Music and Intention, Part 2 - Partial Intention, Errors, and the Subconscious

In my previous post, I explored the idea of making music with too much intention. Now I would like to take a minute to think about the richness of partially intentional music.

An interesting process occurs when musicians reflect of their their own playing, listening to what they do and thinking about how to play better. One of the first things that pops out in listening is the mistakes that were made. Someone who is oriented around playing a certain style or composition "to perfection" will take note of these errors and head back to the woodshed to smooth them out. But it is also possible to use mistakes as a basis for going in a creative, new direction. For example, mbira players in Zimbabwe see them as the instrument teaching them new variations:

"The mbira is said to be capable of making musical suggestions to the player during the performance of an mbira piece. If as the musician plays a particular finger pattern he inadvertently strikes a different key than the one for which he has aimed, it is not necessarily viewed as a mistake. Rather, if the mbira player likes the new pitch he can interpret it as the mbira's suggestion for the next variation and can incorporate it into his performance." From Soul of Mbira by Paul F. Berliner.

Similarly, in their Oblique Strategy card set, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt suggest: "honor thy error as a a hidden intention". Eno and Schmidt point to a latent intention, but they don't pinpoint the source of the intention. What is its source? The possible answers to this question point to a range of possible approaches to creativity. It could be seen as the animistic spirit of the instrument, as above. Or, it could be interpreted as the will of God or the divine.

Adam Young of Owl City believes that his music is God inspired. So much so that you could argue that he's actually claiming a music of "no intention":

"I honestly just try to stay out of it! My prayer is just that God give me the songs He wants me to sing and that they will be extremely "usable" by whatever capacity He chooses to use them. I feel like anything beyond that is almost none of my business!"

On the other hand, David J. Wood, writing in the journal of the College of Pastoral Leaders at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, agrees with the idea that mistakes point the way to new ideas, and goes on to tie the process of accepting them to the practice of Christian ministry. This is what he had to say about mistakes:

"A mistake in the performance of a piece of classical music can jar, jolt, and derail the entire concert. In improvisational music, it can open up a new avenue to explore. Fear of failure is a block to improvisation. Pastors continually work in the world of imperfection and error—in their own lives and leadership, in the lives of their parishioners, and in the lives of their congregations. What is the practice of forgiveness and reconciliation if it is not the gathering up of mistakes into a larger redemptive movement?"

For me, a richer explanation of the source from which the "hidden intention" is that of the musician's own subconscious. Music can be seen as a process by which our hidden thoughts and desires are made manifest.

To embrace creative expression as a mode of revealing mysterious parts of our psyche was the program of Surrealism. In The Surrealist Manifesto André Breton defined it as: "Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express...the real functioning of thought. Dictation of thought in the absence of all control exercised by reason, outside of all aesthetic and moral preoccupation." In other words, Breton and his comrades aimed to take the conscious "critic" and historical moral influence out of the process of creation.

Salvador Dalí came to embrace "the psychoanalytic idea of a 'dream language' spoken by the unconscious, whose unplanned irruptions into waking life constitute the phenomena of delirium and madness, but which is nonetheless the true source of the artistic imagination." He took it further with his Paranoic-Critical method, cultivating madness not just in his art, but throughout his everyday life. He elevated the language of dreams to the same validity as rationality: "The 'hidden meanings' have equal status with the conventional interpretations - their 'real existence' is 'undeniable'."

This last approach brings up the question of whether it is possible to create something new. This is a very important question. If the answer is no, can ever be an "avante-garde"? Carl Jung's archetypes suggest that we all share a common language of dreams. If that's so, it makes me wonder if even Dalí's farfetched creations are really just reruns of the collective unconscious. Is it true that "there is nothing new under the sun" (Ecclesiastes 1:9)? Can a way be found to say something new? Schoenberg sought to find one, seeking to "establish a new musical order in response to the so-called 'collapse of tonality'". He believed he'd found it with his 12 Tone Method. Brian Eno also seems to think so:

"I think very often producers are really trying to repeat things. When they hear something in the new songs that they recognize as being a bit like something that was a success on a previous record, they're inclined to encourage that. Whereas I'm always inclined to encourage things when I haven't heard anything like them before. So when I hear something-- even if it sounds quite clumsy or a little bit unformed-- that makes my ears prick up, and I go "Oh, that's new, I don't know if there's anything like that around," that's what I put my weight behind. I figure the whole of the rest of the world is putting its weight behind the other stuff, the repetition side, the recognizable side. So I sort of want to speak up for the newer stuff."

Joseph Campell said "the main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same". Maybe art and music can be "new" to the extent is the specific language with which we update the ancient motifs for our particular time and place that makes any art original. But this is a question for another time. In the meantime, I welcome your thoughts.

Music can be made with a range of intention, from full intention to no intention. The processes of incorporating mistakes and symbols of the subconscious are two small ways in which the two extremes can be reconciled. But, there is a whole range of possibilities for partially intentional creativity, from the aleatoricism of Boulez and Stockhausen to sound installations that incorporate the ambient sound of the outside world. In my next post, I will explore some approaches to making music that involve little or no intention at all. Thanks for reading!