Our heritage of artistic revelation stems back many thousands of years to the cave paintings of places like Dordogne and Southern Africa and beyond to even older more advanced civilizations of which archeologists are just now finding the most remote, ephemeral traces.
There is a phenomenon related in a historical sense to the development of human culture and in a transcendental sense to consciousness itself. Coltrane referred to this as a reservoir. This reservoir supplies shapes and possibilities for composers and improvisors. It’s important to add that when all composers are improvisers and vice versa, the level of artistic expression will be at an unprecedented level.
The consciousness of certain individuals in a particular temporal period affects the possibilities that emerge from this reservoir in a certain time and place. There must have been very high consciousness in the time of Bach.
At times a certain musician will draw something from this reservoir that refreshes generations of musicians. Sometimes, though, ideas can petrify and become pale imitations devoid of inner life. This occurs when musicians simply imitate innovative artists without drinking at the source themselves.
The ancient concept of the Akashic Field is a good analogue for the reservoir locus. It would be floating above the Earth, maybe just above the atmosphere. At a slightly higher level would be the repository of possibilities from the entire future and past of humanity. Like Jung’s collective unconscious, it can be accessed in dreams, visions and by the cultivated artist.
An explanation of an artist’s so-called “style” could be that the wine from this reservoir will take on the shape of the vessel that it is poured into.
This phenomenon is far from a Western conceit, though the concept of a temporal period may well be. In Bengal today there are still wandering holy men called Bauls that improvise songs based on sacred texts or their own spontaneous poetry. West African Griots are more well known, not to mention the master improvisers of the various Arabic, Iranian and North and South Indian traditions.
Ever since the Cartesian phrase Cogito Ergo Sum was first put into print, the belief that humanity is discreetly separate from the natural world has infected culture. On the contrary, the composing of music, on paper or extemporaneously in performance, is as natural to humans as speech or walking upright. We learn to speak from listening to others but we learn what we want to say by listening to something deeper.
Copyright © 1993-2010 Jack DeSalvo
As far as I'm concerned, this explains why innovation can't be forced, that it's finally a manifestation of the collective that arises naturally out of the work of those highly attuned to the reservoir.
ReplyDeleteI find it fascinating (and am encouraged) that such a thing may well be scientifically quantifiable.