brettworks

“Anomalies are often the path to a new understanding.”

“Today all the available sources of intuitive life – the natural world, cultural tradition, the body, religion and art – have been so conceptualised, devitalised and ‘deconstructed’ (ironised) by self-consciousness, explicitness and the systems and theories used to analyse them, that their power to help us see intuitively beyond the hermetic world that the left hemisphere has set up has been largely drained from them.”

“Most forms of imagination, for example, or of innovation, intuitive problem solving, spiritual thinking or artistic creativity require us to transcend language, at least language in the accepted sense of a referential code. Most thinking, like most communication, goes on without language” (107).

“Skills are embodied, and therefore largely intuitive: they resist the process of explicit rule following” (121).

“In sub-Saharan Africa there is a form of communication using drumbeats which has been dubbed, perhaps somewhat infelicitously, ‘rhythmic drum telegraphy’. The technique is widespread, and by it apparently detailed messages can be communicated over long distances. According to [Rudolph] Laban, there is no attempt, as the Westerner might imagine, to mimic the sound pattern of words or phrases; that would be rendered pointless by the many different languages spoken by different tribes occupying adjacent territories. Instead ‘the reception of these drum or tom-tom rhythms is accompanied by a vision of the drummer’s movement, and it is this movement, a kind of dance, which is visualised and understood.’ Communication occurs because the listener inhabits the body of the person who drums and experiences what it is that the drummer is experiencing. Even if language no longer seems to us in the West to ‘body forth’ meaning in this way, it may be that at least our understanding of music still shares this inhabiting of the movements of the other – the performer, the singer, perhaps even the composer. Laban again: ‘It is … interesting to note that orchestral music is produced by the most precise bodily movements of the musicians,’ and he suggests that perhaps one of the reasons we like to see, as well as hear, music performed is exactly that we can better inhabit the performer’s body, a perception that appears to me intuitively correct” (122).

“The media also promote fragmentation by a random juxtaposition of items of information, as well as permitting the ‘intrusion of distant events into everyday consciousness’, another aspect of decontextualisation in modern life adding to loss of meaning in the experienced world” (390).

“Mathematics needs to be taken up into the living frame if it is to work in music – as it is in the music of J. S. Bach, for example: it needs, in a word, to be embodied. Music is, of all the arts, the one that is most dependent on the right hemisphere; of all aspects of music, only rhythm is appreciated as much by the left hemisphere, and it may not be accidental that, while contemporary art music has become the preserve of a few devotees (in a way that was never previously true of new music in its time), popular music in our age has become dominated by, and almost reduced to, rhythm and little else” (418).

“nowhere can context be more important than in music, since music is pure context, even if the context is silence” (420).

“There is an enormously subtle range of emotional expression over the entire range of the harmonic, with the tiniest changes making enormous differences in meaning” (420).

“The sound of modernist music tends to be intrinsically alien, minatory, which is why it is used in films to convey a sense of some frightening ‘other world’ (for example, at points where such an effect was required in the film 2001, Ligeti replaced Strauss)” (420).

“What about the great music of the past? That cannot exactly be abolished, and the success of the left hemisphere’s drive to impede the composition of new music might be undermined by the sheer power of such music to convince us that there is something beyond the self-enclosed, self-invented space of the left hemisphere’s world. But it need not worry. Here the commodification of art that [Theodor] Adorno predicted has continued apace, taming and trivialising it, and turning it into mere utility for relaxation or self-improvement” (442).

“Our relationship with what is beautiful is different. It is more like longing, or love, a betweenness, a reverberative process between the beautiful and our selves, which has no ulterior purpose, no aim in view, and is non-acquisitive. Beauty is in this way distinguished from erotic pleasure or any other interest we may have in the object. This is surely what [Gottfried] Leibniz meant by beauty being a ‘disinterested love’” (445).

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary:
The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019)