As Rome burns
With the world as it is, how can musicians, with good conscience, continue to spend so much time making music?
(The following is a guest article from local musician Bryan Hooten. Be sure to read his bio at the end of the feature to learn more about him.)
As a musician, I have often asked myself why I do what I do. That question has become all the more urgent considering the crises that loom on many fronts of our existence. While our world financial markets teeter on the brink of collapse, I am agonizing over the last few notes of a melody I am composing. As human beings continue to imperil the natural balance of our planet, I am teaching my students how to construct major and minor chords. While two men battle for the political future of our country, I am staying up late playing music at bars. While we continue to exhaust our natural resources, I spend hours trying to get everyone in my band into the recording studio on the same day. It would seem easy at this point to cast music off as a frivolous and selfish pastime, as something only to be worked on and experienced after all of our bigger problems are solved. I’m sure Maslow would agree. Are musicians fiddling while Rome burns? In a way, yes. That being said, how can I, with good conscience, continue to spend so much time making music?
There is no shortage of insufficient answers to the question of why music matters. Not surprisingly, music and the rest of the arts are often viewed as escapist, as a way to, for a while at least, forget our responsibilities, our obligations and our anxiety. Certainly there is value here. Music can have a calming, centering effect, and we put music on inside our homes and in our cars and on our iPods to provide a soundtrack while we are engaged in other activities. I must also admit that most musicians forget about the rest of the world while playing. Music is also seen as having healing qualities and the highly sophisticated field of music therapy has done wonders for those with chronic mental and physical disorders. Conversely, music is often viewed as a tool for honing the skills needed for other parts of life. Take, for example, the VH1 Save the Music Commercials. I admire the mission of this program and will always fight for the preservation of the arts in our schools, but part of the message devalues music-making itself. In the ads a group of children sit in a room playing instruments while the names of their future professions burst onto the screen above their heads. The names of jobs like lawyer, doctor, scientist, and congresswoman float above the children in white, pulsating text. Apparently not one of these children will grow up to become a musician. Furthermore, we have all seen the proof that studying music increases SAT scores and makes children better at math, spatial reasoning, and a host of other skills. While these are wonderful benefits of music education, it is tragic that many people see performance on standardized tests as the reason to play an instrument, sing or compose. Being good at math does not ensure that one will use that skill for the common good, as our current financial crisis proves beyond all doubt. I would argue that the value of music lies neither in its escapism nor in its pragmatism, but somewhere that transcends both.
Unsatisfied to merely run from the fire or to fight it with the same tools that created it, my personal answer to why I make music began to coalesce while listening to the music of the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Doug Richards turned me on to Ligeti while I was a graduate student at VCU. Ligeti was a twentieth-century Romanian born composer who studied in Budapest, Hungary and was inspired by the work of Bartok and Stravinsky. Many will recognize Ligeti’s music from its inclusion in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. I quickly bought up every recording of his music that I could find and was stunned upon listening to one of his most famous works, Lontano, a piece for orchestra composed in 1967. Lontano opens with the staggered entrance of some 14 players sounding a single pitch. I was immediately struck by the fact that, except for the shimmering tremolos in the strings, it is almost impossible to tell which instruments are playing during the opening and throughout much of the rest of the piece. I was drawn into a sonic world of pure space and color. In fact, the word Lontano means distant or remote. I immediately realized that I had to stop asking questions like “what chord is that?” “what rhythm is that?” and “what section of the piece is this?” These questions actually interfered with the listening experience and Ligeti composed the piece in such a way as to deny those questions. In the score, Ligeti gives the players the following instructions: “To avoid any effect of accentuation, it is recommended that all instruments enter with an imperceptible attack, even when this is not specifically prescribed.” The French avant-garde composer Pierre Schaeffer has shown that without hearing the attack and release of a note, it is almost impossible for the listener to identify which instrument is playing it. Ligeti’s exploitation of this fact in Lontano helped point the way to my realization of music’s value.
Listen to Lotano…
[audio:http://rvanews.net/sounds/2008/11/Lontano.mp3]I spend much of my time as a music teacher showing my students how to listen to music, how to break the listening experience into its constituent parts: melody, harmony, rhythm, form, etc. We call one set of notes this chord and another set of notes that chord. We learn to hear and identify sets of intervals and learn to imitate melodies and rhythms. Similarly, human beings, do this constantly in the rest of our lives, dividing our experience into units of time, colors, and seasons ad infinitum. In as much as our analytical musical tools reflect the basic function of human consciousness, naming and classifying as a way to understand the world, these are valuable skills. However, the reason musicians learn these skills is hopefully not to provide the audience with a puzzle to solve. Despite the fact that I could not aurally answer many of the questions that my analytical brain was asking, Ligeti, in an interview affirms that the answers are there in Lontano.
Technically, Lontano is a completely and strictly structured polyphonic work; that is to say, there is a definite part-writing, there are vertical relationships between the parts and the individual instrumentalists play their parts as autonomous units. Through the complex interweaving and overlapping of the parts, however, the listener loses sight of them, although perhaps not entirely; that is to say, the traces of this polyphony remain audible…I would say that the polyphony is dissolved like the harmony and the tone-colour-to such an extent that it does not manifest itself, and yet is there just beneath the threshold.
Incredibly, Lontano saturates the listener with organization, using a definite compositional system to give the listener the experience of something unclassifiable. A similar technique can be found in the koan practice used in the Rinzai school of Zen Buddhism. Koans are short riddles or anecdotes, most often about Zen patriarchs, that are meant to push the student’s analytical mind to its limit, at which point the student is able to act spontaneously. One famous koan reads…
A student asked “Not even a thought has arisen; is there still a sin or not?” Master replied, “Mount Sumeru!”
Any attempt by the student to posit some logical “answer” to the koan is met by a swift rebuke by the teacher. The Zen koan turns the function of language and logic on its head, pointing back towards a direct experience instead of away. Just as the student of Zen cannot “solve” the koan with the same tools that were used to create it, the meaning of Lontano and of all music is not to be attributed to its tools but rather in the experience it reveals. This experience gives music its power.
Lontano continues onward for some eleven minutes while simultaneously destroying the listener’s sense of time. It sonically depicts bottomless chasms, clouds and rays of light while always defying any effort to label how these phenomena are occurring. The composer’s use of the analytical mind points the listener away from analytical thinking and back towards something more fundamental to our experience, more eternal. We as listeners experience this eternity when give up our reliance on categories, cause and effect and on time itself. Ligeti describes Lontano in this way…
It is music that could give the impression that it could stream on continuously, as if it had no beginning and no end; what we hear is actually a section of something that has eternally begun and will continue to sound forever.
The reason I do what I do is that music gives the musician and the listener a direct experience. This experience is not a way to escape or a way to get better at putting out the fires in the world, nor is it even a way to get to something fundamental and eternal within us. This experience is the eternal within us. We spend our entire lives and much of our mental energy escaping from this eternity. Our consciousness gives us the convention and logic of language, allowing human beings to interact with each other and the world within the pattern of cause and effect. These tools, while useful, ultimately point away from the eternal ground of our being. However, any sign that points in one direction can be turned to point in another. We touch this ground of our being when hear music without the spinning internal dialogue about what instruments are playing which notes. We touch this ground when we listen to someone speak without wondering what we will say next. We touch this ground when we, like the student of Zen, act spontaneously without ulterior motives. We touch this ground when, in silence, we transcend subject and object, when we transcend the idea of self and other. The friction between the universe and our grasping minds creates the fire in Rome. Living in the ground of our being robs that fire of its fuel.
For a much more thorough analysis of Lontano than is appropriate here, as well as commentary on Ligeti’s life and music, please read Music of the Imagination by Richard Steinitz.
(Quotes taken from Ligeti’s interview with Josef Hausler in the book Ligeti in Conversation: Eulenburg Books, London. Sir William Glock, editor.)
Bryan Hooten is a trombonist, composer and educator living in Richmond, VA. He plays with Ombak, Fight the Big Bull, No BS Brass, Verbatim, and various other groups. He teaches Music Theory and Small Jazz Ensembles at VCU and directs the Jazz Band at James River High School. He also serves on the faculty of the Governor’s School for the Humanities and Visual and Performing Arts. He can be seen every Wednesday at Cous Cous (900 W. Franklin) performing with either Ombak or Fight the Big Bull.
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Bryan Hooten
Bryan Hooten performs with No BS! Brass, Matthew E. White, and other Richmond-based groups. He teaches Music Theory and Jazz Orchestra at VCU.
Notice: Comments that are not conducive to an interesting and thoughtful conversation may be removed at the editor’s discretion.
well-written. i don’t think that everyone who listens to that ligeti piece will touch the eternal ground of his being, and i don’t like trying to sum up the eternal ground of our being, either. i respect that you can explain why you do what you do in those terms, but i think there’s so much more to it than that. every time you listen to music, you don’t transcend-i worry about putting too heavy a connotation on something that does have simple aesthetic and entertainment value. i think it’s great to try to explain why musicians do what they do, but it’s funny because you invalidate other explanations on the same basis that you’re validating your argument. you say that words and logic are “useful but point away from the eternal ground of our being.” so i don’t see how words and logic can point you towards that eternal and point you away from it both at once. the reason i can’t subscribe to zen or any religion as a whole is because all of them try to explain their contradictions with logic they have already refuted.
so, i love and respect that you can simplify your motivations for yourself. that’s way more important than what i think about what you think anyway. but i think it oversimplifies something too complex.
and i think there’s a degree of ego-stroking and beating ourselves up that goes on with musicians that fuels the fire as well. if it was all about these zen principles, i think we would be much better people than we actually are. i hope that maybe you would write another article sometime, but next time without refuting valid reasons why many people are musicians and why music is valid and focusing on the “you” part of the equation. because that which is “insufficient” for you, is not so for everyone.
I think that justifying what makes your soul tick can be a very noble, yet hellish experience. Mr. Hooten writes candidly and with good insight into his subject matter, with specific examples and notes. These are important, because being a musician unfortunately means you will constantly have to justify yourself. However, you are not always asked to write a thousand words on what makes you a person, but rather this conflict goes on all of the time. If I could hold onto the belief that music should always be the “eternal within us” I would probably feel safer about my own musicianship.
I guess I have a hard time getting behind the fact that the music world and the “ground” or “rome on fire” world can’t exist simultaneously or even harmoniously. Thanks for the read sir.
Roughly one month after I moved to Boston and began the Jazz Performance curriculum at what I perceived was a “prestigious music school,” 9/11 occurred. Mr. Hooten’s post thoroughly dredges up many of the thoughts and emotions I experienced in the months following, as I tried to justify being in school (and/or expending the energy and/or devoting time, etc.) for something that felt less-than-important…especially as it compared to those tending to that disaster.
Kudos to Mr. Hooten for being honest and unapologetic. I appreciate, on some level, the justification, although (contrary to Tommy’s comment) I don’t believe any artist must ever justify him/herself…even in the most tragic of times. But…
It’s fairly obvious that this post is more about Mr. Hooten’s own understanding of his participation as a musician, his role in society, and the underlying importance of art over the artist — rather than an explanation or rationalization to us, the readers. I suspect that it’s not so important for us to realize all of this (as his posting here might lead one to believe), but rather that Bryan Hooten realizes this. And because such a self-analysis of personal relevance can be downright gut-wrenching, this post is commendable. If that much solicitude goes into Mr. Hooten’s music, then I should start listening.
This was a fantastic read, written not with an ego-stroking mentality coming from an “artist”, but with an honesty that concerns all people who take their craft seriously, whether they are artists, lawyers, or delivery drivers. Mr. Hooten knows music is important, as does Mr. White. We know that on an individual level, art helps people arrive back at their ideals. This is one reason people watch movies, listen to music, or do something as simple as write in a journal. But on a much larger level, art helps humanity in the power of collective ideals. Elton John spent years donating his income to AIDS research; Bob Geldof organized Live Aid. There are tons of examples that show how music is vital to sustaining all of us, and helping society. Entertainment can actually translate into salvation.
Cellist Pablo Casals also knows this is true:
“Music must serve a purpose; it must be a part of something larger than itself, a part of humanity; and that, indeed, is at the core of my argument with music today – its lack of humanity. A musician is also a man, and more important than his music is his attitude towards life. Nor can the two be separated.”
Thanks for all the comments. I will now attempt some responses.
Lindsey: While preparing for this article I was speaking to a colleague of mine who said to me “I hope we can all find our Lontano.” I agree with him. I did not intend to give that particular piece or that composer or even music itself a superior transcendent quality. I was speaking from a purely personal level. It is my hope that we can encounter that same type of beautiful disorientation in a variety of experiences. For me, one of those experiences was with this piece, but I have it often in other ways.
To quote Alan Watts, I would contend that Zen is not a religion but rather a “way of liberation.” The difference between those two terms probably needs some explaining but let’s move on. As with the koan, Zen presents the student with paradoxes to show the futility of trying to unravel them and in this way uses logic to unravel itself. Every system contains a statement that refutes it. Take for example “this statement is false” or “have you stopped beating your wife.” Kurt Godel did some pioneering work in mathematics showing it’s incompleteness.
Tommy and M.W.: Thanks for your thoughts. While it should never required of us, it is an educational experience to justify oneself. If the “why” question never pops up, no problem. In fact, I would ascribe a certain level of purity to that situation. In my case, that question did pop up so I tried to find an answer.
David: Right on!
In closing, I always meant to say that there are and can be a plurality of reasons that any of us do what we do.
I thik the primary underlying reason for creating any form of art, be it visual, auditory, or otherwise, is communication, and as such there will always be a myriad of reasons for this communication.
As far as the “As Rome Burns” question, I would encourage you to think about everything that is going on in Pakistan right now, and then listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, or any other qawwali singer for that matter. The reason I chose this over any other form of devotional music in the Muslim realm, is because it is a very personal expression, as it is all composed of individual poetic verse, and is very much a part of the individual artist’s creation.
On the other side, Sami joik music from the Sami in Northern Scandinavia is very interesting in a totally different way. The Sami people have never in their entire history used physical violence against anyone who has settled in their homeland, subsequently forcing them further and further from their homes (in much the same way as the Native Americans), yet they still create joik as an essential function of their lives. Joik is a solo vocal performance that is created by the joiker in celebration of a person or object. Sometimes they have words, but are usually just pure vocal expressions, meant to capture the essence of the person or thing they are joiking.
Wow…I got on a bit of a tangent there, but basically Qawwali music is Sufi devotional music, which is meant to attain a higher spiritual level in the performer and listeners, while Joik is a means of honoring people and objects in general, detatched from the Sami belief system.
Ok I’ll stop now :)
I reread the article and i still feel the same way. although you do mention trying to find answers for yourself about why you make music, you do say that many answers are insufficient. my point is that maybe they are insufficient for you, but not for everyone. after reading your comment, i realize now that you understand that. i also understand that you don’t think zen is a religion, but i think it would be wise to consider what a religion is and that we use the word from a western outlook rather than an eastern one as, not surprisingly, we were born with and will always maintain (regardless of study and travel and whatnot) a western outlook to some degree. but that’s not the part that bothers me. it’s that yes all statements can unravel themselves, sure. but you use logical statements to reach your conclusions about why you do what you do. by your own admission then, we could use your own logic to unravel itself and leave you back where you started. in the end there doesn’t have to be a reason for you to make music. my only issue is that you are using that which you said is not a proper way to “know” something as a means of knowing something.
certainly i get the point. for you, this is why you do what you do. but even for you, it can’t be boiled down to only that. and now that you’ve clarified, i know that you know that. but in response to the article i wouldn’t have reached that conclusion. i would think that musicians think that they are better than other people because they attain and help others attain the eternal ground of being. i disagree with the comment that it was written honestly and not with the ego-stroking mentality of an artist because all of that is certainly there. perhaps it is noble to undertake justifying why you do what you do, but a lawyer wouldn’t presume to say that he helped people reach the eternal by defending and prosecuting in court. and a delivery driver wouldn’t say that he helped people reach the eternal because he delivered their books on taoism to their homes. that is what i was trying to express in my earlier comment. that this comes off as an unnecessary pretension because anyone who really listens or really makes music knows that what they do is important in that way. but to say it, you must be sensitive to the fact that there isn’t only one path to eternal being and for many people, music isn’t even one of the path options.
i get where the article was going. and as i said, it was beautifully written, but to presume to explain the deeper meaning of why a musician does what he or she does could probably not be done without tooting one’s own horn a bit. i think that trying to relate it to zen is just as much grasping for meaning as our feeble minds do with any way of knowing. (and when i say that zen is just as much a religion as any other i mean that in the sense that any religion is merely a way of “knowing” something through faith in something. zen is a way of “knowing” that we do not know anything but it is still based on faith, because you cannot know that you are right even about that. that was all i was getting at.)
If you’re trying to figure out why you’re doing what you do — then you’ve transcended nothing. However, I’ll not have these sorts of discussions with you via cyberspace — only in person! :-) Harry Partch was always my favorite when I was your age.