It Shook Me, the Light

Bump! This post is from 2010, but it's been on my mind lately. So I'm bumping it to the head of the queue.

 

During the early 1970s I'd played for two years with a rock band called St. Matthew Passion. Modeled on Blood, Sweat, and Tears and on Chicago, the band consisted of 4-piece rhythm section plus three horns: sax, trumpet (me), and trombone. On “She's Not There” the three horns would start with a chaotic improvised freak-out and then, on cue from the keyboard player, the entire band would come in on the first bar of the written arrangement.

On our last gig it was just me and the sax player; the trombonist couldn't make it. The sax and I started our improv. The music got more and more intense until Wham! I felt myself dissolve into white light and pure music. It felt good.

And I tensed up.

It was over.

After the gig the sax player and I made a few remarks about it — “that was nice” — enough to confirm that something had happened to him too. One guy from the audience came up to us and remarked on how fine that section had been. Did he know what had happened? Or, if not ‘know’ exactly, did he sense a special magic in the performance? I ask because performers and audience often have a very different ‘sense’ of the same performance. Perhaps the guy was just complimenting us on our ‘freak-out’ chops, not on any magic in the music.

That's the only time I've ever experienced that kind of ego loss in music. For a few years I was very ambivalent about that experience, wanting it again, but also fearing it. A child of the 60s, a very geekish child of the 60s, I’d read quite a bit about altered states of consciousness, as they were called in the scientific literature. I read around in the secondary and tertiary literature on mystical experiences, and even a bit of the primary literature – though just exactly what’s the point of reading a mystic’s account an ineffable encounter with . . . . well, with what, exactly?

I knew such things happened. And now, in little more than a couple of heartbeats, now I too knew. But what is it that I knew?

Other than the experience itself, I knew that what all those people had been writing about was real. It’s not that I doubted it. Still it’s one thing to read about walking on the moon, even to see video footage and photographs of space-suited men walking about. It’s another thing to be there oneself.

But how can one experience be so powerful, so polarizing, that it haunts your thoughts and echoes through your soul for years afterward? What is the human nervous system that THAT can happen? In attributing the experience to the nervous system – as opposed, say, to an encounter with the divine, I do not thereby mean to dismiss it – oh, that? that was just a burp of the nervous system. We cannot dismiss it. The nervous system is us.

Now the memory's faded & the ambivalence too. But I'm playing better music now than ever I did back then. I’m talking not so much about technique – that comes and goes – but about expressive power, about ‘authenticity.’ Is that authenticity and echo of that experience?

Who knows?

* * * * *

Such experiences are common enough among musicians. Over the years I’ve collected accounts from books and articles. Here are some from Jenny Boyd, with Holly George-Warren. Musicians In Tune. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992.

 

Patty Smyth (p. 161):

When I have had those experiences, I'm singing by myself. I've had those moments when I do feel the voice coming through me, and I know it's coming from out there. It's a certain tone in that voice that makes me feel that way. It chokes me up.

Cece Bullard (pp. 161-162):

It's like you leave your body. It's like you're dizzy and lightheaded and yet right there. My hands just seem to throb, like a pulse almost. It's the best feeling in the world, bar none. It took me a lot of singing lessons before I finally connected with that feeling. The first time it clicked and I connected, I nearly fell down, and I started crying.

Sinéad O'Conner (p. 164):

A lot of times I shake uncontrollably. I can't control the shaking, and it's not because I'm nervous, it's because I'm singing. It's because it's coming out and it's making me shake. It feels like being drunk, it's like an out-of-body experience. There are times when I've done gigs — and it doesn't happen every time you do a show or every time you write something — but they've told me stuff I've done onstage that I'm not aware I've done.

Branford Marsalis (p. 173):

High, you feel high. It's easy to do it physically, but it's hard to do it mentally. I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit. The sublime cannot be routine. Three times, and you never forget them. It's with a combination of musicians, it's never just me.

Ringo Starr (p. 176):

It feels great; its just a knowing. It's magic actually; it is pure magic. Everyone who is playing at that time knows where everybody's going. We all feel like one; wherever you go, everyone feels that's where we should go. I would know if Paul was going to do something, or if George was going to raise it up a bit, or John would double, or we'd bring it down. I usually play with my eyes closed, so you would know when things like that were happening . . . you've got to trust each other.

Huey Lewis (p. 179):

I find it more of a group experience for me. You look around and all of a sudden the song is playing and singing itself. It’s just like a wave that you ride. It’s tremendously exhilarating; it doesn’t take any energy and you look around and say, ‘Yep, this is it!’ It happens quite often but not for long periods of time. Almost at every gig that will happen somewhere for a fleeting moment. Some gigs it happens more often than others, and those are the good gigs.

Eric Clapton (p. 185):

It's a massive rush of adrenaline which comes at a certain point. Usually it's a sharing experience; it's not something I could experience on my own. . . . other musicians . . . an audience . . . Everyone in that building or place seems to unify at one point. It's not necessarily me that's doing it, it may be another musician. But it's when you get that completely harmonic experience, where everyone is hearing exactly the same thing without any interpretation whatsoever or any kind of angle. They're all transported toward the same place. That's not very common, but it always seems to happen at least once a show.

I don’t for a moment think these musicians are all describing the same thing. But just how many different things they’re describing, that I don’t know. Branford Marsalis says, “I feel that musicians who say it happens every time they play are full of shit.” Eric Clapton says that “it always seems to happen at least once a show.” Are they talking about the same thing? How could you tell?

Whatever it is, this family of musical experiences, it visits us in this devastating performance of Leonard Bernstein’s “One hand, one heart” by Jose Carreras and Kiri Te Kanawa.

A White Blackman [#Juneteenth]

I'm bumping this to the top in honor of Juneteenth and my friend Ade Knowles. Rest in peace, my brother. 

* * * * *

I published this over a decade and a half ago on a long-gone personal website and then on a now-dormant site called Gravity. I put it on New Savanna on March 15, 2010. In the wake of Jadzia's wonderful party back in 2014 – yes, gathering of the tribes, a meeting of the stylz – I bumped to the head of the queue.  Now, in August of 2017, I'm doing it again, for various reasons, but mostly on general principle: I like it.

New African Music Collective: L to R: Fonda, me, Ade, Druis.

The first time I heard the phrase -- "white black man" -- Zola Kobas was talking about me. He paid me that compliment after hearing me play the trumpet at a Juneteenth party hosted by a mutual friend, Ade Knowles. When, those many years ago, I had originally become interested in jazz, I was simply pursuing music which moved me. That Zola, a political fugitive from South African apartheid, should see me as a white black man affirmed the African spirit I cultivated in the heart of jazz.

When I was a young boy learning to play the trumpet I looked for musical heroes. Rafael Mendez, a Mexican-American who made his living playing in Hollywood studios, was my first. I admired his virtuosity and expressiveness. I was particularly attracted by the Hispanic part of his repertoire, with its tone colors and rhythms which sounded so exotic, and sensual. Then I discovered jazz.

My first jazz record was A Rare Batch of Satch, which I had urged my parents to get through their record club. I had heard that this Louis Armstrong was an important trumpet player and thought I should check him out. At first I didn't quite understand why this man was so important. But I listened and listened and, gradually, I began to understand his music. There was Armstrong's tone -- by turns jubilant, plaintive, tightly-coiled, tender -- his ability to bend notes, to worry them. And his rhythm, his amazing ability to stretch or compress time, to float phrases over the beat. This rhythmic freedom was quite unlike anything I knew in the military band music which was the staple of my instructional and playing experience. It was exciting.

Above all, there was the blues. There was its emotional provenance, grief, resignation, longing. And there was the sound, the particular notes, those so-called "blue notes." It wasn't until much later that I learned enough about music theory to know which notes these were, to know that these notes didn't exist in any European musical system. But I could hear these notes, I could grasp their expressive power. I wanted to make them mine.

Fortunately I had found a trumpet teacher, Mr. Dave Dysert, who was a jazz musician. He was more than willing to teach me the ways of this strange idiom. He taught me jazz rhythm and phrasing -- "It don't mean a thing if it don't got that swing". He also told me that it was almost impossible for musicians with a "legitimate" (i.e. European, classical) musical background to play with a jazz feel. The ways of swing had to be learned when you were young. That was when I first became consciously aware of the cultural distance between my background and the music I loved.

But it wasn't until I went to college -- to study philosophy -- that I began seriously to think about these matters. That was in the late Sixties, with the civil rights and anti-war movements in high gear. I read about the African origins of jazz rhythm and tonality, about how the slaves were forbidden to play drums but that didn't keep them from clapping their hands or from singing those "blue" notes, the tones they brought from Africa. Reading Amiri Baraka (then Leroi Jones), among others, I became aware of how American music was tremendously indebted to African-American music and, by implication, African music. I began to understand that when I moved toward jazz, as many other European Americans have done, I was moving toward Africa and away from Europe. Whatever American culture is, in general, in the musical arena it is largely a hybrid of European and African elements.

Late in my college career I joined a local jazz-rock band called the St. Matthew Passion. One particular arrangement began with the horns playing in a free-style for a short time after which the rhythm section started the song proper, with a regular beat, and melody, etc. At our last gig the sax player and I were alone -- the trombone player couldn't make it. We began as usual, and then, something snapped. All of a sudden there was just the music, flowing through me. Through us. It was wonderful. And frightening. We pulled back. And the rest of the band came in on cue. The sax player and I never really talked about what had happened -- what could we say? could talk bring it back? -- but, with a significant nod, a mumbled "that was nice," we managed to communicate to each other that something special had happened.

Perhaps a year or so later I went to hear Dizzy Gillespie play a concert at Morgan State. He played a long solo in "Olinga" and, as the solo began to end, I had a definite sense that, in some way, Dizzy was returning to himself, as though his soul had left his body during the solo and now was returning -- from a spiritual Africa, everywhere present, and available, to those who listen but do not seek the present in the future/past. While it is almost impossible to describe this event -- perhaps because I must do so in the language of a culture which tries very hard to deny that such things happen, and are important -- my sense of it is quite definite. To this day I believe that, if I saw a film of Dizzy playing this solo, I could indicate the precise moment when his soul rejoined his body.

Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 2, How to Construct a Spirit

Culture has produced some strange things. Supernatural spirits is one of them. I'm bumping this post to the top of the queue just to get it on my mind, as I need to think about these things a bit more while I contemplate writing a book on cultural evolution.

* * * * *

Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.
—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”

In lieu of an environment that surrounds culture . . . picture an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations between human, animal, vegetable, or mineral.
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

About two weeks ago I posted some remarks on how one thinks about and plays very simple percussion instruments, claves and bells, and told a story about some mysterious tones that sometimes arise in bell choirs. I also promised a post in which I “attempt to construe those sounds as spirit voices.” This is that post.

The Magic of the Bell, Recap

The phenomenon that interests me is that of certain high frequency (around 2000 Herz and above) ‘twitters’ that arose during a certain rehearse I attended some years ago. As I explained in that post, there were four of us, each playing a different bell. Three of us play set patterns, time and again, while the fourth improvised freely over those patterns.

At a certain point, when energy was high and the music was rocking, we all heard these high twittering sounds. None of us was playing them. That is, they didn’t coincide with the patterns any of us were playing. Rather, they somehow arose through the interaction of the patterns the four of us played. We’d played together many times before, and many times since, but that was the only time we heard those sounds.

What were they? The purpose of this post is to explore what’s involved in asserting that they were some kind of ‘spirit.’

What phenomenon are we trying to name and explain?

This is a matter of drawing a boundary. Perhaps the easiest play to draw the boundary, dare I say it? the natural place, is around the sound itself. If we had had a recorder playing during that session, bounding the phenomenon in this way would be very easy. What we’re interested in would be what’s on the recording; nothing more, nothing less.

Then we could examine the recording to determine just what those pitches were like, their dominant frequency, just when they happened, and so forth. That is to say, we would be treating those sounds as nothing but mechanical vibrations, which we are examining in the standard ways. This is, of course, an entirely legitimate thing to do. It’s done all the time.

But THAT’s not the phenomenon that interests me. That’s not where I want to draw the boundary. That’s only one aspect of the phenomenon that interests me. It’s the aspect that tells me that THERE’S SOMETHING ELSE GOING ON.

Remember my description? I said that this happened when the energy was high and the music rocked. That doesn’t always happen. It’s not rare, but it’s not automatic, and for some purposes it’s neither necessary nor desired. So high rocking energy, that’s within the boundary of the phenomenon I’m talking about.

But drawn that way, the boundary isn’t tight enough, it’s not precise enough. For those twitterings didn’t always happen when the music rocked. They happened only that one time, though, as I indicated in the earlier post, Ade (the leader) recognized the phenomenon. He’d experienced it before, but the others of us had not. Ade was (and is) a very experienced percussionist. He’d toured and performed professionally in his youth and has a wide circle of musician friends, including drummers expatriated from West Africa. He knew those sounds, and simply called them “the magic of the bell.”

Other than the sounds themselves, what’s the difference between rocking music and magic music? Whatever that difference it, I’m going to call it spirit.

So, what do I think REALLY happened? Well, I don’t think some ghostly beings from another dimension entered our bodies and guided our playing. But I don’t have a positive account to offer. I think the place to look is in the micro-timings of our movements and in the neural activity in subcortical regions of our brains, perhaps even in the core of the core of the brain, the reticular activity system and, certainly, in the cerebellum. That’s where I think the action is, but that’s no more than an educated guess.

So in saying that those twitterings are manifestations of spirit, I am, in effect, projecting some subtle group-level neuro-muscular activity onto those sounds that serve as a diagnostic indicator of the phenomenon. To say that those twitterings are spirits, or voices of spirits, is to speak figuratively, where the figure is synecdoche, using the part (the twitter sounds) to stand for the whole (group locked in very intense musical activity).

This is pretty much what I’m doing when, in another context I talk of graffiti as manifestations of the spirit, or kami (in Japanese) of the site. When I do that, I’m NOT asserting that some being from another dimension comes through the wall, enters the graffiti writer, and directs his activity. Rather I’m saying that we cannot understand how and why graffiti ends up in this or that particular place without taking into account, not only the nature of the surface itself, but lines of sight and access, general location and neighborhood traffic, legal status (e.g. is it posted as no trespassing) and past history. All of that is important to the sight and I want to treat all of it as an indivisible gestalt. The easiest way to do this is to talk of the spirit of the site.

There are, of course, differences. The spirit of the graffiti site is, by definition, resident at the site. The twitter spirits don’t seem to have any residence at all. They just come and go. But there’s an overall similarity in the mode of construction, both are assemblages of heterogenous components: walls, paints, footpaths, laws, writers and viewers in one case; bells, strikers, and musicians in the other.

Links: Animism, Absorption

E-Flux journal is running a special issue on animism. From Anselm Franke's introduction:

A ghost is haunting modernity—the ghost of animism. It awaits us everywhere when we step outside modern reason’s cone of light, outside its firmly mapped order, when approaching its frontier zones and “outside.” We find it in the imagined darkness of modernity’s outside, where everything changes shape and the world is reassembled from the fragments that reason expels from its chains of coherences.

The task is to bring those constitutive others at the “dark” side of modern reason—like “animism,” but also the “imaginary,” the “negative,” “otherness,” or even “evil”—back into the relational diagram of modernity. To take those universalized sites of otherness that receive names such as “a universal tendency of humankind” or even its “origin,” and bring them back into history, would be perhaps the only way to account for the relational constitution of the present, to face the sorcery of its double binds. To embark upon this task is thus to understand these are never given “universals” of the modern, but its very relational products. They are the sites that modern history is silent about, to the extent that the very narrative of the “the modern” is built upon this silence as its fundament. The narrative-imaginary vacuum of the present is the direct outcome of this silence. This silence tells us that it is actually not animism, but modernity that is the ghost—halfway between presence and absence, life and death. And the future grand narratives of modernity may well speak of this ghost from the perspective of its other, from its “animist” side.

Neuroanthropology has a guest post by Neely Myers on The Neuroanthropology of Embodiment, Absorption, and Dissociation. I've been reading on this kind of thing since the counter-cultural psychedelic 60s. Discussions of trance, Gongfu, meditation, possession, music, etc.

Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 1, Loosen Up

The “sex appeal” of the inorganic, like life, is another way to give voice to what I think of as a shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter.
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

We all know that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why? No, not ‘why “Lucille”’? Why is it named at all?

Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It’s one of his voices, it is, in some sense, part of him.

It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You can’t dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. You musicianship suffers.

As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. Of sure, I can guess, I can make up stories, and you might find those stories convincing. If you’re not a guitar player. But guitar players, the thoughtful ones at least, will know that I’m faking it.

I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.

The Claves

So let’s talk about the claves. The claves are a pair of short sticks that tend to be roughly eight inches long and an inch in diameter. They’re used in Latin music, indeed, they’re central to many genres, to produce a sharp penetrating percussive sound. They’re usually made of hard dense wood. Mine are made of fiberglass:

You hold one clave in your left hand and then strike it with the other one, held in your right hand (if you’re right handed). Simple, no? Well, yes. And no.

It’s more like you cradle the one clave (it doesn’t matter which one) in your left hand. You hold your hand palm-up, lay the clave across it, and grip it only so much as needed to keep it in place. You don’t need to grip it tightly, nor do you even WANT to grip it tightly. If you do that, then your hand will dampen the vibrations and dull the sound. The ‘crack!’ will no longer be sharp and crisp.

Seeing God: Morton to Latour to Harman to Bennett to Alexander to Greenfield to Darwin

There are great big worlds out there. If we get outside of the Enlightenment, of the Judeo-Christian system of a single truth, everything else being superstition or wrong, there’s a world that we can learn from, and there’s so much to learn.
—Dr. Sidney Greenfield

So, some months ago I read this Timothy Morton guy at Stanford’s Arcade and he gets me interested in object-oriented ontology, which is something of a shock as it’s in the Continental philosophical tradition, which I abandoned years ago, when I abandoned all philosophy (and literary criticism, too). What AM I doing reading this stuff? Well, as I’ve said here and there, I’m after graffiti, I’m after the ‘other side’ of literary understanding (it’s ‘other’ from my distinctly non-standard POV, but that other descends from the traditional humanistic criticism that I abandoned).

And so off I go traipsing through Latour, having a grand old time, and now I’ve started reading Bennett (Vibrant Matter) and Harman (The Quadruple Object) and, once again, it’s WTF!city. This stuff is, well, it’s Continental, that’s what it is. And as I read it I’m telling myself that’s how perception works, that’s what the brain is going. I’m psychologizing it. But they’re not talking about the mind, they’re talking about the world. And I know THAT. Heck, that’s why I’m reading this stuff. But do I HAVE to? Why? What’s it going to get me?

[Dude, you won’t know THAT until you get there, will you?

I suppose not.]

Ecstasy and Healing

Meanwhile, in over the transom, one Sharon Alexander Dreyfus tells me she’s read my essay-review of Benny Shanon’s Antipodes of the Mind and before you know it I’ve got an eCopy of her dissertation, Oh My God!!!!: Ecstatic ritual as examined through the evocative techniques of gospel choir, which is right up my alley, since music and ecstasy is something that, not only interests me, but that I’ve been through. Are you experienced? sings the hippy heavy blues metal psychedelic rock guitar-god musician.

Ecstasy, Touch, and the Sense of Self

It looks like I may be doing some posting about music, so let’s gather some ideas. We need, for example, ideas about what came to be called altered states of consciousness (ASCs) back in the 60s – which, of course, invites the question: Just what are the ‘ordinary’ or ‘unaltered’ states of consciousness? So, we’re stepping into a conceptual minefield.

Still if you read widely enough, you’ll come up with accounts of musicians, dancers, and listeners experiencing loss of self (whatever that is), or even standing outside oneself: ecstasy, as the Greeks called it. No doubt you’ve had your own experiences in these directions.

I’ve offered some relevant personal testimony in earlier posts (gathered here), and I may well offer up some third-party anecdotes later on – I’ve got a bunch that I’ve collected over the years. But I want to go abstract in this post.

How is it that one could possibly be outside oneself? How could that happen? The way one approaches such a question depends, of course, on the conceptual system you use. I tend to favor one based on Western science. And that doesn’t give much conceptual equipment at all. It barely even admits of statements of the phenomenon. Still, there’s a little. And I took some of that and crafted it into these paragraphs from Beethoven’s Anvil (154-156):

Spontaneous Combustion: Improv from the Inside

Here's a music story from bygone days. It's from my book, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, pp. 93-94.

A number of years ago I was playing trumpet with a rhythm and blues band in a bar in downtown Albany, New York. It was two in the morning and we were exhausted at the end of a five-hour gig. My chops were shot.

We decided to play one more tune, “Stormy Monday.” Normally I didn’t solo on that tune; however, it is a slow blues, and I dearly love a slow blues. So despite my exhaustion, I decided to take a chorus—one cycle through the tune. I started playing simple figures in the lower-middle register and then elaborated on those figures and moved to the upper register. I hit my climax at the penultimate bar of the chorus, as anticipated, and was ready to stop playing. But, the rhythm section wasn’t playing concluding riffs; they clearly expected me to play another chorus. If I’d had any sense I'd have ignored them and stopped. My lips were crying out in pain; if I played much more my lip muscles would surely fail.

I didn’t like the idea of following a good chorus with a mediocre one. I couldn't remain in the trumpet’s difficult upper register, nor could I drop back to the middle register and then build back up—the two most obvious options for constructing another chorus. In a split-split second I decided “oh, what the hell” and did a Sonny Rollins, dropping to the middle register, growling and flutter tonguing to make the nastiest, bluesiest sound I could. Another power had entered my playing. Captain cat went on the prowl and the music went into overdrive. Solid.

As the band stood around after the gig, several people came up to me and chatted, touching me on the forearm on their way out. But it wasn’t me they wanted to touch. It was the power that emerged during that second chorus.

This “other power” did not possess me as fully as Leonard Bernstein seems to have been possessed by composers of music he conducted. I was at least residually aware of who, what and where I was. But I was focused on the music to an unusual degree, and my playing had an unaccustomed edge and force.

Trumpeter’s Delight

This is related to yesterday’s impressions of The Science of Orgasm and to earlier posts on sexual metaphysics and mystical oblivion.

Bright Moments

I don’t know exactly when it first happened to me, but let’s say I was 12 or so. That seems about right.

I was in my room practicing my trumpet. All of a sudden I felt light-headed, warm & fuzzy, everything went white on me, and for perhaps a split second I fainted – it’s hard to tell about these things, especially when they happened so long ago. When it was over, I sat down on my bed – for I’d been standing while playing – and pondered. I was OK, it had felt good, but did I have some disease? Maybe a strange and awful disease? Maybe even cancer, whatever that was?

So I didn’t tell anyone. Who could I tell, after all? Who could I talk to about something like that?

And it happened again. Just how long after that first time, I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping a diary. But soon enough that I remembered the first time. Maybe within a week, a month, probably not much more. Was I sick? And then again. Felt good, but still the worries?

And it’s been happening to me ever since. For fifty years or so there’ve been these delightful moments during trumpet playing. At its most intense I feel dizzy and very light, warm, and bathed in bright white light. Then, a few seconds later, I come down. Still feeling good, feeling strong and rested.

I long ago stopped worrying about whether or not I was sick. I wasn’t. In fact, such ‘bright moments’ are fairly common among trumpet players. It’s something that just seems to happen every now and then. In fact, one can even find more or less standard physiological explanations of it. It has to do, in one version, with constricting the veins in the neck, making it difficult for old blood to leave the head and thus for new oxygenated blood to get to the brain. I’ve also read that it happens when blowing pressure converges on the diastolic blood pressure in the neck arteries; presumably this restricts blood flow to the brain and induces momentary oxygen debt.

Whatever.

Comparison

Let’s set that issue aside for a moment and compare my description of the subjective experience with yesterday’s descriptions of orgasm, you find similar phrases:

A sudden feeling of lightheadedness followed by an intense feeling of relief and elation. A rush. Intense muscular spasms of the whole body. Sense of euphoria followed by deep peace and relaxation.

The period when the orgasm takes place—a loss of a real feeling for the surroundings except for the other person. The movements are spontaneous and intense.

Basically it’s an enormous buildup of tension, anxiety, strain followed by a period of total oblivion to sensation then a tremendous expulsion of the buildup with a feeling of wonderfulness and relief.

I find that overlap must interesting, most suggestive. But there are obvious differences. Those descriptions of orgasm also talk about “intense muscular spasms of the whole body” and “an enormous buildup of tension, anxiety, strain.” My description didn’t have anything like that.

But then I didn’t describe everything. While playing the trumpet is not the same as having sex, it can be fairly strenuous. Simply getting a sound out of a trumpet is difficult. It takes a great deal of muscular control. Consider the facial muscles, the ones that control tension in the lips. Those muscles are relatively small, they work hard, and one practices long hours to train them to the flexible rigors of trumpeting.

 

But blowing the trumpet involves more than the facial muscles, for which trumpet playing is cruel and unusual punishment. It’s about breath, and breath control. That involves the large muscles of the trunk, the diaphragm, and the supporting muscles of the hips and legs. When you take into account the use of the arms in holding the trumpet and the fingers in manipulating the valves, it becomes clear that you play the trumpet with your whole body, not just fingers and lips.

And when you move into the upper register, which is when these bright moments are most likely to happen, that’s when total body tension is at its highest, though, if you want the music to sound like, well, music, with life and grace, there’s got to be relaxation at the center. If all you want to do is make a loud noise, don’t bother with the relaxation. But if you want the resilience and flow of song, then you have to relax. And, at the same time, keep the tension in the trunk.

My point then is simply that trumpet playing, like orgasmic sex, does involve the whole body, and, in upper register playing, it can involve a great deal of tension and strain. And, in my experience, these bright moments are most likely to happen when I am playing a sustained upper register passage, the sort of work that makes the face red, the neck distended.

But they’ve also happened while playing rapid complex, but not particularly high, lines. And, mere effort isn't sufficient. You have to be in a groove, the playing must have life and feel natural, not just playing the notes. In that context, you can do it. On a reasonable number of occasions I've been able to bring on the warmth and lights simply by playing high, or fast/complex, and bearing down on the sound, working with chest and abdomen. But, without the groove, it doesn't make any difference what I do; it doesn't happen.

Which is to say, you can’t will it to happen. You can’t make it happen on cue. All you can do is set the scene, go through the motions, with all your heart and will and soul, and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.

Fake it till you make it

What we have before us, then, is two very different behaviors, trumpet playing and sex, which can produce similar subjective experiences under certain circumstances. Just what’s going on in the case of these trumpeting experiences, who knows? They happen to trumpeters, there’s a bit of lore about them, but, so far as I know, there’s been no scientific investigation of them. Whatever’s going on in the trumpeter’s brain when this happens, that’s a complete mystery. But I rather doubt that anyone would try to argue that it’s in our biological nature to have such experiences. Trumpeting certainly isn’t in our biological nature, so how could certain kinds of trumpet-playing experiences be in our biological nature?

Sure, there’s a biological substrate to trumpet playing, as there is to everything. These experiences happen when this that and the other are recruited into precisely coordinated activity that allows a little ‘spark’ to ‘catch fire,’ as it were, and become amplified into a bright orgasmic moment. It just happens.

And so it goes with sexual orgasms. The brain doesn’t have a central orgasm coordinator whose function is to cause orgasms. When the circumstances are right, they happen.

* * * * *

Finally, I want to note that these bright trumpeting moments are not the same phenomenon as the ego loss I described in It Shook Me, the Light. That’s something else. Sless likely, more delicate, and more powerful.

Finally, if you want to hear delicacy and grace executed from within tension and effort, listen to the trumpeter in this performance of Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto (1st and 3rd movements). Astounding!