Antenati: A New Phenomenology of Meaning in Music - Part I
Philosophical Basis
When I began this Substack in February of 2024, my intention was to put all my attention into explaining the ideas underlying the antenati practice and to fully develop A New Phenomenology of Meaning in Music into chapters over the course of a year. However, I was offered a doctoral fellowship at Princeton University and all of my efforts subsequently went into preparing for graduate school.
Since then, my ideas have not stopped evolving and have indeed gone beyond those discussed in the paper. And so, in order to keep things flowing, and in order for these ideas to be preserved and available, I’m going to publish A New Phenomenology of Meaning in Music as-is on this Substack in two sections.
The first section lays the phenomenological foundation for explaining the practice. The second section describes antenati’s structure, practice and meaning. Much of this paper is in outline form and I’m not going to alter it very much, if at all.
If anyone who reads this has a question about any of these ideas, please feel free to reach out to me and I will happily engage in a dialogue.
Intro
In 2018, Gideon Crevoshay approached me about recording an album of microtonal music at The Honey Jar—my recording studio in Brooklyn, New York. Over the course of several days, we tinkered with various vocal scores, eventually composing Superstructures: Nine Sense Variations for Voice and A-100. It was immediately clear that we had stumbled onto something extraordinary. But what we failed to realize—at least initially—is that a new kind of musical ‘fabric’ had been formed, one with a meaning and intelligence beyond our intentions, and that we’d taken the first steps towards an entirely new approach to music composition.
We would eventually come to call this approach antenati—a name which means ‘the ancestors’ in Italian and refers to the emergence of ‘spontaneous’ structures from a bed of tension-resolution patterns performed by the composer.
Antenati is a new compositional practice.
But it involves concepts we don’t find in music theory or performance technique.
In order to adequately describe antenati and place it in context, I’m going to establish a phenomenology of artistic practice.
Once the conceptual basis has been laid, I will go on to describe the practice and highlight some of its implications for meaning in music.
Finally I will speculate as to how a phenomenological analysis of meaning might benefit us as a society.
The Problem With Language
A Riot of Color
When someone first tastes a glass of wine, the mind is awash in new information. Often there is a mix of propositions—this wine is french—and sensory experiences—like the flavor of leather and tobacco. Indeed, what some sommeliers call “critical tasting” involves comparing the two kinds of knowledge in order to form beliefs about taste experiences. But as encounters pile up, several things are likely to happen.
Insights which resemble each other will gradually become familiar.
And the brain quickens to subtle unfamiliarities which are then perceived as new experiences.
From here on out, we enter a world in which,
“every visual detail bursts forth in a riot of ultrasaturated color. It had an intensity and vividness — an almost electric quality... A friend, tasting it across the table, compared it to a well-designed neon sign. These images remained in my head long after I swallowed the wine,”
Mental Phenomena
What Alex Halberstadt is describing in the New York Times, regarding one of Maggie Harrison’s wines, are mental phenomena — detailed, textured, tactile places Alex has been and can only conjure for us with words like “riot of color” and “neon sign”.
Esoteric mental phenomena comprise a fair amount of human experience, yet we don’t have a lot of words for talking about them.
Hence, much acquired wisdom remains variously locked in people's minds as experience or shrouded in metaphor and paradoxical axiom.
Artistic Practice
At our recording session in The Honey Jar, Gideon and I eventually played all twenty-three takes of long tones—what would go on to become Superstructures, the first antenati composition—altogether simultaneously,
It was as if a window were opened onto the very passage of time itself
As if beholding the unfolding genealogy of galaxies
Such similes can in-and-of-themselves inspire to convey some of what it feels like to have a powerful and novel experience.
But for the artist who wishes to make processes of ephemeral soft-skills, and to revise and modify and ultimately convey them, a more considerate language is needed.
The Search for Tools
For five years, the full significance of the practice hovered on the edge of my awareness. I was convinced I lacked the necessary building blocks to even think let alone talk about it; so I became obsessed with definitions and glossaries, gradually inventing the tools I would need to uncover its full meaning.
Understanding that antenati bypasses thinking, I focused my efforts on the body and how meaning is processed through the senses. This led me to the field of biosemiotics.
Borrowed terms like umwelt, and functional circle allowed me to think about the moving parts of the practice without collapsing into an exhaustion of word-salad.
I ultimately came to recognize that antenati gives rise to meaning patterns with implications across various fields of human thought and experience.
This led me to distinguish antenati as a phenomenological artform.
In the following pages, I will introduce some terms, define “phenomenological artform” and distinguish it from other types of artistic experience and practice.
Phenomenology
Phenomenal Practice
Why are certain human behaviors marked as special in our minds as opposed to others?
Why does one performance of the same song stand above another?
With the concept of phenomenal practice, I will seek to answer these questions.
Qualia
Alex Haberstadt describes one of Maggie Harrison’s wines by putting into words the experience of tasting it.
A “riot of color” and a “neon sign” are striking descriptions of what philosophers of mind refer to as “qualia”, or the qualitative characteristics of sensation that make up subjective experience.
The term qualia comes from the Latin adjective quālis meaning "of what sort" or "of what kind" and encapsulates the “what-it’s-like-ness” of moments in time—the redness of a glass of wine, but moreover, the particular redness of this particular glass at this particular moment.
The Knowledge Argument
In Epiphenomenal Qualia, Australian philosopher Frank Cameron Jackson distinguishes qualia from other types of knowledge by proposing that a scientist named Mary, being isolated in a room somehow devoid of color, though she had been informed of every mathematical and conceptual fact and principle regarding wavelengths of light and had furthermore internalized and made meaning of every conceivable aspect of physics, optics and neurophysiology, will nonetheless gain knowledge of something new when she emerges from the room and experiences color for the first time.
This experiment is intended to demonstrate that an ability to gain direct knowledge of a moment in time through the senses is a kind of superpower through which knowledge becomes available in zipped form, uncompressing in the brain as mental phenomena.
This knowledge stands in direct contrast to everything Mary had learned about color while isolated in the room—what could be called her propositional attitudes.
Consequently, if Mary were ever to return, she would surely have more to say than when she left having gone from one kind of knowing to another.
Soft Skills
Qualia are the building blocks of phenomenal practice.
They give rise to the soft skills of expertise in music, acting, sports, anything where “mental focus” can take you from middling to extraordinary.
Even the term “phenomenal”, often used to describe when things are outstanding or remarkable, speaks to the extra-special way some human endeavors resonate when observed.
But the qualia of a performer’s experiences aren’t directly observable. They are inherently personal and can only be known by the person experiencing them.
So when we observe a phenomenal performance, we are rather observing behavioral responses to qualia.
And what distinguishes one performance from another is the relationship of the performer to the particular moment in time, or to the qualia in question.
Propositional Attitudes
Ordinarily, qualia are but one aspect of subjective experiences which among other things includes an entire architecture of propositional attitudes that make up the psyche.
Often assumed to be the basic building blocks of thought, propositional attitudes are states of mind which exist in relation to ideas and are experienced as either true or false.
We may think of them as beliefs about experiences.
Mere Qualia
In order for qualia to give rise to “phenomenal” performances, they must be isolated from propositional attitudes, memories of different experiences and expectations as to what will happen in the future.
In other words, they must become mere.
When mental qualia are completely divorced from propositional attitudes— when our experiences are untainted by what we believe about them— then knowledge of mere qualia becomes possible and the direct transmission of phenomenal practice takes place.
Direct Transmission
Imagine we are gathered outside the room when Mary emerges. If we’re close enough to see her face, we may react with powerful emotions of our own.
This sympathetic reflex is an example of the transportive quality of direct behavioral responses to mere qualia.
The same mechanism is at work when we speak of the transportive quality of certain works of art.
The effect is about more than the information conveyed by the behavior (she exclaims “wow”).
The effect is about more even than the meaning Mary is making of the knowledge of the quale of color.
It’s rather a direct transmission of “what-it’s-like-ness” from one subject to another in a kind of inclusive compressed form.
Mark Rothko referred to what I’m calling direct transmission when he once said in an interview,
The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them.
In What Is Art, Tolstoy says,
A real work of art destroys, in the consciousness of the receiver, the separation between himself and the artist — not that alone, but also between himself and all whose minds receive this work of art. In this freeing of our personality from its separation and isolation, in this uniting of it with others, lies the chief characteristic and the great attractive force of art.
How this call-and-response effect works is not fully known. But it’s a fundamental mechanism underlying phenomenal practice and what makes certain human behaviors resonate as more “phenomenal” than others.
Boundary of Rules
When we observe a footballer improvising within the informational system of football/soccer who sees an opportunity and seizes upon it to physically bring about a meaningful resolution to the narrative, we not only understand the resolution of the narrative (yay, we won!), but we acquire knowledge of what the footballer experienced in their accession to that moment in compressed form by observation.
The resolution of the tension-release pattern combined with the direct knowledge of the quale of that moment, is what creates the massive energy that fills the football/soccer arena.
One can imagine the amount of tension released in a pub where the game is televised versus a pub where word is simply announced.
It’s more than the narrative resolution that excites, it’s the behavioral response to mere qualia (by the player) and the corresponding compressed transmission by observation (to the observer).
Flirtation With Perfection
The Spanish term duende has been used to describe the quality of performance we are calling phenomenal.
Mastery of presence within a moment in time can turn a record of that moment, however flawed in detail, into a flirtation with perfection.
Having duende can be compared to the American concept of having “soul”.
That wonderful singer El Lebrijano, creator of the Debla, said: ‘On days when I sing with duende no one can touch me.’ (Lorca)
Federico García Lorca identified duende with darkness because he recognized that mere qualia awakens knowledge of mortality.
‘All that has dark sounds has duende.’ And there’s no deeper truth than that… Those dark sounds are the mystery, the roots that cling to the mire that we all know, that we all ignore, but from which comes the very substance of art. ‘Dark sounds’ said the man of the Spanish people, agreeing with Goethe, who… hit on a definition of the duende: ‘A mysterious force that everyone feels and no philosopher has explained.’ (Lorca)
Mere qualia reminds us of mortality because it reveals that our subjective identities are bound to instantiation in time, hence temporary. It pulls back the curtain on the movie of reality and discloses that we are but a single frame of luminous urgency flickering inexorably in a moment no less evanescent than the last.
Propositional attitudes fortify the myth of continuity (the myth of equilibrium) and stave off existential fear.
Thus, the abolition of propositional attitudes in order to attain knowledge of mere qualia carries risk.
This may help explain why, when given the option, more and more people are happy to rely upon technology to accomplish things such as singing in tune or playing in time—things that in the past would have required a measure of mere phenomenal experience to accomplish.
Duende Structures
Lorca described duende as a force that inhabits the performer. This is in line with the way many artists speak about artistic practice. But in phenomenal practice, duende can be better understood as a structure or mental model we create in the mind according to a set of rules which defines the artwork or activity.
This is more than the lyrics and melody to a song. It’s also the feelings of the character who is singing and the overall feeling of the music and arrangement. It might be a synthesis of aspects of past masterful performances. It is the sum total of the feeling or spirit of the artist’s version of the work. A duende structure is similar to a memory in that it’s a detailed, often emotionally complex model of an experience, not a list of attributes. It is, in short, a mental model of the quale of the piece.
Umwelt
Biosemiotics pioneer Jakob Von Uexküll describes the entire subjective universe of a living organism as its umwelt. He conceives of the umwelt almost as we would a spaceship, a perceptual bubble inhabited by a conscious agent. All of the complexities of the outside world must be negotiated through the simple instruments on the control panel of this ship.
At first glance, it might not sound very satisfying or dramatic to be a tick, but think about living life with only three senses—smell, heat and feel—in dogged pursuit of one simple meaning-rule.
The tick sits motionless on the tip of a branch until a mammal passes below it. The smell of the butyric acid awakens it and it lets itself fall. It lands on the coat of its prey, through which it burrows to reach and pierce the warm skin with its sting… The pursuit of this simple meaning rule constitutes almost the whole of the tick's life. (Von Uexküll)
In phenomenal practice, the boundaries and rules of the duende structure must be doggedly pursued as the only meaning rule, as if the duende structure comprises the artist’s entire subjective universe.
Therefore, the artist must learn to bring their perceptual bubble to some extent inside the boundary of rules describing the duende structure. That is to say, the artist must fully inhabit the duende structure rather than the other way around.
Insofar as the artist’s umwelt is equivalent to the duende structure, the artist will be free to react from within that subjective universe and those behavioral responses will correspond in counterpoint to the quale of the duende structure.
Welcome To The Planetarium
In this sense, the artist’s umwelt is a flexible, malleable and constructed thing. Using the powers of the imagination, the artist may lay out before their own senses the instruments and controls necessary to negotiate those aspects of reality that serve the rules and boundaries of the artworks which exist in their minds.
The key to this lies in meaning. For an umwelt contains only those objects that carry meaning for the subject. In identifying and doggedly pursuing the meaning rule that governs the relationship between the artist and the meaning carriers in the duende structure, the artist creates a kind of inner- or secondary-umwelt.
We may now think of the duende structure as a planetarium constructed inside the mind. Projected upon the enormous domed ceiling are constellations of symbols which define the artwork and for which the structure was created. When the artist begins creating meaning-relationships with these symbols, the artist’s behavioral responses are joined with them in counterpoint, and the quale of the duende structure is transmitted to the observer.
Counterpoint
Von Uexküll has a very beautiful concept of counterpoint that I have adopted and will try to convey here. We might tend to think of point and counterpoint as one thing’s answer to another, a call and response like “thrust and parry” but Von Uexküll’s sense of the meaning is more subtle. In The Theory of Meaning he says,
The flower is a collection of counterpoints that act upon the bee;
and later,
The color of the flower, although not the same to the bees as it is to us, serves them, nevertheless, as a positive perceptual cue because the flower and the bees are composed in counterpoint to each other. (Von Uexküll)
He uses the exquisite patchwork of partnerships, perceptual alignments, unlikely assists, and puzzle-like intricacy in the natural world to illustrate a kind of ontological call-and-response, a structural counterpoint in which subjects are joined with the objects in their subjective universes. He goes even deeper when talking about the octopus and its relationship to water,
Let us take, as the first example, the octopus, designated as the subject in its relationship to sea-water as the meaning-carrier. We will immediately perceive a contrapuntal relationship. The fact that water cannot be compressed is the precondition for the construction of the octopus’ muscular swim-bag. The pumping movements of the swim-bag have a mechanical effect on the noncompressible water that propels the animal backwards. The rule that governs the properties of sea-water acts upon… the development of the octopus’ form to express the properties of sea-water in a counterpoint; first and foremost, an organ is produced whose muscular walls force the water in and out. The rule of meaning that joins point and counterpoint is expressed in the action of swimming.
According to Von Uexküll, no objects will appear in an organism’s umwelt unless the object contains meaning for that organism and so his idea of counterpoint is an expression of his theory of meaning.
The handle of a coffee-cup demonstrates without doubt the contrapuntal relationship of the coffee and the human hand… The meaning to us of our household utensils… can always be traced back to the bridge that is built between [us] and the utensils' counterpoints… The chair is a seating accommodation that rises from the floor, whose meaning lies in its being a number of bridges to various counterpoints. Its seating surface, back and armrests find their counterpoint in the human body, to which they form bridges, while the legs of the chair form distinct bridges to the counterpoint, ground.
In both of these examples, the meaning that defines these contrapuntal relationships is related to form and he in fact hypothesizes that physical forms are indeed joined, not by chance over enormous spans of time, but by meaning. He points to the sun as being responsible for the development of the eye and in a kind of epistemological sleight-of-hand, turns it around on the sun, declaring that conversely the eye is also responsible for the sun.
In his employment of the metaphor of a house surrounded by a garden as the human body, Von Uexküll says,
The body that houses the subject on the one hand produces the symbols that populate the surrounding garden and is, on the other hand, the product of these very same symbols that are the meaningful themes in constructing it.
The sun owes its shine and its form high up in the sky that extends over the garden to the eye, as the window of the body that houses ourself. At the same time, the sun is the theme guiding the construction of the window.
He proposes a theory of the development of forms in which meaning is a kind of fifth fundamental force of nature, responsible for all the intricate joinery we observe in the parquet mosaic of the natural world. A world in which our forms create the objects that appear to us, objects which in turn are responsible for the development of our forms, being joined with us in biosemiotic counterpoint.
This same principle is operating and illustrative as to the workings of the duende planetarium we have now imagined. Just as living organisms behave in biosemiotic counterpoint to meaning carriers in their physical environment, so—by bringing the spaceship of our subjective universes inside the planetarium—the artist behaves in phenomenal counterpoint to the symbols projected upon the mental firmament of the duende structure. Now, looking through the spaceship windows at what appears to be the outside world, we are actually looking at the domed ceiling of the planetarium and the array of symbols which hold, for us, the meaning of the artwork we have come to fully inhabit. The symbols that populate that ersatz firmament spring out of the subjective universe that’s observing them while also having played a role in the formation of that universe—in this instance, the mental model-universe the artist has created in order to occupy the artwork.
So in the physical world, the meaning rule that joins point and counterpoint—the musculature of the octopus and water—is expressed in the action of swimming. Whereas in the phenomenal world, the rule that joins my ability to feel deep aching sorrow (point) to a lyric about lost love (counterpoint), is expressed in the action of singing.
Aesthetics
Because it seeks to answer some of the same questions, one might expect phenomenal practice to intersect with aesthetics. But though phenomenal practice does give rise to a kind of aesthetic regime, it’s a regime based upon the artist’s experience of mere qualia rather than the formal qualities of the behavioral responses themselves.
Phenomenal practice represents an alternative value system to formal aesthetics and places absolute value on the mental states of the artist.
Formal qualities are derived from their bodily responses to mere qualia based upon contrapuntal meaning relationships formed within the duende structure.
Phenomenological Art Forms
Open and Closed Structures
Duende structures can be closed and open to varying degrees. We have imagined the planetarium with constellations of meaning carriers projected upon the dome in a semblance of the celestial heavens. But sometimes duende structures describe artworks with no specific meaning-carriers. These are duende structures we would describe as open.
A Georgian choir is operating within mostly closed duende structures, defined by many repetitions over many generations of singers. However, to the degree that the subjective universe of the singers is brought inside the duende structure, that is the degree to which the singing will transmit the quale of the song to the observer.
John Coltrane, on the other hand, created a system with very open duende structures wherein his quartet could give direct expression to their phenomenal experiences. The relationships within the group, the drugs they took, even the presence of audiences could all be characterized as ritual elements which served to facilitate knowledge of mere qualia within the boundaries of the structures he defined. For Coltrane the duende structures were open enough to allow for direct representation of mental states, but closed enough to ensure group cohesion.
In painting, Abstract Expressionism is another example of very open duende structures which allowed for direct representation of mere qualia. The structures are closed by color choices and reliance upon bodily gestures or other means of getting paint to canvas. But open with respect to almost every other aspect of painting.
Stream-of-consciousness writing and stand up comedy are also phenomenal practices with very open duende structures.
Representation
With open duende structures, behavioral responses become direct representations of mere qualia within an artist’s umwelt (or perceptual bubble) as opposed to within the dome of the closed duende structure. In these circumstances, the structure of the duende serves only to create the inner-umwelt or secondary subjective universe from which the artist observes and responds to mere qualia in the primary umwelt of the artist which can include their thoughts, memories, fears and fantasies as well as sensational stimuli from the physical world.
When duende structures are very open, phenomenological art forms become possible.
In phenomenal practice, behavioral responses to mere qualia sympathetically kindle knowledge of the quale of the performance in the observer.
But in the phenomenological art form, the artist’s physical responses directly represent the mental states to which they are responding in counterpoint as opposed to when there are mediating meaning carriers like a song lyric or the rules in a football match.
Meaning
With phenomenological art forms, deep levels of meaning can be tapped and woven into narrative structures.
Patterns often begin to emerge which resonate across varying fields of human thought and experience.
The basic emergent pattern which characterizes the phenomenological art form is the life-cycle.
Conclusion
In this section, I have sought to take the reader on the journey I took in grappling with the meaning of the antenati practice.
The language I had at my disposal was inadequate to think about the things that antenati brought to mind.
So I began a process of defining antenati as a unique kind of art form.
Delivering a “phenomenal” performance requires a specific kind of relationship to a moment in time.
That relationship can feel dangerous because it makes one aware of one’s mortality.
That relationship can be described in terms of mental constructs which define how the artist and artwork interact.
Depending on certain details of those constructs, a very open artist/artwork relationship is possible.
When this takes place, the pattern of the life-cycle emerges.
In the next section, I will begin where this section ended: with the life cycle—the basic pattern around which antenati is structured.