Composing and the Sense of Self
John Rahn
[Abstract: The sense of self is both an obstacle to art and
necessary for its creation. Games determine many actions impersonally. Music is
a game that can become a friend. A composition must “lift off” into an
independent existence like that of another person. Monumentality and
immortality in art depend on this paradox: I continue to exist in something
other than I.]
We may deplore, in theory, a sense of self, treat it as the seat
of nausea, a trail of slime on the ground of our existential career, a turd, or
dress it in double-knits, or deny the possibility of its existence or the
possibility of the existence of any “subject” which would be its necessary
precondition, or OM it out of itself to reach a clear plateau. Nevertheless we
act, and each act is both the basis of the construction of our self by others
(from “outside”) and adds its increment of memory and passion to the sense we
have of our self. Just as our actions
contribute to the sense of self, the sense of self contributes to our choices,
our actions.
Games
Whole regimes of actions are simply subordinate to rules of the
game being played. One who decides to be a really good squash player must
follow that discipline, eat right, exercise in certain ways, practice the
moves, and on the court, follow the logic of squash tactics. There may be some
inflection of the actual play by the player's self, the physical peculiarities
(tall, short, fast, slow, young, old, etc) and mental dispositions (daredevil, cautious),
but most of the play is selfless. No matter who is playing, certain sequences
of moves and strategic thinking are right, if you have the ability to carry
them out. Even the deceptions are mostly impersonal: as you prepare to hit the
ball, your opponent knows which shot is the most likely because it is the best
choice for you, and knows also that you may choose a different shot if you
sense that it may take your opponent by surprise or off balance.
By “game” I mean any definable domain of actions with its own
internal logic. Making money is such a game. One who has decided to make money
must, like the squash player, fall under the discipline of that game. It does
not matter how much the player wants to make money, except to keep the player
in the game and well disciplined. Certain moves and strategies will work and
others will not, irrespective of personal desires and sense of self. The
classic “con games” exploit undisciplined and ignorant desire for money. The
trick is to play a game your opponent does not know; the mark has the same
desire for money you do, but is unaware of the game being played. In both making money and squash, one player
wins what the other loses. They have entirely unambiguous goals which involve
maximizing one's share of a finite resource.
No doubt many people would like to make money, or even to be a
good squash player, but not all of them choose to play the game, or to devote
themselves to playing it well. They may have physical or mental limitations
which would prevent their being competitive in a given game. The goal of the
game or the scene of the game may conflict with another game which they play
passionately, as when a Christian monastic renounces the world. Some people try
to play a number of games simultaneously: the successful businesswoman who is a
good squash player and also a good mother and wife. The choice of which games
to play depends basically on one's sense of self. Circumstances play a part
both in forming the sense of self and in determining the games one plays. The
scion of a very rich family will grow up accustomed to financial dealings, will
learn the game as part of learning to be a person, and will also have access to
the information and capital to play that game. This does not determine that he will
play that game, but it smooths the road to it.
A person chooses to play a game not only because of the
desirability of the result of the game -- many games have only a formal result,
like chess -- but according to the pleasure the person finds during the actual
playing of the game, a pleasure in the real-time working-out of the rules of
the game and in the circumstances attendant on playing the game. Sailboat
racing and sport car racing have very different sorts of venues for otherwise
similar games. If you like the water and sailing, race sailboats; if you like
autos and great speed and noise, race cars, and so on. There are also secondary
effects: the star football player will make a lot of money and break bones, the
chess champion will be revered in the world of chess.
Music, Games, and Friendship
So why would anyone choose to play the art game, the
art-music-composing game? There is initially the pleasure of making music, any
kind of music. This is an especially pleasurable game. There is a sensual pleasure
in it as well as an abstract pleasure in the rules of the game. Like any
intensely played game, it takes you out of yourself. In the case of music, this
Dionysiac evacuation has the peculiar appeal of simultaneously unbinding and
constructing the sense of self. Music is not a zero-sum game, but depends on
cooperation among players, so that when one player wins all players win; such
positive cooperation can be very appealing in itself. Music is a pleasurable
activity producing pleasure in other people. It is not appropriative, like sex.
If I enjoy playing music with you, I am undisturbed by the prospect of your
playing music with many other people. When I play (perform) a piece of music,
it becomes mine only in that I construct it in the performance, but it remains
freely available for construction by others. When I have composed a piece of
music, it is both mine and not mine, with cultural and subcultural and
individual variations in the kind and degree of possession.
Unlike a painting, a composition is not a possessible physical
object. It is not collectible and cannot be hoarded. Though a melomaniac or
discophile may possess and hoard a great library of recordings of music, the
possession is in principle not exclusive so as to deny possession of the music
by others. When I sing a tune it is mine but also yours. You can simply listen
to it and you can sing it whenever you want. To create a piece of music is
(usually) to make a nonphysical mold, a pattern that can be replicated in
material, sensual form. It is a prototype of the “intellectual property” for
which legal mechanisms such as copyright are still being re-invented. For a
physical object, possession is presumptive ownership and is exclusive; but a
pattern only becomes intellectual property by its potential for possession by
others, and ownership is determined by origination rather than by possession. In spite of the music industry
and the emerging legalities of the information age, making music is essentially
an amiable and a generous act.
Consider friendship. Two friends enjoy one another's company and
conversation. A friendship is deliberately constructed as well as spontaneous.
There are limits to the relationship; transgressing these usually harms or
destroys the friendship. Each friend is reticent in certain ways and refrains
from certain behaviors, such as presumption or domineering. Friends are careful
of each other. Friendship is not a good game, in that there is no firm set of
rules for it. The logic connecting actions within a friendship is tenuous and
adaptive. The relationship is always personal. Friendship is like music in its
amiable, generous, pleasurable, constructive, and cooperative nature, but it is
nothing but cooperation. Friendship is an intricate cat's-cradle of connections
between two selves. Each friend plays his self against the other, tests the
pushes and pulls of the relationship against his sense of self, refines his
sense of self through the relationship.
Music, on the other hand, is definitely a game. The pleasure in
the real-time working-out of its rules is the major pleasure of music. The
sensuous effects do exist: sound is like touch, it is a kind of touch. Some
complexes of sounds are caressing. However, the sensuous effect of the material
sound does not in itself constitute the music. Sound becomes music when it is
perceived as arranged. Sound is a material framework on which to hang patterns,
organization, evolving structures, abstract relationships. Sound which is heard
as music is a jungle-gym for the mind's faculty of abstract organization. The
marriage of a kind of broadcast touch with abstract function is at the heart of
music's peculiarity and appeal.
There is a third component in the experience of music which is
like friendship. This is what makes music important, more than a mere pleasure.
The intimacy of the structures built in an experience of music entwines the
music with the self. The temporality of this intimate experience is an analog
to one's life in general. One lives one's life in the music. The sensuous
structures evolve as they do in life, carrying one's self along with them.
Since the person experiencing the music collaborates in constructing the music
(on the basis of the material sounds provided by replication of the pattern
provided by the music's originator), a dialog ensues which negotiates the
construction of one's sense of self, of alternate selves, freeing the
imagination of self, pulling us out of our ruts, opening up a space and a depth
and a future for our selves. The originating pattern serves as our friend. If that friend is wise and good, the
relationship can be ennobling. It helps us to make friends with ourselves.
Three Levels of Game
Who would not choose to be a composer, if that means creating
pleasurable sensuous abstract structures lived out in time as our friend, our
mentor? The game of composing music is one of the grand games. It is a
meta-meta-game in that each piece of music is itself a game whose rules are
asserted if not invented by the composer. To choose to be a composer is to play
the composing game. The next level of creative act is choosing or constructing
a given set of rules, a syntax, a style, a genre. At the third level, the
composition or game-instance is composed (like a particular game of chess as
opposed to the Game of Chess).
The distinction between the game and the game-instance is a
logical rather than a causal or temporal distinction. Often the rules of the
game are to some degree constructed and refined interactively during the
process of composition, as the composer gets further along in working on it and
as the piece gets more complete. The construction of the rules of the game and
the composition of this instance of the game are in such cases interdependent.
The individual composition calls for and receives the rules under which it
constructs itself; or (to put it another way) the particulars of the
composition arrange themselves “naturally” into patterns, following the
composer's humanly inevitable tendency to repeat and vary. But just as earlier
moments in a piece of music, earlier in piece-time, motivate later ones
regardless of the temporal order of their creation, the rules of the game
remain general and abstract in principle even when they come into existence as
part of a process of composition of a particular piece of music, and though
they may never find another avatar, another instance, they could.
The act of composing is not just arranging abstract patterns,
like a kaleidoscope. The abstract activity is essential but not sufficient. The
composer must give some thought, direct some intuition, toward the person in
the music, the basis of the “friend” that the listener will construct. The
composition of the friend is not explicit, not “Now I am going to compose a
friend in the music.” In any case, the “friend” in the music is just a metaphor
for what actually takes place, for the musical side of the dialogic
reconstruction of the self of the listener through interaction with the music.
The person in the music is in the structures of the music, for the substance of
the music is nothing but its structures. The friend in the music is a quality
in the structures that facilitates the potential of the music for interaction
with the listener's self.
Composing is then really like giving birth, or raising a child,
or teaching. To compose is to help create another, to make up a set of rules
and a sensuous living-out of them which will enable another person to complete
the image of the friend which, in turn, acts as a trellis for the other person
to grow on. Composing is also virtuosity and display and craftsmanship, so that
the games and persons so constructed will be attractive, useful, and fun,
brilliant, challenging, wonderful.
Inflection and Assertion
There are entire genres of inflection, like jazz, which depend
on parody of an existing musical game (syntax, style, genre). Most popular
music is, at its best, inflectional, a more or less creative inflection of
existing games. The inflections become the primary carriers of meaning, while
the rules of the game, because they are constant, become almost inaudible, as
in the harmony of rock music or the rhythm of bossa nova -- so constant that
they can be programmed into electronic keyboard instruments as presets. They
carry no information, no significant variability.
This is not to say that all inflectional music is
information-free. Jazz, for instance, is musically rich and essentially fluid
in its materials, which are the classic materials of harmony, tunes,
counterpoint, rhythm. Good jazz cannot be preset. Yet it inflects these
classical materials, parodying the tune. Jazz is subversive and understandably
countercultural. Its attempts to transcend its dependence on inflection and
parody, to find an identity constructed out of its own traditions in the
non-inflectional aspects of classic jazz, have however led it towards the
classical art music tradition, while classic jazz itself lives on as a museum
subculture. Popular music such as that of Madonna or Peter Gabriel is also
inflectional, but even though much of it is preset-able, it can be significant
and even innovative in its inflections. Good popular music is paradigmatically
postmodern: sampling, collage, comment, and an inflectional variation, all of
which probably relate to the kind of marginal individuation useful to marketing
and commerce.
Modern art music is not inflectional. The rules of the game are
themselves up for grabs: it is a music which transcends the game by composing
the rules of its game, its syntax, its genre, its very aesthetic stance and
cultural position. This very radicality prevents its being a music of
inflection. It must be a music of assertion, of invention and innovation, of
discovery. To compose is not to assert oneself, but to assert another: the game
(rules of the game), the instance of the game, and the friend one finds in the
playing-out of the game-instance. The listener to art music must figure out the
rules of the game by following the play of the game, which is a challenge and a
stimulus to alertness, and the friend one meets in this music can be a
stranger, a foreigner, an exotic, a
relationship which expands one's sense of self. Part of the appeal of art music
is thus related to the appeal of world music and ethnopop: discovery of a new
world. Eventually, if not sooner, the ethnopop ferment will come to its
chemical equilibrium as the music cultures of the world swirl and mix
universally, the explosion of hybrid vigor peters out, and every remaining
individual musical tradition will face the problem addressed by contemporary
art music and jazz: How can a music find newness and vitality within itself to
avoid stagnation?
Schoenberg and Cage
The twentieth-century is (was) a century of innovation devoted
to addressing this problem in almost as many ways as there have been
significant composers. Two figures stand out as representative: Schoenberg for
syntactical innovation, and Cage for cultural innovation. Both founded
traditions whose elements pervade the contemporary musical scene.
Without Schoenberg's by-its-bootstraps re-invention and
universal expansion of harmonic materials, music had nowhere to go: the walls
of tonality loomed high on every side. After Schoenberg, the theory of harmony
has become truly universal, and every harmonic world is a choice. John Cage,
though he studied music with Schoenberg, followed the tradition of Dada and
took it to full flower. The musical and personal eccentricity of a Satie became
with Cage an attempt at living a life and producing a music both of which were
exemplary of his somewhat uneasy blend of Zen buddhism, Taoism, anarchism and
social justice, and Dada. Cage endowed musical composition with an explicit
ethical dimension and invented a new cultural and social role for it. Following
“in his steps” [1] are the performance artists, free improvisors, and
alternative culture musicians for whom making music and living life are ethical
statements, each constructed in harmony with the other. “Compose Yourself (A
Manual for the Young)” [2] is J. K. Randall's title: The alternative culture of
free improvisation, music free from the proscenium, from the audience/composer
duality, from the authority of the composer, from the monumentality of the
composition, and perhaps from the ego if not the self.
Neither of these composers neglected the other side. Schoenberg
also felt the need to invent a new musical society for musical performances,
and Cage also expanded music's universe by opening it to non-intention, chance,
the sonorous found object, the environment, sound which before Cage few
bothered to perceive as musical. Schoenberg's aesthetic remained one of
expression in a dark, Freudian world of universal cultural angst, a
post-Romantic aesthetic in that it assumes that the artist can find the
universal in himself and by expressing it, bring it to light for everyone. It
is absolutely non-egotistical but is expressly a self-involved aesthetic,
disciplined by an idealism and a tortured Atlas-like effort to bear the world
for others. Schoenberg lives in the world of the masterwork, the compelling
universal artifact that is stamped with the identity of its author. Schoenberg
would be a rather heavy father were it not for his unremitting search for a
radicality that subverts the authority that rules the search. Cage worked hard
at constructing his compositions, building structures with an assiduity and
attention to detail that defies the popular conception of his work. In a sense,
Cage left nothing to chance. His stated program was to free composition from
intention, but he could never realize this. It was always his music, his
intention, his 4'33” of piano silence, his frame, his directing authority
behind every anarchistic statement. When you catch a butterfly and let it go
free, that is your choice, you had that power. With Schoenberg, it is the
family (the abstract, Freudian family) that provides the interpersonal
relations behind the music; with Cage, it is the lover: choice not chance,
cherishing by freeing.
The Composer's Self
The composer is of course also a listener and a performer (if
only projectively, in imagination), and in these capacities enjoys the same
relationship to music that other people do. What about the composer as
composer? There is no doubt that the composer's sense of self is bound up with
the music the composer creates (I am using “composer” here as a category for
music creation that includes improvisation and any other mode of creation). The
relation of the music to the sense of self
varies enormously in degree and kind in different musical cultures.
Behold: Mozart, Babbitt, or Glass working industriously, writing
a musical score that narrowly defines the sonic outcome within a traditional
scene of staged musical performance before a defined and passive musical
audience. In this case, a masterwork is possible. The reception of the music is
conditioned to expect that the music be infused with the musical person of its
composer. Phillip Glass's musical style is like a trademark, assuring a certain
quality (it tastes like Coke) and authenticating the experience by the stamp of
the master. We read program notes about Beethoven, his cranky deafness and
passion, about Wagner's domestic arrangements and political maneuverings, about
Janacek's advanced age or Mozart's tender age at the time of the composition,
and so on. Such personal information about the composer would be relevant to
the reception of the music of that composer only in a tradition that strives to
understand the music as an extension of a person, of its single originating
creator. The intimate personal relations that listeners have to the music
induces a cult of the personality of the composer. The mighty music of
Beethoven is heard as mighty Beethoven himself. The feeling of personal
connection, the “friend in the music,” becomes the person of the composer-as-manifested-in-the-music.
This is not without its effect on the composers themselves,
perhaps especially after the contemporary cult of composer-personality was well
developed (by the mid 1800s): Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner. Stravinsky's aristocratic recoil from romanticism and expression
only founded a more enigmatic but still intensely intriguing cult of his
personality. Finally with Cage (and Warhol) we begin to play with the cult of
the personality, accepting its inevitability in this tradition, while the
Randall/Boretz culture and its many cousins attempt to construct alternate
traditions with music but no composer, no audience.
Monumentality
At its extreme, the cult of the composer's personality motivates
people to play the composing game as a way of extending (or maintaining) the
domain of their ego, as a “power trip” to dominate and impress with your
personality the malleable hordes, to colonize them with your self, to frank
them, or to seduce them, as an avoidance of interpersonal negotiation by a
socially sanctioned but at bottom infantile universal assertion of self. The
composer as prick. The music composed from such motivations may actually be
compelling -- this is the point of this powerful motivation.
Composition as manipulation, which ultimately tries to enslave
other people, or to deny the existence of other people, to kill them. The
fantasy of a musical composition that consists of machine-gunning the audience
is almost as old as the machine gun itself, and was common during periods such
as Dada and the 1960s: egotism disguised as nihilism, the quasi-erotic power of
death as the ultimate manipulation. Another fantasy: the audience wired into
their chairs, virtual reality controlling their every sensation and thought,
controlling their selves, substituting the composer's artifact for the very
self of each member of the audience. The total art-work. Possession.
Some flavor of the extension of self, its expansion and
monumentality, is built into the overall tradition of Western art from its
inception and accounts for much of the character of this art. “Exegi monumentum
aere perennius,” wrote Quintus Horatius Flaccus in the epilog to his three
books of Odes: “I have completed a monument that will last longer than
bronzes.” [3] Even in 24 B.C., the
sentiment was already conventional: art endures and is a monument to its
creator. If you go to the classical
section of the Louvre you will see a forest of Roman busts: marble selves
upthrust like magma, congealed extrusions of ego, simulacra of the person
through the face, superfacial immortality through representation in art. The
sculptors may be anonymous here but it was the aristocratic patrons who paid
them, who bought out the artist's share of the immortality of art, an art which
was just as enduring as marble or bronze then, but now is on the Internet.
Horace claimed his share directly as poet: “Non omnis moriar” (Not all of me
shall die).
Immortality
Not only can an idea, an art-work, last longer than a material
edifice, but an art-work embodies the self of the artist in a way that a mere
public work (Ozymandias, the charitable Foundation named meticulously and
conspicuously after the persons donating the funds) cannot. Even children are a
more remote kind of immortality, since they are they and not you. The desire to
perpetuate one's self -- especially as one's age advances -- is based of course
on the fear of death, but also and more objectively, on the feeling that each
individual person, particularly oneself, is a valuable and unique accomplishment
in living, the result of daily struggle that admirably transcends that
struggle, something it would be a shame to lose by death. This is by no means a
universal presumption, but it underlies Western culture.
One of the fascinating contradictions in Cage's work is the
construction of a monumental opus whose premises include the abolition of
intention in art and the disciplined whittling-down of the sense of self. One
cannot simultaneously be a Zen monk and a “great artist,” logically, but actually
it seems that one can try. “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” [4]
“When going from nothing towards something, we have all the European history of
music and art we remember and there we can see that this is well done but the
other is not. So-and-so contributed this and that and criteria. But now we are
going from something towards nothing, and there is no way of saying success or
failure since all things have equally their Buddha nature.” [5] Without being
an artist, one still can do art. The act of making the art proceeds from an
enlightened, self-less nature. You erase the paper, leaving it blank. The blank
paper is then the ground of your action. Your art may be figured, but you are
not there, you are blank. The art is a monument to non-self, and there is no
“I” to invest in the art so that it (the “I”) shall not all die. Art, like
Mallarme’s lace, “abolishes itself,” as under its influence the distinction
between art and life disappears, leaving life in an artistic condition. Art and
the self both become increasingly irrelevant categories as the Zen discipline
proceeds and the universe becomes transparent. This, too, is a kind of
immortality.
The Tertium Quid and Lift-off
I have just been talking about the composer investing the
composer's self in the music, to the extreme of the composer as prick, the
phallic insertion of one's self into others to dominate and control them and to
intensify and aggrandize the composer's sense of self. Yet earlier I said that
to compose is not to assert one's self, but to assert another. When a
composer's self is invested in an art-work, it is necessarily fictionalized.
The rules of the game provide constraints which can never entirely conform to
the life outside the game, the self of the composer. Even for a composer who
tries simply to put himself into the music, to “express” himself (a rather
disgusting expression, squeezing to produce an outflow), hoping perhaps for a
monument or for immortality, the character of the music can never be the
character of the person. This is the saving grace of art. Most people --
people who do not suffer from certain
psychological afflictions-- do not enjoy being invaded and taken over by
another person, manipulated and dominated by the immediate and inescapable
presence of another. They may enjoy a simulacrum of this sensation in play. The
rules of the game provide a playing field that distances both the artist and
the audience from one another, and the characters who meet on the playing field
are both fictional, a fictional composer and a fictional listener, both made up
within the game.
However, the person of the composer is not the only side of the
“tertium quid,” the third ingredient of musical art, the aesthetic mediator
between the composer and the listener which earlier was called the “friend in
the music.” A composer while composing
must pay attention to the sensuous effects, to the rules of the game, to the
temporal dynamics and drama of the playing-out of this instance of the game,
and also to this tertium quid. It is not necessarily the character of the
composer, but it is necessarily an overall quality or character of the whole
piece of music, the aesthetic or feel of the music. A composer can follow the
rules (whatever they are), composing note after note, but the result will be
only an exercise unless an aesthetic sense of the whole emerges. It is this
sense of the whole that guides the composer during composition. The emerging
sense of the whole, as it were the self of the piece of music, interacts with
the self of the composer during the composition of the piece but one is not
identifiable with the other. The sense of the whole piece of music is built not
only of relations within the music and between the music and the composer, but
includes also that piece of music's place in the world, its context both
artistically and socially. Identity is both coherence and frame, the one
reinforcing the other.
When a piece of music takes on a life of its own, when its
aesthetic identity emerges as a force in its own definition and persists, we
have lift-off. The piece of music becomes weightless, buoyant; one no longer
has to hold it up, since it upholds itself. It gains an autonomy and an
independence from the conditions under which it is formed, from the context and
rules of the game, and from the person of the composer. It is born as an
aesthetic entity.
How to Achieve Lift-Off
Since lift-off is the
establishment of an independently existing entity, the first requirement for
the composer is receptivity, an openness and perceptive sensitivity so that the
composer may understand the tentative beginnings of the infant entity, its
potential character. It does not matter when these beginnings stir, or with
what degree of intention by the composer. The composer may even be the
caricature of “Mozart,” a grinning, drooling, intentionless idiot scrawling
note after note on the music paper (or “while seated one day at the organ”[6]),
but unless this idiot can perceive what is taking shape and contribute (however
witlessly) to its ongoing formation, assist at its birth, nothing will form and
there will be no lift-off. At the other extreme, a composer may spend much
creative time in a “pre-compositional” phase which is really compositional,
prior to writing down notes or making sounds but concerned with making the
rules of the game, the syntax of the piece-to-be, so that the aesthetic idea of
the piece which is also taking shape at this time will be possible in its
musical flesh.
Such receptivity is not possible if the composer is blinded by a
preoccupation with the technical machinery of the composing, or by an engorged
and hyperpresent sense of self. This is not to say that egomaniacs cannot be
good composers; the counterexamples are all too numerous. The sense of total
control afforded by the composing process would predispose composition to
invasion by egomaniacs even in the absence of monumentality and immortality.
Composition is the egomaniac's chance to open to otherness without losing
control to another person. The megalomaniac egomaniac composer creates a world
out of himself, complete with others, but the others are the compositions that
are his own creation, even though lifted-off into independent existence.
Moreover, the composer can edit a composition, revising its emerging nature to
fit the needs of the composer. This is something one usually cannot do with
other people. The totalizing,
overwhelming, engorged sense of self of the egomaniac composer feeds on the
dependency of its compositions and on its extended power over other people (the
cult of personality, monumentality). Yet even such a fat sense of self must
remain open to the otherness of the emerging composition and ultimately has to
encourage its independence, because the existence of the art work is not an extension
of the existence of the artist, in spite of monumentality; if it were, there
could be no monumentality. Monumentality depends on this paradox, that I
continue to exist in something other than I.
The Person and the Piece
Not all egomaniacs are composers, and not all composers are
egomaniacs. People with weak egos may be drawn to composition for the same
reasons that appeal to the egomaniac: control, lack of resistance, opportunity
to build a self outside of self, and of course the glory of it all. Even people
with quite normal personalities, those whose parameters are within the normal
range, manage to compose. Composers may be nice or nasty, social or asocial,
selfish or idealistic, religious or non-religious, moral or amoral. Not all of
these differences find their representations in the music produced. The
distancing effect provided by the playing field and the game, and the
subsequent lift-off of the artifact into an independently existing entity,
provide a filtering on the raw human personality of the composer. As the
composer finds himself filtered and refracted by composing, nice and nasty etc.
do not translate very well into the change of context. Someone who is mean and
nasty in her everyday dealings with people may compose a piece of music which
is light, airy, warm, delicate, and pleasing, and someone who is gentle and
thoughtful of other people's feelings in real life may, in a piece of music,
compose out a kind of wrenching aggression appropriate to a Viking berserker.
This does not mean that the nice composer turns nasty or the mean composer
becomes gentle. The integration that rules the personality remains unchanged,
or very little changed, by the act of composing a piece of music that
“expresses” qualities oppositional to those of the integration.
Composing is not a therapy that changes the composer. However,
composing does allow the composer to play with himself, to develop aspects of
his personality that remain on the sidelines in real life, inactive because
they do not contribute much to the integrated agenda. At a given time during
process of the composition of a piece of music engaged in lifting-off, some
latent complex of qualities may be exactly right for it. The complex of
qualities settles into the emergent piece of music and turns itself on,
marrying into the other qualities of the music and, given a responsibility it
never gets a chance at in the composer's life, actively works at the life of
the piece of music. The very existence of the piece of music depends on it. In
the music, the relations within the complex of qualities reach a stage of
development never before seen in the personality of the composer. The quality
of the matured relational complex of qualities as a whole then both forms the
essence of the piece of music, the basis for its lift-off, and is subsequently
available to the composer and to others through the music.
So although composing is not therapy in the sense that the act
of “expressing” aspects of the composer's personality not normally expressed in
life somehow purges them or rationalizes them, the resulting piece of music may
be healing or at least helpful for both the composer and anyone else who
experiences it, in that the matured relational complex in the music is
available as a model even for those people who have not developed such a
complex in real life. It may help to short-circuit the process of discovering
what kind of thing one needs in one's life now, where one needs to go.
During and After Composition: Intimacy
A composer has very different relations with a piece of music
while composing it than she does when it is complete. Once the music has lifted
off and is an independent entity in the world, a composer may even feel shy
around it. The intimacy of the act of composition, when the composer and the
composition are glued together surface to surface, lingers on as an
embarrassment. The completed composition is both more and less than it was
during the process of its creation. The composer remembers the former intimacy
during the concert, and it feels as if the other members of the audience are
sharing this intimacy, also glued to the composer's intimate surfaces, too
close for comfort. The composer knows this is not true, but the feeling
remains. The music is actually now not part of the composer, not even attached
to the composer. The audience is experiencing a third thing which is neither
the composer nor the member of the audience, but is the piece of music. Each
member of the audience is constructing an experience of this music which is
unique. The music-for-Daryl is not the music-for-Bambi. The music which the
composer experiences as a member of the audience is very different from the
music the composer experienced during the process of composition, and it may be
similar to but is is non-identical to any music that anyone else experiences.
However, the mode of this experience is intimate, for everyone. Each member of
the audience appropriates the music. As a listener, I experience the music as
my own, and while I am experiencing it, it is me.
Because the experience is intimate and intense, the listeners
may defend themselves against an upsetting piece of music with the intemperate
vigor of righteous indignation. One's sense of self, one's dignity, has been
assailed somehow, snuck up on and attacked, seduced, overwhelmed; or there
would have been some danger of this, but vigilance and hostility fought it off.
The music was unworthy. One may be glad to yield to a seducer so long as one's
sense of self is flattered or enhanced, and so long as the seducer is not
unworthy of one's love. To give love to or to receive it from something one
cannot respect belittles one's self and shames it. The more the music demands
of the listener, the more respectable that music must be. A music that is
openly trivial and glories in this (or appears to) may be experienced as a mere
toy, a bauble, a bright ephemeral plaything of no importance. Who can be
indignant at such music? It offers no threat to one's sense of self beyond its
mere unassuming existence. Only a curmudgeon would be upset at its very
triviality. By presenting an appearance of no pretensions, it insulates itself
against hostile reactions while preserving its attractiveness as a toy. Yet it
is enjoyed, picked up and bought. Its personal but generic value mimics the
exchange value of the currency it is exchanged for.
A composer risks such indignation all the more when the music
aspires to worthiness: it is this aspiration that renders it vulnerable to
indignation. Indignation reaches the composer unfiltered by the normal terms of
polite discourse or humane conversation. It is expressed without tact because
the audience is not in touch with the composer. The audience knows the composer
(presumably) only as mediated by the composition. For a listener, the composer
is a “media” person rather than a real person. Unlike most media persons,
however, the composer is exposed through the medium of composition in his (her)
most intimate folds. The situation is extreme: violent reactions to heightened
intimacy. The composer may be badly hurt unless she (he) develops a “belle
indifference.” True, the composer-in-the-piece is not the person who is the
composer, and the person-in-the-piece has detached from the
person-in-the-world, but the embarrassing remembrance remains. And after all,
the composer made this piece of music. One does not spit out the soup.
The completed composition is also part of the composer's sense
of self, in the same way that any accomplishment lies under the integration
that oversees future actions. The integration may be partial at any moment: for
these immediate purposes, I do not take into account x, y, and z. My graduate degrees are mostly irrelevant to my
choosing to learn to windsurf. Am I the person that composed that music now? I
may have to exclude some former composition in order to compose a particular
newer composition, though the excluded music lurks underneath this repudiation.
Having composed his Fifth Symphony, Beethoven was changed as a person not only
for his future music but in his daily life, to some extent. The judgments and
reactions of others play a part (I'd like you to meet Beethoven, you've heard
his Fifth Symphony?), but even in their absence Beethoven knows that he is the
person who composed the Fifth Symphony, that the process of composing it
changed him, and that the fact of its existence as an independent entity is a
reference point for his sense of self.
Janus
A sense of self is a dilemma. On the one hand, it is inevitable.
Every act and perception contributes to memory. The memories of past actions
and perceptions are part of the context of each new act or perception, so that
the memory of a new action includes this context. Thus an act is remembered as
part of an ongoing developing context which is unified spatio-temporally in the
world line of the person. Old contexts are folded into new ones. Memory is not
a simple recording process, so that new contexts partially determine old ones,
redetermine them in the light of the present. It is impossible not to be aware
of this process. This awareness is the sense of self.
On the other hand, too much attention to this sense of self is
otiose and vitiates action. During action itself, as opposed to moments of
contemplation, any attention to the sense of self is too much. An action needs
transparency. Self is an opaque body interposing itself between the moment and
the act. Self is too much present. It is the only thing that can be present in
the location of origination of action, but any presence there is too much.
Action is attention elsewhere.
This is the self I left behind me, the posterior face of self,
the self as fumet or turd, a reified life, Hamlet's self. Composing is nothing
but action. A monumental self will kill this action. But there is also an
anterior face of self. At the moment of action, I must choose in the context of
what is going on at that time. The present context includes the past. The self,
as memory of complexly folded contexts of past life, is present as part of the
environment of action. It is not in the place of the origin of action, where it
would get in the way of action. Without its presence as part of the conditions
under which choice takes place, our acts would not be properly human. The self
tempers reactions to “outside stimuli” so that we do not merely ping-pong our
way through life. Its presence in our life helps us to bind time into each act
so that more complex acts are possible, acts that are wholes. Because of our
selves, we can build our contexts like works of art, and we can build a work of
art like a life.[7]
Notes
“Composing
and the Sense of Self.” Codexxi vol.1, no. 1 (Barcelona), 1998.
Also published in Open Space issue 1, Spring 1999: 42-53.
1. Charles M. Sheldon, In His Steps (1896). This all-time
world-wide best-selling novel (second only to the Bible), never copyrighted and
translated into at least twenty-one languages, brought the Christian ethic to
everyday life and action for millions of people and formed movements such as
the social activist tradition in Methodism. Before you do anything, ask “What
would Jesus do?”
2. J. K. Randall,
“Compose Yourself (A Manual for the Young).” Meta-Variations: Studies in the
Foundations of Musical Thought/Compose Yourself (A Manual for the Young), by
Benjamin Boretz and J. K. Randall, Open Space (r.d. 2, Box 45e, Red Hook, New
York 12571, USA), 1995. Randall and Boretz have been working out and thinking
out alternative musical cultures since the 1970s, and have influenced many
musicians and composers in their milieu (geographically, Princeton University
and Bard College in the United States).
3. Horace, Carminum Liber III, XXX, in Horace, Odes and Epodes,
ed. Paul Shorey. New York: Benj. H.
Sanborn & Co, 1919. Mr. Shorey's
notes list the following “similar utterances of ancient poets”: Sappho,
fragment 32; Propertius 4.1.55; Ovid Amores 1.15.41; Met. 15. 871 sqq.; Phaedr.
Epil. bk. 4; Martial, 7.84.7.
4. John Cage, Lecture on Nothing, Silence (Middletown, CT:
Wesleyan University Press, 1939), p. 109.
5. John Cage, Lecture on Something, Silence p. 143.
6. From a famous Victorian poem by Adelaide Anne Proctor.
While seated one day at the Organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy Keys.
I do not know what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.
It flooded the crimson twilight
Like the close of an Angel's Psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.
It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.
It linked all perplexed meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away in silence
As if it were loth to cease.
I have sought but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the Organ,
And entered into mine.
It may be that Death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again, --
It may be that only in Heaven
I shall hear that grand Amen.
7. With essential differences; for one thing, a work of art is a
finished whole, which a life cannot ever be. The temporality of life and art is
explored in my “Repetition,” Contemporary Music Review 7(1993): 49-58.