Welcome to my Substack. I am a musicologist who loves thinking about music. What there is to think about music? Quite a lot, if you consider music a medium of reality – a way of knowing things, a way of being in the world, a way for reality to speak about itself in a manner that excludes misunderstanding. Here I intend to share my inquiries and musings on the matter in a free (mostly) weekly newsletter. Music philosophy, metaphysics and evolution, music culture, history and cognition, zoo-musicology, artistic research and performance are all fields of interest with a wealth of topics begging exploration. If you are interested in experimental musico-sopho-phillo-logico-possibilianist thinking this should be a fun place for you. Hit the “Subscribe” button and keep reading.
Is it alive?
The suspicion that music is alive, an entity-thing with agency and desires, has been working in the back of my mind for a long time. Actually, ever since I played “The Sick Doll” by Tchaikovsky in second grade, my first piece in a minor key. What had begun as an uncomplicated bond to an after-school activity was soon to transition into a life partnership with a two-directional flow: from me, the actual embodiment, from the Other side – the virtual potentiality; from me the ingredients, the time and the attention, from the Other – the soul nourishment, the seductive tease, the multiplicity of choice. Like so many others, I’ve spent countless hours in the “imaginary country that can’t be found on the map”[1], the country of music, populated by moods and gestures, climates and sceneries, movements and encounters. . . by romancing couples and lamenting silhouettes, moral standings, angry fists, battle calls, orgasmic spasms, longings, and so many singular, tangible beings.
Many times I have wondered what are these music things and how are they connected to me: Where do they come from, and why? Are they real? Common sense frames the belief in these sophisticated demographics as childish naiveté – how could they possibly be alive?? – while musicology informs that the entities of music’s are constructions of my imagination without analog in the real world: they are but illusions made-up in a cursory make-belief, products of my memories and unique psychophysical makeup. These kinds of brisk answers lasso the free flight of the musical project and suspend it on the web of reductionist reasoning. They deflect our attention away from the gap that exists between the disciplined matter-of-factness of science, on the one hand, and the tacit, intuitive knowledge of lived experience, on the other. And gap there is. How could music beings be products of my mind, when most often they catch me by surprise, when I ‘encounter’ or ‘discover’ them, even being possessed by them? It is not only that music makes me feel this or that, sometimes I don’t even know how I feel until I find out in and through a never experienced before piece of music. Certainly, music knows me better than I know myself.
[1] Debussy, letter to Paul Dukas, 1901.
Music is (not)
The relationship with music and its entities, as any other relationship, changes over the years. While I was still rigorously practicing piano daily, the dynamic between us was pure and simple, bicameral, dominant-submissive: music speaks, I listen. Since then things have gotten more ‘complicated’, music has, often simultaneously, assumed various roles and positions, many times contrary to one other. It has been a guide and mentor, a sponsor and provider, a best friend and healer, an epitome of the conceivably finest, an ideas’ generator. It has also acted as destroyer of dreams, a nuisance, an instrument of torture, a source of embarrassment, a manic control freak. . ..
In these essays I won’t be gushing over music as a sublime realm of enlightenment and benevolence, as a medium of Truth or the Absolute. Neither do I consider it some sort of wonderful disneyesque magic, an evolutionary cheese cake, a spandrel, or an entertainment option. It is, probably, all of these things, and many more – to each their own – but the way I fathom music is as an encounter and a practice, an ‘itself’ and a process, an evolutionary becoming and an agent on its own terms:
a form of consciousness that evolves alongside other sentient forms of consciousness in an obtuse dimension.
Ahem… consciousness defined, short and sweet
Consciousness is a shimmering term but the following proposition simplifies somewhat its many-splendored complexities. Everything and anything IS consciousness, in so far as consciousness is experience, the integrator and constructor of meaning. While there are many facets and footnotes to this idea, here are two principal perspectives:
1) From a big-picture point of view, consciousness is the ground of reality, its fundamental nature built with bitsy information bricks; “it is the nothingness, the wind blowing toward the objects”.
2) As an abstracted, constrained version of the former, consciousness manifests in the phenomenal world as a continuum ranging from dim awareness (amoeba) to one’s ability to introspect (Sapiens).
And I will wrap it up here.
I wonder, what music is for you? What is the weirdest experience you’ve ever had with music? The worst? The best? What has music taught you?
Until next time –
Mira