Over my many years of musical experience – learning, practicing, theory, improvisation, composition, performing, and teaching, I settled upon a useful framework that encapsulates the simplicity found on the other side of complexity.
Music is an enormous topic and incorporates and develops virtually every human capacity – hearing to be sure, cognitive skills like memory and creativity, physical coordination, sensitivity, emotional processing, linguistic development, just to name several.
With my affinity for spirituality, I was and am quite drawn to the Taoist principles of yin and yang, the most archetypal of categories that describe duality and its interactions. In the course of my musical development, I also discovered the terms tension and release form a core principle underlying music.
Mapping the two together yields the following: yang would be the tension to the release of yin.
Is this merely a case of exotic substitution for perfectly serviceable terms. So what?
A notable insight for me was the following: tension and release, or musical yang and yin, arise in every aspect of musicality.
The central three dimensions of music are rhythm, melody and harmony. To use a spatial metaphor, melody is the horizontal dimension to the verticality of harmony, with rhythm functioning as the underlying substrate upon which the other two dance.
But the more you listen, the more you find, which I’ll touch on further.
What I discovered, during my formative jazz phase learning to improvise, was that there are correspondences among these three dimensions. A particularly dramatic epiphany arose when I came across Hal Galper’s Forward Motion, the main takeaway being that beat one is the last rather than the first beat, and is thus a place for rest rather than beginning.
This struck me like a lightning bolt, though upon reflection is in accord with the other two dimensions of rhythm and harmony. The first note of any key is called the tonic, and the analogy of home base is often used. It is the central note upon which all other notes in the scale relate. It is the same harmonically as well, with the tonic chord almost always being the final chord of resolution in a musical piece, unless the performers are being cheeky, as often happens in more modern music genres and jazz in particular.
As mentioned earlier, other instances of musical yin and yang are found everywhere – in dynamics (loud-soft), sonority (consonance and dissonance), tempo (slow-fast), timbre (compare the distortion of heavy metal guitar with the mellifluous sonority of a cello), meter (even and odd time signatures), and even in form (think of the contrast between a ballad and a jig).
Chords, scales, keys and modes; extensions and alterations, the oft-jarring sound of bebop jazz with its uptempo athleticism and intentional dissonance, or the sublime simplicity of toning the same note with others – can be encompassed with yin and yang.
With this understanding, much of music’s complexity can be simplified to playing with dimensions of yin and yang.
But first, you must hear it.
However, do not simply hear with your ears and mind casting judgments with likes and dislikes (though of course one is entitled to their preferences).
In order to hear the sound of Tao, listen with your whole body, and feel.
Forwarding this one to my son. Brings back the memory of your enlivening conversation with him about music.