I Am Certain That I Am Uncertain

Can we be certain there is uncertainty in music? We sure can. When you hear a song on the radio, typically it is of the teleological variety; that is, you can identify the hook of the song, and maybe even predict some of the tried-and-true chord changes. The moments where a feeling of suspense is building in the music only to be followed by a release is all too familiar to anyone that has experienced music. But what happens when you lose that sense of direction in the music, that orientation that is so easily achieved in teleological music?

Improvisation is a credible answer in this particular case, and it seems to fly in the face of the world we know of music. Prior to experiencing improvised music in depth, music to me has always seemed to fit into that teleological category, though I never identified it as such. It was just something I inherently knew. I knew that although a storm was brewing on the horizon of a musical composition, there would be a hint of sunshine just beyond, a place where I would be safe among the sound so to speak. After exposure to truly improvised music, all bets were off. No longer did I "know" that there was a safe haven; now I have to be prepared for anything, to become an active listener and participant in the music around me.

In a way I feel as though this uncertainty is not unlike that which came packaged up with new physical laws introduced by quantum mechanics (which, coincidentally, features its own "Uncertainty Principle"). The world prior to Einstein and Heisenberg was merely a world of Laplacian determinism, a place where if you knew one state of the universe at a particular time, you could in theory predict what would happen some arbitrary time later. There was a logical progression from physical frame to physical frame, and time flowed on in the process. But what experimentation has shown (and the mathematical formalism to back it up) is that we cannot possibly know with exactitude all properties of a system simultaneously. There is a degree of uncertainty based on how precise we wish to focus on one part.

Music, too, has this inbuilt uncertainty when a performer (or performers) picks up their instrument and begins to improvise a piece of music. No longer can the audience say "here is where I am, so this is where we must be going," but instead, they must be satisfied with "here I am, but what does that mean for the rest of the piece?" There is just no saying where a piece could go, how the dynamics will change, what the volume might do a few seconds from now. It is this inherent uncertainty that allows everyone to engage in the music at the moment and forget about the orientation in time. The music doesn't have a definite shape at a later time, for it can only progress through the "now." This spontaneity I think is what gives improvisation its alluring properties, and in my opinion, the same can be said about the dynamics of our own universe.