The Transcendent Experience in Music

In my last essay I wrote about what I learned from the first time I conducted a professional orchestra.

For this essay, I want to turn introspective and show you a concrete example of this in action so you can walk away with a musical feel for what I experienced on that podium.

We are going to experience the reduction of many into one. I try to lay out how this is done in music through listening as self expression.

For this to work, we’re going to look closely at the smallest possible multiplicity, two notes, and experience them as a single thing. 

Two separate notes have a clear start and end, but they will remain just as that—two separate notes—until the listener also hears, and feels, a third thing: the connection between them. That connection is called a musical interval.

I’ll now walk you through how something like a symphony could be experienced as a single event.

Consider these two notes, “G,” and “A.” It doesn’t really matter which two for this, or even the distance between them. You just need two different notes. 

Try singing them. You hear two different notes at first, right? That’s your perception of the many. All the differences between the two stand out and create a world within your experience.

Now, focus on the gap between the notes. Making sure the two notes are as connected as possible, see if you notice a third internal shift happening while singing the two notes one more time.

Take a second to try.

Doesn’t it feel like you visualize the distance before jumping to the next note? The mind imagines the distance and adds—or takes away, depending on which direction you go—just the right amount of energy into the first note to turn it into the second. 

Another way of looking is this. When you’re ‘on’ the first note, that’s what you hear. But somewhere in the life of that first note emerges the second; the second note is a part of the first.

Then, when you arrive on the second note, your imagination matches the external world, and it is only possible through a living participation with the knowledge of where you are headed. 

The change from one to another wouldn’t be possible without perceiving the whole: the two notes, and the gap between them. A much better word than gap, distance, or interval, is a relation. Music is not just made up, or composed, of these relations. Music is the sound relations. The relations exist only within you. Once you identify the relation, the change, you can then try performing it again, but this time, not as two separate notes, but as one thing: the sound relation. 

Symphonic music is made of this stuff, these sound relations. That’s all it is. In its entirety, symphonic music is a set of sound relations, expressed by a group of musicians. It’s a collection of many unities. Through embodying the relations that bind musical sound together, the many comes into the one. 

When you study music in this way, you can really live the piece from the beginning all the way to the end with no jumps or gaps in the conscious experience. Konrad and I, and many of his students, have independently discovered this. Not all pieces do this. Not all composers are interested in this. Based on my experience, this transcendent quality is what most musicians strive for in some way. There is a famous line that says all art aspires to the condition of music. Here, all music aspires to the condition of wholeness.

All of us are tasked with integrating the manyness of our lives to make sense of it. Just as it is in the interval, we steer ourselves to the future we want by paying attention to what we know and letting it inform how we act. That’s what I saw in my teacher’s eyes. That was the real meaning of “transcending” music. To see life in a living way. To be empowered enough to engage with the world as if it were a musical score. 

Notice that all of these diagrams have that backward facing arrow. That’s the life of our memory. We retroactively integrate the past and create meanings from it. The back arrow signifies the concrete relationship between the past and present, and our navigation from silence, to the expanse, and back to silence again. In music at least, it’s a part of how we experience our wholeness.

The spaces between the notes.

What I have for you to listen to now are 9 chords. Together, these chords form a harmonic modulation, which is a very fancy way of saying it’s a key change. 

Listen to this 37 second clip once or twice to get to know the music a little. Then, see if you can hear the key change within you as the music is happening, and experience a oneness with yourself through sound. Now carry that attention to change throughout your day. While listening, open yourself to what you know and let it guide you, but don’t do anything and let it evolve.