking and work precede it, one must simply wait for insight, it comes on its own time, and of course that means it’s not a good idea to meditate in order to find the answer to a question.
Another aspect of the insight-meditation connection is that we are so accustomed to holding onto a thought that we think is good, following its implications, etc., that the process consumes our minds, and crowds out anything that might follow. So here’s another connection to the Just Listening paradigm: the listening model of being totally aware, absorbing what comes, and not latching onto a favorite or unfavorite occurrence in the music or performance means that when such an event does come, we acknowledge it and return to listening. In so doing, we hear the next thing and the next thing, which we might easily have missed were we involved in our likes and dislikes, and that next thing might be the very turning point in our appreciation or understanding of the music. Likewise in composing, it is incredibly valuable to allow insights to pop up through a variety of means, and sitting meditation is one. (All seem to share the aspect of waiting, in one way or another.) When the insight comes, it is difficult not to obsessively try not to forget it, but when one is able to simply let it be, to risk losing it, it’s amazing how often another comes and another after that.
My response then, to the question of how the Just Listening approach to listening connects to composing is that the process of maintaining the state of beginner’s mind while listening, allowing insight to bubble up without our grasping onto it, exactly corresponds to loosening one’s grasp on the composing process enough to allow unsolicited insight to arise. Thoughts just arise without our direction. Learning to let that happen, learning to give up some of our desire to control the outcome, and let the materials and process more directly speak to us through insight, is an incredibly valuable lesson to learn, and a very worthwhile compositional tool.
Return again
06/12/17 10:54
While in graduate school studying composition, attending concerts of new pieces by my colleagues, I began to learn an important lesson, or at least I experienced an initial step in the process of learning an important lesson. What I found was that as I listened to a friend’s new piece, I would inevitably encounter something I didn’t like, wouldn’t do, or something of the sort, and I would stop listening actively, basically shut out the rest of the piece. Then, on encountering the person after the concert, I had no idea what to say. I couldn’t bring myself to be honest, tell them I didn’t like the piece, hated it, whatever my felt reaction was, because of my compassion for the sensitivity one has after exposing one’s musical creations for the first time.
So I resolved that I would turn back toward the music, keep listening in order to find something I could honestly say I liked or enjoyed that would enable me to have a positive comment to greet my friend with. What blessing this move has been! I found that many times a thing I would never do, thought was awful or ugly, turned out to be the foundation of a successful piece, something I really enjoyed hearing! This turning back, ignoring my reactions, or at least continuing to listen despite my reactions, has become a cornerstone of my listening, and connects to a couple of very important facets of my life.
In realizing that my likes and dislikes, my concepts of music, in fact aspects of my musical training stood in the way of fully hearing music in the first place, I have a direct experience of how knowledge can prevent us from encountering music honestly. That realization, along with a few others, is at the heart of the analytical method, the Sound-Energy Aggregate, and of my new workshop, Just Listening. People with much musical expertise are often so intent on finding what we’ve been trained to listen (or look) for that we don’t hear elements that are the life of a piece, style, or musical culture. And for anyone, getting involved in a thought about how much we like something is just as detrimental to listening as turning away out of dislike.
This listening paradigm reminds me of the old adage to “follow the straight and narrow path”. I heard that a lot growing up, but in my experience, I don’t really go straight, I veer off constantly! And it’s not about not veering off, it’s about being honest with myself that I have veered off, and turning back toward the path I wish to follow. How much spiritual guidance focuses on this very human tendency? Certainly Zen meditation deals with it at the foundational level: when one finds the mind involved in a thought, one returns to counting the breath, or to just sitting. In meditation I find the spiritual reality of a lesson learned from listening to music. And one of the songs from the closing services on Yom Kippur resounds in my mind, a repetitive and uplifting song exhorting us to “return again...”
Returning again to listening is the source of meaningful engagement with music. It needs to be the foundation of honest musical analysis. We have to set our knowledge aside to truly engage, without fear that our knowledge will be of no value. On the contrary, our knowledge does not leave us, it facilitates our hearing in ways that we hardly understand and do not consciously control. When needed, it supports us effortlessly. But I begin once again to enter discussion of not knowing. More on that another day!
So I resolved that I would turn back toward the music, keep listening in order to find something I could honestly say I liked or enjoyed that would enable me to have a positive comment to greet my friend with. What blessing this move has been! I found that many times a thing I would never do, thought was awful or ugly, turned out to be the foundation of a successful piece, something I really enjoyed hearing! This turning back, ignoring my reactions, or at least continuing to listen despite my reactions, has become a cornerstone of my listening, and connects to a couple of very important facets of my life.
In realizing that my likes and dislikes, my concepts of music, in fact aspects of my musical training stood in the way of fully hearing music in the first place, I have a direct experience of how knowledge can prevent us from encountering music honestly. That realization, along with a few others, is at the heart of the analytical method, the Sound-Energy Aggregate, and of my new workshop, Just Listening. People with much musical expertise are often so intent on finding what we’ve been trained to listen (or look) for that we don’t hear elements that are the life of a piece, style, or musical culture. And for anyone, getting involved in a thought about how much we like something is just as detrimental to listening as turning away out of dislike.
This listening paradigm reminds me of the old adage to “follow the straight and narrow path”. I heard that a lot growing up, but in my experience, I don’t really go straight, I veer off constantly! And it’s not about not veering off, it’s about being honest with myself that I have veered off, and turning back toward the path I wish to follow. How much spiritual guidance focuses on this very human tendency? Certainly Zen meditation deals with it at the foundational level: when one finds the mind involved in a thought, one returns to counting the breath, or to just sitting. In meditation I find the spiritual reality of a lesson learned from listening to music. And one of the songs from the closing services on Yom Kippur resounds in my mind, a repetitive and uplifting song exhorting us to “return again...”
Returning again to listening is the source of meaningful engagement with music. It needs to be the foundation of honest musical analysis. We have to set our knowledge aside to truly engage, without fear that our knowledge will be of no value. On the contrary, our knowledge does not leave us, it facilitates our hearing in ways that we hardly understand and do not consciously control. When needed, it supports us effortlessly. But I begin once again to enter discussion of not knowing. More on that another day!
A Few Thoughts on Resonance
29/11/17 10:13
Resonance is an upwelling of unity. When in the presence of vibration, certain objects will start to vibrate with the original stimulus. Think of sympathetic vibration in instruments like the sitar (a set of strings not directly articulated vibrates when the other strings do): the term means something! Sympathy is coming into congruence with another’s feelings, this is a kind of unity as well. A piano or a violin is constructed as a resonating box, an object whose purpose is to vibrate in sympathy with the string source, amplify it so it spreads further. When someone states that what you said resonates with them, they are rather saying the same thing, that it stirred within their mind a sympathetic thought or feeling, a vibration.
So there is something about vibrating together, yes? Isn’t the phenomenon of entrainment the same? When in the presence of rhythm, a steady beat, we start to tap, sway, dance. Isn’t a beat sort of a slow vibration, a periodic reality? When people listen to music together, they become entrained to the same vibration, they resonate with the music, if you will. So a yet-unexplained (but well-documented) neurological phenomenon, entrainment, is a clear demonstration of the ability of musical engagement to create unity.
So there is something about vibrating together, yes? Isn’t the phenomenon of entrainment the same? When in the presence of rhythm, a steady beat, we start to tap, sway, dance. Isn’t a beat sort of a slow vibration, a periodic reality? When people listen to music together, they become entrained to the same vibration, they resonate with the music, if you will. So a yet-unexplained (but well-documented) neurological phenomenon, entrainment, is a clear demonstration of the ability of musical engagement to create unity.