Idea as will, not number

 

 

 

I always like when someone says nice things about my writings. Call me human. One that I remember with greater pleasure came from the philosopher Franco Bolelli (1950-2020), known for his refined taste. It was when he wrote to me “… only you could have pushed me to listen to Pat Metheny again after thirty years… :-)”

 

The mail was dated January 2014, following an article of mine for Blow Up #199 on the guitarist from Lee’s Summit, Missouri. I was happy because Franco had adapted to my invocation for respect to Pat Metheny, his sound and his incredible dedication to music.

 

Franco's distant memory came to my mind while listening to a “conversation” in San Diego in 2018 - for the “Society for Neuroscience” - between Pat and two “neuro-scientists.” I had happened to find this seminar through another conference, in 2008 in Washington, held by Ani Patel, a psychologist specializing in cognitive neuroscience applied to music.

 

Patel works around the theories about the similarities between language and music and, more generally, navigates those shaky seas (unknown to most, but very frequented by cognitivists) that research music with scientific attention. An interest that seems to be driven by the current neo-positivist desire - if not mania - to harness any and all human cognitive processes through numbers and formulas, with special interest for cognitive processes generating viral, mass effects.

 

It was Leonard Bernstein (in 1973) the first to imagine that there might have been a “deep, primordial reason why discrete structures of four identical [well, not exactly] notes” were found in five composers as diverse as “Stravinski, Ravel, Bach, Copeland and the Uday Shankar Dance Company.”

 

In short, he was looking for an innate global music grammar. And - despite his 'full-Monty' attitude as an orchestra conductor [see pictures] he showed none of that pathos towards musical analysis, suggesting instead to ask science and mathematics for help. He ended up hypothesizing a linguistic theory of music after Noam Chomsky, never proved.

 

Patel provided -in his 2008 conference- an interesting overview of the theme that tormented Bernstein. Starting from linguistic rhythms, based on the more regular (English/German) or less regular (French/Italian) rhythm of syllabic accents, passing through the “vowel reductions” (frequent e.g. in English: mis’ry for misery, but more reduced in Italian or French) and ending with the “normalised Pairwise Variability Index” (nPVI) as a measure of the “swing” of a language, based on the contrast of the durations of groups of two contiguous syllables (or, in music, two notes).

 

Measuring it in over 300 French and English (instrumental) musical themes, he recalled, the nPVI proved to be significantly higher in the music of English authors than in French ones, as it happens in the two respective languages. The result ‘authorised’ the hypothesis that linguistic patterns intruded into music; the hypothesis - alas - could not be generalized and, in short, to date there is no 'proof' that linguistic patterns govern musical expression.

 

From a cognitive point of view, however, Patel had found (through brain imaging) that even if linguistic and musical syntax were based on distinct elements, in the processing phase the two converged on the same brain resources. How this happened was... a question for the future.

 

Ten years later, in the public exchange between Metheny and the two cognitivists, on the question about the 'mechanisms' of musical creation cognitivists seem still intent in extending the estimated time frame to success. Possibly Metheny's words helped these men of sciences to quench their thirst of music as "computable facts". A sinister thought, since removing mystery (or, if you prefer, the irrational) from life would likely kill any cultural bio-diversity.

 

In San Diego Pat Metheny confirmed himself  as uniquely passionate musician, as he expressed with kindness the extraordinary power that a man of genius can summon when he applies his total will to music creation. This was the idea of my original article on Pat, in December 2014: a jazz musician loved (or hated) for his "soft" timbre and his melodic phrasing, Metheny transcends the concepts of beauty by creating a pure mental space. And an example of for fellows musicians.

During the seminar, he came closer to my heart when he talked about how his parents got close to consider him a pathological case, when he dropped school at 8th grade and devoted his life to the guitar, practising ten or twelve hours a day. A religious faith, if you like, that at nineteen years old led him to play like no one else in the world.

 

(...)

 

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