IntellectualMusician.com

Buckminster Fuller, the acclaimed Canadian scientist who invented the geodesic dome, described the universe, in his book ‘Utopia or Oblivion’ as entropic. By this he meant that energy escapes from ‘local systems’ causing the Law of Increase of the Random Element. Fuller claimed that this increase of randomness caused the expansion of the physical universe. However, ‘in superb balance’, he wrote, ‘ the human mind continually probes for and discovers the order in the universe’. As a prime example of this questing of the human mind for order in the face of randomness, Fuller sites the example of Pythagoras’ discovery of the octave obtained by halving a tensed string: the logic of music imposed upon random noise.

The history of music is a history of the fertility of the human mind focussed on finding or creating order in sound. Artur Schnabel, one of the greatest pianists of the 20^th century called music ‘a phenomenon sending to man’s minds tones, an imagination of sounds, urging him to release them to a boundless variety of incorporeal structures called compositions which need a transformation into material sounds – performances – to reach their final destination and reality? Or, is the final destination reached only when the material sounds return through the senses of one listening mind, and through it, back to its unknown origin – the divine reality.’

Schnabel, of course, is speaking of the structure of composed music but, as Milan Kundera recently wrote: ‘There were long periods when art did not seek out the new but took pride in making repetition beautiful, reinforcing tradition, and ensuring the stability of a collective life.’ Thus, two aspects of music, of the organization of sound: collective music which seems to arise organically in a community and is recreated (rather than performed) again and again in the community; and composed music which presupposes a creator and performer(s) (who may well be one and the same person). The former, which we know as World Music, or folk music, as Kundera suggests, performs the function of bringing people together in a shared activity where no single individual is venerated above the rest, whereas the latter goes hand in hand with veneration of the individual. But both can be said to share the same basic elements: rhythm, melody, harmony and form each of which might be seen as organization imposed on the natural fibre of life.

Rhythm is arguably the most basic of these elements. In the beating of our hearts and pulsing of our veins, even, externally in the cycles of nature, of the seasons, the tides, the waxing and waning of the moon and rising and setting of the sun, we are and have been through the history of consciousness, aware of a predictable and timed repetition. In our two feet as we walk we create a duple meter. But at what point does the walk become a dance with rhythm imposed upon the meter? The long and short within rhythmic constructions in music has, over time become rational, i.e. sound lengths are determined in ratio to each other. Furthermore, our perception of rhythm is dependent on repetition. A random and ongoing sequence of short and long sounds do not, to our ears constitute a rhythm but in imposing repetition and therefore meaning on a sequence of long and short sounds we seem to re-activate a need to move, clap, beat and dance!

As in rhythm, so in melody for all creatures use rise and fall in pitch to communicate without a need for words and we even imagine anger or calm in the wind or the rain through pitch. We know that pre-verbal human babies understand displeasure and praise through the pitch of their mother’s voice. And for our ancestors the distinction between speech and song was not as clear as it is today. Greek poetry was inseparable from music; melos, from which our word ‘melody’ is derived, referred to both lyric poetry and the music to which it is set. It seems likely therefore that the concept of melody grew from the pattern and meaning of words as well as the rise and fall of pitch in the natural world and in non-verbal communication and developed its own laws of organization. Ferruccio Busoni, the great pianist, composer and theorist of the early 20^th century, defined melody as: ‘a row of repeated ascending and descending intervals which, organised and moving rhythmically, contains in itself a latent harmony and which gives back a certain atmosphere of feeling; which can and does exist independent of text for expression, and independent of accompanying voices for form; and in the performance of which the choice of pitch and of instrument exercise no change over its essence. So, rise and fall has become ‘organized’, ‘rhythmical’, meaningful and indicative of harmony.

This ‘latent harmony’ of which Busoni speaks was not always a feature of melody. Early melody (Greek, Hebraic, Oriental and Christian) was monophonic, that is, sung in unison without accompaniment. But the notion of accompaniment, again, is basic to life. The animal kingdom lives in company, communally; its members attend to, support and converse with each other. The laws of harmony, derived of course from the laws of the physics of sound, were discerned by Pythagoras who described them as an archetype of the heavenly world. The counterpoint (sound against sound) which reached its zenith in the early 18^th century was seen as a kind of alchemy through which man might attain God.

But nowhere more than in the form of music do we perceive a man made order. For music uses its building blocks, as architects use theirs, to create symmetry made interesting through variation. A well-known female Rabbi once commented on BBC radio that life was a succession of periods of ‘wrestle and rest’. Nowhere is this organization of our emotional journey exemplified more clearly than in music. Harmonic tension leads to resolution and we perceive the end of a section of music. The two themes of the sonata, which have been described as male and female, wrestle in the development and synthesize to a single key in the recapitulation. The concept of invariance, derived from Communist theory, provides a useful way of describing the organic growth within a movement of music, or group of movements, where successive phrases are derived from or grow out of elements of the previous phrase. In musical form, the beauty of symmetry and of the organizing skill of the human mind becomes audible.

And perhaps that is the best explanation of what music is for. In making and listening to music we thrill to beauty made audible, palpable and in doing so grow towards what Schnabel called ‘the divine reality’.