On Synesthesia

Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon (1730-1792) was a French violinist, composer, and writer on music theory and literature.  His experience as both a writer and a musician gave him a unique viewpoint on the links between music and language and in developing a philosophy of music.  As explained by Claude Levi-Strauss, Chabanon claimed that although the various forms of art engage each perceptional sense separately from the others, the mind uses the artistic experience of one sense to engage the others.  At its highest level, art encourages and enables this cross-sensual perception.

Chabanon was apparently also interested in spiders and played the violin for them to see what kind of music they liked.  He noted that "the spider, sitting at the center of its web, corresponds with all its threads, living, as it were, in each of them; and (if, like our senses, the threads were animate) the spider would be able to transmit to each of the threads the perception given to it by all the others."

A similar image, Indra's net, describes the interconnectedness of all phenomena. As explained by Timothy Brook, "When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web is tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every datum that is true—every dharma, in the language of Indian philosophy—is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists."

Setting aside for now the lyrics in songs, music consists of sounds but not words, and the sounds are not explicit representations of other things.  A C-sharp note does not carry any significant meaning separate from, say, D-flat.  Each sound is more or less empty and has neither its own meaning nor character.  Musical sounds do not have a precise, agreed-upon vocabulary the way words and writing do, and thus cannot explicitly articulate an idea or describe a scene.

No other art works this way.  To Chabanon, a poem, a painting, or a piece of sculpture were all more or less depictions of other things and conveyed some level of meaning.  Chabanon lived before the age of impressionism and abstract art, so to him all painting functioned as photography does now.

Music does not faithfully reproduce the natural world the way photography or a natural sound recording does.  Chabanon wondered why the charms of music did not require it to have to imitate our sense impressions in the way that poetry, painting, or sculpture were required to provide faithful images. "If music," he asked, "is not an imitation of nature, then what is it?"

To answer his question, he reasoned that the ear found its own innate pleasures, which could be enjoyed independently of the other senses.  Music acts on a sensual level and specifically on the sense of hearing alone, but if it appears to have meaning for the listener, it must be because the mind becomes involved.  Unlike words, sounds have no intrinsic meaning, but the mind "seeks to establish relations or analogies with different objects, and with various impressions produced by nature."  The slightest analogies, the weakest relations are sufficient for the mind to find an corollary. In this way, the mind takes the spider-web thread of hearing to inform the threads of thought, memory, and the other senses.

Knowing that the mind creates analogies and corollaries, composers create multi-sensual impressions using elements of rhythm and tonal scale.  For example, waves on the sea can be evoked not by trying to produce the sound of the ocean the way a tape recorder might but by melodies that rise and fall in roughly the same rhythm as swells in the ocean, and it's the mind of the listener that associates the rise and fall of the music, that slightest analogy and weakest relation, with the rise and fall of the sea. From there, it doesn't take much imagination to feel the sun on one's skin, smell an ocean breeze, and visualize surfers bobbing up and down on their boards waiting for the next set of waves.  That formula has served Brian Wilson well.

Chabanon noted that a weak, continuous oscillation of two notes could render the murmuring of a brook; a cascade of rising or falling notes express a clap of thunder, a flash of lightning, or a gust of wind; numerous basses playing in unison and rolling the melody evoke the sea; and so on. Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf presents a veritable catalogue of these effects, as does Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

Musical impressions can go far beyond mere representations of nature.  Music can capture emotional states ranging from joy to rage, from loneliness to ecstasy.  Modern musicians convey the psychedelic experience by composing music with multiple layers that each function on their own and reward individual attention, so that the listener gets "lost" among the various levels and loses sense of time and forgets which level they're "supposed" to be listening. The Miles Davis Quintet understood this well and were masters at musically evoking the sensation of marijuana use:

Animal Collective understood this as well:

 

In the spider web of our consciousness, the thread of hearing informs the threads of feeling and sight and emotional/cognitive experience.  The mind orchestrates our sensory experience and uses smell to interpret taste, sound to inform sight, and so on, and no sensation stands alone apart from all the rest of sensation, just like the pearls in Indra's net reflect every other pearl in the net.  We're all synesthetic to some degree or another, and the pleasures of music come in part from what our minds do with the sounds presented to us.   

Mingus

The other day, I suggested that jazz musician Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-1977) was the godfather of hip-hop, as his music incorporated samples of the past, both recorded and in his own playing. Turntablists were emerging on the scene just around the time that Rahsaan died, but he improvised before their arrival by keeping a small cassette player tied around his neck to provide samples of recorded music for the stage mic, accepting, and even grooving on, the tinny distortion of his crude analog setup.

Charles Mingus (1922-1979) could be considered the godfather of punk, or at least punk attitude. His Wikipedia bio notes that Mingus was as well known for his often fearsome temperament as he was for his ambitious music.  His refusal to compromise his musical integrity led to many onstage eruptions, exhortations to musicians, and dismissals, and earned him the nickname "The Angry Man of Jazz."  I've heard of at least one sideman who said he was so afraid of Charlie Mingus that he would keep a pistol hidden with his equipment during practice sessions.

What I like about Mingus' music is its intensity, and how it so often verges on chaos and sounds like all hell's going to break loose at any moment, and then Mingus steps in and effortlessly restores order with some Ellingtonian swagger.
   

It might seem a stretch to draw parallels between punk rock and jazz, but many punk rockers have claimed jazz innovators like John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, and Albert Ayler to be influences, even if they didn't exactly sound like them.  Check out this song titled Albert Ayler's Ghosts (Ghosts was a seminal 1964 free-jazz recording by the Albert Ayler Quartet) by Cleveland no-wavers x_____x, and who, by the way, are playing at 529 tonight.   Hear how, like Rahsaan, they incorporate samples of recorded music (Neil Young's Needle and the Damage Done) and in their playing quote songs as diverse as Simon & Garfunkel (Feelin' Groovy) and The Rolling Stones (Satisfaction), and how, like Mingus and Ayler, they are fiercely uncompromising in their approach.

For point of comparison (or contrast), here's Albert Ayler's Ghosts:

Dave Brubeck

Innovative jazzman Dave Brubeck passed today at the age of 91, just one day short of what would have been his 92nd birthday.

During a period of the 1970s, between, say, the demise of "progressive rock" and the advent of punk, when  disco, mellow California pop, and Stevie Nicks ruled the airwaves, I very nearly stopped listening to rock music altogether and retreated into a world of jazz.  I was amazed at the richness and variety of this American art form that was largely ignored by the American public.  Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk became my new John, George, Paul, and Ringo, and as I went further down the rabbit hole of the avant garde, Shepp, Pharoah, Braxton, and Sun Ra became my new Coltrane, Miles, Mingus, and Monk. Speaking of Monk, though, there's a link to a great, nearly half-hour performance by Monk in all of his eccentric genius at the end of the Brubeck clip above.

Somewhere in the background of all this great music, though, there was always the Dave Brubeck Quartet.  They weren't my favorites, and I don't think I ever owned an album of theirs, although I had managed to accumulate a fairly prodigious collection of vinyl.  They were cool and cerebral, and my interests in jazz leaned more toward the visceral and the emotive.  No disrespect toward the departed today or the living back then, but it simply wasn't my thing.

I always did have an appreciation, though, for the playing of Brubeck's alto saxophonist, Paul Desmond.  In 1977, at the height of my jazz enthusiasm, Desmond died of lung cancer, the result of chronic chain smoking.  He was 52 when he passed, and I remember thinking that he was an old man then, even though I'm older than that now.

In any event, at some point around the rise of late 70s punk and the emergence of New Wave, rock music got interesting again.  At the same time, the number of musicians playing music that could legitimately be called jazz had already started to diminish due to sickness, old age, and death, as well as to the economics of the music industry.  I still appreciate jazz and my musical tastes today are informed and influenced by the freedom and creativity I encountered in jazz, but rather than listen and re-listen to the same old recordings over and over, I continue to explore the new and the different, just like Brubeck had during his lifetime.