Follow-up to last post

As promised, I went and spoke to the PEO group. And although they were too kind to say anything or admit it, I fumbled all over myself. What happened is that I started in on the breathing aspect of this idea/theory/mess, and realized (as a woman in the back of the room began to fall asleep) that they were bored, and I had no idea what I was saying. So I shifted gears and skipped directly to the part where I used Mozart as a way of describing what beauty is/was in music.

And I am realizing now that the larger problem here is that there are many directions this conversation has gone with the various people who have been part of it with me. So before I get back up in front of the public again and start to spout this stuff off before it is fully formed, I better have some time to put it all together in my own head.

I walked myself into a teaching corner...

Last summer, I was asked by someone to teach a short class to a PEO Women's group luncheon. I said yes, she said she needed a title. I said 'how about "A Different Way to Listen to Music". There you go.

Problem is, I can't remember what the hell I was thinking about doing when I said that! The class is tomorrow, and I for the life of me can't figure out what I'm going to tell these women. Anyway, I'm re-reading correspondence I had with a colleague on breathing/phrasing/spirit (which is much too complicated to encapsulate here) to see if it was something related to all of this. I kind of think it was, so I'm going to run with it. First, I'll try out in blog form...

The basic gist of the concept arose from a workshop I gave at a choir directors' conference a few years ago, and it went sort of like this: The essence of musical life, and the essence of singing, is breathing. A musical phrase has the same arc to it that breathing does: a moment of preparation, where life does not exist, followed by a life-giving fill of breath. Once the apex of the breath is reached, a slow recede begins, where the breath leaves the body, slowly and inexorably returning the lungs to their original state.

The genesis of my desire to expound on this idea was a conversation with a friend about how this "breath" can be found in all music: first, it appears in the musical phrase: a string of notes that has a rise and fall, ebb and flow. (As choral singers, we find it most clearly in the way we are called to sing the lines in Renaissance music.) Write large, it also appears in the artistic, narrative arc found in all works: symphonies, novels, plays.

The results of these conversations were many and varied, but some of the tangents I was most interested in included the following: in this model, since life is represented by inhalation, and death represented by exhalation, that means that every musical phrase is a representation of life and death. Furthermore, since everything we say or utter or give to the universe is done on the exhale, our act of speaking and singing itself is representative of dying. When we breathe in, we take from the universe. When we give to the universe, we are partaking in the act of dying. This makes Christ's death on the cross all the more profound, as perhaps the ultimate example one can give in human form of artistic gift.

All of this explosion of philosophical whimsy flew madly between myself and two or three friends, and then it stopped. Stopped on my end, because I had no idea what to do with it. So what? What does it mean?

I'm still not sure I know, but I can say this much today (with a deadline looming): it's time for me to tie this back into musical phrasing, at the very least to try and find a way to teach a class on "How to Listen to Music Differently."

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So here goes: If this idea is true on any level, it means that a musical phrase that taps into our spirit is one that is basic to our existence. But that does not make a musical phrase beautiful. What makes a phrase beautiful seems to be simply what a phrase does with our expectations of what that phrase does. Beauty in music, as described by countless philosophers and aestheticians, is the act of expectation arrested. When a musical line introduces a slight alteration that we do not expect, it changes what the next expectation is. When Mozart introduces a simple, short dissonance into an otherwise flawless line, we are surprised, titillated. The next time he does it, we now find ourselves listening for beauty in a new way. (If I can find it, I'll put a brilliant quote on this topic by Maynard Solomon here - he says it far better than I can.)

Of course, our expectations are different when we listen to Mozart, or Sinatra, or U2, or at least they should be. And the person who uses one set of expectations to look for beauty in a different piece of music will surely be disappointed. But the process, I think, is the same. We look for the grass, and when we see a flower, we call it beautiful. That's not to say the grass is not beautiful - indeed, if we were walking through a field of tulips and came upon a well-manicured lawn in the middle of it, we would be just as pleased. It's the surprise - the splash of a new color - that makes the beauty.

It's the contrast in the breath that makes the art.