THE GAIA OF MUSIC
Is a study of the universal operations
by which all music is formed, illustrated by analyses of music chosen
from the widest range of cultures past and present. Since the same
operations also exist in the formation of natural sounds, as well as in
the workings of human hearing and the human brain, the book suggests the
evolutionary origins of these operations.
The following introduction outlines the scope of this work.
INTRODUCTION
With the growth in modern times of sound recordings and of world communications, which today includes the World Wide Web, there has been an interaction of the diverse strands of the "gaia of music" as never before in history. In the words of Margaret Meade: "Men who are carriers of vastly different cultural traditions are entering the present at the same point in time...Today, everyone is such an immigrant in time--as his forbears were in space...Like all immigrants and pioneers, these immigrants in time are the bearers of the older cultures.The difference today is that they represent all the cultures of the world."
Musicians and composers continue to learn, as they must, the surface rules proper to different musical periods of history, or belonging to different cultures: for example, European classical, Gregorian Chant, mediaeval rhythmic modes, atonal serialism, Hindu ragas, African additive talas or polyrhythms, Balinese or Japanese scales, to name several at random. They lack tools for understanding what these diverse systems have in common, or how, in fact, they do all arise from certain universal musical operations. To elucidate this concept of musical operations, and to propose and test a set of universal musical operations in the widest possible variety of music from past and present is the purpose of this book.
The idea of "Gaia" conceives of the planet earth as a unity. Yet how can that be, when we are faced with such an immense and complex variety of living forms, evolving in different directions over such vast aeons of time? There are three answers to that question.
The first is that the earth's immense variety is unified by its common source and origin. From a few inorganic chemical elements were born the first organic cells. No doubt out of many experimental groupings, there survived communities of cells with differentiated functions which ruled the earth for many millions of years. And such communities of cells were the building-blocks of all subsequent life-forms.
Secondly, the earth is a unity because the development of all its variety has nevertheless been subject to the same set of natural laws.
The gaia , thirdly, consists of different strands of evolution which are complementary, interdependent, and interactive to various degrees, as if each were part of the same organism.
Is the world of music also a gaia ?
Is there a common natural source or root of all human music? This book proposes a set of musical operations which form all music known to us. However, it also suggests that these same operations have their origins in the formations of natural sounds, sounds which once vibrated in a world empty of ears to hear them. "Music is natural law as related to the sense of hearing" wrote the composer Anton Webern. Inorganic sound is formed by those same operations which became musical operations in the organic mind of man. Between inorganic sound and the living symbolic tissue of human music, the mediator has been the human mind.
How did this correspondence and transformation happen? Living organisms have, of necessity, encountered the operations of natural sound formation. Hearing evolved by "tuning in" to the natural environment, by a development of similar and parallel oper- ations. Our human hearing can be traced back through aeons of evolution: back to the fish, whose ear works in fluid as our own inner ear still does: to the seahorses who sing courtship songs or the herrings who warn of danger, back even to the most primitive cilia, or tactile hairs, which responded to the vibrations in the inorganic environment from which the organic was born. Those elementary cilia came to form a kind of "harp" in the ear, one which vibrated sympathetically to the components of natural sound patterns. Aeons later, pads of sensory cilia in the basilar membrane formed a much more complex "harp" in human ears. And there is yet another kind of "harp" in the brain's auditory cortex, one composed of neurons. For hearing evolved by first breaking down and then reintegrating those sounds which came from the environment. And this it did by means of the same operations which formed the sound-patterns in the first place. What began as a function of sense perception, in order to discriminate actively among the formations of natural sound, would one day provide tools of construction for human music.
We find that the same melodic and rhythmic cells of music emerged universally in different and separated cultures. As in biology again, these cells were differentiated into varied and often complex forms of music. And just as ancient colonies of cells continue to exist and operate within and indeed enable the later forms of life, including ourselves, so do primitive musical formations persist as the kernel or seed of far more complex music. For example, there is a common thematic matrix in all the late Quartets of Beethoven. Yet that very same matrix--a third within a fourth--was once normal and even dominant in cultures as disparate as the primitive African, Amerindian or Polynesian, or as the classical Chinese, Greek or Indian.
Secondly, if we may consider the earth as a unity because the development of its myriad forms has been subject to a set of universal natural laws, we can talk of a "gaia of music" in a similar sense. This book proposes the ubiquity in music of a set of universal operations. This kind of analysis can be applied, of course, to many other kinds of system, both natural and man-made. What they all have in common is the multiplicity of their end-forms, which actually is infinite; and all these forms produced from astonishingly few basic operations. The operations of mathematics, for example, plus and minus, divis- ion and multiplication, enable the simplest transactions of the supermarket. but they can also produce Bodleian algebra, or Cantor's infinite arithmetic. The set of rules defining the basic moves of chess-figures on their mosaic of sixty-four squares has produced an infinity of chess games throughout the ages, from the most inelegant, up to the Grand Master's dazzlingly unfolding masterpieces, which aficianados will replay over and over again like favourite symphonies. Again, there are only four basic chemical operations in DNA formation: yet the permutations of just these four produce the wealth of genetic hereditary. To take a more homely example, knitting uses only two operations, pearl or plain, themselves very simple: yet these operations result in socks or scarves or cardigans or any other of an infinite variety of woolly clothes. The end product will be limited by local demands and tastes, and by the shape and size of the body it is meant to fit, as a musical piece may be limited by the demands and tastes of its audiences, and by the idiosyncracies of the instruments which must play it. In spite of the same basic operations, no two cardigans or scarves need ever be the same, nor two pieces of music.
Thirdly, the gaia of music consists--like that of the earth's
evolution--of seemingly quite discrete strands which nevertheless prove
to be complementary and interactive. Such complementarity may have deep
roots within the operations of natural sound formation which is the
original soil of music. For example, there are two contrasting types of
rhythmic formation--the divisive and the additive--which we derive from
the periodic harmonic series of physical sound formation. The one type
is an inversion of the other. Different cultures have shown a propensity
for one or the other types. Africa and India developed additive rhythms
into a highly complex art involving repeated talas or rhythmic
patterns, as well as elaborate polyrhythms. Renaissance Europe, by
contrast, concentrated on the development of its harmonies and preferred
simple divisive rhythms of two, three or four beats to the measure.
This had not always been the case. Gregorian chant had derived its elan
and elasticity from irregular and additive rythms. In the 20th century,
Europe would again return to additive rhythms, in a Stravinsky or a
Bartok and in its modern jazz, as if some recessive gene had lain
dormant and now re-emerged.
The Gaia of Music is available online complete from
www.amazon.com