Overview of the Overview

I don't recall how I first heard about Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and His Emissary, but I started to watch the author interviews. Usually I'll hear something and connect it with how I've approached music.

When you perform music in a group situation or even if you're overdubbing, you're listening to the other parts and you're reacting to them. According to his theory of brain hemispheres, the left brain tends to focus on the "prey"-- it's focusing on one detail but at the same time it has to use the right brain in order to get the gestalt. It has to be aware of everything that's going on around it while it's focusing on the one task. That's exactly the way it should work in music but it takes skill and talent to be able to do that. Practice is necessary to get to the point where you can simultaneously carry those two things out. In a group situation when people are all doing that you would say that it's functioning optimally. So if you use that as a metaphor for society in general, take climate change for instance--that's a left-brain thing because we have to focus on specific details as well as the system-level details over 50-100 years. So it's an overview of what the two parts are doing without focusing on either.

There are things he says that I don't agree with or are unclear where they relate to music, specifically rhythm. Is the ability to play rhythms left or right brain? It should be right-brain because it has to do with flow. But the practice to get to the level of flow must be all left-brain and linear. If you can't feel a polyrhythm intuitively, then the left-brain has to be the domain. But even then, does an intellectual understanding of rhythm create flow? I think not. Music as a universal might be a right-brain phenomenon in its best manifestation.

Rhythm is usually the thing that gets missed when people first study music because they are concerned about how it can be right-brained, i.e. to make it flow to the extent that it is out of the linearity of the left brain into more "spiritual" dimensions of the right hemisphere(s). They may envision themselves playing music with total flow without realizing that skill is the domain of the left hemisphere initially. People tend to focus on the melody and the harmony--whether the singer is singing in tune and has a good shape and tone. That's a left hemisphere function and conflicts with right hemisphere flow. But that is a facet of the culture of the West. Right hemisphere flows in other cultures don't involve precision and analysis, so the music doesn't have to be perfect.

Ultimately, playing music is not about self-surveillance--it'surrendering to the opposite, which is the right brain--at least according to him. Musicians will find themselves somewhere between the hemispheres, especially if you're writing and playing.