Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 10 Number 2, August 2009

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Response to Anthony Palmer, “Unconscious Apprehension of Metapatterns Expressed Consciously Through Musical Form”

by 

Iris M. Yob

Walden University

The thesis that Anthony Palmer proposes in his paper that the same laws govern the physical realm as the musical realm and that patterns of connections and meanings in one realm are replicated in the other is a robust one.  I say this in part because the basic essentials of this thesis keep reappearing throughout the history of thought, each iteration bringing new nuances and explanatory power with it.

            Probably the earliest version of this thesis came to us from the Monists, the pre-Socratic Greeks, who proposed that all reality comes from a single source, can be explained in terms of a single active constituent, and in fact there is only one reality.[1]

As Palmer suggests−and his title hints at this−an earlier version of this thesis also comes from Carl Jung and Jungian psychology.  In this case the medium is the “collective unconscious,” the instinctual in the human mind made up of archetypes or symbols common to all.[2]

            Mircea Eliade, a religious philosopher and semiotician, applied Jung’s ideas to the exploration of religious manifestations across times and places.  His multiple works describe the replication of symbolic forms such as the circle, the moon, water, fire, the sun, the journey, and so on by original peoples as widely dispersed as Africa, India, South America, northern Europe, and the Australian aborigine and how remnants of these symbols persist in contemporary society.  He shows how these repeated archetypes are employed to differentiate and interpret various elements of time and space and provide order, connection, understanding, and meaning.[3] Although his work draws on the theory of the collective unconscious, something Palmer makes a point of disavowing, Eliade employs the symbols as meaning makers in much the same way as Palmer suggests in the realm of music.

            A more recent version of the replication of layered patterns comes from chaos theory. What might seem on the surface to be what William James called the “big, blooming, buzzing confusion”[4] of stimuli that strikes our senses whether we look at the world around us or within us is really much more ordered and cognitively manageable than would at first seem possible.  The very pattern of randomness evidenced in phenomena at one level is itself replicated at other levels in remarkably similar ways.  So if one were to draw a detailed outline of the edge of the land where it meets the sea for say a yard or so of coastline, compare that with a map drawn of a mile-long stretch of coastline as viewed from say an airplane, and compare that with a map drawn of the edge of a thousand miles of continent as viewed from say a space craft, the same patterns would occur: the same kinds of irregularities, curves, water channels, promontories, peninsulas, and so on.[5]  So what may seem random on one level is actually replicated at multiple levels and chaos is not as chaotic as one might at first imagine.  Palmer’s work resonates with this kind of conceptualization of similarities not just within one realm like the geographical, but between realms, like the physical and musical.

            This rich history provides an embracing foundation for what Palmer suggests but it also prompts us to ask not only what new nuance does Palmer offer but what has been left behind in this new iteration and what concerns with past iterations have been successfully addressed in this new one. 

            One of the persistent concerns has been around what might be called the “wax nose” problem, that is, the matter of being able to tweak the “nose” of this edifice any way that suits the present demands.  In Palmer’s paper the specter of the wax nose arises in a couple of ways.  For instance, he offers several examples of music that are “spherical,” with a central focal point.  If we listen to the organization of the music as a sphere we may actually bring order to what we are hearing.  But we may not hear the music that way.  Some may hear a cube or other polygon shape; some may hear a wavy line; some may even hear a football grid or a seesaw.  Who is right?  And how inevitable is it that one will hear any of these?  And what does it mean to “hear” a sphere anyway?  What is there about the music that is actually spherical?  We hear sounds or we read a musical line, but where actually is the sphere itself?  Furthermore, what is a sphere?  In common usage, it may be conceived of as a ball, for mathematicians it is the set of all points at a particular distance from a fixed point, and for physicists it is as an object capable of colliding and stacking.[6]  Which sphere are we hearing?  And which laws carry across to the music we are listening to—the common sense laws, the mathematical laws, or those from the physicists?  And where in the physical world do spheres exist that they reappear in human artifacts such as musical compositions?  A sphere and the laws to which it conforms are themselves mental constructs to which physical objects conform more or less.  So one ends up with idealized (in the Platonic sense) physical objects in the non-physical world of aural creations, leaving plenty of room for “wax noses.”

            When one reads Jung or Eliade or chaos theory, lines and circles and spheres are usually part of the discussion, but more often the archetypes being explored are much more complex than these:  coastlines, branches (as one would find in trees, rivers, and veins, for instance), heroes, pilgrims, even water and fire.  These writers were convinced of the pervasiveness of these kinds of highly differentiated objects across domains.  It will be interesting to see whether Palmer also finds these law-governed objects of the physical world present in music or whether their complexity is prohibitive in this kind of exercise.

            At their foundation, these concerns can be reduced to the matter of whether one applies the physical manifestations of universal laws literally or figuratively across various domains.  Palmer’s thesis is built on a degree of literalness: what governs operations in the natural world also governs music and in much the same way.  That may be its primary contribution but possibly the claim that is going to require the greatest defense.  In the end it may be more persuasive to build the case around the proposition that physical manifestations and experiences can serve as metaphors for entering and understanding another world such as music.

            However, while these questions are interesting to raise in philosophical settings, in the end, for the teacher in the classroom, curriculum designers, and those who prepare learning materials, the greatest value in Palmer’s thesis may lie in the fact that there very well may be some kind of connection between what one experiences in the physical world and what one hears in music and in fact both worlds and many others beside them are alike in important ways.  Whether that connection is literal or metaphorical, actual or cognitively constructed, may be less important for classroom teachers than finding out how this robust idea can contribute to teaching practice.  Developing the skills for making the links and providing supporting materials for teachers is a logical next step in Palmer’s project.