UC Santa Cruz

This work may be viewed as a processually-centered approach to attention, cognition, and consciousness as they relate to composition, pedagogy and musicking. Through this approach— which is deeply resonant with streams of Deep Listening— we will seek to apply methodology which focalizes both exterior processual observation (in terms of dynamical systems analysis, neurobiology, musical process, etc.) and internal attention to unfoldment as it is enacted through the activity of musicking (1) [see footnotes below] and the embodied experience of the auditor, in a synthesis, towards comprehensive understanding of the entirety of the processual unfoldment underlying musicking.

An approach which preferences the direct experience of sound and the ‘irreducible’ dimensions of musicking as the primary praxis of complexity unfoldment (and counterbalance to a perceived privileging of artifacted forms of complexity historically, intimately interlinked with the historical realization of phenomenological research cross-modally) is employed towards outlining a laboratory environment which ferments a broader order of understanding than traditional approaches can facilitate.

Central to my argument is an engagement with implicate and explicate process, as well as what these can mean across various dimensions of expression, through a strategy which reveals multiple refractions of a prism of observation which includes ontology and musicking, but is not limited to/by them. Thus central will be orienting the reader within this landscape. PHI X 174, one of two musical compositions submitted, emerged primarily from a process of explicate (and artifacted) complexity, and thus acts as a bridge in my own personal compositional history between the explicate and implicate processual emphasis, in parallel with the historical gesture unveiled in the first chapter of this text. PHI X 174 results from a software-created dynamical system in which the human genome unfolds in iterative complexity. Algorithmic music is generated as resultant of the dynamical activity of the system as a whole (2), and not as resultant of linear generative process. Thus it approaches an ecological approach, but not an implicate approach.

The second composition, Piece for Non-Local Butterfly, is deceptively simple on the surface; in answer to the question: “how can I ferment the implicate activity compositionally, with an ear towards the leading edge which forms of complexity interlinked with Deep Listening and other emergent streams point towards?” (which I’ve explored for several years now), I developed a process which exploits the unique complexity fundaments of consciousness as the implicate stage of musical unfoldment and enactment (parallel to the unity at the level of consciousness explored in Husserl’s work, and in alignment with a deconstruction of the generative roots of artifacted complexity and process), psychology, the conscious observer, and an understanding of the leading edge of complexity exogenation alluded to above, all of which the reader will find unfolded in this text.

As observed operating in Piece for Non-Local Butterfly (which does come from an implicate approach), this process of complexity exogenation is further analogous to the intrinsic activity of the brain, the exponentiation of brain activity spiking corollary to it (in direct contradistinction to traditional [and primarily linear] notions of action and unfoldment in cognition) (3), and serves as a metaphor for the shift in musical, pedagogical, and ontological activity which this work invites a rigorous and active (re)-exploration of, and (re)-engagement with – primarily in the domain of attentional inquiry, and the dynamical activity it unveils as process unfolds. This understanding expands from there into all domains to the degree that they are in praxis to it.

(1) Not making of experience a fetish, but considering it meaningful dynamical unfoldment by which to induce and explore dynamical properties, as the experiential unfoldment is a dynamical system in operation.

(2) It thus outlines explicate process not exclusivated to the human realm: it is a sort of collaboration between the explicate processes of nature, and those of man.

(3) A unique performer was found to be required to rigorously perform this piece, eschewing stereotypes that instruction-based pieces are simplistic in nature. Instead, the forum for, and nature of, their complexity must be understood – in praxis to the complexity habitus out of which it has emerged historically, an inquiry which this text facilitates.