Priests of another knowledge - music theorists - Column

Whole Earth Review, Spring, 1996 by Roger Hyde

I AM A MUSIC THEORIST. It is a title I almost never claim, though it is on my diploma (A.B. in Music Theory and Composition). I am a "writer," "composer," "record producer": these are the job titles people will swallow. But because it is my lot in life is to agonize over the Why questions, I endlessly return to the theory, the blueprint, the mission statement.

When I went into music, it was not to "make music" as if it were weaving rugs or stamping out widgets. Music as art, as communication, needed a content for its traffic. Sometimes I am fully committed to the conventional issues: "Golly, am I sad!" "This is what I think beauty is - and balance and symmetry and suspense and repose ..." But I do go back always to the base questions: What is music? Where does it come from? Where does it go? Can we see the whole perimeter of its range, its spectrum?

In a book I am writing, the special, personal revelation I hope to defend is an applied tactical concept of music history as an evolutionary process: the logical, even inexorable mix of anthropology and physics. And then, to consider the larger implications of that context, and of the possibility that the new context projects some useful grid lines into the future.

That is the practical plan of the work. A lot of books teach music theory; and while I believe I am good at the work of teaching and clarifying, I do not see myself as irreplaceable. However, I take on the process of repeating the whole context because I will need my whole background laid out to support the fact that I will end up in a new place, beyond where I was led - I think.

Here are synopses of the first two chapters (as they stand, tentatively, thus far).

We begin by me explaining where I hope to get us in the end. One of my music professors at UCLA paraphrased Beethoven to us in some class. I will find the original for the footnote, but the gist of the paraphrase was that Ludwig had said: "All of the secrets of the universe are contained in my music, if people could only hear them." My first reaction was to wonder what kind of arrogant son of a bitch he must have been to say such a thing. It bothered me greatly. In spite of the rather practical attitude towards artistes given me in school, I couldn't help but see some people like Beethoven as gods. It hurt to think of him as so arrogant. It took me many years to understand that such a statement could in fact contain no pride at all. What if he meant it literally? (I believe Ludwig was in the middle somewhere - we're all entitled to a just pride in a job well done; and a little extra is only natural.) But when Moses went up onto Mount Sinai and received the ten commandments, he came back and said he had heard the voice of God and that God had given him His law for the people of Israel. Just the facts. Edison invented the electric light bulb and changed the experience of being a human for all time to come. Whatever his emotions were, it was just the truth. What if Ludwig van Beethoven really felt it had been his personal experience as a composer that he had been able to quantify a musical testimony, a report of his philosophical experience that really did describe an alternate, parallax look at the universe? What if he really did believe he had been somewhere, attained a view over the wall that no one else seemed to have reported? Would that not place him in the class of Moses or Neil Armstrong or Columbus or Leif Eriksson or Marco Polo or Lewis and Clark? They were there. They saw what they saw. Did Ludwig see God? Why not? Can we follow him to see God?

It is the nature of the Human to be synthetic: to recognize patterns, join A to B and then feel the gnawing hunger to find C. This is the key characteristic that has brought us to the top of the food chain - and, by no accident, to the top of the heap as powers of modification on the planet.

To begin to understand music we must begin with anthropology. Mathematicians and physicists can pretend, at least, that the truth of what they examine is a pure truth - in that whether the math is done by chickens that count, horses that do addition, or imagined intelligences elsewhere in the galaxy, however they perceive or describe it all, they are dealing with structures of matter or logic that do not change. 2 + 2 = 4 for everybody. Hydrogen and helium are the simplest, lightest elements wherever you find them. But music is only human. Possibly it will be communicable to extraterrestrials someday; but that would be dumb luck. Every living thing in the history of life on Earth has been related to us. We all use the same amino acids to build ourselves, we have all stored our blueprints in deoxyribonucleic acids. Every creature of every kind has been like that: blue-green algae, fish, insects, dinosaurs, toenail fungus, whales, coconut trees, condors, and your Aunt Hannah. Biochemically, we not only speak the same language: we are the same language, we are different words of one long story. We are chemically interchangeable, we are so identical. The slime in your toilet could read and process your genes. It would too, but it would realize really fast that making a copy of you was much too much work and it couldn't be a good parent once you started to get bigger than a slime cell.