Music of Life - Life of Music

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Music of life - life of music

We create music and music creates us. It is a rondo.

If we can imagine health as a state of quantum coherence reflected in the complex dynamics of body rhythms such as the heartbeat, the respiratory rate, and brain waves, then we may contemplate about -What is the music of our organism that plays (and dances) life into being – from the top of our head to our fingertips and toes – every single cell that spins from picoseconds to minutes, hours, days and years?

Each and every player, including the tiniest molecule, is improvising freely and spontaneously, yet keeping in tune and in rhythm with the whole. And yet, there is no “visible” conductor, no choreographer, the organism is creating and recreating itself afresh with each passing moment. What a majestic counterpoint example of maximum local freedom and maximum coordination as a whole.

Tuning – to bring someone or something into harmony

Music attunement can be reached by listening to an instrument, another person's voice, performing and composing-improvising – playing an instrument, using our own voice; singing, chanting, toning (practice of using the voice to express elongated vowel sounds), and laughing.

Music attunement is reached through fundamental principles of resonance, entrainment,  harmonics, musical intervals, color, rhythm and intention.

Our mind can only perceive things within the restricted limits of its sensory capacities, which are only very small ranges within the total vibratory reality.

We live within a perceived reality, but our energy system interacts with the totality of absolute reality.  Not only are we limited by what we are able to perceive, but we are also limited by how we give meaning to what we perceive.

imagination, canon and renaissance

EuMuse is on a mission to teach how to integrate conscious (GoML) - goal oriented music listening - in everyday life; How to creatively alter your sonic environment; How to integrate conscious music listening in businesses, wellness clinics, senior citizens’ centers, hospitals, kindergartens,  schools and homes.

Why? In a world that is continually changing, the moment one stops learning is the moment one stops growing. It is a risky path. The consequences don't occur immediately, but they do start accumulating.

If we acknowledge that knowledge is a public good and increases in value as the number of people possessing it increases - then perhaps scientists without a Ph.D. or a Y chromosome or academic affiliation may become the most powerful voices of a new renaissance. Thus, we can recognize that truly beautiful discoveries represent imagination in art and science as a sentient, numinous gift of humanness.

But  imagination, an innate human capacity, needs proper nurture and cultivation. Imagination, wonder, and curiosity are nurtured by music, by stories, by poems – in brief, by exposure  to the beautiful in any form.  Moral imagination then is a human power to respect men and women as moral beings, i.e., as persons, not things whose value to us is measured by their usefulness.

In September of 2022,  I initiated a series of monthly missives that presented a prelude to some parts of EuMuse work. Today, I am going to argue that the world needs music (Beauty), and that writing must not be an end in itself but rather an opening to further thinking and acting. If we could sufficiently cooperate, what might we cooperate to build?

“When desires and passions do not turn into wrongful paths, music can be perfected. Perfect music has its cause. It arises from equilibrium. Equilibrium arises from righteousness, and righteousness arises from the meaning of the cosmos. Therefore, one can speak about music only with a man who has perceived the meaning of the cosmos.” Herman Hesse

Marina de Moses

What is Music

“Music is a moral law. It gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm and gaiety to life and to everything.”

Plato

Perhaps the most important thing in defining music is the recognition that music is an essential need of human nature. There is something in all of us that seeks the beauty and harmony. This yearning varies in strength and approach from person to person, but it is always there.

It is not an idea, belief, or lesson. It is an experience that is not only taught, but found, uncovered, and recovered. It is not only that we have music. We are a music. Our bodies are a symphony of rhythmic patterns. Our heartbeat, respiration and brain waves all entrain to each other. All our organs are vibrating, twisting, and moving, even if many of these movements are micro movements. As a result of their motion, they produce energies, including pressure waves (sound energy), in physics called phonons. As a photon is to light, a phonon is to sound.

Music is ubiquitous. Sounds permeate everything yet science spanning neuroscience, anatomy, psychology, anthropology, physics, mathematics, musicology and archeoacoustic can’t easily define its complexity.

Modern science is discovering that we all have a faculty that had been thought to be confined to a few rare individuals with extraordinary talents. The gift of music might be available to any individual, provided they are given the right exposure at the critical time. And that raises the question what other sort of abilities could be brought up if we only knew what to do. There may be much more human potential we had realized.

Trust is the new currency in (our) digital economy

There is a vast literature on studies of music, (musicology, philosophy, history, psychology) behavior and the brain. The caveat, of course, is that no one knows the entire corpus of work.  There are anecdotal reports, enthusiastic individual claims, or well-intentioned but unfounded concoctions.

 Or in the words of Arthur Schopenhauer - “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world”.

Today’s “machine-learning” systems, trained by data, are so effective in certain domains that they can make decisions on our behalf. But music, wisdom, and ethical notions such as kindness or goodness, are much more complex and cannot be captured in bits and bytes. AI cannot appreciate the subtleties of Mischa Maisky playing Poulenc Les chemins de l’amour or Leonardo da Vinci painting. Making sure our machines understand the intent behind our instructions is an important issue that requires understanding music intelligence itself.

Music’s defining characteristics, specific functionalities (and/or “efficacies”) cannot be simply separated in broadly termed “musical qualities” such as melody or rhythm.

Thus, we need a new focus on the quality of education and the relevance of learning. Access is not enough.  

Music and Art of Time

We need to nurture the qualities that can prepare people to ask and answer the questions that aren’t “Googleable”, and treasure the values that are not copyable, i.e., attributes that must be generated and cultivated, attributes that cannot be copied, replicated, reproduced, or faked. Values that are generated uniquely over time. Something that cannot be bought or sold but has to be earned – trust, creativity, imagination, authenticity, generosity, listening to music.

It has often been claimed, especially since Kant, that music is the art of time. Objects of musical perception, i.e., tones and tonal relations are presented to the listener progressively in time. The only way to experience it is through listening. And the road to that is time. There is no shortcut to find the meaning in music. In music – like in life – one does not make finale i.e., the end of composition the point of the composition.

Perhaps our happiness – as suggested, for example, by the French words for happy = heureux and heure = hour, time – may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.

Marina de Moses

Music and Future of the Human Heart

“The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with the concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils; The motions of his spirit are as dull as night, And his affections dark as Erebus: Let no such man be trusted.”

Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

Music has been linked to health and healing in ancient traditions for more than 30.000 years, long before the formally organized music therapy field developed in the 20th century. Its effect on our brain, body and soul is undeniable. The answers to many of questions about music now provide a scientific basis to explain how music affects mental clarity, emotional balance, creativity, and personal effectiveness.

Music is one of the few activities that involves using the whole brain. From the perspective of neuroscience, listening to music is one of the most complex things one can do. The effects are instant and long lasting. Not all types of music have favorable effects but for the most part, exposure to classical music has beneficial effects not only for improving memory and focusing attention, learning language, but also for physical coordination and development, relaxation, and stress relief.

EuMuse is a global knowledge project founded with a simple, but powerful mission – to help people access, understand and benefit from scientific breakthrough in music.

How do we learn to listen to music, something that seems so obvious we take it for granted?

Beauty (like truth) cannot be forced on anyone; it cannot be angry or antagonistic. The Good, the True and the Beautiful are their own best arguments for themselves, by themselves, and in themselves.

When one loves beauty, ideas, and truth one desires to learn and to understand the world.

The point isn’t to be “right” or “wrong, “smart” or “dumb”, – it is to incessantly want to know more than you do. Socrates’ main point. A life without curiosity doesn’t count.

The Greek word kalokagathia (kalos = beauty + agathos = good) was a natural combination in the Greek context. It was used not only for the descriptions of beautiful things, but also morally admirable character and conduct, and technically useful things.

EuMuse has a task of turning energy into matter – the energy of music ideas, of imagination, of purpose, of vision - into things that matter in people’s lives.

Music is a time-art. There is no listening in the future and there is no listening in the past thus mindful and goal-oriented music listening (GoML) helps us to consciously accumulate present moment awareness.

In harmony with Simone Weil’s idea that the sole purpose of education is to nurture attention; “attention is the disposition of the subject that is open and available to the reality of other people, ourselves, objects, customs and traditions, ideas, and words such as good, truth, beauty and God.” - EuMuse concept is at once simple and obvious, yet complex and profound. We want to bring greater awareness around the connection between sound, music, brain, and body, and to source simple solutions to complex problems. For when you go from a principle to execution, things are much more complicated: the output is simple to the outsider, the process is hard seen from the inside. Indeed, it takes years of study and practice.

Ambition is about more – Vision is about all

If this is an age of transitions, there is an even greater need to reflect on all that is timeless, and eternal, and what is not.

Billions of people the world over want to know how to be healthier and happier. And while there is plenty of research and writing about economic developments, AI, and inequalities there is insufficient inquiry about cognition and knowledge gaps.

 Perhaps leaders of today need a musical capacity, to be creative and pro-active in a way a group of jazz musicians improvises together. A number of separate individuals, all making their own decisions, act together as a whole. Choices are made from moment to moment both by the group as a whole and by the individuals within it. For jazz musicians to improvise together, they need to listen attentively, while expressing their individuality in a way that contributes to the overall sound.

Art and Science in service of Beauty

In June 1919, Romain Rolland, French dramatist, and art historian who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1915., published a remarkable text titled Declaration of the Independence of the Mind (Déclaration de l’indépendance de l’Esprit). Signed by hundreds of most prominent intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Hermann Hesse, Upton Sinclair, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred Stieglitz - it was a call to use the power of art and science to bring world together. 

A hundred and three years later it may serve as a reminder that art and science should embody the noble goal to enrich the humanity in the face of any threat – be it by weapon or censorship.

What if next giant leap in human evolution may come not only from new fields like artificial intelligence or genetic engineering, but from appreciating our ancient brains as well?

Perhaps in this fusion of what some consider two distinct, incompatible entities – art and science – lies the healing and betterment of humanity.

Marina de Moses

Resonance & Renaissance

The diluvial nature of modern media leaves almost no space for silence and very little time to pause and listen. But just because we are flooded doesn’t mean we have to drown. The challenge is to find the ways to cultivate the discipline and the patience necessary to learn and re-learn.

And that is perhaps the most challenging part of EuMuse music modules protocol – the act of listening - because it is not something that you take. It is something you have to do.

 “One cannot hear music and noise at the same time.”

Henry David Thoreau

Sounds are what we hear, music is how we think, link, and feel. Similar to the pictorial images that emerge from the pixels, but they’re not identical with them - music is much more than matter of acoustical brain stimulation. And it is a fallacy to think you can understand pictures by reducing them to their pixels or music by reducing them to sound waves. On the contrary.

Why We Need To Learn How To Listen

Our musical knowledge is learned, the product of long experience; maybe not years spent over playing an instrument, but a lifetime spent absorbing music from our environment by default and/or by choice. Once you hear something you cannot “unhear” it.

The two most prominent tools that we have as conscious beings - our attention and our intention - combined determine the quality of our listening experience.

Hearing is essentially a passive, indiscriminate response to sound i.e., we have the sound and music in our life (noise, environmental sounds, background music) that happens to us passively and by chance.

Listening, on the other hand, is an active response to the phenomena of sound; it focuses in on certain sounds to the exclusion of others. It involves the will as well as a neurological process.

Conscious music listening - Goal-oriented Music Listening (GoML) i.e., having music in our lives by choice and design, is a skill attained through the same deliberate practice as any other pursuit of human excellence.

Listening to music, regarded as a skill-intensive art, too frequently mistaken for a talent or a passive pre-wired capacity, then becomes something that aids inner transformation versus something that fills our time.

Wholeness of experience itself is a participatory act – both of faculty of being and a function of becoming - to be mastered and refined in the course of listening.

*Persistence and determination are mirrored in the modern science data. Research shows that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything. In study after study, of composers, concert pianists, chess players, basketball players, fiction writers, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is roughly equivalent to three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, of practice over ten years.

Listening to Music

On every new, repeated listening of the same musical piece one can find a new meaning. Not only because of potentially different interpretation of musical score, change of acoustic environment or soundscape, but because the landscape of our life is different and new as well, continuously “reloaded” by the very act of living.

“Liking” of Musical Piece

One can then begin to realize that music identity or “preference” for certain music piece/style depended not upon one's beliefs (inherited or manufactured), but it actually depended on how much attention one has paid to things that were other than “his-her” music identity. And as one deepens this intentionality and attention, one starts to broaden and deepen the sonic horizon and the sense of the music world.

Sonic Horizon – Past, Present and Future

We have a record of written words that shaped human cognition over the centuries, and we have insight to human behavior through archaeological records and images. Unfortunately, we don’t have a record of the sounds that people heard in the past. We don’t know how did Jerusalem sound in 425 BC, Constantinople in 1120, Vienna in 1598 or Tokyo in 1680. Yet, humans are shaped by the sounds they perceive. Every age has perceived a different set of sounds. Therefore, the minds of each age have worked differently. Unfortunately, this part of human history is unknown and often neglected. The earliest known recording of the human voice and the earliest known recording of music was produced in 1860 in Paris. There has been a world of transformation ever since.

EuMuse aims to increase the amount of human wellbeing and talents in three distinct ways.        First, by identifying and linking the knowledge and data that already exist.        Second, by connecting audience with an educated insight, guidance, and access to the right tools.                                                   Third, by creating connections that will amplify human creativity and intelligence via collaborative creation spaces.

In EuMuse work – I aim to emphatically refuse distortions, simplifications, and discriminations – with a goal to show that no sciences (musicology included) are neither neutral nor universal nor eternal and depend on the historical and cultural contexts that invent them.

Although EuMuse is credited to a single author, tangible and intangible contributions from many others permeate it throughout. When we observe the history as a long-term process of co-evolution then we may understand how every great invention, was simply a combination of pre-existing technologies.

One of the most essential elements of human wisdom at its best is humility – knowing that you don’t know everything – and faith - described as a trust in goodness. 

Music can only manifest through, with and in time. Without time music doesn’t exist. Without time we don’t exist.

Marina de Moses

In Praise of Beauty

What is the part that makes us human?

Is it IQ, EQ or quotient of beauty and love?

What remains of a person when their narrative is gone?  

What remains of a humanity when their beauty is gone?

Were we to turn around, look outside, look inside, recognize the assumptions we hold about the world as purely that, merely assumptions – perhaps then we could step back from those beliefs long enough to begin to change them.  We don't have to engage in grand actions to participate in the process of change. Small deeds of creating beauty, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.

EuMuse enterprise aims to initiate the transformative impact of continually changing one’s music horizon towards beauty. Because when we move away from beauty and ethics, both conceptually and linguistically, we end up with ugliness, disorder, and dissonance.

Our world today is flooded with entertainment sound that some mistake for music. Culture of background noise is (without our consent) assimilated in shopping centers, restaurants, airports, and public spaces creating “music” to be heard, rather than listened to.

Making Fugues Together

Living in the world where computers can translate languages without understanding a word, where engineers are perfecting technologies that can take over intellectual processes, humans are less and less aware of their absence (or removal) from the whole process of inquiry.

For thousands of years, indigenous cultures the world over have been using the most intriguing range of memory technologies – including songs, stories, drawings, and dance. Thus, cultures without writing were recording and storing their knowledge of astronomy, navigation, calendars, plants, and animals within their environment with a help of a song and visual imagery. Their vast “portable” encyclopedia was stored in an interwoven memorized web tied to an imagined memory palace or a real landscape. Their memory palaces were spread across the land, structured by sung pathways referred to as songlines. A songline, then provided a table of contents to the entire knowledge system.

How does the “invisibilia” of invisible forces influence human behavior, memories, ideas, beliefs, emotions, and assumptions today?

In the last few centuries engineers have automated physical labor, while in the last few decades we are in the process of automating emotional responses and thoughts.

Equipped with deep learning and other machine-learning technologies, artificial intelligence has proven capable of matching or surpassing some of the most impressive human feats of intelligence. Algorithms are valuable to find patterns and connections that would escape human analysts. They produce, among many things, artwork, and musical compositions. But can algorithms truly replicate the creative process? Can we outsource thinking and our appreciation for art to machines? Can engineering mindset replace our quest for beauty, our complexity of ethical reasoning, and love for the mystique of art?

What is the part that makes us human? Is it IQ, EQ or quotient of beauty and love?                                        

What remains of a person when their narrative is gone?                                                                                   

What remains of a humanity when their beauty is gone?

“Making music together is the best way for two people to become friends. There is none easier. That is a fine thing. I hope you and I shall remain friends. Perhaps you too will learn how to make fugues, Joseph.”

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Marina de Moses

eumuse ~ Invitation

the art of listening

This invitation is artfully balancing act of composing a mutual space for creation. No really creative transformation can possibly be effected by human beings, “unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist between the observed fact and any preconceived ideas, however noble, beautiful, and magnificent they may seem to be.” David Bohm (1917-1992)

Even if we act to erase material poverty and environmental challenges, there is another great task – it is to confront the poverty of beauty, purpose and dignity that afflicts us all.

This invitation goes much deeper than mere expertise of music sharing – i.e., guiding through music listening process. The main aim of EuMuse is to delve into imaginative capacities of audiences, honoring creativity and power, and demonstrating the art of listening. The EuMuse program starts with the idea that the way we evolve our ability to listen will be the way we evolve as human beings.

Why “The half-known hinders knowing. Since all of our knowing is only half, our knowing always hinders our knowing.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832)

 Premise “Do you know that our soul is composed of harmony.”
Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks (1451-1519)

How “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants” Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727)

Driving force “Without music, life would be a mistake.” Friedrich Nietzsche Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) (1844-1900) “Music, the only Force, which links and makes infinite worlds alive”.                                       Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)

What to expect As much or as little as you put into it. One cannot hear noise and music at the same time, but once you hear something you cannot “unhear” it.

Grateful for your attention, described by Simone Weil as “the rarest and purest form of generosity” Marina de Moses