Music Book Review: Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New Aesthetic Paradigm by Tim Hodgkinson

Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New AestheticParadigm

by Tim Hodgkinson (Music 781.1 Hod)

 

From 1968-1978, one of the most interesting bands in the world was a British group called Henry Cow, who combined elegantly detailed composition and wild, almost freeform improvisation in exciting ways. After Henry Cow broke up, cofounder Tim Hodgkinson continued to work in music on a variety of fronts as a composer, as an improviser and performer on clarinets and lap steel guitar, as a recording studio engineer and producer, and as a musical thinker and writer. Regarding that last discipline, he published a book in 2016 entitled Music and the Myth of Wholeness: Toward a New Aesthetic Paradigm, which is a unique and thought-provoking read that seems to combine his early training in social anthropology with a lifetime of participating in and simply being surrounded by music. Let’s talk a little about his ideas that you’ll find in this book, starting with his first proposition as laid out in the introduction or “prelude”:

 

“The projection of the sacred is the human response to the untranslatability between the two informational modes that above all other factors define the condition of that being’s being.”

 

What exactly is he talking about here? Music making is a cornerstone of where he’s going with all of this, but first he has to lay out how he feels that we relate to music. In most cultures, there has been a spiritual or ritual relationship with music, that music somehow expresses the ineffable in a way that we can’t quite put into words, yet we have some broadly-shared feelings and responses to it. At its core, there’s non-verbal communication and expression happening here. From another polarity, we have oral and written language-based communication, which helps us to express ideas and feelings pretty accurately among one another, yet it seems like it often falls short of depicting those subtle, transcendent moments. We write around them and hope that the reader can pick up on them.

 

As mentioned earlier, Hodgkinson’s early scholastic interests were in social anthropology, and in an oversimplified way of putting it, this book combines his interests in music and anthropology or musicology, along with a healthy dash of critical theory and philosophy, to try to identify the “hows” and “whys” about music and its effects on us, individually, culturally, and globally. He begins to look at forms of biological intelligence, forms that don’t necessarily express themselves through the structures of contrived language but are inherent and always working. In doing so, he takes a fresh look at our conceptions of imagination, and differences between discursive, ritual and aesthetic modes of human behavior. Eventually he interprets these modes musically, looking at their effects on improvised and composed music and particularly that interesting gray area that can be found between them, which often demands a new way of listening. Once we’ve had a chance to absorb all of these concepts—and it’s a very novel path down some less-traveled philosophical roads — Hodgkinson then looks at three composers up close through this new lens. John Cage, Pierre Schaeffer, and Helmut Lachenmann, whose bodies of work are quite different from one another, indeed seem to hold up through this kind of conception.

 

While you’ll find some other books in Polley that approach music from this more philosophical side of things, this is certainly one of the most interesting of the lot. I’m still not sure what I think of it in total, and I’m sure I’ll be reading again sometime after I’ve had some more space to think about how it all works in my own conceptions of music, art, cultural studies, and life. But if you’re the kind of musical thinker who likes these kinds of deep dives, I would highly recommend trying out Music and the Myth of Wholeness. Even if some of its points don’t resonate with you, it’s a lot to think about.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Henry Cow: The World is a Problem by Benjamin Piekut.]

[ publisher’s official Music and the Myth of Wholeness web page ] | [ official Tim Hodgkinson web site ]

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

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