‘…how seemingly disparate traditions can co-exist without mis-judging or excluding one another, all the while upholding their respective, distinct and dignified places.’ [1]
There are few things that excite me as much as over-the-top and grandiose titles. So it was only natural that when in July of 2023 I was lucky enough to organize the inaugural edition of the LightSounds festival—I will admit, a copy of the Polish festival I started with my good friend Jakub Królikowski nine years ago—in London, I decided that the first day would be a conference entitled ‘The Future of Music.’ I asked seven amazing artists, some of them colleagues, to speak on this topic, and they all readily and very kindly agreed to do so. In fact, one of the talks was to take place the next day, so as to accommodate the busy schedule of Bei Bei Wang, who surprised and charmed us all by bringing her father with her to give his London erhu debut. However, there was a nagging problem that the conference left behind, though I suppose I could have foreseen this.
And so, once again, I am grateful to Nihal Singh, for being rather easily prodded into agreeing to publish my resultant thoughts on The Vital Anjan. I feel humbled to be put alongside his own clear-headed thinking and the ideas of the journal’s other contributors. Having gotten over that then, I am not yet sure how the proceeding text will manifest; it is either going to be an extremely short or an extremely long text. I feel that before giving the first, hopefully slightly less pretentious subtitle, I should attempt to explain what I am about, and so the sections into which I will attempt to corral my rather scattered thoughts[2] on this topic are as follows: firstly, the problem with which I was left after the conference will be enunciated as best as I can (though it will be done very subjectively). Next, I will attempt to explain what question I was trying to have my very distinguished guests explore, and what I am not interested in knowing per se. Lastly, I will give no solution that I can foresee, for I have no pre-made conclusion here, but I will attempt to propose a framework, a scaffolding if you wish, on which what I consider a responsible ‘Future of Music’ could be built, and, as will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me even a little bit, this I will attempt to inform with my sluggish, uninformed—but I hope at least genuine and honest take—on Gurū Nanak’s message. And so, to the first section.
My Problem After ‘The Future of Music’
Rather predictably, though I must confess unexpectedly for me, all the speakers of the conference spoke about different things. Orphy Robinson, for example, spoke nearly exclusively about what one might characterize as the ‘business’ side of things. For Orphy, the question was one about a changing industry, reeling from the incredible possibilities afforded by artificial intelligence models, while creators were being paid literally fragments of pennies per listening on the streaming platforms. Albums are now seen more as a novelty, and of course that good old Canadian adage, that the message is the medium,[3] has changed music so quickly that it has not yet set into a ‘new form.’
Dele Sosimi, on the other hand, spoke about the variety of ‘roles and responsibilities,’ that he thinks the different parties privy to the world of music have and frequently neglect either through ignorance, an unwillingness to recognize responsibility, or downright greed and nefarious character.
Then there were those who spoke extensively of their own practice, all exploring in depth multi-media, multi-genre, multi-sensory and all manner of the multi-s of art. Zubin Kanga’s interesting, one-of-a-kind research into digital performers and Bei Bei Wang’s journey from traditional Chinese percussionist to a grace of the contemporary music stages were particularly informative and poignant for those searching for potential trends in the the future of the music industry.
The fact of the matter is, if the reader is willing to indulge me as I don my post-modern hat for a moment, that everybody understood the question in a different manner, furthermore, in a manner that I had not intended it to be understood and answered. This should not be read as resentful, though the skeptic in me cannot but help blame the confusion postmodernism has introduced into the collective consciousness in terms of the meaning of words. I am grateful to all the participants of the festival, both the artists and especially the audience, who so enthusiastically reacted to my efforts. But I am fundamentally selfish in this respect, and was hoping to get at least some clarity on what I see as a symbol for the future of everything. For that is what it is: I see music as the greatest metaphor for reality, at once not it entirely, and at the same time encompassing all of it. Why else would the Gurūs decide that it was essential to the most complete mode of worship? How then can I not seek an answer to what the future will be like?
Qu’est-Ce-Que Je Voudrais
So, what did I want? I think this is a particularly important question, given I was putting a few months of my life into organizing an event around a question I was posing, while at the same time professing not being a narcissist. In my own words then “…I want to try and better understand how seemingly disparate traditions…and let’s say academic contemporary classical music can function together without excluding, or mis-judging each other, all the while upholding their respective, distinct and honourable places.” I am very wary of fusion, because as I overheard Bhāī Baldeep Singh musing about a decade ago ‘…for there to be fusion, there need to be at least two things…but there is only one music.’
At the same time, there exist differences in music making, obviously. There are different instruments, which are played differently and are used in different contexts, in different manners. There is music for particular instruments, and music for none at all. There is music that is written and music that is remembered, music that is performed and music that is created. There is even silent music, continuous music, and nonsense music. There is bad music and good music, holy music and vulgar music. Then there are the different art forms with which music can sometimes be associated, like most obviously dance, and more pertinently to my own experience, the visual arts.[4] And yet, all these things are actually one big thing. How can this be the case?
The problem I wish to learn more about is this: what is the whole? When I interact with other musicians and we improvise together, there are two possible outcomes, though often they happen one after the other. The first outcome is that we produce a bad fusion, and this I have found to happen with two kinds of musicians: primarily those that are conservatoire trained (whether classically or jazzily) and have not yet, or cannot, move beyond that training, or secondarily, with traditional musicians belonging to, how can I put this, incomplete systems of pedagogy, ones that, similarly to conservatoire training in its less imaginative editions, teach a contextually-dependent music without conveying the substance of music. What happens is that I try to imitate the musician, and they try to imitate me, and neither of us can do that very well, because the musician is not a classical pianist and I am not whatever that musician is. This results in bad fusion, and that is what most of the albums purporting to play fusion—otherwise an encounter of two different traditions—do. However, once in a while, when the mood is right, or the stars are aligned, or (insert whatever sufficiently mysterious process that produces beautiful things here), an improvisation of this sort can result in a work that is truly not the sum of its parts, but constitutes a complete piece of music.
This can similarly happen when two different artforms interact. In 2010, when my friends and I were somehow able, in an unfinished attic, borrowing equipment of all kinds, each week having to re-learn how to plug it all in, to play twice or three times a week for about a year in our first audiovisual project, a=b=x=y, we discovered just that. Inadvertently, and after much trial and error, the four elements of that we had conceptually decided on before (live sound, generated digital sound, distorted live sound, and live visuals—hence the four variables of our formula, all of which equal each other, and something more) converged to create an experience that outgrew each of the individual things. In other words, our Audiovisual Suite No. 1 became a whole. My query is how? What exactly happens when this process takes place, at a technical level? Can I study it, thereby learning how to reliably achieve it? To become good at creating wholeness, and perhaps gain an insight into what is created? What is a whole?
And this is where the theology of my endeavour begins. I have been interested in wholeness for a while now, and since music has pulled me in mercilessly, quite ardently disallowing me involvement in practically anything else, I am seeking to understand wholeness through it. And here Bach comes to mind when he says “Music’s only purpose should be the glory of God and the recreation of the human spirit.”[5]
One of the things Jakub and I have gotten good at over the eight years of curating and producing our audiovisual festival is that we have become able to separate the wheat from the chaff of the audiovisual world. Though our festival remains small and we cannot possibly invite everybody we would like to (though being a fundamentalist optimist I would like to add, for now), we do try to invite projects and artists who manifest this wholeness, though we do not really think in these categories. When Jakub or I find a project that we like, it is guaranteed that upon informing the other side, agreement will be met. The point is that at least experientially, phenomenologically (perhaps more precisely), there is some knowledge about wholeness that people can perceive, and even get good at perceiving. Jakub and I are by no means finished learning, and we are always on the lookout for exciting work, but we have certainly gotten better at something.
In this search, I believe lies the Future of Music, and perhaps, of the world. Allow me a thought experiment here. Imagine a room in which all the great composers of the past and present appear. I mean this in a European context, so Vivaldi and Bach sitting next to Mozart and Beethoven, next to Wagner, Debussy, Prokofiev and Arvo Part. And so on. All of them that we can imagine and have love for, sipping tea in the same room. Aside from the overarching naughtiness that one can imagine being uttered around the table, imagine that we placed alongside them all the instruments they were so dearly attached to during their lifetimes. So, Buxtehude would have his organ, and Stravinsky his piano, and Weniawski his violin, and Hildegard would perhaps sing, and the anonymous troubadours would play their gemshorns. What kind of music would they make together? With such a plethora of styles and experiences, would they create a wholeness? Now let us take it even further: imagine adding all the master exponents of other traditions, both surviving until today and those lost. Perhaps the traditional Chinese music making so tragically lost during the cultural revolution, or some particularly well-known białe głosy[6] of the past, alongside the complexity of the finest African drummers from Ghana, with the nature songs and dances of the plains tribes of North America, and the most complex of the gamelan orchestras in history, topped off with the incredible musical prowess of past and present exponents of Gurbāṇī Sangīta and Carnatic Sangīta. This group would now include some of the most important humans of all time, including the master musician Gurū Nanak and Martin Luther. One needs only to stretch the imagination slightly further to include cantors from synagogues, Sūfī poet-musicians, Rabindranath Tagore, and particularly well-enunciating muezzins. One can go and on; alas, one must stop somewhere. What would this now sound like? Could these disparate musicians meet and play together? Would they create a wholeness previously unreachable?
The Point
It is, of course, impossible to know. Further, it is a question of belief. Though I am, once again, a fundamentalist optimist, I try not to be naive about the propensity of human nature to do evil, to be bad, to not value good things, to let beauty die. But at the same time, there is only one music. And getting there is the most difficult of tasks.
The above thought experiment poses many questions (for example, logistically we may need a repeat miracle of Noah’s Ark to fit all these people on one boat) but perhaps the most compelling is what would the conditions have to be for these people to play together. And here, going back to what I wrote earlier about the conference in my own words, about how is it that all these disparate traditions might co-exist and co-create with one another a future of music while not compromising on any of the values that they hold so dear, while upholding each others’ dignity, while allowing all to have their respected places of honour that they surely deserve (by the very fact of being included on such an Ark). Answering such a question would provide two answers: first, on how to do this, and second, on how wholeness is achieved.
Where does this lead us? Well, to an obvious end, or perhaps a dead end. If we were for a moment to ignore everything except music, say there is nothing except music and that all people may worship it or not, and that it is good to worship music, then obviously the way to achieve the above would be to align everyone with worshiping the same. Even this, I think, it is very easy to see, becomes impossible very quickly in the real world. And the real world has all the added fuzziness that contrasting beliefs, sometimes completely at odds with each other (though quite often aligned on basic understanding such as direction, sustenance, procreation and so on) bring. And so, we get to that age old quandary: if there is an absolute and I am the one to enforce it, fascism is no doubt my next stop, where if there is no absolute, I end up in narcissistic despair, believing what I believe is the be-all and end-all. It seems that much philosophy, at least of the political, moral, and theological kind is trying to resolve this in various ways, but perhaps there already is an answer, a complete and fulfilling one? Or perhaps there are many answers, which are continually lived out through history by the greatest of us?
It is clear that there are many ways to climb a mountain and that each of the ways do get us to the top. It is also clear that there will be one best way to climb a mountain relative to a given desideratum, and that if one’s goal is to get to the top as quickly as possible, then one would do well to be informed about such a path. This does not make it necessary to choose that particular path, but neither does this lack of necessity somehow disprove its being ideal. Perhaps one’s goal is to take one’s time in climbing the mountain, or to expend more or less energy doing so. Or perhaps, one does not want to get to the top at all; this is certainly a possible choice. And as long as one is honest about it, not convincing oneself that one is actually climbing when one is actually descending, then why not? So all really what is required is honesty, an honest ascent or descent, knowing where one is and where one is going. It is further true that even though we may walk the same road, it will be a different one altogether, due to my biological makeup being different, to my particular hermeneutic goggles being more or less biased than yours, and a whole host of further reasons. In this way, true fascism seems impossible, though even its approximation is dangerous enough to be worth avoiding. However, if this individuality is emphasized too much, and we try to convince each other that going up is in fact going down, and that no matter where one is on the path we are all in the same place anyway, and further similar postmodern spew, then we are being dishonest.
And that, broadly speaking, is where I am. What is it that is happening when two maestros sit together and something incredible comes out? Or that absolute wonder that one feels when witnessing a complete merging of the performer and composer? The answer to these is that I do not know.
A Side-Qualm that Helped Clarify a Curatorial Problem
In LightSounds 2023, I tried something new in terms of programming for the first time. I wanted to include a set with live painting. But, there was a problem that was stopping me from doing so, which I could not overcome, no matter how much I wanted to and tried. The visual aspect of audiovisual art is usually digital in some form, or at least transitory (analog film could also potentially be used). This is because, in my mind until the anecdote below, the visual aspect of an audiovisual performance had to be performative. That is, the visual aspect also had to be in time. This was the reason that I had not programmed live painting before. Though the painting is produced during the performance, it remains, while the music does not. As such, it seemed to me to be a separate thing, not part of the actual performance. It was a reactive act, not a co-active one of creation.
And the truth of the matter is that I was right. I remain right, in fact. But, even so, I wanted to see if I was in fact right, and so, I met with Gwendolyn Kassenaar, the painter whom I wanted to potentially programme, a few months before the festival, to have a talk in a coffee shop, to see if there was something I was missing. And we spoke, quite intensively, for about two hours. At the end of it, though we had had a pleasant and stimulating talk, I remained unconvinced, and was saddened at the prospect that I was excluding a whole genre of art (and what a genre it is!) just because I had some preconceived intellectual notion that was inconsistent with its inclusion. Right at the end, just before we put our coats back on, Gwen mentioned something in passing, as a sort of after thought: the audience, you understand, is part of the process of painting. In other words, the live painter thinks herself not only in a dialectic towards the other performers, but also in one with the audience. The audience influences the painter, just like the audience influences the musicians. It was this seemingly moot point that changed my mind. This is an aspect of the performative part of live painting that I had not considered, and that proved to be connection enough to make the programme.
What is It?
But there are some things that I do know. As a starting point, I do know that it (achieving wholeness in a triumphant act of co-creation) happens. I have done it before, and I have seen it done. I can identify it, when I am in good form, in one listening, or a performance, or even make the judgment about a composition. Conversely, I know when it has not been done; I can identify bad fusion.[7] Then, I think I can identify the elements that need to be in place before it happens. The participants, or single person, need to be trying to do it; they need to be genuinely interested in one another’s work, they need to do it in real time; they need to have humility in that they need to be humbly aware that their way of making music (or projections, or whatever they are involved in) is not the only way, that there are dignified, valid and complete ways beyond what they have known and that the person next to them may manifest this without warning at any given time. Next, they need to have time. This is not necessarily akin to rehearsal time; first encounters like this also happen more frequently than one might be willing to admit. But it would truly have to be exceptional for something like this to happen in, say, one minute. Lastly, the wholeness that happens is not always continuous; it can be reached and then lost, and then entered again.
I think it is clear by this point, that the logistical particulars of the future of music do not really interest me. I am not interested in attempting to predict what directions contemporary music will take going forward, nor who will be making it, nor if they will be paid enough, and neither am I interested in judging music education or deciding whether or not AI will supplant all music making. It is not that these questions are not interesting in and of themselves, and I am always happy (sometimes too eager in fact) in sharing my own opinions about all of these things. But they do not cut deep enough; they are but the practical questions of the operation of music moving into the future. Their resolution and development depend on the deeper question; how do we keep moving forward without losing all we have, from wherever it may be? Saying that one music should be privileged is akin to saying some people should be more privileged than others. It is not that there are not more privileged people than others, nor that this is necessarily wrong, but that clearly, it would be better if we could move towards the future without anyone being left destitute, forgotten. So, it is the case that privilege is unevenly distributed, that the reasons for this are many (I, for one, do not think it is a question of the oppressed and the oppressors, just for the record), and that it will continue to be so. But it is also true that one can try to make it better; I cannot imagine anyone arguing in favour of keeping people hungry. Or of purposefully forgetting a kind of music-making, or an instrument. There is undoubtedly something that can be salvaged, that can be learnt, particularly if it is of a high quality. No, we should aim for everyone to be fed, for nothing of value to be forgotten.
Sometimes I wonder whether this is not a real life example of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem.[8] Being within a system, the truth of the system cannot be proved one way or another. From the inside, the complete picture cannot be visible. One must move beyond the system to have a wide enough perspective to really see its wholeness.
Progress?
A few years ago, when I was writing my music appreciation courses, I gained access to a lot of data. Empirical data, about who listens to music, and why (at least, why they say they do). In this, I confirmed some things that I had heard of before, like the fact that only 2% of the population listens to classical music, and learnt a slew of other fun facts about the world’s people and how they relate to music. Most of these are useless, but some are nonetheless pertinent, if one likes to play connect the dots. So, let us take one of these, and connect it to an insight that I first heard from the dear, spellbinding lutist Henryk Kasperczak. The question is, what was the most popular instrument in the Middle Ages, that time of troubadours, organuum and all manner of perpetual contradiction. Now it is the guitar (or perhaps, more worryingly, the MIDI keyboard?), a hundred years ago the piano. In medieval times, by sheer number, it was the gemshorn.
What is that? As the name suggests, a horn. More like a flute, it was carved out of the horn of a sheep or goat. Now, what is the most interesting difference between a gemshorn and say, a piano? Sure, it is smaller and uses air instead of hammers and strings; but those are obvious things. What is less lackluster, is that the piano is a standardized instrument. How many models of the gemshorn were there, you ask? Well, as many sheep and goats as there were on the continent. Each horn, of course, was a different length, a different shape, a different girth, and could usually only play three or four notes. Finding two gemshorns that could play the same notes would probably have been difficult, and you would need two or three to play a scale up one octave. Most musicians had several dozen in their possession. Imagine for a second, dear reader, what that must have sounded like! Something like the thought experiment above?
Following this idea further, how many tuning systems were around in Bach’s time? How many thirds could one have heard in a single piece? How many timbres of voice could one have heard before affected singing became the norm? Gut strings? Especially when one takes the advent of pop into account, it seems that the overwhelming trend of music has been to become less and less varied. The European classical world has at least resisted this impulse, keeping on board or re-integrating ideas such as novel tunings, formal infiniteness, flexible instrumentation, and so on. At the same time, the prevalence of standardized instruments— not only in shape and form, but also in the notes they are able to render—remains, and the picture is ever more dismal in popular music, especially with the advent of digital recording and music production. The apparent democratization of music-making, complete access to music, and the possibility extended to literally every high-school student in their bedrooms to ‘make music’ has conversely led not to a flowering of variety, but to an almost complete curtailing of it.
On the other hand, there is a sense of development in the European context. It is clear that Bach knew about his predecessors and his contemporaries, and also that he added a certain something to the music that came before him. The argument here, in its most basic form, is that it is not only Bach per se that we revere in Bach’s music, but also how it builds upon what came before it. If it were another way, it would only be the personality that we worship. And further, in the same vein, the clarinet which we have today, playable in its entire range with equal tone, is superior in that way to its predecessor. There is a narrative of positive development that is clear to all who behold the traditional musicological positions, from monophony, through polyphony, to tonality, to homophony, to the formal excesses of romanticism, finally to whatever we have today. The development is positive, not because it is better than what came previously, but because it builds upon it. Here I must remember Bhāī Baldeep Singh in his conservator hat saying, “Whenever one changes something, one loses something.” It is in this light that the correction Bhāī Baldeep gave to the luthier Hans Raj about adding a too lengthy neck to a mock sarandā is to be seen; “There is no one who plays it, so how can you say that it is unplayable in its original dimensions?”[9] So how are we to consolidate these two views? How can there be dismal, unabashed and wasteful narrowing of human potential, but at the same time development?
Keeping symbols alive, let us speak of Mendelssohn. Because why not? It is he, after all, who is credited with the fact that we still listen to Bach today. For taking Bach out of relative obscurity, just under two hundred years ago, and making of him the superstar that he remains today. Oh yes, Mendelssohn knew about Bach. He also lived tragically little. And wrote a lot of music. In the working of the individual then? Is that where the contradiction is solved? In the striving of the individual? One so sensitive, and so knowledgeable, was still able to write music? After encountering Bach? How dare he! Albeit, maybe therein lies the subject of the matter. How is it that he, the so aware Mendelssohn, seeing and hearing such music, was able to keep composing, to keep creating? Why did he not give up? And the answer is that it would have been impossible for him to do otherwise. Greatness is not a scare tactic to sedate masses into complacency, but an impulse to become greater than. And the attempt to do it, that is what remains to be done.
What does the Gurū say?
Frankly, many things, though really, only one thing. But most pertinent to wholeness as related to music is of course the fact that the entire religious corpus of Srī Gurū Granth Sāhib is set to music. In other words, the Word of God must be sung. The message is not passed on through words alone; the music aids in the correct understanding of them. This is the mystical experience, that which is beyond words and understandable only through states, translated for the masses. But not undiscerning, passive masses from whom nothing is required, no! The message is not to be heard and appreciated; it is to be learnt with utmost discipline and devotion, with faith, love, commitment, integrity, honesty, and unwavering clarity of conscience. This is what allowed Gurū Nanak’s original revelatory experience to be transferred to his followers and to their followers.
The words of Bāṇī are pointers of direction, indicators of conceptual space, but they are only imbued with meaning when they are sung, when they are sung to music produced in the original contexts used by the Gurūs themselves. This is what is most precious about what the Sikhs at large had, of which now only echoes remain, but which has miraculously survived through, as readers of this journal know, the absolute genius of Bhāī Baldeep Singh. When sung, these words have the prophetic capability of raising the persons singing to that state of understanding wholeness, where Gödel’s problem is solved un-iterably, just as the experience itself is (un-iterable).
The Future of Music
So what does the Future of Music look like? First and foremost, music must remain firmly rooted in its past. One cannot create anything at all really, if one has not studied the history of music. The big ‘aha!’ moment that happened in Europe with the advent of singing in monophonic parallel intervals and eventually counterpoint, which led to the eventual necessity of well-tempered instruments and tonality, is unique and important. But there are other musical traditions that also need perusal, study, praise, and an audience. There is much the poor ears of the European-trained musician can learn from the intonation of Indian masters or from the rhythms of the Ghanaian drum king. Nothing can be discarded, there is value in it all, and learning about it and studying it will save one from the conceit of believing one has created something new. There is, in my experience, almost nothing new outside the realm of conception. One can name the same material a different concept, but it remains the same material. Thus, in many respects, Schoenberg is similar to late Renaissance music, though of course not in conception.
Finally, as our having a livable future in general is reliant upon us getting along, so too must ‘musics’ get along with each other; there is no place in music for perceived ‘otherness.’ There is, after all, only one music.
Music Itself
I have come to the painful conclusion that I am a Neoplatonist. Music is a funny thing. It exists when it is played. It exists also when it is not played, whether in written form or otherwise. Somebody composes it originally, and then not necessarily the same person is forced to recreate it, not by compulsion of the original author, but by the fact that it is perceived by others, that is communally, only when recreated in this way. So, performance is recreation in the truest sense; one cannot, by strength of material, play in the way originally imagined. Therefore, one must play otherwise. How must one therefore play? And what is one playing? Where is this thing that one is playing? It is clearly outside the performer, because other people can play it, though differently. How is it that a piece retains its identity across these different iterations? These are all run-of-the-mill questions that, phenomenologically at least, point to what music is.[10]
It is a very easy case to make, with the historical background outlined above in “Progress” that music is one. The ages, across time, and the people, across space, focus on this or that element of it. Music, however, is literally the music of the spheres; it is physically a reflection of the properties of the universe. Simple proportions are consonances, complex ones, dissonances. Music depends on proportions. The universe depends on proportions. The music and the universe are one; is it not obvious by now? Those involved in the ‘musicking’ literature, or the relativistic postmodern types, would rather argue for a different ethos of music, one that depends on how it is used in sociological contexts, or one that focuses on one proportion more than another. I think these discussions are a distraction from the actuality of music and its experience. Music is a human universal.
Would they not save time by agreeing that there is only one music? That we all contain different elements of it, manifest different heads of it, but it is all the same? How else could it express all it does? If it is the universe, then can it not also communicate the entirety as well? The beginning and the end of a piece of music is the beginning and the end of us. The return of a piece of music to its home key, is when we return home. The future of music, therefore, is only the future of me, or you, and of all of us.
The Real Future of Music
I think by now, the reader will have become sufficiently disillusioned by this text to have foregone any hope of qualitative answers to what the Future of Music may be like. Hating to disappoint, I will oblige with this fostered attitude. I will however, attempt to lay out the case I think I have illustrated above, outlining my assumptions, that some sort of clarity may be gained on what I think.
Firstly, what is music? Music is literally a manifestation of the universe, in the most practical sense of this. It uses frequencies and the proportions that arise between them to communicate about things that language cannot communicate in a more holistic manner. It is also perceptually located in time, just as our experiences tend to be, but the messages it contains is clearly beyond time.
If this proposition is true, it should also be true that the richness that we have in the universe can be made manifest by music. In fact, the entirety of the universe could theoretically be expressed in one piece, albeit symbolically or expressively. The universe is one thing, and a piece of music is also one thing. Thereby, systems of music, or the above discussed ‘progress’ in music, that limit musical material in one way or another (say by producing a fixed pitch instrument) while simultaneously writing off whatever preceded this move, necessarily make music poorer, meaning necessarily make our perception of the universe poorer.
The variety that we have and have had in musical systems worldwide reflect the richness of the universe, and should therefore be upheld with as much dignity as pieces of the universe, as creation. The reverence here, in its most expressive form I feel is best communicated in Gurū Nanak’s spellbinding Āratī:
ਗਗਨ ਮੈ ਥਾਲੁ ਰਵਿ ਚੰਦੁ ਦੀਪਕ ਬਨੇ ਤਾਰਿਕਾ ਮੰਡਲ ਜਨਕ ਮੋਤੀ॥
ਧੂਪੁ ਮਲਆਨਲੋ ਪਵਣੁ ਚਵਰੋ ਕਰੇ ਸਗਲ ਬਨਰਾਇ ਫੂਲੰਤ ਜੋਤੀ॥
ਕੈਸੀ ਆਰਤੀ ਹੋਇ ਭਵ ਖੰਡਨਾ ਤੇਰੀ ਆਰਤੀ॥
ਅਨਹਤਾ ਸਬਦ ਵਾਜੰਤ ਭੇਰੀ॥
In the sky’s salver, the Sun and the Moon are the lamps and the stars with their orbs, are the studded pearls…
The fragrance of sandal wood make Thy incense, wind Thy fan and all the vegetation Thy flowers, O Luminous Lord.
What a beautiful worship with lamps is being performed? Such is Thine adoration O Lord, the Destroyer of dread..
The celestial strain is the sounding of temple drums.[11]
Next, the merging of differences (or richnesses, as it were) into one wholeness is something that happens phenomenologically across musical traditions, and even across different forms of art. It is perceptible by those taking part, and also by those perceiving, and this creation of a unity out of diversity (one of my most-loved definitions of form) is at the very least one of the solutions to the problem of “…how seemingly disparate traditions can co-exist without mis-judging or excluding one another, all the while upholding their respective, distinct and dignified places.”
The further question arises; how does this wholeness happen? What happens technically when a successful audiovisual performance merges two different media into one, unified aesthetic experience? What happens when two musicians from different traditions play something together that is one? What did we do, that made a=b=x=y’s Audiovisual Suite No. 1 a whole? These questions, fundamentally, are theological questions about the mystical experience. The perception of the many as one, the understanding of the universe as an entirety, the seeing of all human beings as one. As such, mystical texts offer the best explanations of what technically happens, albeit at best through imagery, metaphor, and allusion rather than singularly meaningful prose—the twists and turns of the poetry perhaps more meaningful than iterable experience, just as the experience itself is. However, the conditions necessary for this to happen are to some degree known, and the most fundamental of them is humility. Again, I have found no better exposition of this than:
ਜਉ ਤਉ ਪ੍ਰੇਮ ਖੇਲਣ ਕਾ ਚਾਹ॥
ਸਿਰੁ ਧਰਿ ਤਲੀ ਗਲੀ ਮੇਰੀ ਆਉ॥
ਇਤੁ ਮਾਰਗਿ ਪੈਰੁ ਧਰੀਜੈ॥
ਸਿਰੁ ਦੀਜੈ ਕਾਣਿ ਨ ਕੀਜੈ॥
If thou art Zealous of playing (the game) of Love,
Then enter upon my Path with thy head on thy palm.
Yea, once thou settest thy foot on this Way,
Then find not a way out, and lay down thy head.[12]
So, if one desires to create the laudable ‘good fusion,’ one must have one’s head (one’s ego) in one’s hand. After that, at least tentatively, the conditions are set for something truly exceptional to happen, given the right orientation, sincere, honest effort, and that ever present Grace.
Finally, if I were to summarize this position, something truly theological results, that is: the entirety of the universe is an entirety, and can be perceived as such, by those who firstly rid themselves of ego, orient themselves in the appropriate direction, attempt the feat sincerely, honestly, and without expectation to the highest level of their ability (which they keep developing in like manner), and are shown Grace. That is how we will keep ourselves from reducing our experience of the world from the richness that it truly is, to some clinical, hygienic sliver of it.
Is it not encouraging that prepared piano, joṛī-pakhāvaj, and live projection can meet on stage and create together, without one or another forcing its context, intention, and playing style on the others? Is it not a miracle? Nihal Singh on joṛī-pakhāvaj, Maike Zimmermann shining her live projections, and Cheslav Singh on prepared piano.
I do not know what the Future of Music will sound like, but I know that it will come. Whether it be atonal, modal, tonal, polyphonic, monodic, or asymptomatic, we will be there to experience it and to perform it. Maybe even sometimes to compose it. Whatever it will sound like, it will still be music, and so will remain my dearly beloved. The choice we have, then, is not whether it will be, but whether it will be as rich, as enriching, as it can be, or whether it will have been reduced to a shadowy reflection of the Music of the Spheres.
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[1] This is a direct quote from a private email sent out to an invitee before the Future of Music conference detailing out what I wanted the talks to be about. It was taken from an email sent 08/05/2023.
[2] The reader is asked to excuse this and other injections like it. The asides and reformulations have been left as ‘special effects,’ hoping to recreate the flow of thought that resulted in this text, rather like a story, or a theatrical presentation.
[3] See Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964).
[4] A good idea how far postmodern thought has taken the purported differences of music and music making is the term ‘musicking’ as used by Christopher Small in his 1998 Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening.
[5] Quoted in Ludwig Prautzsch Bibel und Symbol in den Werken Bachs, p. 7; translation from Albert Schweitzer (trans. Ernest Newman) J. S. Bach (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. 1, p. 167.
[6] Literally ‘white voices,’ a common name for a traditional folk style of singing native to Central and Eastern Europe, here written in Polish.
[7] To give voice to the problem of why if music is one, fusion is an accomplishment rather than facile, or even that there exists this puzzle that we have as beings that even though reality is one, there appear to be many things, I think a solid intellectual formulation can be found in the great Dr. Roger Penrose’s A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe (2004). The astounding intellect of this mathematical physicist sees a threefold reality, wherein there is scope for mathematical truths to be beyond reason, for the mind not to be rooted in physical structures, and for the possibility of physical action beyond mathematics. So the three realities that Penrose sees as fundamental (the physical world, the mental world, and the abstract world of mathematics), though they comprise reality, are not the end of it, for each can access realms unavailable to the others. Going further, Dr. Penrose points out the undeniable problems that are posed by the universe being so neatly laid out in mathematics, by consciouness, and by the fact that we can perceive mathematics. This can lead one down many paths of trying to answer these questions, but at the very least, one can point out that, well, perhaps there is only one mathematics, and perhaps there is only one consciousness and perhaps only different manifestations of the same physical stuff. And that perhaps, in actuality, they are one thing.
[8] Ideally, refer to Kurt Gödel’s original paper On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems I (1930). Journey to the Edge of Reason, Stephen Budiansky’s (2021) biographical account of Gödel and his ideas, may also be of supplementary interest.
[9] This is paraphrased from a moment in Bhāī Baldeep Singh’s documentary about Punjabi luthiers, in which he interviews Hans Raj (and others). The working title is Three Documentaries on Musical Instrument Makers.
[10] I always refer people to Roman Ingarden, the Polish aesthetician, for the deepest discussion of music in a philosophical context I have come across, particularly his Studies in Aesthetics (1958), The Work of Music and Problem of its Identity (1978) and Untersuchungen zur Ontologie der Kunst: Musikwerk (1962). If one is looking for something less intellectual, then Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus remains for me the greatest phenomenological description of what music is and what it can do.
[11] Translation by Bhāī Manmohan Singh.
[12] Translation by Dr. Gopal Singh.
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Cheslav ‘Bala’ Singh