This week’s theme is…Sublime Stillness! The mysterious art we call music refers merely to frequencies that fill the air around us, controlled in a specific way by its performers. Technically this may be true, but we sense feelings and motions of intense clarity. Sometimes the incredibly high density of musical events creates furious, busy textures. And at other times achingly long-breathed sustained notes create a sublime impression of meditative stillness that seems to suspend time itself. This week we look at some examples of this.
Sublime Stillness, Day 1 – Miserere by Gregorio Allegri
I’ve recently had a realization about the nature of music. It seems obvious in retrospect, but something I never quite put together until a few months ago is that music is the art of multitasking. Honest-to-goodness multitasking.
What are your thoughts on multitasking? Many people claim that it is authentically impossible for humans, the brains of whom are essentially computers, even if they are the most marvelous computers in the known universe, to truly multitask. Computers, while they may have come to process quickly enough to give the illusion of playing music seamlessly while surfing the internet simultaneously, are actually merely switching back and forth between their multiple tasks countless times each second, far beyond the threshold of human perception. And human brains also, while they may seem subjectively able to handle multiple tasks simultaneously, are actual serial in nature and therefore not actually able to do that. And I think many of us who have observed someone in the midst of “multitasking” tend to agree that that person is not juggling their various activities as well as they might think.
Some have gone so far to describe elaborate theories of just how impossible multitasking is for our cerebral computers…
…and I tend to agree with this, except for one area of human activity, and that is music.
Think about watching musical performers. Anyone who operates a musical instrument is constantly executing two different tasks with different parts of their body, if not more. Someone once told me that a great drum set player will be performing different, independent tasks with each of their four limbs. Violinists’ and guitarists’ hands do completely different things from one another, and much of the difficulty of those instruments (and I speak from experience as a violin teacher here – I imagine the guitar and its plucked cousins present similar difficulties) is overcoming what I call the “ambidextrous impulse”, that is the urge for the two hands to mirror each other when success on the instrument is found only in achieving true independence between the two. Woodwind players’ hands must execute different fingers from one another, and do all of this while the respiratory system is used for air support and embouchure; similarly for brass, although the hand functions are a bit different. On the piano the two hands, and even individual fingers, must be coordinated with the foot operating the pedal into a synchronized ballet full of intricate moving parts. The grand-daddy of musical multitasking is probably the organ which demands independence from each hand, finger, and foot given its pedal keyboard. I have heard that J. S. Bach could improvise in 6 independent musical parts (2 in the right hand, 2 in the left hand, and one in each foot) and I have met at least one organist alive today who has claimed to have that ability himself, which I am inclined to believe. Even singers multitask, matching words to musical lines, and often layering acting and emotional communication on top of all of that. The next time you have to sight sing some vocal music, notice how challenging it is to read both the music and words at the same time; I still struggle with this and sight-sing almost every week myself. Conductors must coordinate entire musical ensembles and maintain cognitive control of all the different parts sounding around them at the same time. Any improvising musician coordinates the physical elements of performance with significant mental calculations, rivaling those any great mathematician, controlling elements of melody, rhythm, harmony and polyphony.
So, I think music is the ultimate expression of human multitasking. Perhaps it is a myth, with our minds becoming trained to switch back and forth between all the little operations so quickly as to transcend the threshold of human perception, but I tend to think instead that it is one of the cognitive glories of music – music truly trains us to do what is impossible in other areas of our lives, to combine multiple, simultaneous actions. No wonder it is so challenging, and no wonder it is so magnificent to behold musicians at the top of their game.
There is another area of music that demands multitasking, but multitasking of a different sort, a purely mental and sensory one. Experienced musicians come to understand that even the physical multitasking of operating a musical instrument is essentially a purely mental game, and intense study of this other area increases our facility with physical performance as well, which is why trained musicians spend time working on it. This other area is called “aural skills”, or colloquially, “ear training”. I think “aural skills” is more technically correct, since it’s not your ear that is trained, but your mind. Our ears actually get worse as we age, a problem exacerbated by today’s headphones and artificially amplified music (in college I tried to spend as little time in bars and clubs with blaring music as possible because I observed, with alarm, the hearing shift those experiences inevitably brought on), so it’s certainly not our ears that improve with this kind of training, but our mental ability to discern the detailed events of frequency, timing, and color that form musical textures, which musicians call pitch, rhythm, and orchestration, respectively.
Since music’s magic is in its combination of simultaneous events, the art of aural skills is the art of listening to multiple events at once, and so musicians’ minds are trained to deconstruct the multiple simultaneous events which form the musical experiences that they encounter. Once you are trained to do this, even just a little bit, your mind starts to do it automatically. Whenever I hear any music at all, I’m usually attempting some level of mental transcription of scales and harmonies at work, which inevitably involves somehow listening to at least two things at once, and sometimes more. How good is it possible to be at the mental multitasking that is cultivated by the study of aural skills? Well, here’s a fun story about that. The subject is something of an outlier, but even outliers are human (although this may be debatable…*wink*).
During the first half of the 1600s a priest and musician named Gregorio Allegri made a magnificent setting of the 51st Psalm, the penitential Misere.
Written in a sort of retro-Renaissance style (Allegri was composing during the transition between the musical Renaissance and Baroque eras – like many of his contemporaries he had a foot in each style and drew from both more or less evenly; for more about other composers who also did this see this post, this one, and this one), and incorporating stylized elements of Gregorian Chant, the sublime and haunting piece for two choirs and, at certain moments, 10 different independent vocal lines, became a favorite in the Sistine Chapel, often performed for subdued evening services. It also became hyped and shrouded in secrecy, feted for its mystical effect. One element of the hype was that written copies were restricted. Even more than a century after its composition there were only three known copies in existence allowed to leave the Vatican, a policy that was enforced by Pope Clement XIV under threat of excommunication. Until Mozart.
During the spring of 1770, just a couple months after Ludwig van Beethoven’s conception, a teenage Mozart visited Rome and heard a performance of Allegri’s renowned Miserere. As legend has it, the budding musical genius returned to his lodging that evening and successfully transcribed the entire score from memory. He returned a few days later to make minor corrections, but not many I bet. Still, he needed two hearings, so he wasn’t perfect. In many of today’s aural skills classrooms, music students listen to examples no more than a few seconds long multiple times in order to transcribe them accurately. At age 14 Mozart was able to transcribe 10 minutes of music, at times 10 voices thick, after essentially one hearing. It seems the dramatized depiction of Mozart’s multitasking ears central to the plot of Amadeus is essentially correct:
The pope was delighted and, rather than excommunicating him, bestowed upon the plucky young Mozart a great honor, a sort of papal knighthood called the Order of the Golden Spur, which he wore with pride for the rest of his life:
The young Mozart’s amazing feat of aural multitasking, cracking the secret code of a particularly mysterious piece of music, is a particularly impressive example of the multitasking that musicians perform every day. Whether performing, composing, improvising, or transcribing, this magical medium of music gives human beings an outlet to demonstrate a feat that is probably impossible in other areas, just one of the reasons that music is so treasured by human kind.
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