Music & the Metaphysical

by  Jonathan Harvey

I was recently asked to define in what way, if any, music is metaphysical? First, as a preliminary caveat about the difficulty of such an exercise, we must admit it is hard to say even what a piece of music is. Is it the intentional sounds of the composer or improvisor(s)? The score? The vibrating excitation of strings, tubes, objects, reeds? Their moment-by-moment acoustic structure, (relative to the harmonic series for instance)? The patterned structure as formed by the memory of the listener in passing spans of time? The mind-set of the listener making a particular response to such a stimulus? An adequate performance (‘accurate’ to a certain threshold -where?- beyond which it ceases to be the piece)? It is all of them and more.

Having admitted that there are no simple premises, all is speculative, we can begin …

A good experience listening to music is in some sense ‘changing myself’. I lose myself and also find myself more truly. This experience includes composing, which is only another form of listening. In filling the blank page we are deciding what we would like to listen to, rather more definitively than when we listen to another composer’s music. Even then, nevertheless, we are certainly selecting how we listen, what we select to make form out of, from the flow of musical data streaming by. Should we link that C# to that D? It’s a choice we make (however intuitively). I respond to my own music as I listen to what I am composing in almost exactly the same way as I do to music which is not by me when I listen to it.

A good listening experience might be put in association with metaphysics, if metaphysics is what we want when we go to music. For me, it is. It is good to be taken out of myself, set in motion, moved, stirred, excited. The motion implied is both a journey-metamorphosis and an oscillation, a vibration like a tuning-fork’s.

In the first case the movement out of myself is a loss of ego. I am no longer a subject facing the music, an object. I am the object. Dualism has been transcended. The shapes and forms of the sound take over and I go with them – up, down, several ways simultaneously, fast, slow, accelerating or slowing, more energy, less energy, feeling the pressure of the harmonies as pressure on my body; I change.

The contrasts are transcended, too, like the dualism. As the piece lies in my memory as one experience, I realise that all the brave and strident characters of this piece, all the self-asserting identities of the melodies in which I ‘believe’ as vital and real, with which I eagerly fly, are so much sand blown by the wind and washed by the sea. They are empty: they are all made of a few (very few) notes, and even these are in themselves impermanent, never quite the same twice. Sand castles for a few brief moments between two tides. Good music, for me, has strong assertions, strong character, yet is constantly changing, constantly ambiguous, many things at once, always undermining.

It is easy to show, with technical analysis, how music is highly ambiguous – goes up and down with the same notes at the same time (given a slight shift of listening level), how it is, again at different levels, in two keys at once, belongs to several strands of argument simultaneously. This is, however, not simple to explain to those without technical training, however clearly they may sense it.

I would certainly call the transcendence of dualistic habits a metaphysical journey or a spiritual one. In buddhist thought ‘emptiness’ is pure awareness – nothing exists from its own side, everything is structured by mind. Emptiness leads to empathy and compassion, to an understanding of liberation, of liberation from samsara. Music is closely related to that wisdom: it has the same liberation process.

A BBC producer recently told me he had listened to a Mozart slow movement which made him so sad he literally wept. So he went back to it again and again. I commented that he could not have been really sad or he would not have loved to go back to it again and again. Music reconciles emotion, brings a deeper harmony in which ‘sadness’ is embraced. A little surprised that he had not been sad in the normal sense, rather reconciled, he pondered a moment and agreed. It is a paradox that we love art about suffering.

The second truth is that we become more truly ourselves in the good listening experience, we live more intensely as Richard Jefferies said about art or beauty. But this feeling of becoming ourselves is, again, not the ego feeling we get when we have scored a triumph, socially, intellectually, materially, physically or however. When we have won the lottery or received a rare standing ovation the good feeling decays in a different way, sometimes with a sour after-taste. For one thing, others have not won the lottery or achieved this ovation, our success is partly at their expense. But in the aesthetic type of good feeling no-one is deprived of anything, because the dualistic ego is dissolved, not triumphant. In normal circumstances we talk about achievements like winning celebrity, beating a record – more votes, more money, more medals, conquering a problem in society, conquering a mountain. In Tibetan buddhist society, I believe, a person is more admired for conquering his or her ego. The sacred literature is full of references to past Conquerors and Heroes – all people who have valiantly struggled with their own inner ego-grasping delusions and prevailed.

The intense excitement of a good listening experience (whether it be an excitement of energy or transcendent calm doesn’t matter) is a sense that we become something else. We are stirred into a vibration linking us to the vibrating world – a sort of intoxication without hangover.

Mystics of East and West have written of the dissolution of self and world (they are now the same) into light. In Tibet, monks for centuries trained to engage in the meditations of light: of getting to the level where light is seen as the nature of being. All worldly existence is imagined as dissolving into light and then being absorbed into the heart. The tiny seed-letter HUM (in Sanskrit script) visualised in one’s heart gradually becomes the sole carrier of oneself – all else disappears – and then this itself evaporates by stages until the last line of the letter dissolves leaving only the clear light of emptiness. This gives rise to and mingles with bliss, like water with water. ‘I’ no longer exists.

We are linked in sympathetic vibration with the world in less strong listening experience; in a very strong one we are unified with it.

How is art which is in tune with such aims to exist in our time, in our society? Great music is being written, not least in Britain, greater than at any time since the Caroline period, as George Steiner said in his 1998 Henry Wood Promenade Concerts Lecture. Music is more complex and rich – at best more sophisticated as an artform than at many other periods. But it falls on deaf ears. Populism peripheralises it. Perhaps Philistinism might be a more accurate word to use. There are solutions: they involve real patience, education and much hard trying. Different concert-formats, more familiarisation. More conviction that a real value is at issue.

 What should be our positive and negative aims?

Positive: Art is at root concerned with the only real problem – the nature of suffering and how can it be alleviated or eliminated. It should aim to suggest to its audience a healing notion of harmony. By this I mean a subtle, possibly complex, certainly rich texture which reflects our perception that there is nothing simple about the lives most of us journey through, but that there is an almost imperceptible way of grasping a ‘key’. Artistic harmony can be sensed, not reasoned about, though as far as verbal explanation is concerned, the crucial signposts occur in spiritual discourse; for instance in the Buddhist idea of emptiness. Art should be an expansion of harmony-consciousness. Art heals the duality-mind.

Negative: We should attempt to reverse the mediocrity of culture in Britain. It seems to me that people are afraid of things (including art) which make them feel small. Such things are undemocratic, they say; they are pretentious or elitist. I recently heard a poem about a much respected and saintly man in our recent history, Rabindranath Tagore, mocking him for his possible sexual actions. How fashionable! The respected figure is, after all, ordinary, just like us; now, the poet seemed to imply, we can feel more comfortable. But this man was not ordinary. We can choose either to deconstruct him to ordinary remainders or to look at what made him head and shoulders above those around him. Which is more interesting to choose? Many today plump roundly for the former. But unless we are in principle prepared to choose the latter and “feel small” we cannot, by definition, grow. In the same way, unless we are prepared for art to appear superior to us (difficult, challenging, profound, uncomfortable or unfashionable) we will never change or evolve, never question our mediocrity, let alone be healed from the conflicts near the heart of life.

– – –

Music is a good means to change: change to more subtle understanding of how things are (impermanent) and how a real conquest is retrieved from that insight. It has always puzzled people that music is promiscuous in its favours and will help a Hitler as easily as a Hildegard of Bingen. (This play on Hi connecting evil and good in language is a close parallel to the way the same two notes can be used to ‘be’ both evil and good in music.) Music cannot be relied upon to do you unambiguous favours for your programme, because though it will seem to help, any thinking person will see there is no necessary connection between music and agenda. Even Plato got it wrong in dictating that certain modes were or were not allowed in his State; moreover everyone knows that even the ‘divine’ Mozart was perceived to be highly immoral in certain quarters of his audience – for instance, for his masses because certain divine passages were later used in the erotically coloured theatre pieces.

Let us take a familiar, if banal, example of music’s slippery representations. Suppose a car company makes an advertisement for television. Some Mozart is chosen which seems to suit the energy of the images of the car – fast or calm, slightly dissonant for excitement or consonant for elegance. The aura of Mozart and all the associations of the style and era lend class to the image (even if most viewers know little about Mozart very concretely). Those who do know a little about Mozart’s music may well be captivated by the favoured sound and, indeed be tempted to buy the car, just as the company hoped. Others, who probably value Mozart more, may well be outraged that sacred Mozart has been used for car advertisement – a totally incongruous association. Still others will realise that both the authentic use of Mozart (in concerts with all the knowledge of the composer’s art, technique and context in mind) and the inauthentic commercial use are subjectively twisted, mythologised. It is the nature of music’s non-absolute value that these uses will both change in time with fashion, they are subjective: there is no ‘truthful meaning’ at that level.

This said, the concert use is infinitely more valuable because it allows one a more neutral perspective if one so wishes. Even more important, it gives one the whole form, not the bits (which may quite possibly have come to be in some perverse way akin to a car or, more believably, a Viennese ball, in our minds). The whole form is the whole point, it shows the unity of all bits, the absolute lying behind the relative, the subsuming of all associations, the deconstruction of all imaginings in overriding form – or ‘emptiness’.

Music is too deep to be ‘used’. Its truths are beyond good and evil. They are a picture of wisdom itself. They are wisdom-in-action. They show us the nature of delusion, because sound-shapes are clearly delusion: we project our life and loves onto them. We see the immense power of illusion and finally, in our grasp of the unity of the experience, we see the emptiness – the transparency of our projections. That is a moment of intense liberation; of true happiness and significance.