Music is not just sound, in fact, sound is not really the foundation of music. Can a ballerina dance without sound? Of course, and it's still a musical experience. According to Leibniz, music is an experience of the soul in relation to the order of time, performed by counting, albeit an unconscious counting process. Can we count unconsciously? Leibniz seems to suggest that arithmetic, or more precisely, the action of counting natural numbers, is a fundamental mental process that occurs out of the focus of our attention. Therefore, unconscious counting, or better, our experience of the unfolding of order and harmony in the course of time, would be a full liminal action. It is an action in the limit, sub-limen action, and sublime action. It happens in the threshold of conscious formation, and therefore with a transforming potential for individual identity as no other art form has. There is a basic intuition of the experience of time that music and mathematics share in relation to this approach to the roots of life-experience. Music and mathematics are liminal experiences that we have to turn into liminoid in order to experience them in everyday life. But not only music and mathematics share this connection to the very basic intuition of time, they both also operate with ideal or imaginal forms and types. And music has a trait that further distinguishes it from mathematics: it directly objectifies the Will even without the mid-world of imaginal forms. Music and mathematics part ways when mathematics enters the realm of the liminoid, when it becomes computation.
It is difficult to determine the mimetic relationship between music and the world, a relationship that humans tried to clarify for a long time. Arthur Schopenhauer particular added the concept of “Will” (Der Wille) to the equation. What is the Will according to Schopenhauer? Perhaps the best understanding of the concept comes from the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. According to classical Vedanta, Reality is Sat-Chit-Ananda, whose difficult translation includes more than three concepts in our modern languages such as Truth-Consciousness-Force-Delight-Bliss-Harmony. The Will is the “Chit” part, Consciousness-Force, the impulse of living intelligence that generates and underlies all creation in the universe. The Will is objectified in representations, in all the range of different representations and their compositions. All the arts objectify the Will indirectly through ideas, and these ideas, in its Platonic sense, are objectifications of the Will.
Music precedes the realm of ideas:
It is an objectification and copy of the Will as immediate as the world itself is, and how ideas are with respect to the multiple phenomenon that constitutes the world of individual things1
We could call such “objectification and copy” a morphism. So in our terms: music is a morphism of the Will, though not an isomorphism, for it is projected on our individual set of physical, psychological and spiritual forces. The metaphysical content of music leads Schopenhauer to affirm that music, to a certain extent, could exist even if there was no world at all2. Music is a form of knowledge, and more precise than any mediated knowledge of the world (like knowledge through reason) for it directly accesses the Will. Through its relationship with the Will, it is possible for us to recognize music in the world, and at the same time, to know the world through music.
The unique epistemological dimension of music as the experience of spiritual morphisms [a link between the Will (Spiritual-Realm), and the imaginal realm] has been acknowledged since ancient times and revived in the Western tradition from Schopenhauer on, especially in Wagner, Nietzsche, and afterwards, in the 20th Century Avantgarde. Music occurs in a different space to that of ordinary experience, in the liminal, but from which principles applicable to both everyday life and transpersonality emanate. Let us remember the final words of Socrates in the Phaedo, when he identifies music and philosophy:
Visiting me many times the same dream in my past life, which was shown sometimes, in one appearance and other in others, he said the same advice, with these words: "Socrates, make music and apply yourself to it!” And I, in my life in the past, I believed that the dream exhorted me and encouraged me to do precisely what I was doing, as those that encourage runners. The dream encouraged me to do what I practiced, to make music, in the conviction that philosophy was the highest music, and that I practiced it3.
Silence is a musical and metaphysical concept. Composer Toru Takemitsu has put it in terms of the modern musical metaphysical experience: Confronting silence by uttering a sound is nothing but verifying one’s own existence. Sound and silence together have given a rich spectra of metaphors for the expression of life’s persistent mystery, furthermore, they conform a full mythology in which the musician can express a wide variety of cognitive and social emotions.
Musical silence is more than repose or the mere absence of sound, for repose has a duration, and absence is the negation of something. This obvious facts were made completely clear and explicit by John Cage in his wonderful 4’33’’. The encounter with naked duration is a true challenge for the mind that we have called "Manas", the common mind, sometimes called the monkey mind. Per se, it is a very intense psychological transformation process in which all the automatisms of the mind are revealed, as we observe in the different meditation processes that try to stop the flow of the Manas mind. Even more difficult to stop is the Buddhi mind that organizes the so-called spiritual life. It is not about doing any violence with the different mental forms that Consciousness adopts. But returning to the encounter with naked duration, returning to the encounter with musical silence, it is necessary to understand different nuances that point towards the notion of presence-absence that we have already used.
In music, there is one kind of silence whose function is orchestrational: we decide which voices intervene, and the absence of a voice at a given moment in a piece implies choices of color and texture. In the psychological realm, to orchestrate is to express intentions in relation to a scenario of psychological forces. Orchestrational silence is therefore the suppression of a possible action for harmonic or timbral (color, identity) reasons, id est, the choice of a particular set of simultaneous relationships that express our dharma.. We silence to give shape to the range of physical and psychological objects. It is the creation of domains by limitation, and it is precisely this type of action that is at the root of all creative form. What we do not include or discard, the intentional psychological absence, has the tone of a complementary quality. Suppose, as an example, that when describing a rose, I left out its perfume. The creation that I make with my words emphasizes its colors, unfolds a world of light, but by leaving out its perfume my experience of the flower is incomplete and the flower itself is then incomplete and limited, ceasing to be a rose to become a symbolic object that points precisely in a double direction: that of the present light and the complementary absence of the perfume. By choosing one thing and silencing the other, I make an ontological hierarchy of the presence of the rose as a double symbol of what I present and of what I leave absent. In both cases, both what I present and what I leave absent show a fundamental social mask, my cultural tradition emerges in orchestral silences. It is a silence of taboos, individual and social.
On the other hand, there are also contrapuntal silences, related to texture as well, but performing a more basic determination of lines. These are silences which give time location and shape the musical discourse by addition. Contrapuntal silence is an articulative silence linked to the freedom of expression of the individual. And in this type of silence the intentions for giving space to what is different are expressed. The absence of contrapuntal silences is the absence of an individual will, it is the sign of a mere adaptation of the speaking social mask. Contrapuntal silence implies a particular harmonic sensibility in the individual and in the social, a practical knowledge for dealing with diversity and plurality without compromising the general harmony. A magnificent example of these silences can be found in the works of Bach. The difference between orchestral silence and contrapuntal silence is the one that occurs between the determination of the total spectrum of psychological identities and the individual psychological identity in relation to the others. The orchestral silence shows the limits of possible identities, the contrapuntal silence shows the freedom of expression of one identity in relation to others. With an example. The strict orchestration of traditional Western orchestras shows the bourgeois and conservative content of the psychological identity of composer and audience (and something analogous can be said for the rest of the classical traditions of world music). In the same way, the strict orchestration of the different genres of Pop music, from Rock to reggaeton, shows its basically industrial content. In contrast to this we have Bach's Art of the Fugue, not specified for any instrument or group of instruments. On the other hand, as a sample of the contrapuntal silences, we see that the Pop-Rock guitar solos lead to the affirmation of a single line and a single identity that represses the others or leaves them as extras, something similar to what some forms of classical music developed from the SXVI.
A third type of silence is the preceding silence, called ma in the japanese tradition and anacrusa in Western music. From the Western point of view, the anacrusa can be either a silence or a group of sounds. How come we consider it a silence then? Because the sounds that belong to an upbeat do not compute in the tempo of the piece, they are like passing notes that express a non-being and a profound form of freedom. Sometimes it is directly an upbeat silence. When the upbeat extends not only to the location at the beginning of the piece, but each silence that precedes a sound has that special character, we find ourselves in the particular experience that in the Japanese tradition is called "ma". Ma is, using our terminology, a specific form of presence. It is a spontaneous encounter with presence-absence. This encounter is related to the notion of surprise, in relation to the unexpected appearance. When the anticipation of the appearance is not met in terms of expectations, we have an instant of spontaneity in relation to presence-absence. This encounter opens a form of primordial sensation in our consciousness that produces joy or fear with great intensity. In both cases it is an experience of psychological metamorphosis. If it is of fear, it is an experience on the left side of the threshold (the zone of personification), if it is of joy (not pleasure, but joy) it occurs in the zone of transpersonality.
There is a further dimension of musical silence which can be extended to any epistemological experience. Through the action of memory (Mnemosine), the three kinds of silences described extend and transform experience on the inner dimension of the listener-composer. The aesthetical experience extends beyond its sound parameters into the realm of the listener particular psychological connections. Silence is needed to make the piece intelligible, to give it a meaning. Silence becomes a receptacle for musical reverberation both of the physical sound and of the psychological process initiated by the music. There are a number of Bach pieces (see the Ricercare of The Art of the Fugue, or the Contrapuntus X of the Musical Offering, etc.), (also Brahms, Mahler, and many others) which include this kind of silence. For instance, he writes at the end of the piece a white note and right after a silence of white (instead of writing a whole note) in which the piece gains an extra time for its processing, both at the acoustic and the psychological level. When not in the score, this kind of silence is spontaneously produced at the end of a performance, sometimes unfortunately broken by an insensitive rush for thunderous applause. There is a form of silence that we could call silence of dissipation of the form. The appearance of sound or experience in general fades away, leaving a reverberation. This type of silence is very rare in everyday life as we link one experience to the next. But it is precisely in this silence of dissipation, when there are no purposes yet in sight, that we open the door to the deepest psychic contents of the unconscious. This also occurs in the "ma" silence, but with a different meaning. This silence of dissipation is the entry into a "Pralaya". What remains in this silence will be transported to the next cycle of experience, the next Kalpa. It is quite a complex art, this letting go without letting go from an intention to let go.
Silence in us is unequivocally connected to breathing... to the hiss of our nervous system (the two sounds that you would hear in an anechoic chamber), to deep sleep and to trance-contemplation (samadhi). The Yoga Sutra of Patanjali starts precisely from this point: “Yoga is samadhi”, in the sense of a state of inner bliss and Silence.
1Schopenhauer.Ibid.
2Cf.Schopenhauer.Ibid.
3Plato. Phaedo 60E-61A. Gredos. Madrid 1988 pp. 32-33.
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