"The world is more a dance than an equation"
A grumpy comment on Iain McGilchrist, and some reflections on music and Mozart
Prejudiced and impatient as I am, I have never engaged properly with the work of Iain McGilchrist. I struggled with The Master and His Emissary, and have not read his recent massive book The Matter with Things. Left brain analytical, right brain holistic? A helpful metaphor to a limited extent, perhaps, but there needs no 600,000 words, my lord, come from a tome to tell us this. (It’s the emboldened stupidity talking.)
For some who are little like me, as well as for others who are more generous, Understanding Iain McGilchrist's Worldview by David McIlroy via Perspectiva may be useful. At just 1% of the length of The Matter With Things, it can easily be read in a single sitting.
I won’t attempt to engage with most of the points in McIlroy’s summary, let alone the book itself [1], but will rather note one of the ones that happened to stand out for me on first reading:
…being is not a static quality but a continuous presencing. “If one espouses a view of the world as a flow, not as a collection of things; then all that exists is not just, inertly, being, but always ‘be-coming’; and time and movement is bound up in that very concept.”
A reason this stood out for me may be because I have found myself coming back to half-familiar thoughts and experiences in relation to music and its flow from a slightly different angle.
After ten years singing a repertoire of ‘world’, folk and contemporary non-classical harmonies with a community choir, I am visiting for a while with another choir that sings what my old community choir leader sometimes refers to, half-disparagingly but affectionately, as ‘Western white art music.’ The primary draw was Mozart’s Requiem, which I have never sung.
Studying and performing a work like the Requiem, one learns to be more analytical and more appreciative of the individual parts — notably the inner voices of alto and tenor. But one also becomes more appreciative of the whole. I am singing the bass (for me, a formidable challenge), and in rehearsal we sometimes sing the parts individually and then together, and I marvel at how the separate lines, individually beautiful, come together in counterpoint and harmony that one experiences as more than the parts.
Music, by its nature, is all about flow and becoming. It is, as Thomas Browne put it, ‘an Hyroglyphical and shadowed lesson of the whole World.’ And, as I noted in A Book of Noises, to make or listen to music requires the stimulation of neurons in more regions of the brain than almost any other activity, linking deeply into areas devoted to vision, motor control, emotion, speech, memory, planning and sexuality. ‘What might be special about music,’ writes the musician and psychologist Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, ‘is not so much that it is different from everything else, but rather that it draws everything else together.’
Something of the power of the Requiem is well expressed by the presenter Tom Service:
‘Mozart’s Requiem stands not for the end of life, after all, but for the intensity of time-stopping life enhancement that we experience, and not only at the end of our lives… The lesson of the Requiem isn’t a morbid invitation to join Mozart on his deathbed. It’s a reason to be more like Mozart in his life, to be in the perpetual light of each moment, to relish and celebrate…’
A unique quality of Mozart's music, Service suggests, is
his virtuosity of empathy... an acceptance and a revelation of a multiplicity of feelings; the creation of different emotional perspectives at the same time in the same bar...
Footnote
[1] e.g. ‘Consciousness is prior to matter’? Given how little is understood about either, what grounds for placing one as prior? (Maybe I should read the book!). I like this from Jaron Lanier:
Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.