Hemispherics

As many musicians may remember, the 80s were a period of fusing philosophy, self-help, and general New Age mysticism with music, from Jung and Joseph Campbell to Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson.

For me, it was the Police's Synchronicity album. Sting saying that he saw himself as a Jungian analyst when he got older somehow piqued my interest in both what he was doing musically and what he was saying in the lyrics. When you reach your 30s the introspection typically begins.

The entire Collected Works of Jung were at my local library and I read many of them and then became the access point to other books on psychology and philosophy and continues to this day.

What I've realized is that music is an access point to a certain spirituality. Many other things can be, but music is unique in that is suffused in the passage of time and the musician feels a special connection with it. (For me, fast tempos slow down time).

Recently I've been watching talks and interviews with Kenny Werner, a jazz pianist who cut his teeth in that same time frame (mid-80s to early 90s). Jazz in particular is a magnet for this kind of thinking, and as I have learned after reading (some of) Iain McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary, playing music is largely a function of the right hemisphere because the analytical left hemisphere can interfere. But does it really? Both have to be used in music: A composer has to be in the left hemisphere to do the work, but the right hemisphere should ultimately be the Master.

It's ironic that for all the interest in today's society in psychology and philosophy none of the new music seems to be spiritually influenced by it. I know from experience, inputs from other domains can change your thinking about it, which may be a function of the left hemisphere (in which that change seems deliberate as a form of free will) or the function of the right hemisphere playing devil's advocate with it.

The use of tension and release is a way to use both, and interestingly is something that is elemental to jazz and jazz improvisation, but in other areas as well. Frank Lloyd Wright frequently used compression/decompression with things like low ceilings and narrow hallways leading to big rooms (a corpus callosum if you like). But jazz, like classic music, is also very concerned with rules, but jazz (or any improvised music based on codified forms), is unique in that it lets the right hemisphere be the Master. But the left hemisphere has to have the opportunity to do its thing when necessary. In music, saying a certain section is 16 bars and repeats twice is a function of the left hemisphere because the right hemisphere could never get it straight. It would want to be different all the time.

My running list of Hemispherics: