In Praise of Long Form Music

I grew up as a symphony kid in the '70s. Dad was a professional flutist, we had nothing but classical records in the house and I spent many hours in the audience, and later in the recording booth. I still love classical music all these years later, as well as jazz and beyond.

So what would make someone like that into a confirmed Deadhead? I’ve wondered about myself for most of my life, and finally realized it’s partly that I love long-form music that takes you into other realms, realms beyond words. Beyond organized thought. Music that that’s less explicit or direct than 3-minute pop tunes about love, but lets you approach in your own way, provides loose guideposts to your internal journey, and unspools slowly with themes and variations that change, depart and recombine over enough time to let you really sink into it. So when I first heard 2/13/70’s Dark Star>Other One>Lovelight in 1981, I was hooked. It has structure, intention, movement—but it’s not prescriptive. It doesn’t tell you what to think, what to feel. You have to engage with it and take your own meaning from it. That’s what continues to draw me into the Grateful Dead, year after year. And it’s surprisingly similar to the experience I get listening to a Beethoven symphony or a Dvořák cello concerto. Even “programmatic” music like Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherezade” or Delius’s “On hearing the first Cuckoo in Spring” can transport a listener to realms not dreamed of by the composer.

Of course the Dead and Western classical aren’t the only long-form musics. Indian classical music has been gorgeously exploring mental and emotional terrains beyond words for thousands of years, and I’ve been lucky enough to see Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan and others. I love a lot of so-called “modern” classical, like Ligeti, Boulez and Schoenberg (I recently saw what might be Morton Subotnick’s final performance, at MIT’s List Arts Center). Minimalists like Steve Reich are some of my heros; I consider some of Brian Eno’s work to be in that category.

Also, some composers have experimented with extremely long-form songs, like John Cage’s As Slow As Possible, currently being performed in Halberstadt, Germany, slated to end in the year 2640. And Jem Finer’s Longplayer should play for 1000 years without looping; the current performance, if uninterrupted, will conclude on December 31, 2999. But though I’m fascinated by these beyond-human-lifetime Deep Time performances intellectually and philosophically, I like music with a bit more structure.

I suspect one way long-form music works on the mind is to occupy the prefrontal cortext, to “tie it up” listening to the notes, the chords, rhythms and timbres—all the things we usually associate with music listening. But while the conscious mind is otherwise occupied, the subconscious becomes free to wander, free-associate and make oblique connections, without the constant judgement we normally apply. I think this is one of the wellsprings of creativity. Many scientists have attributed creative intuitions to long walks, music, and that limnal space between waking and sleep. And since meditation is a well-trodden route to enlightenment, where especially Buddhist traditions try to quiet the conscious mind, it makes sense that a musical meditation might have similar effects.