"The most important criterion of melody for Gurney is that it be a sequence of notes that together have a certain minimum “rightness.” This rightness can be understood, it seems, counterfactually, in terms of the effects that changing single notes would bring about […] The special quality or character of a given melody is dependent on every note it comprises; change any one and invariably the result will be either no melody or new melody. Any true conception of the form of a melody requires apprehending each and every element for what it is as it occurs. By contrast, the general outline or contour of a melody gives practically no idea of the melody whatsoever. The essence of a melody lies in the specific notes that go to make it up, and not in anything more general that may be abstracted from them." (Levinson 1997, 4-5)
Reading the excerpt from the Turangalîla-Symphonie against Gurney’s criteria (as told by Levinson), we will have to admit that the important thing in Messiaen’s sweeping gestures is precisely only "the general outline". It is possible to change pitches within these movements without changing the essence of the gesture/figure. What we hear as a melody is not so much a sharp line as it is a fuzzy one—a pitch cloud where the inner details are unimportant.
The important question then becomes: what does replacing (traditional) melodies with such 'clouds' in which the details are interchangeable do to our listening experience? My answer, as stated at the very beginning of this text, is that they make us take on a kind of 'psychic distance' to the melodies, similar to the spatial distance we have to adjust to in order to see the lilies emerge from the paint that Monet applied to the canvas.
The very opposite of sweepingly gestural music is pointillistic music. Consider for example the traditional music for the gǔqín. This music, with all its many varieties of ornaments to a monophonic melody—its different shades of vibrati, soft dynamics, and contrasting usage of registers and playing techniques—contains effectivities that afford, contrary to Lizst and Messiaen, a very 'close listening'–a detailed listening. If the pitch sequence was presented with homogeneous timbres (where each pitch is plucked in the same way), this detailed listening would not appear. Because of this pointillistic articulation, I listen to this music with a kind of microaudial attention to the sounds. Because of the heightened focus on the timbre of single sounds, the difference between for example stopped notes and open strings becomes incredibly vast and impactful, and I know few other kinds of music where this happens.
Generally speaking, music that invites 'detailed listening' seems to operate at certain perceptual boundaries. A prerequisite to being musically attuned to a mode of listening where the intimate details of sound become so impactful as in the gǔqín music seems to be a ground of musical simplicity. On a temporal plane, enough time has to be given to the listener. The music can not move too fast. On a textural plane, certain boundaries regarding the textural density need to be taken into consideration. The music cannot be too 'thick' and complex, but rather must be slender. In the gǔqín music, the articulation of simple, slowly evolving monophonic melodies combined with a pointillistic inhomogeneity in the components making up a phrase seem to invite this 'detailed' listening.
Figure 3, which features just one single right-hand stroke from the famous composition Shuǐxiān (水仙), illustrates the inner workings of this gǔqín repertoire. The pitch is stopped with the ring finger (名指）at the huī (徽) position wài (外＝卜) on the fourth (四) string, plucked with the middle finger inwards (gōu 勾). The sound is starting a little to the right and makes a short glissando down to the indicated pitch. This ornament is called zhù ( 注). After the pitch 卜 is clearly established, the left hand moves up (上) to the huī position 9,8 (九 八) where the ornament náo is applied (猱), which is a sliding movement that moves up and down twice from the pitch where the second movement is smaller in its scope. Landing again at 9,8 this “phrase” is finished with the yǎn (罨): while keeping the ring finger on 9,8 one 'places' the thumb (大指 = 大) on the huī position 9 hard enough to make that pitch sound.
This is a complex melody indeed but it is a complexity that invites the listener to actualize the subtleties of sound. It is therefore a very different complexity from the cascade of pitches employed in the excerpt by Liszt. The mode of listening is one of closeness, rather than distance, and one of detailed intimacy with the variegated sounds. The variety of ways of plucking the strings and ways of ornamenting them creates an overall pointillistic texture where each note is given heightened attention and a unique profile.
Note that this is definitely not the same as saying that each sound is played as if it existed outside of larger musical phrases and forms. Such an attitude would be a kind of musical variation on the visual connoisseurship that sometimes, according to its academic critics, could be found in extremist fractions of the wénrén-huà (文人画). For these particular literati painters, the true meaning of any painting was placed primarily in the brushwork rather than in the depicted scene. The ink traces of the brush on silk were read and interpreted in a way divorced from the figurative 'subjects' that were made up from combining such brush strokes. When these extremist literati focused their attention on the qín, an inappropriate focus on 'the single sounds' and the 'touch' of the musician was to be expected. Van Gulik, who to a large extent introduced the qín to European audiences, was colored by the approach of the literati when he described qín music as being 'not primarily melodic' (1940, 1-2) and that the beauty of it was in the sculpting out of each separate pitch as an entity in itself. James Watt (1981) describes this tendency as especially strong in the Guandong school:
"It is well known to those who appreciate the Chinese visual arts that in later Chinese painting the expressive brushwork became more important than the representational content of the picture; hence the movement towards a kind of 'abstract expressionism' which relied on greatly simplified pictorial conventions for any allusion to physical reality. Similarly, the sensuous tones of the qin strings during the same period [from Ming and forward] became predominant in qin music in many regional schools of playing, and the melodic line, which is the other important element of the music, became neglected to the point of almost total disregard. This tendency is particularly notable in the Guangdong 廣東 school of playing in recent years" (Watt, 1981).
With traditional qín music, it is simply not the case that we hear each sound 'in and of itself'. Sounds are always related to a melody, phrase, form, and modality. But we are, it must be acknowledged, simultaneously with this melody allowed to listen very closely to the separate sounds and discover their unique riches by way of a pointillistic articulation. To say that we hear 'each sound by itself' might be a pedagogical device when we want to direct a student's attention to something that we find valuable in this music—the most private intimacies of sound–, but we cannot say that it is an accurate description of the adequate mode of listening to this music. In order to describe this adequate mode of listening, we also have to emphasize how the sounds connect. The importance of finding a balance between melody and pointillism was indeed addressed by the master Xú Shàng Yíng (徐上瀛) in his 17th-century qín-treatise Xī Shān Qín Kuàng (溪山琴況). Master Xú stresses that in order to not lose ourselves in the intricacies of present-moment awareness and the subtleties (細 xì) of sound, we have to bring a careful balance to the interplay of macro-and micro-perspectives. This is expressed beautifully by master Xú in the perhaps paradoxical saying that: “notes must sound tightly arranged though appearing sporadic; they must rise and fall gracefully and be well-linked though appearing disconnected” (in Tien, 2015, 88).
Master Xú's paradox expresses the insight that the three times of past, present, and future must be allowed to exist unobstructedly. The music must be performed so that neither past, present, nor, future is given primacy. Xú's paradox has an interesting parallel to Buddhist meditation practice as I understand it: while the novice meditators focuses on 'the present moment' in order to free themselves from conceptual proliferation and 'mental time-travel', this focus on the present moment alone must, when advancing on the path, ultimately be replaced by an experience of time that is not divided up into past, present, and future. The experienced meditator actualizes instead the total interfusion of past, present, and future as elaborated in the Avataṃsaka Sūtra's teaching of emptiness as the unobstructed interpenetration of phenomena.
Michael Pisaro (2009) pointed out that in a lot of early Wanderweiser music, the heightened focus on silence and very few, sparse sounds caused a heightened focused listening where single sounds took on the complexity of the music that Xenakis only achieved with masses of sound: “Once I did start to hear it, over the course of the nearly two hours duration, the music became almost unbelievably rich: there seemed to be more sound, more tightly compacted in this miniature world, than in the statistical complexities of Xenakis”. But Pisaro’s remark must be read as a metaphor: it is not really the case that listening to this prototypic Wandelweiser-piece provides the 'same' type of complexity as listening to the prototypical Xenakis piece. With Xenaki's sweeping gestures, there is none of the intimacy and closeness that the pointillistic approach favored by Wandelweiser composers affords. But it is true that since our listening to the sparse sounds becomes so detailed and rich, we can metaphorically compare it to the rich, busy, thick music by Xenakis.
Another point that is important to emphasize—one that might be slightly misrepresented with Pisaro's quote above—is that this 'detailed' listening that pointillism affords is not so much a deep listening as it leads to attention to the 'surface' of sounds. The constantly shifting timbres of the qín melody draw attention to each sound's unique mode of appearing, and by bringing focus to sounds' mere appearance, the empty, transparent, aspect of sound is revealed: the detailed listening does not lead to us going deep into the sound but rather makes us realize that sounds are empty and transparent–that surface appearances are all there is. This difference between depth and surface has nothing to do with how 'absorbed' we are in the experience—it has to do with the quality of the mode of listening, not the quality of our engagement with the mode. Attending closely to the sounds themselves means that we become aware of their ground of emptiness. The edges around phenomena become transparent. This is because everything we discern closely enough disappears into its fundamental empty nature. There is a tendency in our ordinary everyday (saṃsāric) life for the empty natures of particular phenomena to be hidden from us. This is so because we do not discern the phenomena closely. Dùshùn (杜順), the first patriarch of the Huáyán school, described how the shì (事)—the particular phenomena—can hide the lǐ (理)—the universal principle. Even though shì ultimately is indistinguishable from lǐ, saṃsāric causal events can lead to situations where "only the events appear, but the Li does not appear" (trans. Chang, 1971, 217). It is like "when water becomes waves, the aspect of motion appears while the aspect of stillness does not appear at all" (Chang, 1971, 217) When the movements of the water become too big, we grasp it from a distance as a wave. The form hides its empty nature. What is sweepingly gestural in music and sounds like billowy masses are just like such waves that hide the lǐ.
As Dùshùn points out, it is also through the shì that the lǐ can be revealed. The process in which gestures hide the empty nature of phenomena can be turned around so that phenomena reveal their empty nature. This happens when shì intimates lǐ: "When Shih grasps Li, Shih is emptied and Li is substantiated; and because the Shih is emptied, the Li that "dwells" in the total Shih vividly manifests itself" (Chang, 1971, 217). In music, to have sounds vividly manifest themselves as dwelling in emptiness can be achieved by a pointillistic approach, and not with a billowy approach. This is one of the reasons that pointillistic approaches are useful ingredients in Buddhist poetics that through art seeks to intimate emptiness. In emptiness-experiences, sounds arise and disappear as fleeting, empty 'surface' phenomena, as empty movements of Mind. But using pointillistically varied textures is just one way of fascilitating a 'detailed' musical attunement that leads to a revelation of sound's emptiness. Other important ways constitute specific usages of intonation, dynamics, and timbre. These different parameters often work together. With regards to the gǔqín, the soft volume, the shifting timbres, the complexity in intonation, and the pointilistic structure through which these are presented together create very intimate and 'detailed' modes of listening.
This focus on the 'surface' rather than 'depth' of phenomena is revealed in the music's openness to co-exist with the surrounding non-objectified background ambient sounds; the music does not only lead to a concentrated focus on the sounds of the music but also makes other ambient sounds present. These background sounds become present but without becoming the explicit object of attention. They become, in other words, present as emptiness. As explained above, this happens because the detailed listening allows for the edges of the sounds to become transparent; the sounds are recognized to dwell in the unarticulated emptiness that constitutes their very nature. Morton (2007) captures this phenomenon under the aesthetic quality of aperture. Music with the aesthetic quality of 'aperture' is open to its surroundings as if the music was always beginning anew from the ground of emptiness and the ambient sounds surrounding it. The quality of aperture comes about because this "beginning-ness" of sound is explicitly thematized through a detailed listening to the 'materiality' of sound. Morton (2010) likens this to not having a frame around a painting or not being able to distinguish a minimalist sculpture from its surroundings. There is an element of 'uncertainty' as to where the 'art' begins. The contact between the sound and the surrounding environment, as well as between the musician and the instrument, becomes content. As the soft, plucked gǔqín tones fade away, the detailed attention to the subtlety and 'empty materiality' of sound—the 'close listening' to surface phenomena—extends into the surrounding field of noises and dissolves any artificial barrier between 'music' and ambient sounds. Ambient sounds can then continually be presencing with the sounds of the qín, but we do not start to listen to the ambient sounds as if they were part of the composition, nor do they ever become the direct focus of our attention, and neither are they rejected from the musical attunement. The ambient sounds are present as empty forms and perceived as what Dōgen called without-thinking. It is in this way that we can say that the music does not create its own 'virtual world' but has an 'openness' that invites an intimation of emptiness.
It is important to note that this openness to background sounds never happens in music that uses sweeping gestures, such as the Turangalîla. When listening to the Turangalîla, it seems to be part of that music’s adequate mode of listening to 'ignore' ambient sounds. Saito, after attending a symphonic concert, accurately voices this feature of much orchestral music: “The outside traffic noise, the cough of the audience […] are […] consciously ignored, though they are part of our experience contemporaneous with the symphonic sound” (2007, 7).
There is a famous anecdote where Takemitsu is having dinner with a shakuhachi musician whose performance (at the table) makes Takemitsu more aware of the 'sizzling sukiyaki' and the ambient sounds around him. When Takemitsu recounts this experience after the performance, the musician says that "then it is proof I played well". Takemitsu's comment was not a critique of a boring performance that made Takemitsu's attention wander, but rather high praise. Playing the shakuhachi invites, like the qín, a great focus on the 'materiality' and subtleties of sounds. Timbres range from very muffled, almost pure, muted tones to very bright, noisy, airy sounds. Similarly to the gǔqín, these sounds are in the traditional honkyoku compositionally presented through pointilistic structures. The result is that one listens to these pieces with a very close listening, a close listening that will allow a co-existence with ambient sounds.
The Buddha taught 84.000 different gates to the dharma because everyone is working with different afflictions. The kind of music that will be helpful for some, will not be helpful for others. Yet, certain kinds of music seem to be more successful in intimating emptiness than other kinds. In the Diamond Sūtra, all phenomena are described to be illusory. All conditioned phenomena are explained to be like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows. The veil-like sweeping gestures of impressionistic music that asks the listener to take a 'psychic distance', and not listen too closely, might even by some be interpreted to embody this teaching; it musically 'conjures up illusions' and by doing so illustrates perhaps that everything is an illusion. It is maybe not impossible to find profound teachings even in the Turangalîla, but compared to the gǔqín music, I would argue that the music of Messiaen does not intimate emptiness as closely. The 'psychic distance' in the Turangalîla actually functions, the way I see it, like a veil that covers up the empty nature of sounds. It is an illusion that hides the illusory nature of phenomena. It is the shì that hides the lǐ. By not allowing ambient sounds to exist within its musical mode of listening, and instead creating an exclusive musical attunement where only the sounds of the orchestral instruments are true, the music reifies this veil as a virtual reality. Its borders are clearly established. With the pointillistic gǔqín music, on the other hand, the sounds are allowed to be heard intimately-superficially. And the same moment as they are heard, their illusory natures are recognized, and at that moment they open up to a non-objectified otherness as they evaporate into emptiness.
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