Posts Tagged ‘wellbeing music’
Wellbeing music
Beethoven’s famous 9th symphony can be seen as a search for the best music:
1st movement: expectant, noble, bold.
2nd movement: boisterous, terse, briskly grand.
3rd movement: reflective, pastoral, profound.
4th movement: Beethoven quotes themes from the earlier movements each followed by a blast of disapproval and grumpy passages in the lower strings which imply disgruntled verbal rumination: “No,” he seems to say, “I liked that music for a time, but it’s not ultimately satisfying.” Those lower strings then find Beethoven’s famous “Ode to Joy” theme, but even this is dismissed and abruptly the symphonic orchestra gives way to the human voice – of the singers and choir with this new theme, and then the orchestra, vocalists and choir take on the most rousing ‘feel-good’ ending in the Western Classical repertoire. So apparently Beethoven likes this better.
I mention Beethoven’s 9th’s testy musical ruminations as I have been undertaking something similar in the last few months. My new, more relaxed job leaves me time for reading, writing and listening to music, and I’ve been diving into all my musical favourites, which for me means the great works of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, and many highlights of Romantic and Modernist composers. I started making playlists of my absolute favourites, firstly as it made locating them easier, but then I remembered from my teaching days the idea from Wellbeing Theory (associated with Dr. Martin Seligman’s Positive Psychology) that musical playlists could be used to spread happiness and contentment in your life, rather than, say, merely entertainment. The concept of wellbeing is an often misunderstood one. When we hear the word ‘happy’, many of us think of rather simplistic, superficial perkiness, or the kind of forced jollity encouraged by American motivational speakers (or fast food chains). Seligman wanted to encourage genuine happiness in many domains; the term ‘wellbeing’ is more all-encompassing and, I think, involves a more middle-ground awareness not only of the gloriously pleasant and fun, but of the more slow-paced, profound contentment that can come from an awareness of the ordinary, the everyday or even the poignant or tragic. (An idea brought home by Pixar’s brilliant “Inside Out”, I might mention.)
So here is where my search began within the realm of music: I was seeking not just “fun toons” but something more therapeutic.
Popular music
Popular (non-classical) music, to me, is the music of society – it’s music for dancing to at parties or entertaining crowds at concerts. But we aren’t always in a social situation and social music without society can seem lonely or out of place. Furthermore, social music tends to be rather superficial because it must appeal to the tastes of a broad audience. The result is a certain sameness: pick your genre and that will usually indicate the mood; songs generally have the conventional verse-chorus-verse form with only slight variations on this. This music can get old quickly, suggesting pop music has a short shelf-life requiring constant novelty (who knew?). Plus much of the profundity of popular music comes from un-musical associations: through the verbal expression of the lyrics, or via nostalgia – ‘remember the first time I heard that song?’ Am I valuing this music or my own capacity to reminisce?
Western classical
Like Beethoven, with a blast of disapproval, I shifted from my popular playlists, and returned to my roots – in Western classical. Here there was more complexity: music reflecting great narratives, historical and philosophical developments, even experimental art. Here the mood could be fractious and ever-changing (Beethoven tends to interrupt conversation at parties), the formal structures diverse and unpredictable: yes, much of it is in sonata form but with longer duration, more diverse instrumentation, and complex musical techniques. I sought Classical works without too much doom-and-gloom as my goal was contentment not morose depression – so I focussed on works with a balance of moods and lots of interest – like Beethoven’s 9th: rousing melodies, contrasting tone colours, inventive variation and development, balanced form, a satisfying movement from dark to light…
And yet, even here, I began to have my own doubtful ruminations (in the lower strings). Even complex and artful developments become learned, predictable and stale over time. Even manageable variation in mood made listening difficult because you couldn’t experience satisfactory resolution unless you sat through the whole thing – and Beethoven’s 9th goes for over an hour. (A lot of Western Classical is essentially in a state of perpetual instability until the final resolving cadence…) And I loved those beautiful singable melodies yet I kept waking up in the night with Bach polyphony or Beethoven variations going around and around in my head. It seems Western Classical is just a more long-winded, complex, highbrow form of popular music, its epic masterpieces actually just a refined form of bombastic entertainment.
Most Western music is too ‘rational’
The problem, I think, has to do with discrete formal structures and ‘verbal’ phrasing. Western music is so very specific, and not only in terms of its notation systems. Each component of a piece of Western music is precisely positioned to produce ‘X’ effect – establishing a theme or varying it or resolving. This makes Western music almost like language, like someone speaking, because language is similarly made up of discrete parts arranged in a specific order. Consider a melody like ‘Greensleeves’ or ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’: the first phrase ends on a musical comma, like someone asking a question or starting a discussion. The next finishes the ‘sentence’ with the perfect cadence acting as a full stop. (Beethoven’s “Hunt” piano sonata no. 18 embarks on a whole flirtatious conversation!) I was seeking music that was meaningful throughout, not just when it had finished its ‘conversation’ (its often laborious ‘explanation’). Furthermore, it’s full of what I call ‘eventism’ – instead of music as a flow of pure experience, it becomes strictly linear with a beginning, middle and end like a narrative. This isn’t music for the everyday but for special occasions where the whole apparatus of a concert with a focussed audience has been assembled; it’s ‘chunky’ and inflexible, almost ‘commodified’.
Indian Classical music
Then I remembered an odd experience that I had some 20 years ago. While studying mythology and religion, I thought I’d take a look at Indian Classical music: I did a quick Google search, watched a Youtube clip of Ravi Shankar playing at Woodstock, and spontaneously burst into tears. Odd that. Mythologist Joseph Campbell described Indian music’s powerful effect as deceptively emerging from the ordinary and everyday. You listen and it just sounds like musicians tuning up, then all of a sudden you notice that it has been this amazing music for some time, occasionally even the most exciting dance rhythms and all, and you didn’t even notice. It occurred to me now that it would be just like India, with its unique continuity of humankind’s ancient religious traditions (free from the corruptions of excessive literariness, dogmatic morality, defeatist eschatology, or secular rationality and individuality), to have discovered the healthiest type of music. Typical.
So what’s so good about it? Firstly, a majority of the music is improvised, which provides freedom and spontaneity, plus it makes no two performances identical so the music is hard to get tired of. However, improvisation can sound disjointed and rather structure-less, leading to the effect of aimless noise (even nihilism). This is usually remedied by frequent repetitions of set structures, such as effectively a kind of ‘chorus’ in between improvised variations by a performer – although this often returns us to the verse-chorus-verse structure of the popular song. Jazz, for example, also utilises standard chord structures (the famous ‘12-bar blues’) and consistently syncopated (‘swing’) rhythms. I find jazz to be either boring or too repetitive, plus its constant mood of ‘cool’ suggests this is music of society and fashion again. But in Indian Classical the method of providing structure to the improvisation is uncommonly brilliant. Enter the famous raga.
A raga is a strange combination between a collection of pitches (like a scale) and not so much a melody as melodic structures. This blurring of harmonic and melodic elements is a clue to its effectiveness as a loose improvisational structuring device (along with the rhythmic counterpart, the tala). The raga determines the scale of notes that the improviser uses, but also includes rules of melodic movement with many, for example, having a slightly different pattern of notes on the way up than on the way down. The performer begins most pieces with an alap, a slow-paced improvisation on the raga (that part that sounds like tuning up), often leading to a gat or bandish, an instrumental or vocal composition before more improvisation and a jhala, a fast-paced ending section where the rhythm overpowers the melody. Syncopation is prominent but not within the metre itself (like with jazz) – it’s not regular so it ebbs and flows rather than ‘swings’.
The instrumentation is intimate, spare and consistent, usually made up of no more than a melodic line, a drone, and percussion, usually a tabla (twin set of drums). The melodic line is performed by a vocalist or one of various plucked string instruments such as the sitar, sarod, or veena, or a reed instrument such as the bansuri (bamboo flute) or harmonium (a kind of accordion). The drone is a pedal note on the tonic (foundation note of the raga) usually played on the sitar-like tambura or tempura. The melodic line and the tabla don’t rhythmically coincide closely, contributing to the sense of flow, enhanced by the drone which pervades the performance with an other-worldly unity, famously symbolising Om, the sonic representation of the Divine essence of the universe and/or consciousness. (Figuratively, the drone is the ongoing foundation of the universe, while the raga and tala dance and play out particular expressions of species, environment, times, consciousness or other potentials.)
All of this results in hardly any discrete ‘sectionality’ or ‘eventism’. Both the melodic raga and the rhythmic tala are characterised not by restrictive structures but something like what is called in Western music ‘motivic’ development or ‘motivic cells’: small patterns of just a few notes (or rhythms) which recur and alternate but don’t often repeat precisely or with exact regularity. This ensures unity (since it is made up of restricted elements) while permitting irregular phrasing, retaining interest and avoiding ‘language effects’. The performer can also execute small glissandos or vibrata in the melodic line (vocally or by employing the pitch-wobble effects on the sitar), again eliminating discrete note partitions. Even the sectional boundaries between the formal structures like the alap and gat/bandish don’t sound discrete, organically merging into each other.
Most radical of all (for the Western listener) is the absence of harmonic progression – the one raga is the foundation of the whole piece, and there are no true chords at all. (This is like being stuck in, say, F major and never encountering a chord progression.) This would be monotonous except that without harmonisation (the pitched elements are mainly solo or in unison) the listener hears more a constant possibility of harmony rather than either an absence or presence. I realised that, in Western music, while harmony contributes to directionality and mood, it actually restricts meaning by slicing the music vertically into sections; much of Western music is ‘locked’ to the chord assigned to that particular metric unit to avoid discord thus limiting flexibility, motion, and interpretative possibilities, each moment thus having limited ‘meaning’. Harmony in Indian Classical is only implied by the sequential pitches in the raga as the notes only truly coincide with the tonic drone and with the sympathetic strings of an instrument like the sitar, if present. (Sympathetic strings are not struck directly by a performer but make a kind of resonant, sometimes slightly dissonant buzz as a result of the principle of harmonic vibration, like with tuning forks.) The effect blurs harmonic boundaries but in a highly organic way (considering the distortion is made by natural vibrations of harmonic likeness).
The overall effect of listening to Indian Classical is calming but not boring – subtle enough to be entertaining but not immediately thrilling as this would shatter the calm. Neither is it ever depressing or drab. Furthermore, it can be faded in and out at just about any point without greatly distorting its overall effect. On first listening, it resembles folk music, but with what sounds like a weak, meandering, unmemorable melodic line, but, ironically, the lack of a conventional melody with its discrete phrasing is where the majority of the interest and invention is located – no sleepless nights with annoying ‘earworms’ here. Indian Classical has some unfortunate associations with the hippie movement, and it does seem an appropriate accompaniment to free love and drug-taking with its free-flowing nature and its psychedelic drone, but careful listening suggests that you are actually only hearing the overlap between bohemian ideas and the more complex psychological depths of Indian religion, out of which this music emerged. This association needs to be seen through in the same way that appreciating organ music requires a conscious dissociation with staid Christian church services (or, similarly, rap with criminal activity).
The overall effect of Indian Classical is one of flowing calm, but with a sense of understated variation or suspended interest that I never really get tired of. I can listen to it anywhere at anytime and it both soothes and occupies one’s mind. (The ideal for me is Indian Classical with something similarly low-key to occupy me visually such as going on a walk around my neighbourhood or watching videos of motion such as Youtube videos of train journeys or drone footage.) The effect is fulfilling in a distinctly ordinary and human way.
More Wellbeing Music
My newfound appreciation for Indian Classical set me wondering what other types of music might be similarly therapeutic, if for no other reason than it is nice to mix it up sometimes. Here is what I discovered:
European medieval plainchant
Gregorian chant is of course unaccompanied vocal music sung in monophonic unison, without time signatures, built from non-diatonic modal scales, with melodies constructed in arch-like phrases which, significantly, are not expressive of specific emotions nor depict discrete images. This means that plainsong isn’t declamatory; it has no message to impart in a ‘verbal’ way except the pure sequence and sound of the tones themselves. While later European church music can sound pompous and moralistic through its depiction of Christ’s suffering, God’s blessings or pious outrage, medieval plainsong reflects the belief that the Latin text (itself mystically obscure) and its modal melodic lines were holy in themselves – much like Indian ragas. The development of the Notre Dame organum and discant styles of Leoninus and Perotinus through the 12th and 13th centuries largely maintain the sense of restful suspension in motion (Leoninus even employs a drone) often with just two voices (still no diatonic triads). Beyond into the 14th century and the Renaissance, I find the mood becomes too ‘secular’ with polyphony leading to harmonic ‘chunking’ and more prominent use of thirds adding more ‘mundane’ drama. Plainchant can sound monotonous though, but to break up a long session of Indian Classical, it can be quite refreshing, especially, for some reason, in the morning hours.
Western Classical ‘Impressionism’
Largely by chance, the second movement of Ravel’s piano suite ‘Gaspard de la nuit’, entitled ‘Le Gibet’, is, in spirit, very close to an Indian raga piece. Musical ‘Impressionism’, named after the art movement with its preoccupation with hazy spontaneity, sunlight, and colour rather than discrete detail, is largely represented by Debussy and Ravel, who employed not only loose metric pulses, fragmentary melodic motifs and occasional non-diatonic harmony, but ambiguous tonality. Here, for example, the third of a given triad might be omitted, or blurred by including both the major and minor third, thus rendering the chord neither major or minor, or technically both. This creates a suspension and mysticism even while using diatonic tonality and conventional time signatures on paper. ‘Le gibet’ also includes imitation of a bell repeatedly tolling quietly in B flat which acts just like a drone. I prefer Impressionist piano works but I suppose Impressionist orchestral music could be just as appropriate although I worry that its complex shifts in tone colour and occasional post-Romantic crescendos can break the spell. Too much Impressionism can sometimes lead to emotional mush but it is invigorating interspersed with some raga or plainchant – indeed, both composers frequently feature on Classical ‘Chill’ albums because they are so therapeutic.
Other kinds of traditional ethnomusic
Most forms of prehistoric, traditional, ancient or medieval music are worth investigating as they emerged from cultures with a religious rather than modern aesthetic sensibility, with greater focus on uniting a community and abstract psychological centring (which I think should really be the highest aims of all art). They tend to focus on contemplative sound rather than verbal messaging and, when they have harmonies at all (rather than remaining monophonic), many of these are modal, as in, their harmonic scales are divided more evenly like the pentatonic scale (often linked to mystic philosophies of the 5 elements). The more even division of the octave produces balanced suspension again with the absence of the conflict associated with the diatonic 7th leading note which lends Western music its hyper-dramatic quality. However, I’ve found many ethnomusics can be so subtle in our modern context that it can sound like unmusical squawking or clinking noises: perhaps more listening is needed. I enjoy Chinese traditional music particularly played on the zheng or guzheng (plucked zither) which again features pentatonic scales, motivic melodic patterns, plus glissando and vibrato. I also don’t mind traditional drumming, whether African ritual or Taiko from Japan; Tibetan meditative chants (lots of Om here); and reconstructions of ancient Celtic intoned singing from Gaul.
Ambient modernism
You might have noticed the overlap between the musical elements I’ve been pursuing and certain types of modernist electronic music, sometimes accompanied by whale sounds, and dubiously marketed as ‘meditation music.’ This type of therapeutic music can be made quite easily with a cheap electric keyboard and very basic musical ability. This can sound cheap and nasty though, and can also be very boring, so I reserve this category of ambient modernism for pieces which, despite their apparent abstract simplicity, are actually quite complex (or which I just happen to like). Something like Ligeti’s ‘Atmospheres’ for example, which you might know as the monolith music from “2001: A Space Odyssey”, as its drone-like abstract micro-pulses are more complex than they may at first appear (as director Stanley Kubrick found out when he couldn’t find a film composer who could convincingly emulate it). Charles Ives’ “Unanswered Question” is another, and there are elements of ambient electronica that may also suffice. You might think Minimalist Classical would be appropriately contemplative, but I find it way too regular, repetitive and finally, empty and cold, particularly the more monotonous Philip Glass variety. Minimalism needs more irregularity to be interesting which is why I prefer the proto-Minimalism of Sibelius’ heavenly 5th Symphony which I can’t stop listening to, despite its occasional ear-wormy effects which it manages to achieve even with motifs and not real melodies.
Nature soundscapes
Recordings of rain or ocean waves or whale sounds aren’t music of course but their organic irregularities are comparable in effect to therapeutic music so I occasionally indulge in these too if only for contrast and to give music itself a rest.
Western Classicism (dubious)
My final category of wellbeing music isn’t entirely successful but it’s close. My criticisms of Western Classical always return to the instability and unsettling drama of diatonic harmony, melodramatic orchestration and complicated ‘intellectual’ sectionality, but what if, I reasoned, we found Classical pieces which are so toned down and subtle – almost humble? The music of the Enlightenment (1750-1800) (or ‘Classical’ era) is promising as it was largely a reaction against dramatic emotionality and was inspired by, ironically, the age of early science and rationality. The problem is, since the goal was to compose music with, for instance, clear singable melodies, I’d need to find works which failed a bit or were a little ordinary in achieving their brief. Mozart and early Beethoven were disqualified here, but Haydn, particularly in his less remarkable, more unassuming mature piano sonatas, could almost be called therapeutic. Similarly, with Neo-Classicism of the early 20th century. Stravinsky, for example, deliberately employed ‘motivic cells’ in his melodic lines, but I needed to shy away from his more dramatic ballets and focus instead on his more restrained works such as his Symphony in C, his Dumberton Oaks, or Ebony Concerto. Even then, the muted, suspended quality of the music tends to undershoot the ineffable and ends up sounding merely ambiguous – but music of this sort is at least rather neutral and certainly no worse than an uninspired droning noise (like that made by the air conditioner restarting).
To conclude, I have to report that I am much happier listening to all this Wellbeing music. I hope what I’ve written doesn’t sound too arcane or abstruse: the musical effects of Indian Classical are there to be experienced. I think this reflection raises some interesting questions about the purpose of art in our rational, individualistic, commodified age. For example, to what extent are we merely distracting (entertaining) ourselves even with our most apparently highbrow, complex or deeply personal amusements, and what unrecognised strain does this put on our mental wellbeing? How might we regain some of what we have lost, not only in the music we listen to but in other aesthetic and spiritual areas of our lives? Are mostly social benefits of engagement with artistic novelty and intellectual ‘thematic’ exploration worth it considering the cost incurred to our temperaments through the accompanying sense of alienation, and the resulting search for something more meaningful?
Thomas's Rant 