[for BARD, May 10, 2004]

Preparing for the Propaganda War in the Time of Global Culture:

Trance, Form, and Persuasion in the Renovation of Western Music

In this essay I will begin and end by introducing my explorations of non-traditional musical scales. In a long central digression, I will explore some connections between the organizational principles of (what the 20th century called) "formal" structures, on the one hand, and the communicative and psychological processes involved with (what the 20th century called) "trance" on the other. This synthesis will point the way toward new approaches to cultural agency in the 21st century climate of Empire.

First, here are two brief epigraphs from Hardt and Negri's Empire .

The political must also be understood as ontological....

and

[ T ] he multitude's virtual set of powers is constructed by struggles and consolidated in desire.

                                                --Hardt and Negri, Empire (354, 357)

Part 1. Early Twentieth Century.

It is a little strange that Schenker, on one side, and Schoenberg, on the other, each failed to fully assess and exploit the deeper character of western music through an analysis of its foundations in the twelve-note scale.

In his classic 1906 Harmonielehre , Schenker follows the derivation of the western scale generally accepted since the time of Rameau's 1722 Traité de l'harmonie . The notes arise from the harmonic series, and this is their justification in what was called "Nature." Yet Schenker feels that music starts when this "Nature" stops; "there is no unambivalent association of ideas between music and nature," he writes. [3] But then, paradoxically, he goes on to make a problematic appeal to essential human nature, in characterizing the relation between the notes of music and the overtone series of so-called "Nature." "In reality," he states, "the artistic relation between the overtone series and our tonal system is as follows: The human ear can follow Nature as manifested to us in the overtone series only up to the major third as the ultimate limit; in other words, up to that overtone which results from the fifth division. This means that those overtones resulting from higher subdivisions are too complicated to be perceived by our ear...." [25] This does not stop Schenker, though, from staking his so-called "Nature's" claim upon Western harmony. The diatonic scale is so invested in this "Nature" that chromatic alterations all over the place cannot pry us loose from her. For instance, Schenker writes that "the tonicalized scale-step...signifies a triumph of Nature, perhaps the greatest triumph of Nature over our art: Nature, so to speak, disavows our system; all minor thirds, the diminished fifth (and, therefore, the minor triads and the diminished triad) disappear; their places are taken by major triads alone, and, although Nature takes the detour of an artistic and merely artificial means, viz., chromatic change, she achieves nonetheless the result that the root-tone quality, which she had in store originally for all tones with equalizing justice, in the end manifests itself here, albeit in a different way, in the chromatically tonicalized scale-steps." [288]    

            Schenker's assumption that the major triad is the foundation of music could not be more firmly stated. Here also we may discern inklings of Schenker's trademark understanding of the passing note and the auxiliary note as counterpoint fundamentals, and by implication the crucial structural role of the leading tone in the system of twelve tones. Nevertheless, Schenker's prejudices regarding the demi-god "Nature" and his embeddedness in the Western classical tradition forestalled any further development of his thinking with regard to what I referred to earlier as the deeper character of western music's foundation in the twelve-note scale.  

            While Schenker was looking back, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg were of course looking ahead; breaking down these same principles. Their acceptance of dissonance released the leading tone from its contrapuntal and melodic functions; and their abandonment of the triad released them from so-called "Nature's" hold on the overtone series and the diatonic scale. Chasing along after them in this direction, other composers did explore the use of alternative scales--using quarter-tones, sixth-tones, etc.--though the examples I could give would include very few well-known composers. Since Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, and all the rest of these composers attacked the founding principles of common practice Western music as it is embodied in the diatonic scale, it was almost impossible for them to consider constructing a parallel analysis of different scales with the objective of reproducing (rather than destroying) the whole Western edifice of harmonic practice, in its full Schenkerian prolixity, within a completely different scale system.

            Why, though, was this psychological hurtle so enervating, so difficult for composers to jump, when early twentieth-century modernism encouraged as much cultural fluidity as it did? First and foremost, there was the inertia of institutionalized instrumental performers, whose technique was founded on the classical repertoire. And then there was the considerable problem of devising a notational scheme for non-diatonic scales. Both of these challenges, performance technique and notational novelty, also arrived along with much of the new twentieth-century music; however, in most cases the new music's performance techniques and notations had grown organically out of preceding traditions. Another difficulty was the larger cultural framework within which "classical" music was being challenged by industrial recorded music. Until the tools of music production became fully accessible to the active listening public three quarters of a century later, and until the collapse of the boundaries between urban and industrial culture that came with this enfranchisement, the free musical use of appropriated material and of noises was far from the center of the conceptual map. Sure, "pop" music thrived on medleys and standards, but remixes did not come to the center until the 1990s. Sure, Spike Jones and Walt Disney had noise orchestras, but these were "novelties." Sure, classical music used old themes and styles for their color, but the eclecticism of Paart or Schnittke, let alone the plunderphonics of John Oswald, had to wait. Sure, Varèse and musique concrète used noises, but not in the way that is now the accepted practice in electronic music composition.

            Today musical culture is fragmented; the old categories remain: classical, jazz, pop, C&W, etc. But the larger picture has changed; the culture that is music has changed. The social function of music has become more diverse, both more individual in its production and reception, and at the same time more industrial in both its production and its reception. This has made it challenging to discriminate boundaries, new territories, since it is no longer possible to shock, to violate delicate sensibilities. At the same time, an oceanful of new practitioners are vitally activating every identifiable spot on the cultural spectrum. So, then, what kind of importance could we now attach to formal explorations of the diatonic scale?

I will get to the proposals I have in mind for the diatonic scale problem in due course. First, though, I would like to address the larger issue of motivating explorations in form.

2. Stories and Pictures.

            In art, but if anything even more so in music, formal investigations have been regarded as pathways toward the absolute, as "art for art's sake," as "leaving the world behind," and as self-validated or ideally valorized endeavors. Today, though, it is impossible to ignore the fact that idealism and introspection serve, and have always served, regulatory social interests, whether of a king, church, state, or corporation. I will take the approach that a fuller understanding of the relationship between formal cultural structures and immersive cultural experiences will increase our understanding of the relations between culture and power, and can help us to sharpen our weapons in preparation for the all-out propaganda wars ahead in the global 21 st century.

Music has played a compound role in the social relations of power, because the putative but illusory unity of music is splattered across a bewildering and sometimes contradictory field of sociocultural functions. First, music holds a strong claim on its own immateriality or "purity," on participating in what Herder called the "absolute." But second, and more significantly, music has an almost genomic authority over our movements and feelings, especially with regard to our group experiences. There is almost no social event that does not invoke music as its matrix, its glue: marching, dancing, chanting, choral singing; these are only the more vivid social sites at which music sports its magic on us. And third, in apparent contradiction to the social use of music, there is the antithetical immersive experience of meditation, of one's personal (or even inner) relationship to a song or a sound, of loud or quiet experiences that seem to take us out of the social world completely. Fourth, there is a clear sociobiological spin that can be applied to the observable attachment of music to courtship, desire, and sex. Finally, I would add the ways that music is so enigmatically wedded to narrative, to images, to spaces, and to theater. Among all of these complex relationships, I will seek a commonality in the odd correspondence between formal structure on the one hand and on the other hand that profoundly subjective and disdained terra incognita that we call "trance."  

               Although what we call "trances" arise in a wide range of contexts--among mediums and shamans; in possession states and in dance; and in trance subjects who may be ecstatic and vigorous, or lethargic or even somnolent--the twentieth century began with Freud's disavowal of hypnosis, an apostasy that he conceived as the turning point in his invention of psychoanalysis. Subsequently--and even though both the foremost skeptic of hypnotic trance (Theodore X. Barber) and its greatest master (Milton Erickson) thrived during the twentieth century--a blanket of doubt, cynicism, and disdain was cast over both the investigation of trance and the development of language tools suited to such work. A rash of books on "altered states" appeared during the 1960s in the flush of enthusiasm that came to the industrialized world with the introduction of psychedelic drugs, but these volumes served largely to demonstrate the inadequacy of their investigative language in coping with trance, let alone with drug-induced states and mental illness.

            Since I will be using this term, 'trance,' I will elaborate on it a little in so far as to say that my usage derives from the hypnotic and therapeutic work of Milton Erickson (1901-80), who was arguably the most accomplished student of hypnotism in the last century. Erickson realized that the classic hypnotic trance is one among many related forms of learned activity; that the hypnotic trance is at one end of a continuum that extends regularly into the everyday, into the balance of conscious and unconscious activities that we are all experiencing all the time. Our conscious awareness can shift easily across the territory of our unconscious sensations, associations, and memories, or it can leave them behind entirely. In Erickson's sense, "trance" refers to the displacement of conscious attention--a condition of preoccupation, absorption or "sleep" in which one's unconscious processes are unobstructed and active. Trance is access to the great unconscious.

            Of course, some people do not believe that they have a so-called "unconscious" at all, even though this is the part of their thoughts that does most of the thinking and takes the best care of them. Right now, for example, there are a hundred things one could turn conscious attention to that are being handled completely competently and gracefully outside of conscious attention. What are you doing with each of your hands or feet? Are they feeling comfortable, too cool or warm, or tight in your shoe? Is the seat about to collapse? Your unconscious can catch you. It can drive you home while you think about something else, make your breakfast or do any other routine activity that you have learned "by heart" while you turn your conscious attention elsewhere.   

            A formal displacement or misdirection of attention provides one route to unconscious processes, but perhaps not the only one. What appears to be a more direct contact with unconscious processes is the habitual trance of storytelling--if you will accept following a story as a kind of trance, as I do. And yet here, too, the occupation of our conscious attention with the formal problems of the story line commonly distracts our conscious attention, leaving it to the unconscious to assimilate the story for us, to fall into the trance of the narrative. This is the absorption of a spellbinding taleteller, of theater, of the narrative cinema.

In the logic of pictures, storytelling is a starkly effective tool. Edward Hopper's 1932 "Room in New York," for example, draws the viewer into an ambiguous relationship between two players. [Hopper, Edward. "Room in New York" (1932), oil on canvas, 29 x 36 in. Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; F. M. Hall Collection. In Lyons, Deborah and Adam D. Weinberg, Edward Hopper and the American Imagination . New York: Whitney Museum of American Art and W. W. Norton & Co. (1995), Pl. 2.] (Show Slide 1) He is reading--but what? and why?--while she turns to plunk at the piano--but why? to annoy? to seduce? As in all storytelling, rhetorical devices, formal structures and relationships, are there to set up our investment in the tale. Here there is the window frame we are peering through, the stark whites and yellows spotlighting the figures, that draw our attention in , while letting us forget that our eye has been caught in the position of a peeping tom: the torsion of the figures away from each other implies their imagined relationship to the voyeur. Only this much, and already we are inside the story, lost in the confusion of the picture.     

            By comparison, the surrealist Rene Magritte, in "L'Invention collective" of 1935, [Magritte, Rene, "L'Invention collective" (1935), private collection, Belgium. In Larkin, David, ed., Magritte . New York: Ballantine Books (1972), Plate 12.] (Slide 2) creates a "distant and accurate relation between two realities" (to invoke Pierre Reverdy's measure for the strength of a surrealist image) by disguising the woman, as a fish; but this image does not tend to invoke a narrative interest. Yet Magritte's work brings us to the brink of trance by absorbing our interest with a metonymical device, and invests this relational formalism in an unsavory and propagandistic patriarchal indulgence.  

3. Camouflage.

            Perhaps the most stark irruption of formal dominion over content was the development of cubism, when the figure succumbed to reductivist design structures built upon Cezanne's famous cone, sphere, and cylinder. The decade of World War I was also the time when Heinrich Wölfflin's Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915) introduced the discrimination of form and content into analytic discourse. In fact, World War I brought into being the most prominent and widespread usage of design to specifically obscure content, namely camouflage. During the same decade, Max Wertheimer's founding paper of gestalt psychology (1912) provided a disciplinary context for studying the human rendering of content through the perception of form.

            The First World War began in the traditional way, with troops gaudily and recognizably decked out in uniforms. When, however, military engagements became reduced to the trench warfare that was in the end the hallmark of that war, priorities were rapidly reversed: it had become obvious that being conspicuous was deadly; being invisible let one live on to fight another day. This life and death premium on invisibility called upon the military for unanticipated expertise, in the form of a nuanced understanding of visual systems of shape and form recognition--an understanding that had long been the province of artists. Suddenly artists were important and useful. Among the many artists who designed World War I camouflage were Marcel Duchamp's brother, Jacques Villon; the founder of the Maison Cubiste, André Mare; Grant Wood; Thomas Hart Benton; and Charles Burchfield. (Behrens 35, 68, 100) The cubists, who had so systematically created visual interest by unexpectedly fracturing the subject, recognized parallels to their work in camouflage. In his biography of Picasso, Roland Penrose points out that "Harlequin, Cubism and military camouflage had joined hands. The point they had in common was the disruption of their exterior form in a desire to change their too easily recognized identity." (Penrose 205. Quoted in Behrens 71)[Penrose, Roland (1973), Picasso: His Life and Work. New York: Harper & Row.] Gertrude Stein described Picasso's reaction to a camouflaged tank on the streets of Paris. "Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait ça , he said, it is we that have created that. And he was right, he had. From Cezanne through him they had come to that." (Stein, quoted in Behrens 70.)[Stein, Gertrude (1933), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . New York: Random House.]   

            The most startling and inventive approach to camouflage in World War I was called dazzle . Dazzle was an approach to naval camouflage invented by the British artist Norman Wilkinson in 1917. Whereas on land the stationary object can be concealed like a leopard by melting it into the background, at sea ships were in motion against distant and changing backgrounds, and they were getting blasted to the bottom by U-boat torpedoes. Wilkinson

suddenly got the idea that since it was impossible to paint a ship so that she could not be seen by a submarine, the extreme opposite was the answer--in other words, to paint her, not for low visibility, but in such a way as to break up her form and thus confuse a submarine officer as to the course on which she was heading. (Wilkinson 79) [Wilkinson, Norman (1969), A Brush with Life . London: Seeley Service. Quoted in Behrens 86.][Behrens, Roy R. (2002), False Colors: Art, Design and Modern Camouflage . Dysart IA: Bobolink Books.] (Slides 3, 4, 5)   

            This radical inversion forces our attention to the broader question: what is camouflage? Where is it to be positioned among the larger vocabulary of dissimulating tactics--disguise, magic, misdirection, and lies? Dazzle makes it clear that camouflage is not one thing, a figure, but is instead systemic, a paradigm; in this it participates in the linguistic discrimination, metaphor versus metonymy, or paradigm versus syntagm, familiar from the writing of Roman Jakobson. Disguise , the substitution of one face for another, is a metonymic transformation, whereas misdirection , the figural interruption of content, functions on the metaphoric plane: and the formal system of visual signification bears this resemblance to the larger rhetorical structure of language.

However, we are doing more, here, than reduplicating the structuralist understanding of signs. Camouflage is indeed a form of magic --it encompasses misdirection, illusion, the interrogation of issues of completion or incompletion of the object; but beyond these matters (that form the infrastructural support of magic), camouflage also asks us to participate in the psychology of the hunter and the hunted, to examine the structures of control and influence that pin down the prey, that show the hunted how being fascinated can renegotiate the system of authority from the posture of the unarmed.

4. The Nineteenth Century.

            The structure of time-based forms, such as music, media, theater, literature, and lecturing, engage us in a crosscurrent of conscious and unconscious processes. Where time is involved, there is forward motion; and forward motion is impelled by desire. Temporal extension allows for conflict and resolution, tension and release, and defeat or victory, but at bottom these machines of forward motion are fueled by desire. Time-based forms, then, admit the possibility that we might be able to manipulate the economy of desire through exchanges between eroticism and trance.

Is there such an exchange? Freud describes a key episode that occurred while he was still using hypnosis and had not yet developed his psychoanalytic theories linking sexuality and neurosis. He was treating one of his "most acquiescent patients," he says,

with whom hypnotism had enabled me to bring about the most marvelous results.... As she woke up on one occasion, she threw her arms round my neck. The unexpected entrance of a servant relieved us from a painful discussion, but from that time onwards there was a tacit understanding between us that the hypnotic treatment should be discontinued. I was modest enough not to attribute the event to my own irresistible personal attraction, and I felt that I had now grasped the nature of the mysterious element that was at work behind hypnotism. In order to exclude it, or at all events to isolate it, it was necessary to abandon hypnotism. (Freud 1961, 27)[Freud, Sigmund, An Autobiographical Study , in James Strachey (ed.), TheStandard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1961) Vol.XX].

In the background of this portentous scene are the paradoxical sexual outlook of the Victorian nineteenth century as it has been described by Foucault, the question of women's social position and the authority of medicine over women, and the occult and suffragist associations of trance.

Freud identified the inception of psychoanalysis with his dropping of hypnosis. In so doing, he was cleaving to the materialist scientific heritage of Hermann Helmholtz, whose larger effort had been the colonization of subjectivity through a mechanization of perception. Freud's abandonment of hypnosis was a political and social act, as well as a way for him to keep sexuality at arms length in his work, while colonizing it, and women's subjectivity in general, as a theoretical territory.

I have alluded to the fact that in the late nineteenth century trance was an empowering system for numbers of American women, among whom suffragists were a significant influence. At mid-century Sprirtualist meetings, as Ann Braude describes them,

Men called the meetings to order, forcefully presiding over gatherings that could number in the thousands. They addressed audiences in a "normal: state.... In contrast, the women at the podium were unconscious. Trance mediums were understood to be passive vehicles, whose physical faculties were used by spirits to express the sentiments of these unseen intelligences. Mediums presented not their own views but those of the spirits who spoke through them.... The essential passivity of women was asserted in a public arena, displayed before thousands of witnesses.... (Braude 85)

Because the trance was viewed as enabling women to speak who were otherwise unqualified to do so, the claim of entrancement became a convention used to support women's right and ability to ascend the public platform. (Braude 89)

The cause of suffrage was not a Spiritualist issue, but it needed these women who had public speaking skills,

the dynamic speaking mediums of the Civil War period [who] transferred their talents to the suffrage cause. Most continued to speak in trance but spoke for suffrage in a conscious state as well.... (193) In Connecticut, New Jersey, Indiana, New York, and Michigan, mediums and their supporters played important roles in state campaigns. Throughout the country, the suffrage movement benefited from Spiritualism's best speakers. (Braude 196) [Braude, Ann (1989), Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Boston: Beacon Press.]

5. Advocacy and Advertising.

I propose that the global culture of the twenty-first century invokes a need for artists to sharpen their didactic weapons; to animate new voices; to prepare for entry into an arena of discourse far more menacing than the so-called "marketplace of ideas;" in short, to invent new ways to convince people of things.

Text, pictures, and sounds can accomplish many of the same ends, where it comes to advocacy. If we want to find out what might make an advocacy message most efficacious, we should probably ask what state of receptivity might be negotiated in the receiver. The method of mirroring the reader, viewer, or listener--that is, locating that person's identity and interests within our message--is certainly one key to their receptivity. To open the suture between the reader, viewer, or listener and their mirror image, one does well to first anesthetize this conscious process; to pry into the region in which unconscious values may be renegotiated; to leave the subject fascinated by their own thoughts, their own absorption, the fascination which their own inner processes bring them to. And this, of course, brings us to a second tool that suits the kit of advocacy--the confounding of consciousness that can come in the form of a trance. Perhaps a very small trance, or a slight and partial trance, but in any event, a moment in which the conscious subject is removed to some distance from our message, and a wakeful and engaged unconscious subject finds itself in parallel with our message, ready and free to absorb from it whatever it can find useable, useful, suited, ideal, measured to fit.   

            It may sound strange to your ears to associate learning, intellectual change, with trance. But bear in mind that I am using the term 'trance' to stand in for that condition in which the wandering attentiveness of the conscious processes is occupied, directed inward, or otherwise recursively oriented, so that the learning processor of the central nervous system--the larger and so-called "unconscious" system that redirects the values and associations underlying what we say and choose to do, the tangle of glial cells that negotiate our synaptic reinforcements, the inner schooling of ourselves that we want and approve--so that this system can be touched effectively with reason, feeling, and story.   

            Trance can be politically powerful, though it is in itself effectively neutral. While I want to acknowledge a profoundly conservative political role that trance may play, and has played in the support of aristocratic regimes through its several anti-political tendencies--first, to absorb individuals in their own experiences; second, to be allied with religious systems of social and political asphyxiation; and third, to invoke absence rather than presence as a criterion for action--I particularly want here to underscore the potential for a political utilization of trance in implementing programs of individual and group persuasion. If the mechanisms of trance induction are applicable to an understanding of the psychology of persuasion, they should be examined by artists and independents as much as by businesspersons and advertisers.

            Many findings of perceptual psychologists have of course long been incorporated into design principles, for example the expectation that the moving eye will follow a border or line, and will seek out eyes and sexual characteristics in figures. And advertising research is plowing up new psychological turf relentlessly, continually exploring the perceptual and motivational advantages of using particular colors, of using a particular schedule of presentation, and so forth. Small wonder! --because design is the product.

            If the greatest early triumph of twentieth century advertising strategists was their success in identifying products with a uniform American lifestyle, the second-greatest triumph was their colonization of the body. By inventing the dangers of halitosis, germs, and body odor, and other social imperatives, advertisers directed their audience's attention inward to their own bodies, invoking what hypnotists call ideosensory awareness--that is, reflexive attention to ones own inner sensations. Of course a hypnotist, rather than using the threatening and direct "Does your breath smell offensive?" might propose, "Your hand is feeling lighter and lighter." Both cases invoke sensory channels--smell and touch, respectively--that turn attention to the body; the first--in its implicit invocation of a future social situation--tends toward the form of posthypnotic suggestion, whereas the second--in problematizing the present moment--tends directly toward trance.  

It is important to notice this temporal discrimination, which positions social concerns--insecurity, guilt, and sexual desire--in a future tense mode, whereas trance inductions utilize the ideosensory present. This may be seen as consistent with Freud's observation that feelings of attachment, but not of sexual desire per se, are experienced in hypnotic trance. Sexual expression in general may be seen as future-oriented, not only in regard to its role in relationship formation and procreation, but also in the way orgasm may be interpreted as a future-moving self leaving the present behind. The moment of orgasm, in this view, takes place in the phenomenological future. Time is the image completion of desire.

A redirection of sensory modalities, as happens in situations where attention is drawn inward upon the body, can affect our thinking profoundly. Even a momentary shift of emphasis, as in the aroma of Proust's famous cup of tea, can destabilize established conscious routines and permit the emergence of new patterns of thinking.

The cultural turn toward ideosensory modalities that was foregrounded in the kind of advertising that emerged after World War I was also reflected in other cultural changes. Before the War, one survey showed that only 26% of Americans cared for their teeth; by 1926, after millions of soldiers had found out about toothbrushes, the figure rose to 40%. [Fox, Stephen. The Mirror Makers: A History of American Advertising and Its Creators. New York: Random House, 1985.](99-100) The advertisers' shift toward body cleanliness was not only motivated by the profits to be made marketing new products, it also represented a conservative political spin. In the 1920s there were three Republican presidents;

drastic congressional limits and quotas on immigration; the Rotarian sensibility of the Saturday Evening Post ; the founding of Reader's Digest , and such political/racial reactions as the Red Scare, the Sacco-Vanzetti case, and a rampant Ku Klux Klan. Amid these varied nativist impulses, advertising's discovery of the body made perfect sense. It projected a WASP vision of a tasteless, colorless, odorless, sweatless world. (Fox 101)     

            Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays, founded the counseling profession in public relations, which he called "Engineering of Consent." However, if Freud's work influenced advertising strategies, it was certainly not through the deliberate utilization of trance induction techniques. It was only much later, around 1980, that the sophisticated twentieth-century hypnotic induction techniques of Milton Erickson were carefully analyzed and applied to a business application called Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP). The research on Ericksonian trance methods that led to the development of NLP was based on an intensive study of Erickson's methods by Richard Bandler, a psychologist with a background in mathematics, and John Grinder, whose other work is in transformational linguistics. Transformational grammar, which has developed out of Noam Chomsky's groundbreaking work in the 1950s and '60s, is the most formal and symbol-based school of contemporary linguistics. It is not surprising, then, that NLP was designed as a formal scheme for analyzing and controlling human behavior. Though from the outset Bandler and Grinder insistently distance their approach from the quantitative methods of behavioral science, they nevertheless claim that

NLP is concerned with form, not content, [so] strategies for effective and appropriate behaviors may be drawn from any model and applied to any other model of our choice. For example, the creative strategy of an artist may be appropriately transferred to an uninspired aerodynamic engineer faced with a challenging design problem. Or, the operational motivation strategy of a highly efficient business organization may be adapted to a sluggish government department. (13) [Dilts, Robert, John Grinder, Richard Bandler, Leslie C. Bandler, and Judith DeLozier (1980), Neuro-Linguistic Programming: Volume 1 / The Study of the Structure of Subjective Experience. Cupertino CA: Meta Publications.]      

Beginning from simple psychological templates, for example the pacing of a client's behavior and the subsequent leading of the client's actions in a desired direction, and closely fitting their linguistic analyses to these structures, Bandler and Grinder build a framework within which the simple formulaic processes of traditional trance induction can be encompassed, but which are radically expanded and loosened from earlier hypnotic practices.

Let me offer a small example of how the inward redirection of conscious attention can serve ideological or cultural interests. When you greet someone by asking "How are you?" you are turning their attention inward , reinforcing their sense of physical and judgmental autonomy, their individual identity, while simultaneously you are activating one of the basic methodologies of hypnotic trance induction: focusing the subject's attention inward, on their own inner physical sensations . The "How are you?" ritual that is so pervasive among us, and is commonly regarded as supportive of the other individual , is a powerful propagandistic tool in support of the Western ideology of individualism.

The history of advertisers, as pictured by astute critics like Stuart Ewen, the author of Captains of Consciousness , [Ewen, Stuart. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture . McGraw-Hill (18r976).] reflects conscious deliberations by advertising strategists, aimed at developing a pervasive American "consumer" ideology and a level playing field for marketing. The toolkit of advertisers has embraced the subtlest psychological tactics imaginable, including those I've alluded to with the "How are you?" example above.

            Are these techniques, and NLP, tools that are powerful enough to be suitable for social control applications? Perhaps; however, getting results from them is not easy. The focus of concentration and the understanding of behavioral structures required for NLP to function are beyond the capacities of most people to absorb except with a great deal of training and dedication. To the extent that the techniques of NLP do work, though, they indicate that there is indeed a structure to be found in Erickson's trance induction that may be less apparent than the formulaic induction procedures of classical hypnosis, and that this structure, like the traditional methods, is subject to formal analysis and description.

We begin to see that advertising has been there before us: the formal elements in advertising are dominant ; that's why the commercials are separate from the programs. And as one looks back over the historical course of artwork that is recognized and praised for its value as propaganda , we see a startling profusion of formalist approaches--the collages of Heartfield, the constructivist posters of revolutionary Russia, even the design-conscious peace posters of Peter Max. How is it, then, that in all propaganda abstract and formalist principles--the apparent antitheses of propaganda--provide so dominant a function?  

6. Making Propaganda.

Just as a stage hypnotist utilizes the social pressure of the audience to overwhelm the willing subject quickly into a trance, so inter personal group experiences heighten the trance-inducing capacity of rhythm, as in group dancing, marching, and chanting. Moreover, the attentional aspect which is the central characteristic of hypnotic trance is responsible for the fact, often utilized by Milton Erickson, that onlookers, envisioning the experience of a trance subject, themselves frequently also go into trances. This "onlooker" phenomenon, which transfers trances through the attention of the onlooker [Can the Medusa myth and the tale of Lot and his wife be echoes of this phenomenon?], also of course transmits music trances to "dancers" and "marchers" who are merely envisioning the dance or the march. Listeners, audiences, performers, and those who hear the sounds in their heads are each attaining characteristic trances. Just as ALL music in the end is "microtonal," all music is "trance music."

            It was a hallmark of the later work of Milton Erickson that by deliberately puzzling or confusing his clients' conscious attention, he was able to achieve a more direct relationship to their unconscious processes--including the clients' fundamental sense of self, their habitual behaviors, and certain of their attitudes; in short, he was able to address the places where their psychological problems were seated. Usually, but not always, his "depotentiation" of conscious processes was characterized by "trance." What I have been getting at here is simply that the most clearly-understood pathway to the seat of our ideological outlooks, our habitual behaviors and attitudes, bypasses our conscious processes--and in particular, it seems that the route is most direct when the rational mind is set aside or directed to other things. But let's get down to brass tacks, and take a look at some methods. The tactics that are used by Ericksonian therapists to depotentiate conscious processes include boredom, distraction, confusion , and interruptions . Some examples will help to show how these tactics are related to classic formal structures in media and other art.

•  First, boredom . The use of extended durations that is common in structuralist and conceptual media works (which is to say formalist media works) is usually treated as an exploration of an altered sense of temporality or expectation. Said another way, these works are boring; yet boredom is, as these works themselves demonstrate, in fact productive of a renewed orientation toward those fundamental (ideological?) actuators, expectation and the value of passing time.

•  Second, distraction . Consider one example of the distraction technique, cited in Stephen Gilligan's book Therapeutic Trances. The subject is asked "to count backwards from 1000 to 1 by 3's, or verbalize the alphabet forwards while visualizing it backwards (i.e., saying "A" while seeing "Z", saying "B" while seeing "Y", etc.)...." The similarity here to certain formal/conceptual paintings, films, and even performances is pretty striking.

•  Third, confusion . Erickson has described how he once used confusion to rattle and destroy his opponent in a professional debate, simply by deliberately and persistently using sloppy grammar and an incorrect choice of words; that is, he wielded a formal disruption of syntactical and semantic usages as a propagandistic weapon.

•  And fourth , interruption . The interruption tactic in trance induction includes introducing meaningful nonsequiturs or rapidly changing the subject --which are stock formal techniques.

And so forth--with repetition, multiple communication modalities, allegorical and figural meanings, confusions of reflexivity, and so on. The wherewithal for distracting and depotentiating conscious mental processes is almost a direct translation of the formalist artist's toolkit. I believe that there is still much significant work to be done in the development and thorough understanding of abstract and formal art making tools, and that these tools have a prominent role to play in the work of any propagandist.

            The new understanding of the connection between messages and receivers that I have outlined here offers no assurance that there is an efficacious way for messages, even messages that change people's minds, to have a substantive impact on conditions in general.

7. Repetition.

            Rhetoric, which according to Aristotle was the art of persuasion, was in a sense a strategic nuclear weapon in ancient Greek and Roman politics. Effective public speaking was the key to social and political effectiveness; so the regulation of common people's access to rhetoric was the barrier that sustained the aristocracy. Upper class education in Europe centered on rhetoric for the next 2,000 years, into the nineteenth century. In Greece, the sophist movement, which beginning in the fifth century BCE promoted general social access to rhetoric on a pay-as-you-go basis, and consequently served the interests of effective direct democracy, was attacked with the total cultural resources of oligarchic Greece. Plato's assault on Gorgias of Lentini, regarded by the ancients as the inventor of figures of speech, pins him as a rhetorician, not as a philosopher. Gorgias was the leading sophist of his day; he was so able as a rhetoritician that he was actually able to convincingly defend the proposition that nothing exists .

            In the classic book on rhetoric that was long attributed to Cicero, and which is "the oldest extant formal study of figures" of speech, (Cicero xx) [Cicero, Ad C. Herennium Libri IV: De Ratione Dicendi ( Rhetorica ad Herennium )(1977), trans. Harry Caplan. Cambridge MA and London: Loeb Classical Library 403.] the author begins his study of figures with repetitio , which he praises for its "impressiveness and vigor," and urges "that it ought to be used for both the embellishment and the amplification of style." (Cicero 277) A "complete theory of Repetition" (Cicero 314n b ) follows in the Greek text. In a modern literary dictionary, repetition is defined as:

An essential unifying element in nearly all poetry and much prose. It may consist of sounds, particular syllables and words, phrases, stanzas, metrical patterns, ideas, allusions and shapes. Thus refrain, assonance, rhyme, internal rhyme, alliteration and onomatopoeia are frequent in repetition. (Cuddon 552, s.v. repetition ) [Cuddon, J.A. (1977), A Dictionary of Literary Terms . Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co.]

What may be said of repetition in poetry applies in every particular to song and dance as well. What has not been said, though, is how or why repetition should have the impact it does, and consequently why it should be so central in the sociocultural mechanics of education and persuasion. However, we can form a broader picture of repetition by drawing upon an experiential understanding of hypnotic trance.

My understanding of hypnosis and usage of the term 'trance' draws, as I have said, from the work of Milton Erickson, who saw trance as a condition in which conscious processes were suspended to a certain degree, and unconscious processes, largely seen as benign and teachable, could be released. As in most schools of hypnosis, Ericksonian trance is commonly induced by occupying the subject's conscious attention with internal mental or bodily events. The hypnotic induction reorients the subject's perceptual focus, commonly shifting it to a posture of systemic self-reference. This happens when the subject is enabled to reflect upon a range of questions such as whether she or he will soon go into a trance, or when; or whether an arm feels cooler or warmer, or whether something that I just said makes any sense at all, or whether the feelings of pain, pleasure, hunger, pressure, brightness, or whatever can be a little greater or lesser from moment to moment.

In the common trance induction that requires the subject to count backwards, the subject is being required to focus internally on a string of learned associations that must be revisited consciously to "get it right." Any problem that refocuses attention internally on learned associations, such as reading, thinking about something else as you drive, daydreaming, watching TV, and so forth, involves the sort of repositioning of conscious attention that can make trances and access to unconscious processes possible. Where did the time go? How could I have not been paying attention to my pain? or my bills? or whatever. Even listening to a talk can provide this sort of redirection of attention.

Trance makes greater focus possible because it is simply the regulation of attention. Since repetition redistributes focus to its previous point, repetition is an effective mechanism for introjective absorption of conscious processes. All mammals are habitually attuned to orienting themselves, or as we might also describe it, to learning ; and humans are particularly facile at this. Repetitive processes invoke a related mechanism. Neurophysiology describes learning as a process in which the repeated activation of certain neuronal connections establishes a chemically habituated system that we call a memory. In this process, we can understand the repetition as an orientation of internal psychological organization through an internal comparison process, so that this orientation is inevitably accompanied by some measure of reflexive attention to the fact of repetition itself and a concomitant reduction of other sensory input.

            Repetition is a common experience, but also a very strange one. As Roland Barthes comments,

repetition itself creates bliss. There are many ethnographic examples: obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites, and Buddhist nembutsu, etc.; to repeat excessively is to enter into loss, into the zero of the signified. But: in order for repetition to be erotic, it must be formal, literal, and in our culture his flaunted (excessive) repetition reverts to eccentricity, thrust toward various marginal regions of music. (Barthes 1973, 41)

It is impossible not to notice that (suddenly!) Barthes's examples here are almost all from music and speech.  

            Freud has suggested that a group with a leader, but without other structure than its relation to this leader, is bonded by a "libidinal constitution" comparable to the non-specifically-sexual emotional ties that he locates in trance. " A primary group of this kind is a number of individuals who have put one and the same object in the place of their ego ideal and have consequently identified themselves with one another in their ego ." (Freud 1921, 48, emphasis in original) [Freud, Sigmund (1921, 1959). Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. and ed. James Strachey. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.] In his study Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud seems to suggest that when the subject identifies with an ego ideal outside the network of consciousness, hypnotic conditions result. My own inclination is to reverse Freud's logic here; to suggest that Freud has identified a mechanism by which trance can condense the "ego ideals" of a group within the authority of a leadership. Whether repetitive movement is dance, factory work, or marching, its trance has strong implications for social bonding, and for the possibility of organized leadership--the subject's identification with an ego ideal, in Freud's terms. Repetitive movements in themselves do not necessarily facilitate social bonding. On the other hand, repetitive movements can be powerful instruments of group formation, and can also certainly instrumentalize subservience to authority. Here is Roland Barthes again:

encratic language (the language produced and spread under the protection of power) is statutorily a language of repetition; all official institutions of language are repeating machines: school, sports, advertising, popular songs, news, all continually repeat the same structure, the same meaning, often the same words: the stereotype is a political fact, the major figure of ideology. Confronting it, the New is bliss (Freud: "In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm"). (Barthes 1973, 40-41)

8. Repetition.

Whatever the space of time between them, each instance of a repeated psychokinetic experience is a reorientation, a reinstatement of a prior circumstance. In this respect psychokinetic repetition is the intersection common to two elements, neither of which is usually the subject of serious discourse: rote learning and conscious awareness. Concerning rote learning, repetition as reorientation is an overdetermination of experiential inscription that shapes our later repertoire of recall; as to conscious awareness, in the sense that all cognition is re-cognition, cognition is built upon recall, and (in a recursive formulation) upon the capacity which recall affords us for re-orientation.

Repetition, in all its forms, is a stimulus to reorientation, to a capturing of our fascination with how to understand where we are in the process of events and the meaning of our senses. Repetition snaps the reorientation mechanism into a loop, and tends to capture our conscious processes, unless we redirect our attention elsewhere. This is why repetitive events can make us forget what time it is, even where we are or why we are doing what we are doing. Time, in particular, is subject to reorientation with repetition; but the greatest introjective absorption of our conscious processes probably comes from repetitive events that direct our orientating focus toward our own bodies. Repetitive body movements or vocalizations, as in factory work, chanting, or dance, are each powerfully associated with trance induction. You can pay as much attention as you wish to, and begin doing this as soon as you decide it would be appropriate for you.

            The fundamental measure of our experience is the scale from same to different : are two things, events, perceptions, or actions similar or not, and in what way(s), and to what degree? We habitually orient ourselves by making comparisons like this. The appetite we have for similarity often produces startling effects, as when we suddenly recognize a face, or experience a deja vu , or discover a hidden relationship to solve a problem. Completely unfamiliar situations, in which we are disoriented, make us feel anxious; completely familiar situations lead us to boredom. Then there is the mixed situation, in which elements of similarity and difference are balanced in one way or another. Two things may be figurally related, yet differentiable. If the conditions of similarity are pronounced, the relationship may be described as a reorientation, a situation that invites the subject to be positioned in an ambiguous way, so that elements of the one experience may be conferred upon the other. When this condition is repeated, we experience a pattern or rhythm. In this respect, a rhythm is implicitly a repeated ambiguous orientation.   

Repetition, in its link to reorientation, comprises an internal process that can be thought of as a reductive schema, in associational terms. That is, by recirculating an orientation, perception, or event, one both reinscribes that event as a memory and simultaneously superimposes the interim experiences of each loop. If I go to the store and buy the newspaper every day, and then I buy all kinds of different things at the store while I'm there, I will develop a strong memory of going there and getting the paper, but all the other individual things I bought will probably be forgotten. When a person in a trance is reoriented to the same conversation they were involved in when the trance was induced, there is a great likelihood that the whole trance experience will be spontaneously forgotten. Erickson used this method frequently to invoke amnesia for the interventions he had suggested during a client's trance, or amnesia for the entire therapeutic trance, in order to remove doubts the subject might have had about if or how to pursue his suggestions. Erickson would do this without any direct instruction to the subject,

by the simple expedient of making a few remarks as the subject emerged from the trance which related to or continued a conversation begun prior to the induction. The reorientation thus required takes subjects back to the beginning of trance and sets the trance experience off as a separate, encapsulated, dissociative phenomenon which they then have difficulty remembering. (Havens 211)

[Havens, Ronald A. The Wisdom of Milton H. Erickson: Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy . New York: Paragon House and Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1985.]

Milton Erickson describes this as "reorientation in time."

            Recall, now, the repetitiousness mentioned by Barthes--"obsessive rhythms, incantatory music, litanies, rites, and Buddhist nembutsu, etc." "Obsessive rhythm" enacts a system of temporal reorientations that repetitively references itself and loses itself in its own process. Not only does the significance of each beat as the "first beat" vanish, but an overall collapse of orientational process begins; unless there is a renewal of conscious attentiveness to events outside the repetitive system, there is a lapse toward trance--the trance of the march, of the whirling dervish, the ecstatic dance, the reverie of repetitious prayer. When have we ever understood the similarities among these events so clearly?

            Repetition makes a conspicuous appearance in seven presumably distinct types of activity: music, dance, rhetoric, ritual, pedagogy, military training, and hypnosis. Remarkably, the first two of these, music and dance, arose in ancient Greece from a common source, mousik? (the art of the muses)--a term that denoted the conflated disciplines of poetry, dance, and music, and from which arose Greek theater. This conflation may be extended to rhetoric as well, with the recognition that in early democratic Greece the law--whence rhetoric was said to have sprung--was founded in the nómoi and the tradition of Homeric recitation.

The three of these activities that can be used most productively in understanding regular repetitive psychokinetic activities are music, ritual, and hypnotic trance. Music has a tight connection with psychokinetic repetition, but has rarely offered much explanatory power. On the other hand, all repetitive psychokinetic activity can be understood in terms of ritual, and analyzed from this angle as a social transaction. Also, and this is of particular interest to me, we might expect that some understandings having to do with hypnotic trance would apply to music, since music, repetitive activity, and trance phenomena overlap in significant ways.

We know, for example, that repetition, like confusion, can displace conscious mental processes and abet trance. We also know that trance induction is facilitated by reorientation to the physical, social, and emotional circumstances in which trance induction occurred previously. These facts alone might encourage us to treat musical rhythm in terms of trance--or at least in terms of micro-repetitions and sequential micro-temporal reorientations, which would then be susceptible to interpretation as waves of micro-trance-inducing events that the listener may learn to accumulate within a fuller hypnotic trance condition.

Music (like much momentary experience) involves re-cognition and repetition over several temporal ranges. That is, music deals with meter and rhythm, beat and ictus; it has regular repetitive features that are articulated at the time scale of a footstep, word, or heartbeat. It also has repetitive features that recur over the course of a minute, and which correspond to the time scale of melody, stanza, sentence, or action. Finally, and quite different from these, there is the longer-term re-cognition of memory: the tune that is remembered or the melody that you hear inside your head, and the sequence of words that ties the music to a scene or scenario. Each of these temporal ranges of recognition finds its way into our experience of music, through rhythm, melody, and strophic structure.

This model begins to organize other more readily perceived affinities between music and trance--the "transporting" qualities of music, the "evocative" experiences of music both as "mimesis" and as a stimulus to memories of other times and places, and several other aspects of remembering in music--the "favorite tune," the song that you "can't get out of your head," and other fixated experiences of musical sonority and words. Music can carry you back.... And simply remembering the tune and remembering the words are important components of the experience of music--along with the Beat, the flow of the sound.

Remembering, which in this way of thinking can be seen as nothing more or less than reorientation of the self in time--or age regression, as it is called by the hypnotist--either is, or is always accompanied by, trance. Memorization "techniques" even sound very much like hypnotic inductions. For example, the ancient "method of loci," whereby one imagines moving through a familiar series of spaces, recovering images where one had "left them" earlier, is homologous with a common authoritarian hypnotic induction tactic called picture visualization, in which the subject is told to traverse imagined spaces via a tunnel, boat ride, or such, and at each spot is given trance-deepening images or suggestions. Another memory technique that also involves a visualization approach uses composite associations, usually bearing a metonymic relation to the "memory," to build up an image. For example, one might memorize the name 'Kasperek' by associating it with an image of Casper the Friendly Ghost having a car accident, or "wreck;" or one might use an image of a chuckwagon (hash van) to remember the term 'Heshvan.' Here the structure of unconscious processes, which coincide with trance, is marked by punning and the other processes of displacement and condensation that Freud himself first associated with word play. All of this is to say that if the structure of the unconscious is the structure of language, per Lacan, then trance is the condition of access to "memory" and language.

Similarly, forgetting--that is, amnesia, or repression--frequently marks the partitioning of the different trances that comprise the continuum of experience. We habitually mark off the continuum of our experience into separate trance spaces by using reorientation experiences as junctures. Rhythm, then, and repetitive events in general, are a stimulus to the attentional machinery that articulates the trance structure of experience; [This will receive theoretical elaboration in a subsequent paper.] and music, which is largely built around structural repetition and deviation, is a playground for the "attentional machine."

9. Working the Scale.

Let's get back to the diatonic scale. As the basis for the twelve-note system of Western music, the diatonic scale has three features that make it "work." First and foremost is of course the major triad, a combination of three tones that, as Schenker has reminded us, appear as overtones in the harmonic series. [Slide 6: The harmonic series, as represented by Schenker. Harmony (21)]

In spite of Schenker and almost every other theorist having jumped off in the direction of harmonic analysis in terms of the overtone series, though, once the major triad has been introduced [Slide 7: The major triad.] there is almost never again in Western common practice discourse a mention or clear usage of the harmonic series; rather, the triad is flexibly treated as a pair of intervals--the major third and the minor third--and these are built up on top of one another to produce prodigious stacks of thirds, and hence triads, such as seventh, ninth, and eleventh chords, etc. Two major thirds make an augmented triad and two minor thirds make a diminished triad; the only problem with these triads is that though the thirds are consonances, the outer intervals (a diminished or augmented fifth) is not the consonance that one has in the major or minor triad. In either the major triad or the minor triad, any tones in the triad taken two at a time form strongly consonant intervals. [Play track 1: D Scale line 2.] This is as true of the major triad as it is of the minor triad, which competes with the major triad for top dog in the Western system, even though the minor triad is nowhere to be found in the overtone series. The important thing about a consonant triad is that each of its three composite intervals is a consonance. Period.

            The second important feature of the diatonic scale is the leading tone . [Slide 8: Diatonic leading tone.] The fact that a major third above the perfect fifth comes very close to the tonic note, as B does to C in the key of C, means that the scale--which is composed from three triads, one stacked atop the next--is guaranteed to include a small interval that can be used to lead a voice into the tonic from the dominant. It is the leading tone that lends dominant harmony its instability, that comprises the forward-leaning impulse in Western music, that gives harmony its narrative sense of conflict and resolution. The leading tone is echoed in each of the half-step intervals in the twelve-note system, an incredibly rich source of musical fuel that powers the engine of Western counterpoint.

            Finally, in the fully articulated twelve-note system that is the product of scale building on each note of the diatonic scale, there is concealed a feature that is important because it is virtually inaudible. This is the closure of the twelve-note system under the circle of fifths. [Slide 9: Syntonic comma.] Technically, a scale built upon C will include a fifth above, which is a G. A scale built upon a G will include a fifth above, which is a D. A scale built upon a D will include a fifth above, which is an A. And a scale built upon a A will include a fifth above, which is an E. But this E is constructed differently from the E that is a true overtone-series major third above C. This difference can be calculated, very simply, by examining the various frequency ratios that compose the two different constructions. The major third E differs from the cycle of fifths E by a tiny interval, about 0.22 semitones. This interval is called the syntonic comma. What we do to avoid this problem is called "equal tempering." In effect, the major third on the piano is set about a seventh of a semitone out of tune, and the perfect fifth is set about a fiftieth of a semitone out of tune. The four fifths that construct one E pull it about a thirteenth of a semitone flat; this adjustment, combined with the major third adjustment by a seventh of a semitone sharp, balances the whole system in the familiar twelve equal intervals. Why is this important? Simply because in the Western system, which uses key changes, major-minor shifts, and modulations, one can not have a triad that would produce two widely-separated Es. That is, the syntonic comma must be small if the number of intervals in the system is to stay under control.

            Now I have found a way to generalize the requisite conditions for a scale to be capable of common practice Western harmony. If there were to be a scale that was completely different from the standard diatonic scale, yet that could support the full weight of Western music theory, such a scale would certainly afford a valuable vantage for achieving a different perspective on the twelve-note system. The scale we want must be built on a triad of three consonant intervals smaller than an octave. We can take the liberty of calling the lowest interval a "major third" and the widest interval a "fifth." Then the "major third" and the "fifth," stacked end to end, must almost but not exactly make up an octave. In addition, four "fifths" end to end must arrive almost exactly at a point several octaves above the "major third." If this prescription sounds like arithmetic, it's because all of this can easily be expressed algebraically.

I have located two interesting triads that satisfy these conditions. [Slide 10: Seven triad.] The one I have been exploring since 1998 is constructed around the intervals with frequency ratios of 7:6 (the "major third") and 3:2 (the "minor third"), with an outer "fifth" interval having the frequency ratio 7:4. Here the "fifth," rather than drawing from the third harmonic in the overtone series for its consonance, draws from the seventh harmonic. The perfect fifth of our usual diatonic scale shows up here as the "minor third," and a new interval, the ratio 7:6, which is a bit smaller than our ordinary minor third, functions here as the "major third."      

What does this triad sound like? [Play track 2: 7 Scale line 2.] To compare the "major" triads of the diatonic scale and what I have called the "seven scale," here we can hear them in stereo on opposite tracks. [Play track 3: 7 D Scale line 2.] Now, what kind of scale does the new triad generate? [Slide 11: Seven scale.] There are no major thirds in this triad, and the "leading tone" lies, as it happens, just above rather than just below the key note. The "leading tone" is also much closer to the tonic note than before, about a third of a semitone. If we label the notes of this scale in the key of C, then the "leading tone," B, is a microtonal interval above C. If we call the new triad C-E-G, just to keep the harmonic functions of the notes labeled in familiar terms, then the new "C-E-G" major triad will actually lie on or near the diatonic scale steps C, E flat flat, B flat flat. As you can see, the relationship between harmonic and melodic functions is quite different here from the diatonic scale system.

Here is the diatonic scale in C. [Slide 12: Scale examples 1-2-3.] [Play track 4: D Scale line 1.] Now, in the seven scale, here are the notes with these same names, C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C . [Play track 5: 7 Scale line 1.] Again, here the two scales are for comparison, on different tracks. [Play track 6: 7 D Scale line 1.] The new dominant seventh triad, "G-B-D-F," is something more than a diatonic whole tone below the tonic, while the subdominant triad, "F-A-C," begins something more than a whole step above the tonic. Here is the dominant triad "G-B-D" followed by the subdominant triad "F-A-C." First we will hear the diatonic version, then the seven-scale version, and finally both for comparison. [Play tracks 7, 8, 9: D and 7 Scales line 3.]  

[Slide 13: Scale examples 4-5.] To demonstrate what dominant harmony sounds like in the seven-scale system, here are a couple of lines in which the tonic and dominant chords alternate. First, here is the diatonic version. [Play track 10: D Scale line 4.] Now here is the seven-scale version. [Play track 11: 7 Scale line 4.] And here they are side by side. [Play track 12: 7 D Scale line 4.] Similarly, this is the diatonic version of the second line. [Play track 13: D Scale line 5.]   And the seven-scale version. [Play track 14: 7 Scale line 5.] And side by side. [Play track 15: 7 D Scale line 5.] To get a fuller sense of how the seven-scale system is on the one hand capable of iterating the full range of harmonic complexity in the diatonic system, and to offer an idea of what this can sound like, I have translated the familiar first Bach Prelude in C from the Well-Tempered Clavier into the seven-scale system. This is a robot performance by midi from the score. [Play track 16, Bach Prelude in C.]   

            I began working with this scale in 1998, when I recorded a version of the song "Beloved Comrade" that was released on an obscure label in Buffalo. In order to get an idea of the original harmonic structure of "Beloved Comrade," here is what Josh White's 78 rpm recording from World War II days sounds like. [Play track 17: Beloved Comrade - Josh White.] My version of "Beloved Comrade" is fourteen minutes long, but I would like to play it for you. [Play track 18: Beloved Comrade (1998).]  

Tony Conrad

Buffalo

May 7, 2004

SLIDES

1.   Edward Hopper

2.   Rene Magritte

3.   Dazzle

4.   Dazzle

5.   Dazzle

6.   Harmonic series

7.   Major triad

8.   Diatonic leading tone

9.   Syntonic comma

10. Seven triad

11. Seven scale

12. Scale examples:1-2-3

13. Scale examples: 4-5

[14. CAPTCHA]