Exploring the way music creates magic in our minds...
Brief chronicle of the history of the SEA
Ever since begin introduced to modern music at the Governor's School of North Carolina in 1974, particularly from playing Ligeti's Atmosphères, I have had the conviction that sound itself is the fundamental expressive medium. I did a lot of work in electronic music, and loved working with long evolving sounds. In that process, I realized that my "sounds" had rhythm, timbre (of course!), pitch, harmony, dynamics, pretty much all the musical elements. I realized that each element contributed a shape, an energy contour, and that the interaction of those energies creates the flow of shifting musical energies. I termed the composite the Sound-Energy Aggregate (SEA). First this was a compositional approach, and then it became an analytical technique.
The idea has developed gradually over the years, and I now think of it as a phenomenology of music, or at least that is part of its essence. It is likewise a contemplative approach to analysis, primarily because it is founded on the actual sound of the music, and uses the study of notation only secondarily. To listen to everything at once, not getting tangled up in thought, is not necessarily easy, and is very much akin to the Zen practice of Just Sitting, or Shikantaza.
One way or the other, SEA analysis aims to be inclusive of all approaches to musical analysis, converting insights from any close study of music into estimates of energy contributions of the many musical parameters. It seeks to lead one to insights into the audible structure of music, into how the interaction of parameters creates a unified, supple, multi-dimensional flow of shifting energy.
Opening up the conceptual realm of energy manipulation, of counterpoint of disparate elements, opens up the potential for understanding and documenting the interaction of music and extra-musical elements such as dance, film, or theater.
The idea has expanded into a workshop, Just Listening, which focuses on the listening itself, in a group, as a pathway to deeper understanding, to grasp the power of "not knowing", and to foster compassion for oneself and others.