Audiation—Stage 1: Retaining an “Aftersound”
There is No Present
“I don’t mean to alarm all of you, but there is no present,” Dr. Gordon once said during a lecture on audiation. He went on to say, “As soon as you call a moment ‘the present,’ it becomes the past.” The following audio clip is from another lecture—my favorite Gordon lecture (1984)—during which he describes Stage 1 of audiation.
The main idea to take away from this post is that audiation is a process (a fragile process as we will see later) that begins inauspiciously, with simple memory.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the 1945 British film noir classic Dead of Night. (You can find it on Amazon Prime Videos.) Anyway, the film takes place mostly at night in a remote farmhouse in England, where 7 strangers meet in the living room and tell creepy stories. I wouldn’t think of revealing all the dreams-within-dreams that happen in this film; but I do want to quote one of the characters whose attempt to recall his dream reminds me of Gordon’s notion of an “aftersound.” The character says,
Trying to remember a dream is … how shall I put it?… like being out in a thunderstorm. There’s a flash of lightning. And for a brief moment everything stands out, vivid and startling.
So then. What happens if we’re hearing music, but there’s no “lightning”? In other words, what if we don’t attend to the music we’re hearing? In that event, the audiation process breaks down.
What you’re about to hear is a fascinating, infuriating, comically ill-conceived critique of the audiation process by Bennett Reimer (1994) from his infamous debate with Gordon. Even after hearing the following audio clip many times, “stunned” is the only word I can find to describe my reaction to it. Please listen to the entire excerpt and then feel free to comment on it. Trigger-warning: This audio clip is not for the faint of heart!
The mind does not process musical events in the moment they occur; therefore, aural perception does not exist. The mind can deal with sound events only as gestalts because the mind is a gestalt making apparatus; therefore, children do not have to be taught to hear music as structured events.
Where do I start? First, I learned, after 35 years of teaching, that children do indeed need to learn how to understand musical structure. Such understanding is not automatic. Second, our students can process musical wholes, or in Reimer’s word, “gestalts,” but only when their minds are engaged. If our students hear music mindlessly, if they fail even to retain an aftersound, then the audiation process is doomed before it begins. Gordon (2012, p. 19) summed up the precariousness of Stage 1 this way:
Unless we give conscious meaning to the aftersound within a few seconds, what we have retained in Stage 1 is lost.
I want to bring up one more point about Stage 1 — staying awake! Audiation must be an active process if we expect it to work at all. I remember a lecture by Roger Dean, former chair of the Music Education and Therapy Departments at Temple University, during which he described the breakdown of Stage 1 this way:
When you’re driving your car, how many of you have stopped at a red light, startled yourselves awake, and then asked, “How did I get here?”
As I have often done, I’ll let Rudolf Flesch (1954, p. 104) have the final word on mental acuity:
Effective speaking and writing depends on effective listening and reading—and even more on effective seeing, hearing, feeling, and doing. If you feel that your command of English isn’t up to par, the real reason is probably that you go through life half asleep. Wake up!
I attended a lecture that Dr. Gordon gave back in the 1990s during which he said, “I don’t mean to alarm all of you, but there is no present.” He went on to say, “As soon as you call a moment ‘the present,’ it becomes the past.” The following audio clip is from another lecture from 1984 during which he describes Stage 1 of audiation.
The main idea to take away about stage 1 is that audiation is a process (a fragile process as we will see in a minute) that begins inauspiciously, with simple memory.
I don’t know how many of you have seen the 1945 British film noir classic movie Dead of Night. (You can find it on Amazon Prime Videos.) Anyway, the film takes place mostly at night in a remote farmhouse in England, where 7 strangers meet in the living room and tell creepy stories. I wouldn’t think of revealing all the dreams-within-dreams that happen in this film; but I do want to quote one of the characters. His attempt to recall his dream reminds me of Gordon’s notion of an “aftersound.” The character says,
Trying to remember a dream is … how shall I put it?… like being out in a thunderstorm. There’s a flash of lightning. And for a brief moment everything stands out, vivid and startling.
So then. What happens if we’re hearing music, but there’s no “lightning”? In other words, what if we don’t attend to the music we’re hearing? In that event, the audiation process breaks down.
I hope all of you will have a chance to hear the infamous debate between Dr. Gordon and Bennett Reimer. Bennett Reimer was a prominent music educator in the 1970s and 80s who was very much against pattern instruction. During the debate, he said, “The mind is essentially a gestalt making apparatus. Children, therefore, do not have to be taught to hear music as structured events, that is, to think musically. The human mind can only deal with musical sounds as gestalts.”
I respectfully disagree. First, after 35 years of teaching, I learned that children do, indeed, need to be taught to understand musical structure. Such understanding is not automatic. Second, our students can process musical wholes, or as Reimer put it, “gestalts,” but only when their minds are engaged. If our students hear music mindlessly, if they fail even to retain an aftersound, then the audiation process cannot even begin. Dr. Gordon summed up the precariousness of Stage 1 this way: “Unless we give conscious meaning to the aftersound within a few seconds, what we have retained in Stage 1 is lost.”
Basically, stage 1 of audiation comes down to one thing: staying awake! Audiation must be an active process if we expect it to work at all. I remember a lecture by Roger Dean, the former chair of the Music Education and Therapy Departments at Temple University, during which he described how Stage 1 might break down. He offered this analogy:
When you’re driving your car, how many of you have stopped at a red light, startled yourself awake, and then asked, “How did I get here?”
It’s time now to move on to stage 2, during which we focus no longer on retaining an after-sound and staying awake. Instead, we focus on essentialness—which is a crucial MLT topic that nobody seems to care much about. In fact, I believe that the most neglected, but essential, topic in MLT is … essentialness.