The Musical Matrix Reloaded

1. ‘Many Worlds’ and Black Swans: Contemporary Models in Music, the Arts and Ideas

We have seen that the brain is a creativity machine. It searches for patterns amid chaos and ambiguity and it constructs models of the complex reality around us. This search for order and pattern is at the heart of the artistic and scientific enterprise alike. Eric Kandel¹

In ‘The Road to Reality,’ Roger Penrose raised the need for scientific theory to forge powerful directions for the 21st century if it was going to reveal significant new discoveries of comparable import to those of the 20th century.² Since contemporary ideas differ substantially from those of the past, they need innovative approaches to develop new theories. Such new approaches in turn provoke different questions, and in the attempt to answer them, reveal striking perspectives on events and existential contexts.

The value of new theories is not that they make truth claims, although after a time they tend to become ingrained in the intellectual landscape. Rather, they offer challenging ways to rethink existing premises of how the world works. David Passig writes that while convincing scientific theory most closely corresponds to facts, theory is not in itself truth but rather an explanatory scenario. In this context, he notes: “We need to remember, however, that scientific paradigms are useful in offering us mental patterns, not eternal truths.”³

Those mental patterns are subject to both external influences involving changing social and cultural paradigms, and an internal evaluation of problem-solving. Adopting new theoretical and philosophical approaches from a different intellectual sphere may yield surprising insights. Isaiah Berlin, reflecting on the agenda of ←17 | 18→philosophy, sees modeling as a central method of defining identity by providing a framework for explanatory criteria and proposing new intellectual constructs.4

One aspect of the contemporary intellectual landscape is the coexistence of theories that propose descriptions of reality from radically contrasted points of view. In physics, for example, concurrent with classical descriptions of time and space providing identifiable co-ordinates in the physical world, competing narratives in quantum theory describe highly unpredictable behavior at the micro level of existence in the indeterminate behavior of sub-atomic particles. As the prevailing conceptual model, a seemingly random substructure underpins patterns of existence.

There are some surprising, albeit logical consequences of quantum theory for contemporary existence, and by extension, for musical works. One is the parallel between the unpredictable “underworld” of quantum existence and the unstable “overland” climate of the postmodernist world, dislocated by terror attacks, economic collapse and natural disasters.

With unpredictability and chaos prevalent in so many areas of life and perception blurred by advertising images and computer graphics in a hologram of unstable identities, it is not surprising that perception of contemporary reality is often closer to the random quantum world than to any set of known co-ordinates. In times of personal anxiety or social disruption, even when forefronted by what Philip Roth has called “the unstable illusion of stability,”⁵ the randomness of underlying existence becomes effectively the model for lived experience. As part of the multiplicity of contemporary identities, artworks, past and present, nevertheless propose modes of experience different from everyday reality, even when they are in part referential to existential human dilemmas. Through innate structure and dramatic designs, they can be construed as alternative worlds, self-standing entities with their own rules of engagement.

Penrose proposed that reality can be described as conceptual worlds from three perspectives: mathematical, physical and mental. While each approach is autonomous in material and perceptual modality, it may nevertheless have connections to the others in terms of imagery and/or conceptual values. At a further level of connection, though, a construct in one of these conceptual perspectives may provide a model for another, so that imagery in one world becomes the basis for a reconfigured metaphor in another area of discourse. As instance, Gluck and Calzabigi crafted their classicizing agenda for opera in the 1760s and ‘70s by ←18 | 19→adopting the terminology of “moving architecture” to musico-dramatic realizations of the noble and statuesque. Plasticity of ideally represented human forms in classical sculpture and harmonious proportions of architecture are reinterpreted in the opening instrumental music in Act 2 Scene 2 of ‘Orfeo ed Euridice,’ which conveys the serenity of the Elysian Fields through rounded melodic contour and symmetrical phrasing. But an alternative agenda to idealized human beauty also impacted Greek sculpture. Heroic human forms could be equally contorted by rage and vengeance, as in the intense twisting movement of ‘Laocoön and his Sons’ in the Vatican Museum. The father and his two sons are strangled by writhing snakes in retribution by Poseidon for revealing the trick of the Trojan horse.

In ‘The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music’ Friedrich Nietzsche identifies incipient violence that threatens to derail human action in his modeling à l’antique.6 Reinterpreting the opposed imagery of Apollo, the god of reason, and ←19 | 20→Dionysos, the god of inebriation and unbounded sexuality, Nietzsche depicts drama as polarized emotional conflict, locked between the intense striving for love and the downward pull towards death – in Freud’s terms, between Eros and Thanatos. Nietzsche envisages this experiential conflict as the powerful tension between the background’s Will-driven surging energy field that threatens to engulf “left-brain” activity like logical action and decision-making, and the Apollonian constraint of foreground structure through words and motifs that make drama – and music drama – possible.

As well as these external manifestations of background Dionysian force-fields which have the potential to disrupt normal enterprise, the model has striking parallels with the structure of the mind. Beneath the neo-cortex’s rational faculties of order, reflection and decision-making are the disruptive drives of the old ←20 | 21→crocodile brain. In everyday social relationships, the conscious mind imposes essential constraints on the primitive brain’s libidinous desires; but, unfulfilled and often unvoiced, those repressed desires seek outlets in fantasy, dreams and art.

Despite the mind’s distinctive arenas of action, these mental ‘dramatis personae’ are not completely immured from one another. At the interface of consciousness, which Freud, in ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ compares the portal of the mind to the archeology of a buried city, suppressed emotions from the subconscious cross those fuzzy boundaries, allowing the psychic substratum to emerge into conscious existence.7

The second aspect of modeling from quantum physics is another kind of intersection, the tunnel-like connectors between space-time zones known as “wormholes.” In particle physics they are infinitely brief links between domains, and on account of the extremely difficult conditions needed to create and, even more, sustain them, they primarily inhabit the realm of theoretical calculations. Rather than limited to largely hypothetical possibilities in the actual world, “wormholes” have become actual connectors in hypothetical worlds – in pop culture’s fantasy fiction and sci-fi movies, where “wormholes” are effective short-cuts between remote cosmic zones, like the jump into hyperspace to avoid enemy pursuit in the ‘Star Wars’ movies or that ultimate inter-terrestrial hiphop ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. In this lighter vein, physicist Alex Vilenkin calls “wormholes” “shortcut tunnels though space-time for intergalactic travel.”⁸

While “wormholes” are passageways between otherwise discrete realms of time, space and the imagination that have become permeable, they are not just connectors in the external world, real or fantasy, to the remote past or distant space. They are equally the means of recourse to other worlds of inner experience, in the seamless crossover to the past in dreams and memories, interspersed with fragmentary consciousness of the present. Proust’s recreation of internal imagery, as part of the multiple existences of individual human existence and the porous boundaries between them, stems from the evocation of such shifting layers of consciousness.

The famous description of the madeleine, the cake moistened by lime-tea, is precisely such a connector between the present and the past. It opens up a whole inner world buried under years of oblivion which now springs to the surface of consciousness with vivid immediacy.

The madeleine is the technique that opens the whole novel by connecting the weight and disillusion of present time to the richly textured past. Juxtaposing a dark present to images of love and longing beneath the surface, ‘A la Recherche du Temps Perdu’ is very much a ‘Winterreise’ world. Instead of a physical image that springs open memory, in many of the ‘Winterreise’ songs, slippage between the physical present of the frozen landscape and the inner world of memory is effected by the switch of tonal domains between tonic major and minor. In ‘Frühlingstraum,’ no. 11, the opening dream of colorful flowers in May is brusquely torn aside by the incursion of the dark, cold present with ravens screeching from the rooftops. Ending this abrasive intrusion is a fierce ascending A minor broken triad, ‘ff’. Across the ensuing silence, the pitch A is the connector to A major, ‘pp,’ as the dream world resumes, as longing for a spring that never comes.

Unforeseen from the point of view of logical process, this rhythmic momentum and sweep across tessituras is arrested by an unexpected interpolation in B flat major (bar 105 in Ex. 4). Poised ‘pianissimo,’ the B flat major section, belonging neither to what has preceded nor what will follow it, holds in suspension the movement’s time and action, its very stillness like music reflecting on itself from a remote distance. These planes of momentum and reflection are linked by a slender funnel of two pitches, D and F in flute and oboe, as the switch point into the stillness of the B flat major section. The interpolation lasts only six bars – four for the B flat reflection itself and two as transition back to the main action of the movement. Reinterpreting the pitch Bb as a chromatic 6th like the Schubert quintet example, this is followed by a bass G#, enhancing A as the dominant of D major in preparation for the second subject.

A similar procedure of pitch and temporal connection between contrasted material and expressive domains occurs in the slow movement of Beethoven’s 9th symphony, where the keys of its double variation form, alternating B flat major, ‘Adagio molto e cantabile’ in 4/4 and the¾ ‘Andante moderato’ in D major, are connected by a re-contextualized link. Towards the end of the first B flat major section, the outer pitches of the strings, F and A, (bar 23), frame the dominant 7th of B flat major with its implicit expectation of resolution. On the last beat of the bar, though, the bass line F rises to F#, bypassing expected closure, and switches onto the sharp side of the tonal spectrum. The bass F# realigns with the 2nd violins and violas, which unfold the beautiful D major theme, as seen in Ex. 5.