The Veda, musical minimalism and sexuality

[Sean McHugh]

Hello, nice to be here on this impressive forum. Here's a tract I wrote trying to outline the links between the Vedic tradition, repetitious musics and Western musical minimalism, and sexuality. I tried it on an art music forum but there was little comprehension, so any comments here read with interest. To be truthful it's rather abstract and some of the concepts aren't properly explained here as it forms part of a much larger project. I wasn't sure which board to post it on so if there's somewhere better obviously it can be shifted.

 

A little about me- I'm 38, been to S.Asia three times, practiced Transcendental meditation for nearly 14 years, studied philosophy including some Indian and Buddhist, and applying for a music PhD in minimalism particularly on the connections with Indian music. The following would put any faculty on the ceiling as it doesn't cite sources or fit into much of an established paradigm, but of course the entire Vedic tradition and its directly perceived, intuitive nature is still an utter mystery to these benighted people. So it's not something I'm likely to present to an academic, but is more a record for myself of how I see things.

[Sean McHugh]

Stillness and self-reference are the nature of the absolute, consciousness and the field of the gunas and its logic that interfaces with the relative: the unitary absolute relates only to itself, contrasting with the relative, or the relative’s relative value, which relates to other elements of the relative. Repetitious processes in music provide key expression of and access to the absolute by isolating the aesthetic or the gunas’ logic, in giving the representation back to the attention before it has chance to try and necessarily fail to reconcile or make sense of it rationally: the mind is flooded with reality, purity and sense of ecstatic drowning as the intellect gives way to spiritual devotion. Postmodernism’s concern for surfaces and homogeneity in place of traditional depth structure, teleology and narrative provide an important base for repetitious music, particularly minimalism: the incredulity towards overarching principles or authority from without parallels the contemptibly, laughably misplaced activity of the intellect working with relative relations without absolute reference, and its resulting structures. The intellect needs only alignment with the intuitive aesthetic- depth is in fact to be found in surface, not on it but within it.

Repetition also reflects the use of repeated mantras in meditation for the mind to find unity with itself, moving from 3<SUP>rd</SUP> state of consciousness where the attention attends to concepts and objects of the senses, to 4<SUP>th</SUP> where it’s left only with its absolute Self: its nature providing for no relationships with anything beyond itself, there’s no critical context but only a constant tireless focus or being, without need for rest and reflection. Self-referentiality fixes the attention at every moment and on every fractal level, no matter how closely one attends to the music, negating perspicuous framing that distracts the attention between structural points.

Repetition prevents the attention getting lost in thought or the senses and instead always retaining its Self through emphasis on sensation’s detached aesthetic content, not its conceptual attachment to the mind from lack of coordination or NB unsupported discursive activity, nor reflection on either: the Self paralleled in the aesthetic is given back to itself before it can be lost to itself. Self-reference is the nataraja’s circularity but distinct from the confused circular thought of the uncoordinated conceptual mind, trapped in itself in the wrong way and lost in the senses. The clarity and naturalness of self-referral 5<SUP>th</SUP> state of consciousness where the attention returns back to itself before reaching the objects of the senses, the knower established as separate from action and objects in an unaffected relation with them and the gunas, is the first stage of perceiving the absolute value of the relative and the relative’s real nature as included within the absolute: the relative as a whole is a holistically contained realm and hence really only referring to itself in the same way does the Self. Repetitious music encapsulates the attention’s return in its re-presentation of aesthetic material before the intellect can lose itself in confused reconciliation attempts, allowing intuitive logic to emerge per se.

In repetition the cognitive faculties have a clear play relationship with their sensory information, the interface between subject and object as rational construction losing definition: the attention’s return before reaching the object also means it relates to it unaffectedly, and ultimately hence containing it within itself, in 7<SUP>th</SUP> state. So though repetitious workings aren’t always obvious in great music they shed light on the source of its aesthetic value, and indeed if there is hope for the rediscovery of tonality and any future for art music, it’s to be found in these workings and particularly minimalism. Moreover repetition is the essential practice for accessing the content of any music- though the aesthetic is immediate, music needs to be listened to at least five times in order to assimilate and resolve the intellectual complexities its aesthetic meaning or inner life of tones is couched in, to reveal it to the individual mind’s intuition; aesthetic experience, as with the Self, is inter-subjective and universal, and not ostensive or external.

Repetition along with juxtaposition (see that chapter) bring stasis from loss of teleology and produce an ecstatic flow of surface material through the attention’s focus on it per se, and thus submerge any formal rationalizing architectonics and framing; indeed stasis or a sense of stillness itself can also provide for the attention’s return on itself. Minimalism and other repetitious forms may be highly and pre-compositionally architectonically structured but the aesthetic interest is in the repetitions and the initial material’s slowly evolving characteristics. Aesthetic material is for-itself rather than for set outlines and traditional linearity, moving only on the basis of inner intuitive connections between the successive presentations: the aesthetic is the unity of the underlying logic of the mind and the logic of the noumenal in-itself or reality behind appearances, and needs no external guidance. Repetitious and juxtapositional musics have more homogeneity and less depth-structure in the intellectual sense, and less stratification between foreground and background or even between upper and lower parts, providing a holism, immanence and euphoric lucidity, and sense of the transcendent and divine.

These musics prioritize concern for inner detail and the mind’s seeking of possible options and directions the music must go in, finding transcendental rightness in the good composer’s decisions: insight is in intuitively right selections out of an array of possibilities, where the logic not being intellectually defined or eliminable perennially enriches the mind. As in the nataraja and its dance and play, freedom and infinity are paradoxically found through remaining within unstated aesthetic logic and what is right- embodied by repetition and development of material by small degrees and within limits, and within tonal harmony. For instance among the greatest of all music, the Bach Cello suites show it’s through repetitious structures such as series of arpeggios that are expansive but contained in gesture, harmony and rhythm, that music can find great depth and inwardness, not through supposed hidden intellectually transparent principles that modernism can foreground and dialectically build on.

Successful repetitious works then include Glass’s Dance No.1, Satyagraha, Powaqqatsi, Einstein on the beach, Belle et la Bete and Music in twelve parts, Reich’s Six pianos, Variations and Eight lines, Adams’s Nixon in China and Grand pianola music, Nyman’s The Man who mistook his wife for a hat, Part’s Spiegel im Spiegel, Litany and Credo, Bax’s Paean; Ustvolskaya’s Fourth symphony, Stockhausen’s Stimmung, Stravinsky’s Rite of spring and Les Noces, the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh symphony and last movements of the Pastoral symphony and Violin concerto, the fugue of Bach’s Toccata and fugue BWV.565, most of Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, and Wagner’s Rheingold prelude and most of his operas. The effects are also shadowed in some pop and folk, for instance Senegalese and other West African musics and their accentuated and endless drumming rhythms.

The sense of direction retained within the stasis, homogeneity and holism of repetition, out of the material’s inner processes and potentials or gunas allowed by the intellectually silent but dynamic background, formal schemes often being submerged in a lack of articulation, is further exampled by Feldman’s Coptic light and Rothko chapel, Ligeti’s Atmospheres and Lux aeterna, Ives’s Central park in the dark and The Unanswered question, Bax’s Christmas eve, Messiaen’s Et exspecto, the closing movementsof Quartet for the end of time (the title alluding to an end to formally symmetrical metre) and La nativity, Part’s St. John passion, Gorecki’s Miserere, Tavener’s Akathist of Thanksgiving, Eno’s Music for airports, Bryars’ Violin concerto ‘Bulls of Bashan’, Kancheli’s Third symphony, Ustvolskaya’s Octet, Cage’s 4’33’’ and Solo, Poulenc’s Horn elegie, Ravel’s Bolero and Daphnis et Chloe, the sequential ends of Strauss’s Death and transfiguration and slow movement of Mahler’s Fourth, Bruckner’s symphonies, the slow movements of Dvorak’s Fourth, and of Beethoven’s last seven string quartets, Schutz’s St. John passion, Tallis’s Spem in alium and most renaissance polyphony, plainchant, and the piano music of Poulenc, Mompou and Satie such as the three Gymnopedies with their stillness, dispatch and interest in the moment rather than high minded architecture; also Webern’s Bagatelles or Five Pieces despite their rationality.

All have an uncertainty over where the music is going next yet combined with powerful, inevitable forward movement, the music extending itself and luminously reaching into and realizing further realms- creation ex nihilo but with its own deep logic. The focus is on the aesthetic and the gunas themselves, meaning issuing from within the material freed from rational direction from without: the on-edge quality reflects the passions, particularly sexual sensation with its procreation ex nihilo, but also our natural, effective, focussed but unformulated approach to all life. Containment within oneself is real freedom because reality issues outwards from the absolute and the realm of gunas within the relative. Moreover, cymatics shows how in nature form in various materials from sand dunes to galaxies can be generated by sound, the material shaping itself depending on resonance between it and the frequency: though the sound is from without, form is generated in correspondence and unity with the content’s inner characteristics.

Particular instances of the fascinating inner movement in repetition include the sets of chords of similar character in Reich’s Six Pianos, Glass’s Third Dance, Scelsi’s Fifth String quartet, many climactic points in Bruckner, near the start of Stravinsky’s Petrushka and ends of Symphony of psalms and Firebird, and the comparable last movement of Messiaen’s La Transfiguration. Though not repetitious the chordal writing in Haydn’s piano works has the same mesmerizing quality, and along with Messiaen’s juxtapositional piano music and its vertical harmony initially for its own sake rather than structure, and much minimalism, ask for hearing at a higher volume to bring out the fabulous inner detail. In each case the attention narrows down to concentrate on the intuitive, presuppositional cognitive faculties’ reciprocal involvement in the art-recipient relation, or the aesthetic in isolation.

Intellectually one might expect repetitive music to be dull, based on its low information content and high redundancy in terms of discursive thought and formal frame, but the aesthetic is self-justifying, inexhaustible and self-framing, all as the light of the Self is self-effulgent and not dependent on intellectual deliberation or anything in the relative. Aesthetic play of content needs no outward framework to play within because its nature is intuitive not critical- it’s a self-corroborating, reason-obliterating realm of meaning incredulous towards dialectics and their lack of foundation. There needs to be a unity of form and content in art and life to avoid loss of Self, groundless theorizing and absurdity: NBs however don’t have all their discursive minds underwritten by Self and can think groundlessly without meaningful internal contradiction, having limited Dionysian intuitive aesthetic experience and in poor social conditions creating reflective, detached art and its architectonics, instead of living fullness of IB life.

[Sean McHugh]

 

An early example of repetition in Wagner is the thematic Rule Britannia overture, the score of which was rejected by a London evaluating panel, doubtless as it can look too simple on paper, where the theme is presented such that it becomes ever more rich and interesting the more it’s heard. In the late operas the motifs all relate to underlying configurations or sets of notes that are never stated in the music, and the resulting holistic, hermetic structure that keeps within initial conditions is all as keeping within the nataraja or keeping the unstated Self within the attention, the absolute hidden in the relative. The Rheingold prelude is the first mature music in this revolutionary step into the amazing involvement, exhilaration and forward movement issuing from repetition and the exploration of the relations and logic of the inner characteristics of strong material per se.

Wagner’s motifs aren’t developed but new ones generated out of their characteristics, with their possibilities and surrounding textures explored up to set levels of complexity, and right artistic decisions on which direction the material moves in being made at each point: this along with the unstated seminal material behind the motivic network parallels the immutability of the Self yet proliferating evolution and gain in relative life, itself hermetic and holistic on the large scale. It’s the emphasis on the Dionysian aesthetic here, undiluted by disingenuous Apollonian formalism that causes people’s aversion to Wagner, living in the repressed West where art developed as an objectifying, reflective repository of the Dionysiac, following loss of real Dionysian life and increasing alienation in the modern period: Wagner’s passion and intensity moves away from art and closer to life again, fundamentally conflicting with current culture and normative systems.

Wagner uses not only networks of repeating undeveloped motifs but at times immediate repetition: at one point in Gotterdammerung for instance the redemption motif is repeated several times in increasingly rich harmony, orchestration and volume to focus the mind on its aesthetic content, drawing the attention back until the motif is enlivened in the mind to shine in utter radiance and divine power, the Dionysiac exultant in both fullness and order. Wagner also expresses on the wider scales the on-edge sense of keeping the Self and not being lost in theory in his immense long term intuitive control despite passion in the moment- the absolute and relative together. Similarly in the Walkure second act opening, at the point where the initial motif must be furthered instead of new material being provided in a form leaning on balance and intellectual satisfaction, it’s simply replayed but again at increased volume: it works superbly through attending to the increasingly emerging infinite aesthetic resource in the quality material, traditional development by implication being unnecessary and ultimately misguided. The wider form by motivic web is grounded in stasis but with new motifs generated, similar to minimalism and the stasis from architectonic suppression though long term change of material- in both cases structure being developed out of plastic-ended recombinable motifs. Other Wagner-minimalism parallels include through-composition and elimination of points of rest and reflection with the attention transfixed only by onward movement and exhilaration, sectional working through the areas of the material’s possibilities, and concern for the moment and its closed inner freedom over closed extended melody and its groundless overbearing formal presuppositions.

Minimalism is anti-authoritarian in its repetition, high redundancy of content, low information, tonal harmony and subsuming of form while creating its own inner space for material to play, yet its formal processes and control parallel serialism in constricting the material’s development. There’s similar loss of play within architectonics and critical distance in Wagner, the content framed by no traditional context but again by intuitive movement in the cognitive faculties- there is unity of form and content, subject and object, the gunas in art being those of life. Minimalism may be highly architectonically structured but as in Wagner the repetitions disorientate the intellect, prevent perspicuity and undermine pillars, with transitional bridges to successive regions constantly built and burnt. Yet the internal logic allows the music to levitate, with play self-validating through ecstasy of the moment in place of outer logic: as with orgasm, the moment and its inner imperatives obliterate any surrounding intellectual construction. After these musics there is no need for more art but only for life, architectonic contrivances being central to art but no longer necessary: unity of the gunas with their frame free of affected relation is our unity with life.

Slower minimalism that reduces down the iterations can also illuminate the process to beautiful effect, for instance in Glass’s Violin concerto, Company, Facades from Glassworks or Tirol piano concerto; however there’s similar aesthetic logic, moving only in the moment referenced to no structure outside itself in any good melody, such as in the Chopin nocturnes, Shostakovich or Dvorak symphonies, or Monteverdi, Puccini or Sullivan numbers. It’s present in examples of juxtaposition over linear architectonics like the Messiaen and Schumann piano works or Strauss and Bax orchestral works, and in motivic writing in Beethoven’s Eroica symphony first movement (see that chapter) and the Grosse fuge, as well as Wagner. In all cases the right selection from an evolving array of possibilities is made based on that moment’s logic, the movement being unpredictable yet in great music inevitable and commanding. In slow and rapid minimalism the flux and movement is the same, just that more of the possibilities are foregrounded on the surface in rapid and more only in the mind in slow, but decisions are made with the same poised intuitive control and inner form. There’s the dynamism and infinite possibility of the silence of the Self yet right action at any one point, all as the self in lived life being aligned with the Self or the gunas, the logic within the dynamism.

Stasis can also arise from a drone, with long intense notes giving time for the attention to return back on itself in re-engaging with them, exalting in aesthetic awareness of one’s own Self: as with the focus on aesthetic content in repetitious music, the mind transcends the intellect for aesthetic life, retaining the Self and finding the absolute in the relative. Examples include the second section ofPart’s Tabula Rasa and Cantus for Benjamin Britten, the first movement of the Pastoral symphony, Young’s Seventh composition (a two note chord ‘held for a long time’), some Hildegard of Bingen and other medieval music, and singingly intense held notes in Wagner. Also in both the improvisatory North Indian Gandharvaved and Scottish piobaireachd bagpipe musics there are constant base notes, intersected respectively by the bamboo flute with complex rapid melody within a raga or chanter and isolated groups of grace notes- all different and reminiscent of the Scelsi Fifth quartet. The Indian melody reflects the mind’s thought and discursive wanderings while periodic attention to the magnetic, hypnotic drone reflects self-referral consciousness, the returning mantra in meditation and stress release. Bagpipes also have only nine notes but this limitation increases rather than decreases the fascination and its wider repertory’s idiom is accordingly repetitious and rhythmic yet complex and unpredictable. Further, some effective film music is static, ambient and non-melodic, for example Cliff Martinez’s for Solaris of 2002.

Scarlatti’s ecstatic sonatas use repetitious devices but also example the exploration of the same small scale form, over 560 times, and many baroque and renaissance composers among others likewise wrote large numbers of similar works, Birtwistle being a recent example with his series of similar extended orchestral canvasses developing under the contained dynamics of their particular material. Examples in painting includeCezanne’s and Rothko’s reproduction of the same scene or scheme numerous times and Van Gogh the same sunflowers five times: in each case a specific form is explored with endless depth and interest, again staying within the nataraja. Moreover op art and Bridget Riley's repetitive geometrical schemes create mesmerizing, disorientating effects and movement in stillness through explicitly drawing in the self-referential nature of consciousness and the cognitive faculties- a similar process to the glitter, dazzle and Dionysian aleatory associations of incident in minimalism the individual mind makes.

In all cases energy and movement issue from a seething background stasis, all as right and powerful action issues from the Self’s dynamic stillness. Repetition’s containment and trancing effect embodies the constant focus of 5<SUP>th</SUP> or circumscribing the Self within itself away from unsupported thought, and its exhilaration the infinity of achievement residing in consciousness. Achievement is essentially already accomplished because all relations are with the unitary absolute, the lack of relative relations meaning the ecstatic answer to all problems is that there is no problem. Repetition, self-referentiality and the lack of subject-object distinction, everything being contained within consciousness, bring loss of distance for critical or individual subjectivity: there’s no externally conceived framing, depth structure or foreground-background contrast for material or thought to play in. Yet only conceptual criticality or individuality are lost, intellectual space and its ideas of subjectivity being without the possibility of a substantive base, and instead true collective, Dionysian subjectivity emerges; in both the aesthetic and sexual, private subjectivity transcends to the intersubjective and universal.

Cognizance is a matter of self-referentiality not discursive deliberation, external reality intimately relating to us: quantum physics indeed implies that the most distant galaxies only come into existence as billions of years old when observed, their photons behaving in the same observer-dependent way in experiments as all others. And as post-foundationist epistemology and the impossibility of intellectual demonstration of the outside world’s existence shows, there’s no reality external to us, or to the nataraja, or to our topologically closed universe we can see: everything’s contained within our awareness. There’s likewise no need to look beyond the aesthetic per se to arbitrary architectonics, theoretical castles in the sky and endless critical positioning: only the aesthetic or the gunas’ level, or life itself, leads the way. And self-referential 5<SUP>th</SUP> state of consciousness is bliss-consciousness, happiness being our underlying natural state and provided for nothing by the aesthetic, not something we have to create from scratch or work towards dialectically.

Repetition exults in itself, reflecting consciousness’s emergence of understanding out of itself, including ethical understanding in one’s desire rising to support that of others and delighting in the happiness of others desiring it: similarly smiling at others or laughing, they smile or laugh because they see the same happiness integral to them, and a self-sustaining and all-embracing loop develops, also as with smiling to a mirror. We smile because we smile, the absolute depending on nothing beyond itself, generating and perpetuating itself all as aesthetic return’s lack of justification, which repetitive music focuses on. Knowledge, ethics and aesthetics inhere complete within us and accordingly core human activities such as art, spirituality, sex and friendship retain their interest for us independently of our exposure to them: any critical justification would involve separating ourselves from ourselves, impossible as our basis is a unity transcending the intellect concerned with dualities. Computers’ functioning may be split up but we are alive- God is one and there can be no talk of other Gods: the base necessarily can’t move to be looked at critically by shifting position elsewhere.

Repetition eliminates the confused pursuit of intellectual reconciliation by overwhelming with the Dionysiac, all as sex makes clear that beyond the conceptual mind relinquishing attachment from ideas and evaluations about sensation, holding onto a sense of distance between oneself and the senses is misguided, particularly as the repetitive movements persist towards their conclusion; approaches to life based on detailed reason and contingent, contextualised systems of thought are negated by a grounded, triumphant immediacy. Moreover minimalism is accused of being unrelenting, wilful or monotonous when it’s just a focus on the underlying aesthetics, truth and Self, which never tires and should never sink below the level of the attention: an example is Nyman’s work with its constant line and focus, such as A Handshake in the dark or The Piano concerto.

Though regular architectonic, teleological art music can be readily listened to while doing something else, the two activities involving different parts of the mind, intuitive and intellectual, good repetitious music is uniquely compelling and engaging, making other activity almost impossible- the focus on the aesthetic leaves no unsupported intellectual activity to run alongside a formal frame. You don’t want to miss a single split second, contrasting with other musics where the attention can assimilate and internalize them partly by reference to pre-given schemes: repetitious music, similar to the narrow, contained idioms of folk or pop, is getting closer to life and away from art reflective of and distanced from life. Being continuous with life, uncritical folk and pop are more easily ignorable altogether but repetitious music remains critical art because of inner form and seething dynamics in the mind, aligned with the gunas. Through intuitive critique repetitious musics connect the gap between whatever aesthetic reference or gunas alignment there may be in the identity thinking of contextualized life, along with its folk or pop, and in abstracted architectonically critical art that goes beyond this and its present cultural inconsistencies.

Repetitious music has no specific points of change for the intellect to wait for but instead a constant slow rate of change, and thus only the intuition finds itself at one with the evolving landscapes; Wagner’s sophisticated transition processes and continuous integrated contrapuntal virtuosity enhances the bridge-burning, and the intellect struggles even to recall a previous state the present one evolved from. This may occur to the intellect as suspicious change by stealth but it’s more circumscribing the mind in the nataraja and rapture, focussing it in the ever fresh moment and avoiding loss to account or theory. Sunsets (see The Sun chapter), work in exactly this way, changing imperceptibly to provide constantly refreshed magnificent, immense aesthetic vistas and clarifying the absolute unity of nature with the perceiving cognitive faculties and mind- ‘I am That’: change continually takes place just as one’s interest would be sated. Academics have argued that minimalism’s submerging of pre-given structure is deceptive in the same way that contemporary consumer culture dulls the mind’s perception of the wider system and prompts it with mindless desire for new but essentially the same goods- but the real source of insight and freedom is from within, not more framing from without.

Sexual activity’s repetitions, its unity with oneself and the other person, and repetition of the activity parallel musical repetition. In sex the mind’s attention to the repetitions is self-referential in the Self-your Self and Self-other’s Self relations, their Self being the same as yours: sex unifies Self via your own sensation unified with that provided you from the other, your perceptions of their experience with their experience, all unified with yours, and so on- and the music encompasses this in its proliferating, interrelating vortex of the perception of repetitions and them being given back to the mind again. There is a background stasis in sex, it referring only to itself and nothing out in the world, and taking place in one location, combined with intense involving activity making clear the Dionysiac is all there is; sexual activity stimulates itself as it proceeds, the passion and interest increasing with the repetitions- all as in music. Offspring are produced by sex out of the finest foundations of its for-itself nature, all as the absolute connects with the relative out of its isolated and hidden nature via the Self and the gunas, by comprising the relative’s underlying structure. Strong onward movement paradoxically issues out of static, for-themselves repetitious systems with inherent necessary, pre-rational dynamics and logic: direction is uncertain and weak issuing from imposed dynamics.

The decline in production of quality art music as a result of post-tonality and postmodernism’s levelling environment may be countered via inner dynamics of post-narrative, non-teleological minimalism- although the tensions in the West particularly as its energy source runs out may be increasing to a point where a much simpler, less alienated life is re-established, thus eliminating the need for a critical art tradition altogether. Minimalism’s success in bridging the gap between life and art while remaining critical shows the redundancy of framing as externally conceived beginning, middle and end, or in society as driven metanarratives or overarching sets of principles. If development and evolution are to be authentic they must proceed along self-generating lines not based on gaining the fruit of action but located in the moment, as with walking up steps in the dark and using a torch for each, one at a time- then there is the unpredictable inevitability of intuitive form in unity with not dominating content, relative and absolute together. Moreover the reduced reliance on architectonics and intellectual framing of the aesthetic in minimalism, and links with pop, make it easier to assimilate.

[Sean McHugh]

With romantic music and particularly Wagner the listener has a fuller identity with the inner dynamics of great art, with critical distance and objectivity given in the Self’s self-referral processes rather than relative separation from the aesthetic content. There’s unquenchable absorption in good Wagner and minimalism, endless melody and lack of symmetrical rest points meaning the listener never wants to relinquish the music’s hold on the attention; linearity is expressed only in the Dionysiac’s own hypnotic onward movement and surge, in a unity of relative and absolute that leads to Self-based thought and action in life. Moreover as minimalism is nearer to popular music Wagner moves towards cinema, in each case closer to life than architectonic art.

Minimalism is a valuable expression of the postmodern concern for surface and textual consistency as a reapplication of the confused modernist process of foregrounding structural elements and material in trying to make intellectual sense of the hidden aesthetic. However it has parallels with serialism in its holism and self-referentiality, homogeneity and non-hierarchical ordering, concern for no historical paradigm, and pre-compositional design and autonomy that undermines individual subjectivity and personality in the composer and listener, except that the disregard for depth-structure allows universal Dionysian subjectivity, and its directed onward movement, to emerge instead. Also minimalism doesn’t share postmodernism’s nihilism towards the critical on all levels and has the open-ended logic of holistic form that characterizes life anywhere, thus paralleling 5<SUP>th</SUP> state of consciousness in being simultaneously critical and lived, relative and absolute.

Traditional formal music’s closure and resulting objectivity and autonomy furnish the sense of separation or self, but formal schemes given from without are arbitrary and such a self or identity unstable: minimalism instead locates the self in a more intimate relationship with itself where it recognizes its own nature in the material’s hermetic step by step movement. Life has neither closure nor definite answers on the intellectual level and hence music emphasizing life’s aesthetic essence over formal frames is more authentic and conducive to 5<SUP>th</SUP>; faith in the rightness of the aesthetic and the unstated gunas makes it unnecessary to abstract them away in a formal autonomous sphere of meaning purely reflective of life. Life questions cannot be answered nor reality and truth begin to be accessed by Western rational philosophy but only by open-ended Vedic philosophy, or art.

Minimalism’s development has reference to Indian traditions- in music, for instance in the rapid melody over a drone along with complex rhythmic and metrical schemes, in philosophy in interconnection and concern for subjective experience, and in religion in sensuousness and exultation. Also minimalism’s paradoxical nature of being small scale repetition and constant change within large scale forms and background stasis, reflects the Self’s dynamic silence and the combination of richness yet nothingness of the Veda- its detailing of sophisticated relations which are essentially intuitively obvious, and for a realized person as a well with water all around. These relations are also comparable with the seething virtual quantum events of a vacuum, and with the inner movement yet non-relation to anything else of sex. Dynamic silence and all polarities are in pure form in the 4<SUP>th</SUP> of transcendental meditation with the mind observing itself without thoughts, immobile in circumscribed attention; minimalism’s subtly changing motifs moreover reflect the changing character of the mantra during its repetition.

Minimalism’s focus on the aesthetic in isolation means of course it may lack the same depth of interest and complexity as music generating it from wider means, but its value is in containing the attention in a similar way to the intuition keeping back from unreferenced discursive thought. As in Shiva’s dance in the nataraja, bliss consciousness, freedom and boundlessness is really found within limitation because they’re already given and contained within us, and have core expression in the intellectually closed down nature of sex and its subject-object unity. The contained state in life is of unsuperfluous thought and action, not doing what isn’t necessary and acting silently as required by anonymous, unpossessed underlying dynamics. Architectonic structures in art however, subservient in minimalism, do embody circularity or coming back but in long term, reflecting the culture’s state of loss rather than immediate return of the Self to itself where one can be oneself and fully live life. Harmonic movement away from and back to the tonic particularly reflects keeping the Self and self realization after a period of self-consciousness and lost thought, and the realization that of course you just have to be yourself: the most fabulously sophisticated and complex life activities are common sense. Indeed almost all Shakespeare’s plays conclude with the return of the king, the real authoritative, divine ruler within us.

The development of material only out of its own characteristics and level of the gunas brings the thrilling sense of creation ex nihilo, for instance in Glass’s Satyagraha opening scene or Wagner’s Rheingold prelude with ideas cutting into an undeveloped harmonic base seething with potential. Both composers use interconnected holistic form, for Glass becoming an entirely static, non-dramatic montage, abstract and surreal and going far beyond direct representation of events; Nyman’s The Man who mistook his wife for a hat libretto also concerns a shifted perspective on life and a logic beneath its surface and arbitrary structures and levels of order, as given expression by music in general or its aesthetic gunas, without which we are lost.

Adams’s Nixon in China by contrast is an example of postmodernism’s Dionysian play, non-discursive critique and incredulity towards overarching schemes and authority. Nixon's 1972 visit to China is recent history to relate to closely, even within personal memory, and as often with Glass the music is drenched in marvellous nostalgia; the libretto comprises poetic couplets, complementing the surrealism and iconoclastic repetition of music and words, and indeed people not normally singing to each other. Singing though captures the Dionysiac, as indeed in Greek tragedy, realizing the subject matter’s remarkable vitality. The opening two acts have more clearly delineated statements and melodic sequences but in the third these are spliced and juxtaposed such that they are taken less seriously, being treated nihilistically or hypercritically- both the closed sections and what emerges to have been the overly high tone of Nixon’s and Mao’s ideological stances are mocked. Indeed with such irreconcilable differences the only option is to transcend them to a state of play without attempting dialectical critique: the protagonists slide into personal reminiscences aligned with the postmodern concern for subjective response. Arbitrary subjective viewpoints of course are useless since a unitary truth does exist, but with subject and object being intimately linked personal intuition is the route to it. Furthermore most of the best music is in the first half followed by an anti-climax, disrupting linear development and reflecting postmodern uniformity.

Moreover Adams’s Century rolls is a dreamy commentary on the romantic piano concerto, its disbelief in definite structure and content and letting the music slide into surface effect, glitter and garish colour similarly critiques the whole modernist paradigm of determinate components. Further, Ives uses tonality non-structurally with for instance unexpected placement of triads bringing a critical position moving behind dialectics to look on them with detachment, serenity and humour, and again encapsulating American ghostly mysteriousness, hypnosis and unreality lying behind massive materialism.

Thought is closed down by architectonic rather than intuitive, material-led form in that bondage and boundary come from external imposition not the internal containment of self-referentiality and necessary right action. Freedom and ecstasy issue from within, also as expressed in sex for the girl in bondage, and the man giving himself to her without reservation, as much a prisoner: the for-other rational but uselessly free Apollonian is relinquished to leave for-itself locked-on Dionysiac, the field of given truth and gunas, and senses and passions at the interface of experience and reality. For-other and love then issue from the encompassing Self-Self relations of for-itself sex as having and being had dissolve, all as the Dionysiac and the material in intuitive form provide movement out of their inherent gunas and aesthetics structures. The same disappearing insatiable quality and impossibility of complete familiarity of sex and its independence is at its artistic height in music of successful intuitive form, such as variously in minimalism and Wagner, it being instead in closed architectonic sequences where sated familiarity and restriction is found. Inscrutable aesthetics offer greater liberation couched in their own fixed logic than in perspicuous frames for the intellect’s fearful attempts at determinate reconciliation and satisfaction.

Moreover the aesthetic’s inscrutability relates to the indeterminate foundation of knowledge and impossibility of its intellectual grounding: the epistemological search for certainty and intellectual transparency of the 17<SUP>th</SUP> to 20<SUP>th</SUP> centuries was inconcludable and misguided, only complementing ever-shifting modernist perspectives and metanarratives. Rather than the basis of our experience being knowable and graspable in a forgrounded intellectual way it has transcendental and divine reference beyond the thinking mind, its holism infinitely leading onwards to more knowledge, as in minimalism and Wagner. Instead of limiting frames, systems or principles in life there is only on-edge experience as guided by inner its form, with the discursive mind aligned to and never foolishly replacing it.

The fascination of the Dionysiac and aesthetic in minimalism is paralleled by the fascination in the facial expressions of those either led to execution, being tortured (in 3<SUP>rd</SUP>) or experiencing sexual sensation, with the more Self content to interface with the relative, as suggested by intelligence and attractiveness, the better- as for instance here (BA vids links). In art, the passions, sex and death, the absolute in the relative and dissolution of duality have core expression or realization- and it is this coordination that the whole mind achieves in 5<SUP>th</SUP>. This focus of the attention to something narrow in scope is all as in minimalism, often particularly when the subject keeps expressions to a contained minimum so they count for more in indicating their experience and movement towards death or orgasm: the interest is in the switching between failing to intellectually reconcile what’s happening in terms of the relative, because the absolute and its immediacy and reality is involved, and failing to reconcile the absolute per se. Inward transcendence beyond the vortex of dualities and their aesthetic play to the oneness of the absolute or Brahman is the only reconciliation possible, encompassing absolute and relative together. There’s the same riveted fascination in the smallest, finest details in minimalism or faces, indicating the Dionysiac and the directness and irreconcilability of the aesthetic reference in sensation or intuition, sometimes for instance prompting rewinding either recording. The listener and watcher is stilled with the intensity and focus of their awareness, their Self as seen in the Dionysiac given back to itself: in both minimalism and the passions the absolute in the relative, and the cognitive faculties and consciousness encompassing the external world, unite subject and object and dissolve external, voyeuristic, vicarious experience into one’s own.

Rational Apollonian activity underwritten and subsumed by the Dionysiac in 5<SUP>th</SUP> allows the attention’s smooth movement from one to the other without disjunction, grounding it and giving it meaning. The emergence of sexual sensation into the mind, as with visceral physical contact’s emergence into the seemingly Platonic in seduction, makes evident the unity of the two but a substantive transition nonetheless appears to exist in the affectation of 3<SUP>rd</SUP>, where the attention isn’t already located in the Dionysiac and on the level of orgasm; Western culture and NB unsupported discursive mind also normalizes a transition. The unity of the two encompassed by the mind is all as musical movement along aesthetic lines at key points or denouements where recombination of material takes place seamlessly due to the new dynamics already being in place under the surface, for instance in Glass’s Second and Fourth dances. Perception here of other legitimate aesthetic angles on the system also enhances real intuitive critical insight into pre-rational cultural presuppositions, and thence the forms of life built on them.

Glass’s Dance No.1 is a good example of minimalism’s parallel of the aesthetic focus in sex- it has truly incredible magnetism, creating an insatiable fascination and desire with the attention transfixed and mesmerized by every last detail: possibly the most unturnoffable, compulsive thing ever written its returns are almost unique in music. It’s music of sheer ascent and exhilaration with intense onward lines, rhythmic intoxication and understated radiance and ecstasy paralleling sexual and narcotic experience, complemented by erotic overtones of the solfage syllables sung. Bass keyboard notes become increasingly rapid as the work progresses and as in much pop music the starts of bars or short phrases are accented, all as increasing heartbeat and inner rush towards orgasm with the thrusting rhythm increasing more slowly; moreover the repeated actions in both minimalism and sex, including the movement of lips or skin across each other, and the nature of sound that comprises all music, reflects material reality’s fundamental nature of vibration and form from sound. There’s also the elation of good jazz group improvisation on the same material, blending fabulously in high colour; emphasis is on the unmediated, experiential aesthetic, the non-theoretical base level of reality.

Repetitive actions and circumscribed attention in minimalism, sex and various religious chant intoxicate due to the correspondence with consciousness’s divine self-referral nature, needing to refer to nothing beyond itself. The self-referential experiences in sex of yourself and your sensation and of the other person and theirs are centred on repeated action at the crotch by the crotch- the body’s aesthetic centre or mind’s absolute reference or ratio point as expressed in the relative form, referring only to itself: body and mind and object and subject are dissolved and any ratio-nal intellectual activity eradicated. The relative all makes reference properly to the transcendent absolute but the absolute only to itself, this having purest expression in the orgasm within sex’s hermeticism: the crotch’s stimulation is for-itself and similarly minimalism’s aesthetic content has no framing reference for wider analysis, the material and its repetition justifying itself, like the Self by itself for itself. Despite sex and minimalism being confined and narrow and in a sense dull, they can paradoxically be of utmost meaning, interest and exhilaration, focussed on the visceral Dionysiac and its logic, the essence of art and life.

The ever-fresh interest in minimalism’s re-introduced material is all as that in seduction and sex, and life, being via the constant reference to the absolute and fundamental gunas or imperatives operating in motiveless silence, free of relativizing, proportioning and dismissal: one kisses because this action in the relative refers to the absolute, and one continues and proceeds under dynamics independent of ratios with anything else. Reasoning and reconciliation stops seduction, there being only self-justification and kissing because of kissing. There’s no wilfulness or inflexibility in good minimalism because the aesthetic, the Self, truth and sex is that which is to be insisted on: in Nyman for instance there’s often one exultant idea after another, a manic onward drive lacking pause and rest for critical reflection, but with inner logic and space. Moreover works like Reich’s Variations and Music for mallet instruments and their the long underlying waves overlaid with repeating insistent material parallel Tristan and the sexual character of all Wagner’s mature music.

There are also the parallels in minimalism and sexual interest of the mind looking around the endless interrelations and reciprocal interaction between it and the experience, and its intoxication by its own transcendental, rationally unfathomable stimulation. Further the moment to moment renewal of interest in the leading gunas in these particularly reflects 5<SUP>th</SUP> immediacy and the natural approach to all things afresh, independent of baseless reasons or ideas. Self-referral aesthetic processes and their infinite resource of meaning are also central to tonality, minimalism’s harmony and the force shaping all normal musical aesthetic content: it has transcendental reference from its end of phenomenology equation of acoustic with subjective consonance, which avoids the infinite regress of epistemological justification and arbitrary dialectical reasoning behind alternate harmonies. As in sex the aesthetic logic of intuitive form and tonality is of inexhaustible return, distinct from the contrivances of architectonics and other harmonies.

[Beggar]

 

I am That..

 

That - (definition) - The illusion that I am God.

[Murali_Mohan_das]

This reminds me of a joke:

 

Knock, Knock.

 

Who's there.

 

Knock, Knock.

 

Who's there.

 

Knock, Knock.

 

Who's there.

 

Knock, Knock.

 

Who's there.

 

Phillip Glass

 

***

 

But seriously. This looks like an interesting essay. Of course, I'll have to run to my dictionary to look up "teleology" (I've looked it up before, but I still can't remember what it means).

 

Maybe I'll come back to this and try to slog through it.

 

Is there an "executive summary"?

[Sean McHugh]

Hi Murali, well no there's no summary. It's part of a longer project, but how can you summarise any Vedic-influenced thought? Summaries are concerned with hierarchies rather than the whole.

[Murali_Mohan_das]

 

Hi Murali, well no there's no summary. It's part of a longer project, but how can you summarise any Vedic-influenced thought? Summaries are concerned with hierarchies rather than the whole.

O.K., I'll try to wade through it (dictionary in hand) when I've got the gumption.

 

I think Popeye the Sailor Man did a pretty good job of summarizing Vedic thought.