Schenker and Heptapods

I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later (Miles Davis)

Sometimes at work we have clinical sharing CPD sessions, where team members present recent work with video or audio clips. This is a process in which the various approaches of the music therapists and the challenges presented by different clients and clinical contexts can be explored and reflected on. During one of these a colleague and I were discussing some group work. We played some audio in which, out of nowhere in particular, I began to play something new on the piano, to which other people in the group responded. Someone on the team, on hearing the excerpt, asked ‘Why did you play that’. My slightly facetious answer of ‘Dunno, why does anyone play anything?’ was probably inadequate. It was a valid question, and I then tried to answer it in a more considered way. The answer was that sometimes, when nothing much is happening musically, I’ll throw something in, to see what response it gets. The decision about what to throw in might be based on something conscious, but it might not. It might arise out of an impulse to fill the space, and it might be based on something that’s in my own head, which may or may not have anything to do with the client. Of course I’ll be considering the client’s needs, their resilience, whether it’s the right moment to add something, but the actual musical content may not have emerged from any clear linear process of decision making. (I’m leaving aside any unconscious reasons I might have for playing a particular thing, since I don’t, at least at the time, know what these are.) This is in contrast to a more typically ‘music therapy’ response, where I might pick up a pulse or a pitch, or a melody from the client, and interpret this through my own music. This could be complementary, or challenging or supportive, or many other things.

But the seemingly random musical interjection can sometimes lead somewhere interesting and new, introducing possibilities that might not have been there before, which might be helpful for the client. It reminds them that you are a separate musical person, and this might be just what’s needed at a particular moment. Also, this is the way music often works. Any piece, improvised or composed, has to start from nothing, from silence, from a moment waiting to be created. Think of any of the great works by the great composers. The mystery of where that initial idea comes from (the D minor Chaconne, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Tristan und Isolde) raises a question, and the rest of the work is spent answering that question (or perhaps delaying answering it).

The science fiction film Arrival is based on the story by Ted Chiang entitled ‘The Story of Your Life’ (beware mild spoilers). In the story the main protagonist, an expert linguist, is called on to try to interpret the language of newly arrived extra-terrestrials (heptapods). This is a long process, but eventually it transpires that the aliens have a conception of language which derives from a different experience of time from our linear one. Like Vonnegut’s Tralfamadorians, they perceive the whole of time as a single entity. Everything that will happen has, in a sense, already happened. Consequently they construct written language in a non-linear way. Rather than left to right, their language representation is more like a picture, where the whole is known before the picture has begun. The ‘sentence’ or ‘paragraph’ gradually emerges as a complete entity before the eyes of the reader, as if Dickens were able to write David Copperfield by adding the words, not in order, but dotted randomly throughout the blank pages of a book, until gradually the whole novel emerged.

Once David Copperfield has been written, you can write it again this way, because you know how it goes. The same goes for a musical work. A symphonic movement is a case in point, because sonata form has a deterministic quality. The opening statement can be heard, in retrospect, to influence the direction of the rest of the piece. This is particularly clear in the great works of the classical era, where there is a feeling of completeness, of inevitability, about the musical argument. But it can also happen in an improvisation. Think of Miles’ famous solo on So What, which, over the course of time, now feels set in stone. It’s regarded as a classic musical statement in a similar way to a well-known composition like the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The more you dig down into this idea, that music makes sense in retrospect, the more the idea of determinism can take hold. The point of Ted Chiang’s story, that time has a dual quality, that it can be experienced in a linear way, or perceived as a unity, but not both at the same time, incorporates both the idea of a musical work, and also the concept of music in action, as a thing that you do, that takes place in a sequence of moments. Christopher Small, in Musicking, rejects the former and opts for the latter, and as music therapists we might have a tendency to do the same. But when you listen back to the recording of a session, or listen repeatedly to an excerpt when preparing for a presentation, the question ‘Why did you play that?’ is often answered by what happens subsequently, rather than what has happened before.

I don’t know, but maybe this concept of music as a preordained object is part of the deal. The music-moving-through-time perspective is an obvious one, but the idea that it should somehow all fit together is also widespread. Often to my chagrin, I studied musical analysis as part of my degree course. The Schenkerian idea of the Ursatz, the underlying form, is about as deterministic as you can get, but so too is the approach of analysing motive, making links between the melodic fragments that occur throughout a piece. We search for evidence that it all makes sense, even when we didn’t spot it the first time around. In clinical improvisation, we’re trying to make sense not only of the music, but also of the client, and of the relationship. We don’t know what’s going to happen until it’s happened, either in a musical way, or any other, but afterwards we can look back and decide whether it was coherent, and perhaps answer the question, ‘Why did you play that?’