Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in Music

CONSCIOUSNESS, CREATIVITY, AND COMPLEX TIME IN MUSIC GUERINO MAZZOLA 1. TIME IN PHYSICS NE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC ONTOLOGICAL CHANGES in modern physics of the twentieth century was the revolutionary reconceptualization of time. It started with Albert Einstein’s special relativity, where he embedded time in a four-dimensional space-time. Einstein had adopted the space-time approach of Hermann Minkowski, who, in a famous statement stated that “[h]enceforth, space for itself, and time for itself shall completely reduce to a mere shadow, and only some sort of union of the two shall preserve independence.”1 Time then became a multiple variable, the Newtonian singular “divine” time was replaced by a plurality, one in every frame of reference, and different frame times being related to each other by the Lorentz transformation of space-time. The second revolution of the time concept was introduced by Stephen Hawking (among others) in order to solve singularity problems of the Big Bang model of the evolution of our universe in the initial moment some 13.8 billion years ago. Hawking’s concept of time steps from the real time axis to the plane of complex numbers: Time now has two coordinates t = tR + itI, the real time tR and the O 432 Perspectives of New Music imaginary time tI. This complex ontology has also been proposed and studied by physicists Itzak Bar and John Terning (2010). These two revolutions in the concept of time, however, did not apply to the human cognitive reality, except in Einstein’s case for the metaphorical and vague popular statement that “everything is relative.”2 In what follows, I will introduce the thesis that complex time could be a key to some of the most virulent problems in the artistic reality of music, namely the nature of artistic consciousness and creativity, especially from the perspective of musical performance. This thesis is also in the spirit of John Rahn’s unique proactive spirit in music theory. 2. CONSCIOUSNESS AND CREATIVITY IN MUSIC The performing musician, whether rendering a composed work from a score, or creating in a more-or-less free or improvisatory fashion—in jazz for example—faces a complex combination of memory, technique, gestures, and the balance in the famous temporal καιρός (Kairos) between past and future moments. Successful musical performance is a highly creative and complex activity, at the very center of which is the sophisticated consciousness of the artist which manages the harmonious collaboration of the above-mentioned components in real time. “In real time” means in every moment of the performance; more precisely, in every infinitesimal point of physical time. I know as a performing free jazz pianist what every good performer experiences: the complex processual unfolding of musical performance is a rich machinery that defines and is happening in a big space of consciousness and presence. This configuration is described in Mazzola (2011, ch. 4.12). This artistic complexification is however a miraculous phenomenon since it happens in “no time,” in the physical moment of presence. We are confronted with a big “space” of consciousness that occupies no time in the physical time line. This makes evident the problematic status of creative artistic consciousness, and of consciousness in general: How can it be that a rich processuality is construed in no physical time? It seems that this type of phenomenon is enabled by the existence of a huge “space” of consciousness that is attached to every moment of physical time. This situation in its acute extremism in performing arts questions a classical rationale for understanding and even defining consciousness in cognitive and neuroscience. If no extra “space” is added to the classical physical ontology, consciousness cannot cope with its performative quality. So let us present the following thesis: Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in Music 433 Thesis: Any workable concept of consciousness, and in particular artistic consciousness in the performing arts, must be built upon a “spacetime ” that is added to the classical physical spatio-temporal ontology. 3. CARTESIAN DUALISM The above thesis is given a familiar philosophical perspective if we review the Cartesian dualism which Descartes set up in his Principia philosophiae (Descartes 1983), where he describes the three substances of being: res...