Pointillism

After listening to European classical music, I often find myself thinking of its strong resemblance to impressionistic visual art. I'm not just drawing this connection between impressionistic paintings and the impressionistic music of Debussy and Ravel, but rather between those paintings and a broader characteristic of European classical music that has persisted since the Baroque era. When encountering both European classical music and paintings by artists like Monet, I notice the need to perceive the art from a certain distance to accurately grasp its gestural and figurative elements. In a gallery, we must physically step back to transform the brush strokes into recognizable images, such as water lilies; up close, the figures become indistinct. Similarly, when being musically attuned to much European classical music, I take a metaphorical 'step back' by adjusting my 'psychic' distance. While in the gallery, the reason for the step back is transparently clear. In music, however, the nature of this 'step back' is more subtle since it relates to how we conduct our awareness when listening to this music.  

Figure 1 

One of the ways in which I have tried to explain the reason for this 'step back' is to point to the music's proclivity for the sweepingly gestural. By sweeping gestures, I refer to those larger musical figures containing an abundance of tones, where the exact individual tones are not 'melodically charged' or particularly important—it is the 'general' or 'statistical' movement of the whole figure that matters. The inner details of these sweeping gestures are not carved out too carefully, since the listeners will not 'hear' them. The first works to use sweeping gestures in this way were perhaps the preludes non mesurés of French Baroque composers such as Louis Couperin. These gestures then found a prominent place in Romantic piano music by composers like Franz Liszt (see for example an excerpt of Liebes Träume in Figure 1), and continued in 19th-century and early 20th-century impressionistic and modernist music by composers such as Debussy, Boulez, Messiaen, and Xenakis. 

While Xenakis’s use of large 'cloud formations' in orchestral pieces exemplifies the sweepingly gestural taken to an extreme, a more typical example is found in Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie, excerpted in Figure 2. Here we see one sweeping gesture in the piano followed by a collective sweeping gesture in the woodwinds. In neither case is any single melodic line, internal counterpoint, or moment of voice-leading emphasized within the groups. What matters instead is the 'panoramic' movements of the sweeping gestures. If we try to listen to the inner counterpoint, the moment-to-moment voice-leading, the fine intonation, or the harmonic tension and resolution within the progression of chords in these sweeping gestures, we would be listening inadequately. In fact, it would run counter to the elemental processes described by the theory of auditory scene analysis (Bregman 1990), which explains how our auditory perception automatically 'groups' such configurations of sounds into broader gestures.

Figure 2

In the excerpt from Turangalîla, these 'billowy masses' obscure, in a certain sense, a 'sense of melody.' Of course, I use the word 'melody' here in its most 'conservative' sense possible, for the sake of contrast. Levinson (1997), in Music in the Moment, gives an apt account of this conservative view of melody when describing the aesthetics of Edmund Gurney. His clear and lucid explanation is worth quoting at length:

"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 conveyed by Levinson), we realize that what Messiaen has written often fails to qualify as a melody because it is not the case that each gesture is truly "dependent on every note it comprises". On the contrary, what is central to many of Messiaen’s sweeping gestures is precisely only the "general outline". It is possible to change pitches within these movements without altering the essence of the gesture or figure. What we hear as a melody here is not so much a sharp line as a fuzzy one—a pitch cloud in which 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 experience of listening? My answer, as stated at the very beginning of this text, is that they make us position ourselves at a 'psychic distance' from the melodies, similar to the spatial distance we must adjust to in order to see the lilies emerge from the paint that Monet applied to the canvas.

If sweeping gestures give rise to musical 'clouds,' then the very opposite is pointillistic music. Consider, for example, the traditional music for the gǔqín. This music–with its many varieties of ornaments applied to a monophonic melody, its different shades of vibrat0, soft dynamics, and contrasting uses of registers and playing techniques—affords, in contrast to Liszt and Messiaen, a kind of 'close listening': a detailed listening. The thin, monophonic texture of a single melody is, of course, the most important way in which this music contrasts with sweepingly gestural music, but the pointillistic articulation is important too, since variations in timbre bring about a detailed listening that would not appear to arise as clearly if the pitch sequence was presented with homogeneous timbres (where each pitch is plucked in the same way). In the gǔqín music, the articulation of simple, slowly evolving monophonic melodies combined with a pointillistic inhomogeneity in the components making up a phrase, creates conditions for 'detailed' listening. The music is heard with a kind of micro-audial attention to the sounds. Where Messiaen’s music compels us to step back and perceive a blurred outline, the gǔqín draws us in to perceive finer details of sound. With such 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. 

This suggests more generally that music which fosters 'detailed listening' operates at certain perceptual boundaries. A prerequisite for 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, the listener must be given enough time; the music cannot 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 must instead remain slender and transparent. 

Figure 3

To see how this detailed listening operates in practice, we can examine a single gesture from the gǔqín repertoire in the form of a single right-hand stroke from the famous composition Shuǐxiān (水仙).The notation for this stroke is given in Figure 3. The pitch is stopped with the ring finger (名指）at the huī (徽) position wài (外＝卜) on the fourth (四) string, and plucked inward with the middle finger (gōu 勾). The sound begins slightly above the target pitch and makes a short glissando down to the indicated tone. 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)–a sliding movement that oscillates up and down twice from the pitch, the second movement being smaller in scope. Landing again at 9,8, the 'phrase', if we may call the execution of a single pitch a 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.  

As this description makes clear, this 'single sound' is complex, but it is a complexity that invites the listener to engage with the subtleties of sound—not to place it at a distance. It is therefore a very different kind of 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 ornamenting them creates an overall pointillistic texture, in which each note receives heightened attention and assumes a unique profile.

Even so, this focus on individual sounds does not mean that each tone is played as if it existed independently of larger musical phrases and forms. Such an attitude would be a kind of musical variation on the visual connoisseurship that, according to its academic critics, could sometimes 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 largely divorced from the figurative 'subjects' formed by combining such brush strokes. When these extremist literati focused their attention on the qín, an inappropriate emphasis on 'the single sounds' and the 'touch' of the musician was to be expected. Van Gulik, who largely introduced the qín to European audiences, was influenced by this literati perspective, describing qín music as 'not primarily melodic' (1940, 1–2) and emphasizing that its beauty lay in the sculpting 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. Yet, at the same time, we are allowed to listen very closely to the separate sounds and discover their unique riches through pointillistic articulation. To say that we hear 'each sound by itself' might be a pedagogical device used to direct a student's attention to aspects we find valuable in this music—the most private intimacies of sound—but we cannot claim 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 avoid losing ourselves in the intricacies of present-moment awareness and the subtleties (細 xì) of sound, we must bring a careful balance to the interplay of macro- and micro-perspectives. This is expressed beautifully by Master Xú in the perhaps paradoxical saying: "Notes must sound tightly arranged though appearing sporadic; they must rise and fall gracefully and be well-linked though appearing disconnected" (Tien 2015, 88).

Master Xú's paradox expresses the insight that the three times—past, present, and future—must be allowed to exist unobstructedly: being attuned to music means being attuned to a world that has a past, a future, and present-moment experience, and the music must be performed, Master Xú tells us, so that none of the three times is given primacy. Another way to express this is that even though the qín music is pointillistic, it does not mean the music should lack a clear Gestalt quality—the perception of the melody as a whole. According to Gestalt theory, the individual sounds and the melody are dynamically interdetermining: the notes are shaped by the melody, and the melody is shaped by the notes. The melodic Gestalt is not something that appears later, once we have heard all the notes and summed them together, but arises immediately. As Zwicky (2019) explains, "we don't perceive melody in an aggregative fashion—first one note, then the next, then the next—and then stick these elements together with some sort of epistemic glue" (4); rather, we perceive the melody as a whole. Xú's emphasis on the Gestalt quality of music has an interesting parallel to Buddhist meditation practice, as I understand it: while novice meditators focus on 'the present moment' to free themselves from conceptual proliferation and 'mental time-travel,' this focus on the present alone must, as one advances on the path, ultimately be replaced by an experience of time that is not divided 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.

Another style of music that, like the gǔqín, invites close, pointillistic listening—but in a very different cultural and aesthetic context—is Wandelweiser. Michael Pisaro (2009) has pointed out that in much early Wandelweiser music, the heightened focus on silence and the presence of very few, sparse sounds encourages highly focused listening, where single sounds take on the complexity that Xenakis achieves only with masses of sound: "Once I did start to hear it, over the course of the nearly two-hour 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 prototypical Wandelweiser piece provides the 'same' type of complexity as listening to a prototypical Xenakis piece. With Xenakis's sweeping gestures, there is none of the intimacy and closeness that the pointillistic approach favored by Wandelweiser composers affords. Yet, it is true that because our listening to the sparse sounds becomes so detailed and rich, we can metaphorically compare it to the rich, busy, and thick music of Xenakis.

While Pisaro’s observation helps us appreciate the heightened focus and intricacy of pointillistic listening, it is important to emphasize that this 'detailed' listening does not necessarily lead us into a deeper, hidden dimension of sound. Instead, it directs our attention to the mere 'surface' of sounds. In the qín melody, the constantly shifting timbres 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: detailed listening does not take us deeper into sound; rather, it makes us aware that sounds are fundamentally empty and transparent—that surface appearances are all there is.

This distinction between depth and surface is not about 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 sounds reveals their ground of emptiness: the edges of phenomena become transparent. This is because everything we discern closely enough disappears into its fundamental empty nature. In ordinary, everyday (saṃsāric) life, the empty natures of phenomena are often hidden because we do not observe them closely. Dùshùn (杜順), the first patriarch of the Huáyán school, described how the shì (事)—particular phenomena—can obscure 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). He further illustrates: “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 water grow too large, we grasp them at a distance as waves. The form hides its empty nature. In music, sweepingly gestural passages—the billowy masses—are just like such waves, concealing the lǐ that is their nature.

It is thus not the case that shì always hides lǐ, as if we would never be able to directly experience phenomena as lǐ. On the contrary, it is only as appearance that emptiness can be perceived: musical listening reveals emptiness only in and through the appearing sounds. As Mipam writes, there is not any non-appearing emptiness:

"Whatever appears is necessarily empty,

Whatever is empty necessarily appears

Because appearance that is not empty is impossible

And emptiness as well is not established without appearance." (in Duckworth 2008, 10)

While shì can hide lǐ as in the case with waves of water and billowy gestures, it is only through the shì that the lǐ can be revealed. This happens when shì intimates lǐ and reveals its empty nature: "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, allowing sounds to vividly manifest themselves as dwelling in emptiness can be achieved through a pointillistic approach, rather than a billowy one. This is one reason that pointillistic approaches are useful ingredients in Buddhist poetics, which, through art, seek to intimate emptiness. Yet using pointillistically varied textures is only one way to facilitate a 'detailed' musical attunement that reveals sound's emptiness. Other important means involve specific uses of intonation, dynamics, and timbre, which often work together. In the case of the gǔqín, the soft volume, shifting timbres, subtle intonation, and pointillistic structure through which these elements are combined create highly intimate and 'detailed' modes of listening. In such experiences, sounds arise and disappear as fleeting, empty 'surface' phenomena—empty movements of Mind. 

There is a direct relationship between what appears and how we conduct our awareness, something that Odin (2001) has explored in relation to aesthetic qualities. It is not enough to describe aesthetic qualities as merely something in the sense datum, in the noema: they must also be described as arising from a certain noetic attitude of the perceiver. The noematic content of sounds as emptiness is associated with a noetic attitude that does not take the metaphorical 'step back' as in a gallery looking at a Monet painting. The noematic content of perceiving sounds as billowy masses is associated with a noetic attitude of taking a step back. When how we conduct our awareness changes, the phenomenal form changes; and when the phenomenal form changes, the way we conduct our awareness–the mode of listening–changes. Mind and phenomena are interdependent; sounds and modes of listening are interdependent.

Besides hearing musical sounds either as billowy masses or as emptiness, the difference between these two modes of listening is also revealed in how the environment 'around' the music is experienced. A crucial feature of the mode of listening that attends to the detailed surfaces of sounds 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 enter awareness without becoming explicit object of attention. They are, 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.

This openness to environment has been theorized in aesthetic terms by Morton (2007), who captures this phenomenon under the aesthetic quality of aperture. Music with this quality is open to its surroundings as if the music was always beginning anew from the ground of emptiness and the ambient sounds enfolding it. Morton (2010) likens this to not having a frame around a painting or to a minimalist sculpture that cannot be clearly separated from its environment. 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. These ambient sounds co-present with the tones of the qín, but they are not reinterpreted as part of the composition, nor do they ever become the direct focus of our attention, and nor are they rejected from the musical attunement. They are present as empty forms and perceived in what Dōgen called without-thinking. Rather than creating a self-contained ‘virtual world,’ the music sustains an openness that intimates emptiness.

This openness to background sounds never occurs in music that relies on sweeping gestures, such as the Turangalîla. It seems to be part of the adequate mode of listening to such music to 'ignore' ambient sounds. Saito (2007), after attending a symphonic concert, accurately observes: "The outside traffic noise, the cough of the audience […] are […] consciously ignored, though they are part of our experience contemporaneous with the symphonic sound" (7). In striking contrast, there is a famous anecdote where Takemitsu, dining with a shakuhachi musician who performs a piece at the table, found himself more aware of the 'sizzling sukiyaki' and the ambient sounds around him during the performance. When Takemitsu recounted this experience, the musician replied, "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 pointillistic structures. The result is a close listening, which in turn  allows ambient sounds to co-existence with the musical 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. The Diamond Sūtra describes all conditioned phenomena as 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. Yet, compared to the gǔqín music, I would argue that the music of Messiaen does not intimate emptiness as closely. Its psychic distance functions as a veil covering 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 excluding ambient sounds and creating an exclusive realm where only the orchestral instruments count as 'music,' it reifies this veil as a virtual world, bounded and self-contained. With the pointillistic gǔqín music, on the other hand, the sounds are allowed to be heard intimately and superficially. And the same moment as they are heard, their illusory natures are recognized. At that moment, they open up to a non-objectified otherness as they evaporate into emptiness.