How Music Works (59 page)

in Africa identify only two senses: seeing and experiencing. The experienc-

ing sense includes intuition (why don’t we include that as a sense?), emotion, 324 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

smell, touch, and hearing. The Ivilik Inuit, who live in northeast Labrador, don’t think of space in visual terms the way we do (possibly because their

visual environment is almost devoid of features and landmarks); they think of space by referencing their other senses.

I read a short piece in the
New York Times
recently about a nine-year-old named Matthew Whitaker who was born twenty-three weeks premature,

weighing just under two pounds. He has never been able to see. Every Satur-

day, he travels to New York from his home in Hackensack, New Jersey, for a

full day of music lessons. He plays seven instruments.

“He hears everything as music,” said his father, Moses Whitaker. “The fax

machine sounds like an A. The copy machine is a B flat. The jackhammers

are making the drum beats that he likes.” When the subway rumbles, Mat-

thew taps his cane on the ground to recreate the noise. He hums along with

the city—the fast cars and fast talkers. When asked to describe New York, he stands and pivots a full 360°, pointing his fingers in front of him. “New York City is a circle of sounds,” he says. “There is music everywhere. Everybody has a smile on their face. It’s musical, it’s dark and so beautiful.”8

What Matthew describes is a kind of re-enchantment of the world. Of

course those magical and unexplainable parts of the world didn’t just go away; as both Freud and Jung argued, they burrowed into our unconscious, knock-ing around in there and affecting everything we do, and they emerge from

time to time in different forms. This might happen via urban myths, goth-

inspired fashion shoots, folk tales, horror movies, Japanese anime monsters, experimental music, or the power of pop songs and the somewhat theatrical

and ritualized ways that singers perform them. We’re fascinated and drawn

to stuff that science can’t explain—the transcendent, the uncanny, things

that affect us without words—and music both touches on and emanates from

those mysteries. It reconnects us to that lost time of enchantment.

I think that this semi-mystical sense of the world has also begun to

re-emerge explicitly as music over the last fifty years or so. A lot of postwar musicians and composers began to think of music in completely new,

or maybe in completely old, ways. John Cage is maybe the most famous of

them. He likened his view of music to what was then contemporary archi-

tecture. Those modern buildings and houses had lots of massive glass walls

and windows, and in Cage’s view this meant that the outside world was

being allowed in, was being considered part and parcel of the architecture,

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instead of being shut out. Compartmentalization, the difference between

inside and outside, between the environment and oneself, was breaking

down. Art, too, was being made of junk from the street—Cage’s friends Jas-

per Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were making art out of everyday stuff,

as did Duchamp before them. Couldn’t music, Cage reasoned, be similarly

inclusive? He answered the question in a fairly literal way—by including

street sounds, speech, accidents, and thumps into his compositions. This

might not have been what Pythagoras had in mind, but still, Cage was invit-

ing the universe in.

Erik Satie might have been one of the earliest to imagine that music could

be something more than what it had been relegated to in Western culture.

“We must bring about a music which is like furniture, a music which will be

part of the noises of the environment… softening the noises of the knives and forks, not dominating them, not imposing itself.”9 He wrote some pieces that he referred to as furniture music, which weren’t exactly the proto-ambient

music you might imagine, but they’re pleasant, if fairly repetitious, and soon, as he hoped, one begins to ignore them. This was a radical idea—that you

would write music with the idea that some of it might
not
be heard. But things went further than that.

Bing Muscio (his real name!) of the Muzak corporation said that the music

his company produced should be
heard
but not
listened to
. At one point, Muzak was the largest music network in the world. It had at least 100 million listeners—or non-listeners, if you prefer. Though we don’t have traditional Muzak to complain about anymore, its concept was ingenious. Its inventors noted that the efficiency experts who had insinuated themselves into the American workplace were concerned that workers were alert at some points in their work day and, typically, had an energy slump in the mid-to late afternoon. The bosses wanted a flat graph—constant and efficient workflow all day long. This brings us back to Ken Robinson and Tom Zé’s ideas of industrial capitalism as a producer of human machines. The technologists at Muzak thought they had a solution to this productivity problem: they would smooth out those curves using music. Calm

music would be played during energetic hours, and slightly more energetic music was programmed later to pull workers out of a slump. People believed it worked.

Rather than licensing existing recordings to play in shops and workplaces

that subscribed to their service, as is usually done now, Muzak hired musi-

cians to replay familiar songs and instrumental pieces in ways so that the

326 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

music intentionally
wouldn’t be listened to
. The dynamics (the changes in volume level), and even the higher and lower pitches, were ironed out. It seemed as if Muzak had sucked the soul out of the songs, but in fact they had created something entirely new, something close to what Satie imagined: furniture

music, music that was clearly a useful and (to their subscribers) functional part of the environment, there to induce calm and tranquility in their shops and offices. Why is it that Satie’s compositions, Brian Eno’s ambient music, or the minimal spaced-out work of Morton Feldman all seem fairly cool, while Muzak is deemed abhorrent? Is it simply because Muzak alters songs that are

already familiar to everyone? I think it’s something else. The problem is that this music is intended to dull your awareness, like being force-fed tranquiliz-ers. Of course, not everyone objected—Annunzio Paulo Montovani recorded

a series of lush, string-heavy albums billed as “beautiful music,” and he was the first artist to sell a million stereo records.

The concept of a musical soporific doesn’t work across the board, though.

Not every activity is improved by adding a soundtrack. I can’t listen to music while I write this, though I have friends who have music playing constantly

in their studios while they paint, do Photoshop work, or design web pages.

But my attention is always drawn to music. One recent study claims that

analytical work is hindered by music, while creative work can get a boost.

I guess it depends on the creative work, and on what kind of music you’re

talking about.

NO MUSIC

In 1969, UNESCO passed a resolution outlining a human right that doesn’t

get talked about much—the right to silence. I think they’re referring to

what happens if a noisy factory gets built beside your house, or a shooting

range, or if a disco opens downstairs. They don’t mean you can demand that

a restaurant turn off the classic rock tunes they’re playing, or that you can muzzle the guy next to you on the train yelling into his cell phone. It’s a nice thought though—despite our innate dread of absolute silence, we should have

the right to take an occasional aural break, to experience, however briefly, a moment or two of sonic fresh-air. To have a meditative moment, a head-clearing space, is a nice idea for a human right.

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Cage wrote a book called, somewhat ironically,
Silence
. Ironic because he was increasingly becoming notorious for noise and chaos in his compositions. He once claimed that silence doesn’t exist for us. In a quest to experience it, he went into an anechoic chamber at Bell Labs, which was a room

isolated from all outside sounds, with walls designed to inhibit the reflection of sounds. A dead space, acoustically. After a few moments he heard a thumping and whooshing, and was informed those sounds were his own heartbeat

and the sound of his blood rushing through his veins and arteries. They were louder than he might have expected, but okay. After a while, he heard another sound, a high whine, and was informed that this was his nervous system. He

realized then that for human beings there was no such thing as true silence, and this anecdote became a way of explaining that he decided that rather than fighting to shut out the sounds of the world, to compartmentalize music as

something outside of the noisy, uncontrollable world of sounds, he’d let them in: “Let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for manmade theories or

expressions of human sentiments.”10 Conceptually at least, the entire world

now became music.

Others used length and duration to create music that more closely

resembled phenomena in the world. In the mid-1980s, Morton Feldman

wrote a string quartet that lasts six hours. “My whole generation was hung

up on the twenty- to twenty-five-minute piece. It was our clock. We all

got to know it, and how to handle it... Before my pieces were like objects;

now they’re like evolving things.”11 Music, in this way of thinking, became a space you inhabited rather than a discrete object. There’s a similarity here to the Chinese musical tradition that sees each tone as a musical entity in

itself. This is a very different approach from the classical Western view,

which says that music is about relationships between pitches and notes

rather than about the sound of the notes themselves. Chinese composer

Chou Wen-chung wrote an essay in 1971 in which he seems to agree when

McLuhan says that in the West,
how
things are organized is more important than
what
those things are. Newer Western composers seem to be moving toward some meeting place in the middle; their compositions ask us to see

music and notes as form, as things, as an environment and a place of deep

listening. In a way this is reminiscent of the cosmic monochord. They have

heightened their work by making very little happen—nothing goes on or

changes, often for very long periods of time. The repetition and stasis force 328 | HOW MUSIC WORKS

you—if you don’t turn off your stereo or leave the perfomance—to sink

deeper into the piece. It becomes a part of your surroundings, or similar to a natural sound like waves or wind. Things change just like they do in the

natural world, but very slowly.

In 1977, composer Alvin Lucier made a piece using one string—a mono-

chord. By listening and focusing on different parts of it as it vibrated, one could hear a whole range of sounds when these overtones were amplified via

microphonic pickups. Like Lucier, composer Ellen Fullman also works with

long strung wires as her instruments, turning the entire interior of a building into an instrument by running the “strings” from one side to the other. As

with Lucier’s piece, she lets the natural overtones determine what the mode

or scale will be.

In 2005, I, too, turned a building into an instrument, by using an old pump

organ’s keys essentially as a set of switches that activated machines clamped to various parts of a big old industrial space. Motors would vibrate girders, which would resonate according to their length. Little hammers would strike hollow cast-iron columns, and they’d act like xylophones or gongs. Skinny air tubes would blow into the plumbing, which would become like lovely resonant alto

flutes. You’d think it would be noisy and “industrial,” but it was actually quite musical. The general public was invited to play the building via this contrap-tion. Everyone got a chance to sit at the organ and do whatever they wanted.

Was this a piece of music? A composition? Who knows? What was more

important to me was that this device democratized music. Given that this

wasn’t an instrument on which anyone could be a virtuoso, the playing field was leveled. Kids who played it were technically as good as trained and experienced composers, and even as good as the musicians who sometimes sat at the thing, and
knew
it, instinctively. The kids’ usual fear and trepidation about playing an unfamiliar instrument in front of others vanished. Like Lucier’s wire and Fullman’s strings, there was no composition involved in the creation of this music—

the music was absolutely determined by its environment and by the players. A lot of this cosmic music has no beginning and no end. It’s music that proposes that it exists, like myriad other elements that surround us, as a constant element in the world, rather than as a finite recording or performance.

Last year, I saw a performance by composer John Luther Adams. It took

place at the cavernous 67th Street Armory in Manhattan and featured, for

more than an hour, at least sixty percussionists playing mallet instruments

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like xylophones and wind-effect machines. There was a score, of sorts. I

looked at one that was resting on a music stand and saw that it consisted

of a series of short, unconnected two- or three-note phrases. The idea was

to play a phrase, not necessarily in unison with the other players, and then gradually the players would move on to the next phase. One by one the players would begin playing the next group of notes on their charts on whatever