Crow Epistemology

As music, architecture and all other arts are created exclusively for the human being to perceive, process, and understand, it would make sense for the creator to keep in mind the nature of the human mind when designing his art. One essential limitation and strength of the human mind, that would strongly effect the tangible communicative power of a given piece of music in particular, is outlined in the concept “Crow Epistemology”. I first heard this term in connection with music composition in a lecture entitled “Ayn Rand: Music Hypothesis & Musical Integration” by David Berry, http://www.sdavidberry.com.

Crow Epistemology is a term coined by Ayn Rand in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology that refers to the principle that human beings can only deal perceptually with five or six units simultaneously. The “Crow” label refers to a a psychological experiment where two people went into the woods, and the crows would go into hiding until both people came out, even one at a time. If three people went into the woods, the crows would wait in hiding until three people came out. If five people went into the woods, however, the crows would mistakenly come out of hiding when only four people came of the woods, because the number of individual units they can identify has been exceeded.

Humans are the same way, but we create concepts to deal with a group of units too large in number for our brains to grasp individually. If we see two pine trees and a maple tree, we can identify them as such, but if we see 30 oak trees, 500 pine trees, 10 maple trees, and 200 larches, we would identify it as a forest. In other words, we can integrate an unlimited number of units into one easily manageable unit, whereby we actually expand our range of consciousness beyond the crow.

What does this have to do with music?

A piece of music sounding for a listener may contain an almost unlimited number of elements: multiple instruments, many simultaneous pitches, many motives and themes that come and go, many layers of “melodies” or important lines weaving in and out of each other. Of all those elements, what the listener actually perceives and can integrate is quite a different matter. In remembering the crow, and the human mind’s need to reduce many individual units into a minimal number of concepts, we can understand that the listener may only perceive and grasp a relatively small number of elements out of the many elements in the piece of music. This would mean that possibly much of the composer’s carefully chosen and slaved-over creation could be lost! You may ask as I did why the listener could not integrate the many individual elements into a few graspable concepts while they are listening, and so far I have concluded that it is the lapse of time that frustrates this process in the case of music. Unlike a painting where all items are there simultaneously and will not disappear, musical elements exist over a set period of time -they come and go. Especially dependent on the listener’s musical training and aural memory, he may only be conscious of the current moment in music, and possibly, but more limitedly, what just happened before this moment and some recollection of past moments if they reoccur again to jog their memory. This phenomenon is at its worst when musical communication is probably its most crucial: when a listener only hears the unfamiliar piece of music once, for the first time.

How does the composer salvage all the hard work he put into those many elements and ensure they aren’t lost on the listener? How does he convey the complex emotions and ideas he set out to communicate and avoid dumbing down his creation to only a few elements just so the crow can grasp it all?

In short, the extent to which the composer pre-integrates all the elements of a musical piece for the average listener is the extent to which that listener will grasp all the elements on the first and only listening. The composer needs to group all those many elements into fewer easily graspable packages; she needs to connect similar things, make contrasting things seem obviously different, emphasize relationships and logically bridge one moment to the next. I would say that the composer needs to simplify the elements, except that you are not necessarily removing anything, and that this kind of simplification implies the most complex integration process on the part of the composer. In terms of what this would literally mean in a piece of art music, I can think of some specific techniques off the top of my head or principles to keep in mind:

• Repeating a key motive or melody in a prominent way several times will ensure it is remembered and isolated as an integrated, important “package.”, The reason being is that, firstly, frequency in a work of art usually equals importance, and the amount of time spent on something in a piece of music also does the same.
• Timbre can be the tone color of one register of an instrument, one instrument in its entire range, or a combination of more than one instrument. It contributes to the emotional quality of the line that the instrument (s) is playing, and thus can be used to represent a certain emotion or help reinforce prominence in a key motive or melody. Isolating particular timbres as being significant and having them reocurr in key places help the listener more easily identify them and perceive them as important.
• The number of different active lines, or melodies, that a listener can perceive simultaneously is probably even more limited than the crow’s perception of physical objects. It is probably limited to two on the first listening, maybe three or four on repeated listenings or if the listener is musically educated. Too many simultaneous melodies or active lines has a way of collapsing into just an overall harmonic progression, or, more often, a texture. If these melodies are all significant, the composer needs to remember they will not be perceived as such if too many other significant or active lines are happening at the same time.

I’ll stop there for now since further ideas might require a more complete treatise on how to compose, which I’m not prepared to write. I will mention, though, a possibly unexpected musical example which I think does a masterful job of integrating many musical elements into crow-sized bites. I actually developed the motivation to think further on Crow Epistemology and music when I was listening to Igor Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, or The Rite of Spring, on the radio. Whatever one may say about the sense of life of the piece, it very expertly presents many very complex, shockingly unusual elements, possibly quite unlike others we might be familiar with, in such a way that the average listener can follow the basic form of the piece and recognize important moments. To the average listener, and thinking back to when I first heard the piece before I had any musical education, the piece sounds very modern, very dissonant, very avant garde. It was surprising for me, and perhaps for others, to learn that this piece was composed in 1913; this was only 20 years after Tchaikovsky wrote The Nutcracker, Suite, 15 years before Ravel’s Bolero and 27 years before Rachmaninoff wrote his Symphonic Dances. But it had sounded to me more like music of the 1980s in terms of its tonality and unusual melodies. Now, having studied music history, and music composition, I can see how it actually employs the ancient integration techniques that helped music of the Romantic, Baroque, and Classical eras be so accessible to the average listener compared to much of the more modern music since 1950 or so. Again off the top of my head, some of the ways I noticed that Stravinsky integrates his material is the following:

• He repeats important motives or themes, and presents them without too many other competing active lines playing simultaneously.
• He uses certain unique timbres in key spots, usually tied to a certain melody, like a painter carefully only using the color red in key significant spots. For example, his use of the high E-flat Clarinet parallel in 2 or 3 octaves with the low Alto Flute on a very contrastingly serene melody makes a very unique, open and haunting sound. When he plays this melody with this timbre again, we remember it right away even though we had only heard it once, and recognize this return as significant.
• Though his melodies at first seem complex and intricate, they are integrated by being composed of little cells of the same material. The opening of the work does this, where the high bassoon line presents a melody, and cells or pieces of this melody are then repeated in varied form, but always keeping the same basic “shape.” Think of a crystal that is composed of mini versions of itself. I think this technique, and other applications of this principle elsewhere in music, has strong ties to the principles of organic architecture, which will definitely be a topic of study and discussion for me later on.

Further study of the piece will reveal much more and would clarify some of these points, so I will stop there until I have that chance. There are many other, perhaps better examples of musical pieces that feature masterful integration of many complex elements, but I specifically was inspired by this one because a) its successful integration actually allows our brains to accept and understand these shockingly different and new elements he presents where we might otherwise be utterly confused, and b) it seems to have the dissonance, outrageous extremes, and fresh outlook than many modern-day composers are trying to achieve, but the difference is that Stravinsky integrated all the elements into graspable packages whereas many avant garde composers today do not.

An aside: Another interesting related topic that will no doubt bring me to the keyboard again in the future is how minding the Crow Epistemology relates to architecture. How many visual elements can be recognized by the viewer and how does the architect integrate them all to ensure they will be? “Theme and Variation” in architecture (not sure what the architectural design term for it is – can anyone help?) will most certainly have a place in this discussion.

So, in my quest for clearer compositions where all the essential elements are perceived by the listener, I am going to strive in my music not to forget the crow, lest he forget me.

[A Disclaimer to my composer and philosopher comrades: I admit that not all my ideas or concepts here are fully formed, but this blog is my pensieve of thoughts that I will be continually examining and verifying in my lifelong study of music, architecture, and creativity.]