Be serious for a minute.

Some months ago I bought a copy of 101 Experiments in the Philosophy of Everyday Life by Roger– Pol Droit.  The experiments are challenges to our way of acting and thinking about matters that we take for granted, as in “Try on Clothes”. Some might seem familiar to John Cage and Zen enthusiasts: “Encounter pure chance”, “Listen to short wave radio” or “Be aware of yourself thinking”. "Be serious for a minute" takes a similar approach but its intention is to explore some musical considerations.

Be serious for a minute

Duration 1 minute

Props None

Effects critical

If you have made the effort to be serious you may have encountered some problems, perhaps one of these:

What am I going to be serious about? How can I be serious, I am in no mood to be serious? There are far too many pressing problems for me to worry about making an effort to be serious.

Given that our attention to everyday life is forever mercurial exercises like this are quickly put to one side and we move on to the real concerns of the day.

Having imitated Droit’s style let us move back to familiar blogging territory. Many years ago in my early teens I listened to Tchaikovsky’s final symphony and asked myself “how does he sustain a particular mood for such a long time”? At that time I held the view that one’s artistic work reflected the emotional state of the creator as he/she worked, I imagine it is a view that has been shared by a number of people.

So what is “serious” and why do we regard it as a value so highly? Two useful definitions can be applied:

That which is demanding and requires careful consideration and application.

Acting or speaking in earnest, rather than in a humorous or light-hearted way.

The first definition seems to be perfectly suited to musicians. Without stating the obvious we all agree that there are many demands on performers, composers and listeners when approaching a great work of art, several of these demands have been considered in our blogs, most recently that of attention which is particularly problematic for the physically less active listener.

Art music (the opposite face of folk music) makes great play of the application to detail, organic growth requires step by step logic and serious listeners delight in how subtle the alterations can be in developing musical material.

From Classical times onwards the separation of the composer’s music from his hands to those of the performer placed new demands on the detail required in a score to show musical intentions. In our own time this problem has resulted in many scores being prefaced by pages of instructions as each composer explores a range of new approaches to texture and rhythm in particular. In the light of these comments are we to consider the work of La Monte Young as wholly unserious in the "Compositions 1960"? Here are the instructions for #4

Instructions:

Announce to the audience that the lights will be turned off for the duration of the composition (it may be any length) and tell them when the composition will begin and end.

Turn off all the lights for the announced duration.

When the lights are turned back on, the announcer may tell the audience that their activities have been the composition, although this is not at all necessary.

The arguments for the serious side of such compositions are well known, but at the time the humorous presentation here (as with a number of Cage’s writings) must have created mixed feelings amongst critics and audiences.

The second definition is particularly important to the music of the 20^th century. Being serious is a matter of constraint. Musicians love working with restrictions, they can offer types of scaffolding that enable rapid progress. Educationalists also like scaffolding in early stages of learning, but are wary of their being over used and retained for too long. The development of the 12 note system may have seemed like a blessing to scaffolders, but that view is fraught with danger. The system is not a form nor is it a formula for expression, yet the view held by many that the two are inseparable, with the emotional content expressionistic. The association of 12 note music with expressionism reads like an inescapable chain of historical events; brutality, industrial growth, inner conflict and neurosis all have their part to play in the voice of the serial style, and these are among the dominant concerns of the first half of the century.  

If we listen to the music of Webern we are presented with some interesting considerations regarding seriousness. He is methodical, and his music is associated with structure, so much so that his work was adopted as the source of educational study for serialism by many, if not most, universities. Yet Webern’s music is not expressionistic, it is abstract in the sense that it draws on design, canons and palindromes in particular, these arising from his studies of medieval music. Here we have beauty in form. The PDF “Anton Webern and the influence of Heinrich Isaac” makes interesting reading for the above named sources of Webern’s composing style, a development from his earlier involvement with Romantic ideals.

http://www.bestmusicteacher.com/download/webern_isaac.pdf

The last accusation one could make against Webern is not being earnest (2^nd definition), but it is one that was often made against the British composer Malcolm Arnold. Arnold had the gift of presenting humour in music, and his film music makes great use of parody and instrumental colour as in the “Belles of St. Trinians”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jF7MiZ5UxDg

as Kenny Everett used to say, “all done in the best possible taste”.

It seems to have been a problem for many that Arnold could write light-hearted music and symphonies. There is an implication that one cannot be humorous and intellectually rigorous. This of course was not a problem for the first Viennese school. Not only are Arnold’s symphonies logical, sometimes employing 12 note music techniques, they can be intensely dark and serious. The first symphony is remarkable in contrasting the two sides of his personality, particularly in the first movement which is driven by the aggressive opening rhythm. The movement presents a kaleidoscope of emotional changes bordering on the psychotic. The music has many features in common with Nielsen’s 4^th and 5^th symphonies both in design and quality. Interrupting the darker side of the music there is a violin and harp episode in the fourth minute which is akin to an offstage comment in the theatre, it has a cheeky character, but this evolves from the pianissimo level and light scoring to a full attack on the ear. The symphony is played in full here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdElsJMZ4NI

To conclude, for the composers who read these blogs I shall paste some further instructions in the style of Roger-Pol Droit.

Be serious for two minutes

Duration: 2 minutes

Props: An instrument/voice

Effect: instructive

Improvise two contrasting pieces, the first serious the second humorous.

Having followed the exercise determine which was easier. Try again and sustain the mood for longer.

Reconsider.

Time travel and music.

I listened the other day to a podcast from the BBC series “All in the Mind”, it explored the idea of mental time travel and how we revisit our past and anticipate the future. It explored the idea of the uniqueness of this activity to mankind. Having made progress with the research into primates being able to sign and respond to a limited vocabulary it seems that we desire something more complex than the use of language to demonstrate our uniqueness on this planet.

As we have said before music is an art form played out in real time, performers, composers and listeners are all deeply involved with the passing of time and perhaps less obviously involved in the anticipation of what is to come. We must also be aware of the instant at which we perceive the unfolding drama of music, I use ‘perceive’ as the physical processes of response may mean that we are constrained from responding in the present, but experience delays, more of that later.

Let us begin with familiar examples of visiting the past. We have built up a hugely profitable recording industry on reworking performances of Baroque and earlier music. There is considerable research to demonstrate why certain choices are made but in all truth reconstruction of music is as much an act of imagination or mental time travel as it is science. Many unfinished scores have been completed, some, like the final fugue from the Art of Fugue have several possible workings while others may require less speculation, for example the orchestration of piano scores. Reconstruction from sketches is a task requiring considerable empathy with the composer's technique, and the musical world owes a debt to the work done with Elgar and Maher in particular. This is not time travel as in Star Trek but the deep insights gathered through diligence provides opportunities for pleasure and discussion.

Listeners attempt reconstructions when they recall previously heard music. I understand that I am not alone in having lucid recollections of music, rather like an MP3 player being switched on in my head. On a lesser level I can conjure up a melody and play it at the keyboard adding appropriate (and sometimes more exotic harmonies). All of this is revisiting past material which forms a template from which I can draw at will. Some Jazz players enjoy blending melodies into an improvisation when the harmonic formula is shared, it can be amusing or even striking if well prepared. This idea of a matrix of events like a cutlery drawer from which you draw the appropriate tool for the job has an important role to play in the process of anticipation.

Anticipation is an everyday event in our lives, we are sometimes surprised by the fact that our bodies have taken over the task of picking up the correct screwdriver for those tiny computer parts before we realise that they are needed. In terms of artistic matters we may anticipate how a novel or film will evolve, it is often the essential part of the entertainment provided. We may anticipate the outcomes of discussions on political or philosophical matters, though we are learning that anticipating the results from a large community can be unreliable.

For music the process of anticipation is essential as it often requires rapid and skilled responses, whether accompanying students in an examination, performing in an ensemble, improvising in a group, or controlling a mixing desk. Slow responses can terminate and ruin any of these, and experience helps provide rapid responses that make the errors pass by with little or less attention.

Musicians like actors often picture themselves performing in a hall or theatre with audiences before the event, for many it is a way to overcome the sense of fear before the presentation. The usual model for anticipation is stimulus / reaction, repeated as a chain of events for the duration of an activity. In “guided imagery” there is no real stimulus though we may use our memory to simulate the sense of expectation. In the sporting field much is made of visualization, but to think of the action as visual is misleading, the kinesthetic and auditory functions are equally important. I recall a visit to Cardiff Arms Park where I was shown how their amplification system was used on entering the playing area to get players used to the roar of the crowd and increase the adrenalin before play. Those who are unfamiliar with the technique may start with this short but intriguing document:

http://www.humankinetics.com/acucustom/sitename/Documents/DocumentItem/10855.pdf

The quantity of material as stimulation in music can be large. Consider the information in sight reading a single line from a vocal score at a moderate pace. Now reflect on the idea of playing the Ives piano sonata (Concord) at sight which is on a par with climbing Everest. Remember that if the stimulus has to be processed (reaction) there will always be a time lag. This applies to reading a text, and research has been done to determine the time lag in the process of the working of the eye, processing the text, recognition of patterns and conventions, e.g. speech marks, use of italics, rhyme in poetry, bold lettering and so on. The lag is increased if the text has to be read out to an audience. Many of us are aware of the power point curse of people reading from the slides, and our gratitude when there is an experienced user who draws on experience and uses the slides as simple markers. In order to perform a reading, whether it is text or music, we cannot let the chain of physical events slow us down, so we draw on the matrix of experience. Having played many Bach piano pieces it is easier for me to sight read a new Bach piece than it is to play a Shostakovich Prelude and Fugue, and that may be easier than playing a Bax sonata, and that again easier than a piano sonata by Nurtan Esmen even though the technical demands may not be dissimilar. Put another way we can make predictions even though we may not know the exact context.

In our experience we may know for example the reactions demanded of us in playing a scale and gather that requirement as a chunk of information rather than read one pitch after another. At the level we are discussing the structure of the performance is prepared before notes are played. Psychologists recognise that we are creating structures from birth to develop anticipation.

The notion of training now takes on a different emphasis, repetition isn't the means to accelerating our responses, rather it is the development of the experiences which form the matrix that permit rapid reactions. For the improviser anticipation is the filtering of possibilities from the schemes in his / her experience, the main material is already in place.

To return to teaching, one could describe in words how to play an instrument, but this sort of instruction does nothing for the novice performer. There are physical interventions, demonstrations and many repetitions of basic movements. No one really knows how these skills are incorporated to produce a performer, how the individual actions move onto the level where we no longer pay attention to the control of single events, we abandon our concern for the basic structures, we have to, as dwelling on any part of it interferes with the process.

This has its part to play in the listening process, and, to return to the previous blog on musical climax, a significant part to play in the engagement we have on an emotional level with the music we enjoy.

For most of us the subject of conceptual involvement in the past and future is understood at an intuitive level, but when applied to music making we often take the miraculous, like time travel, for granted.

Blogs on British music of the 20th century may be viewed as a single PDF at:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_EeqYYl3MfMOFZUZWlrZW9uTzg/view?usp=sharing

Bax Sonata No 4

Bax: The Mystery of Dermot O'Byrne / Seven symphonies or one?

Bax Symphony No 3, movement 1.

An overview of Havergal Brian’s 1^st symphony

“Dusk” from the “Hourglass Suite” by Frank Bridge + link to Piano sonata analysis

Egdon Heath

The simplicity of Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb”.

Peter Maxwell Davies: “Stone Litany” – a cycle of movements.

Frank Bridge

Sea Idyll, Lament and Winter Pastoral

F. Bridge 1^st Idyll from Three Idylls

H. Brian 4^th Miniature from 4 Miniatures for piano

The elusive climax.

Can you remember your teenage years? Perhaps you are fortunate enough to still be young and the memory is fresh, or perhaps you are still in the second decade of your life. Whatever your circumstances we know that those years are times of upheaval and excitement, great highs and depressing lows.

In my teenage years, living far away from the large towns and cities, the “serious music” I encountered was through vinyl or radio, and this was restricted mostly to Classical or Romantic music. The joy of listening was enhanced when the orchestra played tutti, fff and the musical motif shone out in complete clarity. When I was introduced to musical analysis I understood this to be the musical climax of the work, the term was added to my vocabulary and there is stayed as some sort of fixed object for many years.

As I had time to read as well as listen I came to enjoy reading plays and came to understand that drama shared with music these moments of intense activity, there was a specific design relating to the number of acts and the point at which a climax was to occur. Gustav Freytag created a chart which became known as Freytag’s pyramid. Most musicians will feel comfortable with the design and I would encourage readers to explore the parallels with music. The basic design is as follows:

The “exposition” where characters and their environment is revealed. This is followed by “inciting incident”, where a single event triggers the start of the engagements and conflicts which is defined as “rising action” on the pyramid. The climax follows, revealing the moment of greatest tension in the play or novel. After this apex comes “falling action”, often revealing the consequences of the engagement. The final parts are the “resolution” where a solution is found and the “denouement” where the author may leave the audience to contemplate the theme and potential outcomes for the character.

Now let us consider the elements of a musical climax as it might occur in the Classical and Romantic music I listened to in my teenage years.

The climax is part of a continuous process of intensification and the realisation or working out of the potential in the musical figures presented in the exposition. It is designed to result in an emotional highpoint (both in terms of the structure and for the listener). Musicians consider the process as a three part strategy of preparation, climax and the release of tension. Many composers are of the opinion that the longer the preparation stage the greater the intensity of the climax. If so the great works of the late Romantic period should have greater points of intensity than a Classical symphony, a point which seems instinctively correct.

On the matter of tension building this has been covered in previous blogs under the title “Composers Toolbox”. At the climax point itself one would expect the greatest intensity of rhythmic movement, loudest dynamic, richest texture and usually an unambiguous statement of the theme. The music may then rapidly diminish in intensity or make a more gradual reduction. Again some musicians take the view that the longer the release the greater the sense of peace and rest at the close. While this scheme works for many works composers from the 20^th century onwards were willing to challenge the format, an example is the last movement of the sixth symphony by R. V. Williams, which undoubtedly has a point of intensity but is far removed from the design suggested above.

When considering the musical climax in its usual definition it was suggested that it reveals the emotional highpoint for both the planning of the music and the response from the individual. There is a problem with the second part of this suggestion. In the first place if there was a simple trigger for our emotional response to music it would occur each time the music plays. For me, and I would suggest for most listeners, this isn’t true. In my voyages through symphonic writing I came to understand that the symphonies of Mahler had the potential to evoke powerful emotional responses. All the planning is there for this type of engagement, yet there were times when my anticipated response failed to arrive. Was this a result of a weaker performance, lack of involvement with the music, poor attention, distractions?

Listening to reviews of record releases where the finest performance is suggested should help to find the ideal choice for the best emotional response, particularly when played on your new sound-reproducing equipment, but this is not guaranteed. Perhaps the situation is better when attending a concert, a good listening position is taken, the hall is excellent, and thankfully the audience in good health. One could add to that the anticipation and the sharing of the experience which we know through the blog on laughter has a profound effect on our response. Experienced listeners know that this should make a difference but the emotional response can still be elusive.

Even more problematic for the definition of the climax is the ‘failure’ of the individual to respond to the composed climax point, and the discovery that the moment of frisson may occur at points of lesser stimulation, perhaps the introduction of a particular texture, an unexpected event, change of harmony, an unexpected variant on a melodic shape, the possibilities are numerous. Cassius’s famous quotation comes to mind:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves

The frisson we sometimes experience is sometimes found in music that doesn’t follow the accepted scheme applied to Classical and Romantic music. There are shortcuts to exciting the listener which may be applied in a three minute popular song; unexpected harmonies, sudden changes of dynamic, discordant notes against the melody, innovative textures from unconventional instruments or sampled sounds. The power of association with text or image is perhaps the most powerful tool, though the question of how well the effect is retained with repeated listening has to be asked.  

There are many subtle ways of reaching a point of intensity in music without assailing the listener. Much of the serious music today appeals to the intellect but composers retain an element of showmanship, and enjoy keeping their audience on the edge of their seats. In featuring music of different nationalities on G+ pages it is easy to hear that the Japanese have retained the inclusion of emotional cues in their music over and above many other Western composers. Some works, e.g. those presenting changes of texture as the main composing intention, can be fascinating to hear, but engage us on a primarily intellectual level. This may be part of a gradual evolution, such as we have heard in e.g. the music of Philip Glass, compare Music with Changing Parts to the 9^th Symphony.

This blog has been a general introduction to the matter of emotional response and requires examples of the alterations to methods of creating a climax in the modern age. This matter will be considered in the new year, until then please accept my wishes for a pleasant and hopefully not too exciting Christmas and New Year.

Chunking and musical attention

Chunking to assist short term memory depends on organising a structure to patterns to ease the "digestion" of information. A ten number sequence could be difficult to recall, but if the set is a recognisable pattern it could be very simple indeed, e.g. 1 through to 10 or the same sequence reversed.

Two chunks like 1 to 5 and 10 to 6 are just as easy to recall. The more random the sequence the harder it is to retain, it also becomes more difficult to pay attention to other simultaneously presented information.

Fortunately great composers are very good at arranging material in ways to make the absorbing of information easier, if not easy. It seems unlikely and anachronistic to think of pre 20th century composers setting out to reveal a piece of music as chunks of information though sometimes an analysis will present information this way in order to illustrate cohesion. It is likely that composers worked their structures to aid our attention and recall from the process of their improvising and composing at the keyboard.

Chunking is less concerned with key structures and long term planning, we need only recall that STM (short term memory) is a matter of seconds to understand why. There is debate about how much evaluation and judgement can take place at the level where the primary concern is recognition, so comparing like with like is probably reserved for LTM.

In order to assess how a listener might chunk a piece of music I am going to take a Schubert sonata, written in 1817, the sonata in B, D.575. In previous blogs I have demonstrated the importance of rhythm in the opening movements of sonata form works by Classical composers, and this work makes a powerful argument for the cohesive use of rhythmic figures.

The opening three bars of this sonata are restricted to presenting the tonic chord and we wait until to fourth bar to hear a change to a seventh chord on G sharp. The musical interest lies in the dotted rhythms, see fig. A 1 to 4. The two rhythmic cells are simplified for the descending answer, using A2 only. The remainder of the opening 15 bars emphasise this figure, though A1 is used to pull the music back to lead us into the triplet bass section. The opening bars are full of alteration of texture, harmony and dynamics, but there is no doubt that the 20 repetitions of the dotted rhythm form the glue that holds our attention, particularly on our first hearing of the music.

Bars 15 to 29 place the thematic interest over a triplet bass, but our attention is quickly drawn away from the background pulse by the short (harmonically simple) melodic phrases, which extend the dotted rhythm (A2) to B1 which has 14 repetitions.

The character of the music changes at bar 30, partly through the three quaver pulse in the left hand accompaniment, but the main change of character is the addition of a grace note to rhythm A2. Bar 31 modifies the rhythm by adding a double dotted note, which gives greater cohesion to the repeated four bar phrase. These two rhythmic alterations contribute a great deal, certain as much as the harmony, to the change of character.

The following return to B major gives greater impetus to the music, the crotchet is accented, so A2 is reversed, repeated and extended with four staccato quavers and completed with the original A2 figure, see fig. C. This longer phrase is repeated and then truncated to the second half only. Cross beat accents and fz add interest, as does the dialogue between left and right hand, overlapping, phrases, all of which drives us to the repeat of the exposition and later the arrival at the development where the dotted rhythms are quickly intensified by using double dotted quaver/ demisemiquaver figures.

Having worked an excellent transition to the development and intensified the original rhythm, the remainder of the sonata reworks the rhythmic characteristics of the exposition. There are of course many subtleties to entertain the listener and these will be enjoyed with repeated exposure to the music.

It is possible to pay attention to more than one type of information, and it would make no sense to suggest that we hear only one parameter of music. Each person prioritises differently, that is why we can argue about how we hear a given piece and why some might find one work agreeable while his/her neighbour disagrees. For all that it is clear that the rhythmic design of this work offers considerable continuity which supports the variety of key changes, harmonic surprises and changes of musical character.

Gradual change characterizes a great deal of serious music up to the present day. It is an important part of the thinking behind large scale structures and is much used by Mahler, an examination of the first movement of the 8^th symphony is a particularly fine example of its use. In our own time demands are being placed on our ability to absorb detail, perhaps in part offset by our ability to replay, isolate and examine sections of music in detail. Will we evolve with the music to be able to “collect” more information or chunk sections to aid our understanding of challenging music? Time will tell.

The process of gradual change can be applied to each of the musical parameters. I once worked a piece using a particular delay programme and realised after completing the composition that there was another cohesive factor at work which I hadn't planned. Looking at the sound file of the recording I saw that the music was being automatically panned gradually from left to right in regular periods of time by the software. Did this attentiveness happen as a result of becoming aware that a sound, once on the left, was now centrally placed or on the right, or was I "rehearsing" the fact that the sound was in motion, rather like our early ancestors being aware of something moving in the long grass?

There is a great deal of time spent in educational circles about thinking about thinking as a means of improving skills. As I made my focus attending to attention while music played there is little doubt in my mind that the experience of listening was changed to my "usual" approach. On one recent occasion while listening to Schubert's final piano sonata, I started with the "attentive" approach and without noticing slipped into complete involvement with the character of the music. I discussed this with Nurtan, who I am certain has experienced the same or similar event.

While we are fortunate in having a great deal of information to draw on regarding memory and attention, and I am sure there are readers who can refine the information given in light of recent research. There is far less information on the interaction between music and attention, there are complex issues at play here, particularly in contemporary classical music which has different concerns to popular and certain types of dance music.

There is some popular interest in the use of music with regard to mindfulness, this is a different issue and has general and often unsubstantiated claims as to the relationship between the music and the listener. There are academic courses for the study of mindfulness, hopefully there is some serious academic research being done or to be done on this issue in the near future.

FURTHER QUESTIONS ON ATTENTION AND MUSIC

Ken's fascinating discussions on memory, music and attention raised a number of questions in my mind. I thought it would be interesting to try to formulate these questions broadly and solicit interpretations, answers or further questions from the readers of this blog. First, I must confess that my knowledge of psychology in general, and cognition in specific are woefully inadequate. Thus, if some of the questions I raise are naïve or have well known and documented answers it will at least serve a few like me well to get those answers. Also, of necessity some material, ideas and definitions are redundant with Ken's blogs.

I shall start with the immense power of perception, recognition and selective ''initial fundamental attention to desired detail '' (IFADD) utilised by the human and apparently other high order species at all times. This can be described by an example. If one looks at an object, the brain immediately isolates and extracts the necessary information and discards the remaining stimuli. This information is a small fraction of all information received and transmitted by the optic nerve. In other words, when you look at a person, the brain isolates the essential features and some few additional details such as colour of the wall behind etc., but ignores most of the information received. It is not like examining a photograph in detail, but extracting the necessary information instantly. This is important for survival as well as being able to learn a task by paying ''attention'' to the essential detail. Somewhere along the line we have ''learned'' the essential details. I suppose, in the process of learning what to see, a neonate also learns how to see.

I think, we can translate this to sound as well; with the hierarchy Overall stimuli +  shape + colour Û auditory stimuli + Rhythm + Pitch with analogies: Type and degree of blind » type and degree of deafness (e.g. tone deaf » colour blind).  This observation raises the first question. The IFADD is evolutionary necessity for survival so is the aural communication in higher order species. What is music analogous to? What logical or operational or simply  heuristic construct can explain our ability to focus on music?

In this first question we can use Ken's midday meal example and or our ability to listen to, for example, radio by filtering out other sound as noise. In time, we don't even hear them. Somewhere along the developmental route, some of us learn to listen to music. Usually this is at a very early age. What are the particular determinants? What makes a young child to apply IFADD to a complicated structure as music? A close examination would suggest that so far as IFADD is concerned a piece by Ligeti or Bach is no more complicated than a jingle or children's song. Given this universality, a child must learn the IFADD of music and apply that knowledge to listen to any kind of music. This does not imply qualitative judgements as like, understand, prefer etc. It is simply ability to listen to music. Unfortunately, this construct implies that the child had learned IFADD of music through paying attention to the IFADD of music. That is circular and unacceptable logic. Embedded in this, there is a question of conformity; because without a certain degree of conformity ensemble music would be impossible, we would not be able to understand each other's music.

If we accept the argument that music is extension of speech (e.g. Leonard Bernstein – Harvard Lectures – The Unanswered Question) we either have to deny the fact that only a subset of each society is musically inclined or there is a drive, desire, talent or genetic make-up that induces a child to pay attention and continue to learn the skills required to pay attention to music. What could be a plausible explanations for this? How would one explain the talented progeny of a musically not talented couple or the other way around? What is musical talent? Is it inherent or somehow imparted?                                                              

It was said many times that music is an ephemeral art and takes place in time. To be as such, the IFADD of music is changing completely, albeit at times only in detail. In order to be comprehensible, the mind has to select a finite interval over which the IFADD is defined. We do not hear music continuously but over intervals that are sufficiently small to define the ''motion'' but sufficiently large to define the timbre, pitch etc. I assume that these intervals are nearly the same for each individual. I think, otherwise, it would be difficult if not impossible to communicate musically. This difficulty does not exist in visual perception even at a reasonably close distance. This is because visual structures are not time dependent for reasonably long intervals.

 The questions these observations raise are many. Even if we accept very loose definitions such as talent, training, interest as fundamentally necessary definitions, we still need to depend upon even more woolly definitions such as mood, distraction, etc, in defining attention and / or attention span in listening. I am deliberately excluding performance, those who were fortunate to take part in public performances would be able to tell a story or two about pure adrenalin based performance on occasion.

I hope some, hopefully, many readers will have answers, further questions, conjectures or thoughts on this subject   and willing to contribute to this blog. One or both of us will continue the emerging discussions as appropriate. If nothing else, all of us can learn from each other.

Attention is a process by which we actively engage with specific information from our environment. For listeners this could be a symphony playing on the radio with random additional material such as a pressure cooker steaming away as you prepare your midday meal, the postman delivering letters and two crows squawking outside your window. I imagine many of you will ask the relevant question: how do we manage to experience all of these sensations and still focus on just one element? In order to get to terms with this, and determine whether we can focus on a preferred element, we must understand the process of withdrawal, bottlenecks and shared tasks.

There must be a number of musicians who have experienced the wonderful sense of rapture arising from listening when we are so engaged on the “primary target” that all secondary inputs have zero impact, we have tuned in to one element and seemingly tuned out all others.

Readers of these blogs who have taken on the psychological arguments in relation to music will be well aware of the basic requirements of attention for survival. Here our interest is directed towards limitations on our ability to stay on task, and what we can do to maximise contact with music, especially as we know instinctively that our attention is limited in terms of both capacity and duration. How selective can we be and what do we miss when we are selective? Are certain senses more powerful than others, is there a peak point at which visual or aural material creates an overload on attention?

Posner and Boies (1971) suggested that attention has multiple sensory functions, for musicians the two of significance are detecting signals for focused processing, and maintaining a vigilant or alert state.  Other psychologists have used terms such as arousal, effort, capacity, perceptual set, control, and consciousness as synonymous with the process of attention, I am sure that performers and composers alike feel comfortable with these terms.

Attention involves selecting some information for further processing while inhibiting other information. Understanding attention is as much about filtering information as selection. This creates two states change blindness (Simons & Rensink, 2005) and change deafness (Vitevitch, 2003). In examining how partial our attention can be, psychologists are exploring the notion of top-down processing, a flexible and dynamic approach to attention as what is important at one moment may no longer be so at the next, and our goals shift accordingly.

Knowledge, beliefs, goals and expectations can alter the speed and accuracy of the processes that select meaningful or desired information; what we might think of as scanning and selecting material. However, because of the variety and quantity of information available in (say) a concert hall, top-down attentional selection does not always lead immediately to your goal, in our case focused listening. The recognised term for our attempts to direct attention is “mental effort” which accepts that given two sources of information we are not able to give equal weighting to both.

Just as there are limitations on the quantity of information that can be processed simultaneously in space, there are limitations on the speed with which information can be processed in temporal sequence. There are suggestions that we are limited by sensory overload, a bottleneck of information, certain critical mental operations have to be carried out sequentially (Pashler & Johnston, 1998).

When our attention requires a physical response this will create a bottleneck, good sight-readers have developed the knack of shifting attention back and forth at a rapid pace. As with multiple sensory inputs, coordinating two output responses is more difficult than simply making a single response. It is not impossible to do two things at once, and as musicians are well aware, we can get better at this with practice, but there is usually some associated cost or failure even when one is skilled.

As suggested the effective strategy for multitasking is to switch quickly back and forth between the two tasks rather than try to deal fully with both simultaneously. Before becoming expert sight-readers we may break down the process into smaller units with longer periods of rest to determine levels of accuracy and regions of faults (rhythm, wrong notes, lack of articulation etc.). We still do not know whether it is possible to perform two tasks at exactly the same time or, if it is, what happens to the quality of the attention paid.

Now that we have an outline of memory from the previous blog and a general understanding of attention it is time to turn to how some people absorb music and problems faced with attention when listening.

Several years ago I worked with a youngster who had a number of difficulties with learning, without going into details his literacy and numerical skills were very weak as was his retention of factual material. It came as a great surprise to me one day when I heard him reciting streams of rap along with stylistic gestures and intonation. I asked him to perform in front of his peers and he did without hesitation or any signs of anxiety, (unlike many of the more gifted performers I had worked with). It would seem that he had been involved in a high level of rehearsal having given considerable attention to performance detail picked up from audio and video sources. His passion for this style of music cut through the obstacles which were inhibiting his other learning. I can attest to the fact that he wanted to be equally able with other studies, particularly his numeracy, but for both of us this was an uphill struggle.

The Welsh have a tradition of storytelling and reciting and I have observed the capacity for some people to absorb large quantities of verse with little apparent effort. (In medieval times the expectation for any storyteller was to know 10,000 lines of verse). To be able to recite or sing in this way there has to have been detailed contact with the subject matter, but not necessarily all at once. The content may have been absorbed in chunks, starting with the gist and then adding to this until a complete performance is absorbed.

Chunking material is part and parcel of music, we are well aware of the role of repetition which contributes to our attention and recall of larger works, but chunking works on small scale events as well as larger formal units. Musicians are adept at matching and comparing related phrases through transposition, inversion and a whole host of methods of variation.

As can be seen from the wiki definition below the psychological definition is adaptable to the musicians approach:

Chunking in psychology is a process by which individual pieces of information are bound together into a meaningful whole. A chunk is defined as a familiar collection of more elementary units that have been inter-associated and stored in memory repeatedly and act as a coherent, integrated group when retrieved.

In a design like sonata form we have motives and rhythmic elements repeated many times within a section then aspects of these elements extended before a recapitulation. This provides the listener several opportunities to refresh his/her contact with the music, and this is important because our attention is in a constant state of disruption.

Over the past few months I have kept a diary of my listening, or to be more explicit, a diary of how often my attention has wandered while listening. It could make for depressing reading in that every session has a number of breaks which paints a poor picture of the contact I have with music. On the up side I know that I have a good recall of many musical works and can replay significant sections in my head, or match a score with an “aural impression” of the sound without a recording. In the early years of listening to Classical music I know that I would pick out significant details and build onto these, gluing a number of parts together to form a more continuous experience of the musical logic. At this stage of my life I have a little more difficulty in absorbing music, but my listening experience helps me to form a stronger set of references on which I can draw to build up familiarity, so one loses a little and gains a little. 

The diary was particularly useful in showing what sorts of interference came between me and the music, it was nearly always involved with problem solving. In the middle of a piece I would become absorbed by any tasks that were incomplete, sometimes musical, sometimes far more trivial. Having become aware of this I tried to resolve any issues before listening only to find that my mind would conjure up issues from further back in time or of less significance. In other words I had formed a habit.

For many people music is regarded as a form of relaxation, in this state turning inwards to problem solving is acceptable as long as the listener is aware that the attention to the music is diminished. We can attend to two tasks, but never equally.

Don’t be harsh on yourself if you discover that your attention has lost its focus, go back (if you can) to the point at which you lost contact. It may be that there is an issue at that point which requires detailed observation and dealing with it may be of use in the future. Sometimes several returns are necessary, but remember rehearsal is vital to our long term memory.