Paul
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(Future Me: Apologies in advance for the long post. I hope this is ok).
Playing music really is part of the backbone of my life Mark. It is an amazing thing but (in the West particularly) cultures are very poor at encouraging people (of any age) to engage in making music (I think) because there is a Left-H (hemisphere) emphasis on ‘rightness’ ‘quality’ ‘precision’ and ‘attainment’.
In cultures where things are less formally organised in music, where the transmission of music is essentially oral, where the aims are social and expressive- almost everybody plays music, almost everybody dances, almost everybody sings. I was lucky enough to be inoculated with such a culture in my twenties after playing guitar and singing a lot in my teens. It transformed my perspective and life totally.
Music is now the domain of my life where a cooperative unity of the two minds I carry with me is expressed most harmoniously. And having that experience informs where I might aim for other domains, like thinking and wondering or communicating with others.
There’s another thing I have noticed that might be useful to mention- in any creative endeavour it is appreciation that matters most. I think his is really about attention (and there’s a recent video I have yet to watch on this from Iain). What I mean here is that you could be the most fluent and sophisticated executor of an operation (a piece of music, a cake recipe) but unless you appreciate what is created and how it feels, you will remain uninspired, it will not transport you, you will not notice what is special about it, and in it’s execution (critically in music for example) you will not express this or develop the piece.
I have known a number of wonderful, classically-trained musicians who feel like this about music: for them the achievement has really been about left-hemisphere criteria such as precision, fluency, mastery- so, deviation from these aims is seen as risky or even dangerous. Indeed, it probably is all of these things where the expression is part of an orchestral presentation. But it is a feeling many of them find hard to shake when they play elsewhere.
Anyway, for me that capture by the oral and mostly African tradition of music taught me the foundations of an appreciation of Rhythm. And the cornerstone of this was something called a ‘clavé’, a two bar, typically 2/4, looping rhythm. Learning how to perform one of these rhythms is totally within anyone’s capacity. They are actually very simple- but do not seem to be. That’s the beauty of them.
The magic happens when you split the rhythm across your two hands with the right playing the regular, 1-2-1-2 pulse and the left playing the asymmetric part. Suddenly, the rhythm is transformed in your mind into a gestalt; something which has an actual personality or character. With maybe an hour’s practice pretty much anyone can learn to do this just tapping their hands on their thighs. Then you can spend another hour swapping the hands around so the left carries the pulse and the right the asymmetric. Then you can alternate left to right on the pulse/ asymmetric parts… but I digress.
Why do this? Well, you already own the instrument so it only costs you time. More importantly you get this wonderful experience, that you don’t really hear the rhythm (in other words know the rhythm and it’s personality) until you split it across your hands. If there is a better or more accessible demonstration of the power of asymmetric, hemispheric processing, I don’t know what that could be.
Suddenly the rhythm comes to life and you realise that it almost seems to exist in a Platonic Realm (or something like whatever that is); that the rhythm seems conscious, playful, alive. It is a most joyful and humbling experience. So, once you have this appreciation, the experience is transformed (and transforms you).
There are many videos out there teaching how to have the experience I am talking about above but here’s one that shows where it can go. Notice how the the whole piece seems ridiculously complex, seeming to shift beautifully and smoothly like a musical kaleidoscope. Actually what is happening is conceptually simple (from the left-H): the right hand and left foot play a two separate but repeating rhythms. Notice, the right-H appreciates and wants to experience the beauty but cannot access doing it without the help of the left-H. Amzingly, the only thing changing here is the left hand, smoothly switching between counting in fours, counting in fours but starting the first bar one beat later and so on.
Now I can appreciate what’s happening here but I know the only way I could really experience it would be to do it, and to do it enough that my hearing engagement could draw back and appreciate the whole. It would probably take me a couple of weeks of regular study (and a drum kit) to try this for myself- if I lived as a hermit without concern for other things this would be much less intimidating. An adept could probably gather this within an hour.
What I’m trying to say in this rambling and wordy way is that an appreciation of the whole drives an understanding of the parts of the whole that is then wonderfully recombined as a new whole when it is reassembled in the direct experience of doing and re-appreciating.
Now notice how this experience is only really accessed when the rhythm is split bilaterally, across the hands forcing cross-lateral disinhibition to create a gestalt experience. I believe this is one of the reasons music, dancing and other coordinated, fundamentally bilateral actions are so engaging and beautiful to us.
I hope this makes sense and I hope it illustrated what I’m trying to say about the fluid and constructive interplay between the hemispheres I believe is uniquely accessible through music via Appreciation as the foundation.
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I think you are right Mark. Maybe what we’re seeing here is a skilled individual who has learned to suppress inhibition with that suppression ‘bleeding over’ into other activities. Playing music at any level places an enormous burden on the person doing it… and that burden doesn’t lighten with skill. If anything, the opposite occurs- for example, once you develop cross-lateral independence in your hands, you might focus your attention on touch, fluidity, timbre or any of the myriad variables of importance.
And then, any of these will have an overarching, structural significance in a piece all of which need to be dynamically managed to achieve the aesthetic aims of the player. And there’s no more challenging example than an adept musician improvising fluently.
The involvement the vocal cords in music has always fascinated me- these muscles are bilaterally controlled but in normal use are ‘in sync’ with each other. It would be interesting to know if these involuntary vocalisations represent independent control of the left and right vocal cords, entrained with the activity of the hands as they play the piano.
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Well, that’s now near the top of a long list of things I must listen to. Thanks very much Tom
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Hi Tom
That is an absolutely fascinating and rewarding reference. Many thanks for digging it out and sharing.
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Hey Matt,
Thanks for creating this group and posting up. I thought I’d have a pop at a reply here but my thoughts would apply equally to most of your other topics in the section. Note, I am fairly new to Iain’s ideas and and have yet to even start his latest.
As someone interested in psychology and philosophy I find this area of medicine both interesting and confusing at the same time. For example, it is clear to me that the efficacy and the effectiveness of SSRIs in the treatment of depression (for example) is widely disputed. Yet, in Western cultures certainly, they still represent the front line and default treatment of this disorder.
The model for depression being employed here is one in which the patient presents with a serotonin deficit and I am yet to be convinced that there is any evidence for this. One recent meta analysis (Moncrieff et al July 2021) seems to suggest that there is no association really at all.
Further, I find it hard to understand why this particular aspect of bodily functioning should be considered causal, even if it could be demonstrated that there is a concurrent deficit in serotonin that correlates to depression.
So, the radical in me feels the urge to critique the whole idea rather than to engage with the detail. I do hope this is ok.
It seems to me that there are some pretty big assumptions made in this field generally. First, that the brain is the seat of psychological disturbance and second that modifying levels of neurotransmitters will have a desirable and long term effect.
Of course, there are some features of orally consumable drugs that are worth considering: they are easy to manufacture at scale (once you have the technology in place to do so) and they represent an easily standardised and inexpensive treatment for large populations (in contrast, for example, to psychotherapy).
This view might be a bit ‘meta’ but it seems to me this is at least one other crossover with Ian’s ideas: that the theoretical modelling, diagnosis and treatment of depression in Medicine follows a pattern that is convenient for mass treatment but which ultimately doesn’t work very well and is based on ungrounded (some might say false) causal pathways. We might say it is a very left brain way of understanding and treating depression. I could say the same seems to be the case for the psychoses.
In saying all of this I do not even slightly reject the idea that things we consume have effects on the body and mind or that there are not people (perhaps even a large number overall) who are assisted by them. In contrast, the right brain therapeutically attempting to make sense of the whole when assisting someone with a mental health problem might find they don’t have the time to really understand the problem or that the person will not or cannot engage.
Of course, appreciating the whole of something in its context and fully understanding it is not what is happening when we agree with our doctor to take an SSRI. Is it a stopgap measure that we have come to rely upon as a culture? Has doing so distorted our willingness to think about more labour intensive ways of helping those in distress?
Are we simply, as a culture, missing the point?
I do find it interesting, this left brain notion that we are examining and understanding a fairly static system in which diseases of the same kind present now as they always have but we simply understand and name them better than we did.
The contrary view is that we really don’t understand them at all now (just as we didn’t in the past), but have simply constructed a more plausible narrative for accounting for them, one which opens up simple, cheap, standardised treatments for large populations.
Perhaps my bias as a psychologically minded person drives me towards the latter but I think this is where I chime with Iain’s positions on consciousness and the mind.
Of course, these positions may simply be outliers in a much messier dynamic reality where even the underlying conditions we are discussing come and go… If I remember correctly melancholia and post-partum psychosis have almost disappeared when controlling for diagnostic variability whereas non-melancholic depression is at pandemic levels.
Anyway, I hope the above s food for though Matt.
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Hi Euan, Don, Samuel
Lovely to listen through the music above. Beautiful.
Here is a track from Virginia Rodrigues which features on her album ‘Nós”. She is a Brasilian from Salvador do Bahia, a city steeped in the traditions of the Candomblé. This song, Eligibo (Uma Historia de Ifa) is beautifully converted from its warlike original by Rodriguez into a soothing lullaby.
It speaks of a city of light and is a song that resonated with me very strongly at a pivotal moment in my life.
Anyway, lovely to meet you all.
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Yes, you are making an excellent point here Samuel. If I may be so bold, what we think of as “Classical Music” is probably quite a different thing to what is was originally. It was just music and played to varying degrees freely. I don’t think this is much of a mystery really because culture (particularly textual, language based and hierarchical culture) tends to close down variation over time.
I do think that where this culture produces really remarkable musicians and performances, there is probably a large degree of free expression of which the listener is only tangentially or implicitly aware, something that runs probably counter to the general point I was making.
But then I also think this isn’t typical for most musicians.