On Musical Experience

What is it about music? How is it possible for a great, life-changing, profound and moving experience to come from hearing sounds?

To fully answer that question would be to catalog all human nature and experience, and would take volumes. To a young teenager the answer might have a lot to do with what sounds are being heard during love’s first kiss. To a wife, the music playing at her young husband’s too-early funeral. To an angry young man it might be the words and rhythms that reflect and magnify feelings of power and machismo. To a female cricket, maybe it’s the sound of a male cricket.

In short, music is in the mind of the hearer. And there is a giant variety of experiences in the world that are rightly called “musical.”

But the musical experience I focus on is that rare, exalted, sought-after and profound experience that emerges when, by listening to sounds, the normal stance of being-in-the-world, as Heidegger might have said, is subverted and supplanted with a different kind of consciousness. This kind of experience stands apart from the very human (and maybe therefore artificial) nature of that universally accepted and unquestioned “basic stance” that construes the world as exterior to us and as a series of fleeting, disconnected moments we live through.

To try to describe this experience is futile, of course, because to the many people who have never had it it sounds bizarre and unbelievable, and to those who have, descriptions fall short.

But let me still try to convey at least the idea that there is a rare kind of experience that can occur when listening to music, and that this experience takes one out of one’s skin, so to speak, presenting an alternate reality … or maybe an alternate view of reality that makes the normal structure and pattern of consciousness seem to stand in relief, and no longer seem like the actual, direct experience of reality that we never even think to question because we assume it lays before us the world and the universe “as it really is.”

Science has already shown, however, that reality includes elements that are simply beyond human experience. Who can fathom the big bang, billions of years of evolution, the billions of coordinated biological events put into play along our cell membranes when we simply lift a finger, or the strange reality of sub-atomic physics that may allow one particle to exist simultaneously in different places? But, while science may prove there are different realities (or parts of reality, if you want to think of it that way), it doesn’t give us a way to directly experience those realities. They’re mediated by instruments, our own human reality: that basic stance of the structure of consciousness.

Music, on the other hand, offers the opportunity to alter our own experience and perception in its most fundamental structure, to experience a different reality directly … to live it, even if only briefly. An attentive listener who is open to such an experience just may have it when presented with sounds that are capable, in their mysterious way, of restructuring the lived experience of the moment.

This is as far as I go in philosophizing. My goal is to try to create the conditions under which this sort of experience is most likely to occur. And to share what I’ve learned with musicians who may find it useful if they have that goal, too.

I’m trying to walk the walk … and I want to show you how to do that, too. To that end you’ll find here some explanation and discussion about putting sounds together in performance in a way that might more likely lead to exalted musical experiences.

Performance Workshops

Beyond explanation, example and discussion is the practical–the attempt to do what we’re talking about. If you are a musician or conductor who wants to try to bring your skills to bear in creating the conditions for great musical experiences, consider joining one of the performance workshops.