Atmospherics
2026
Pentimento Volume 3
On the invisibility of music
by Jon Hassell
How to explain the gap between visual and musical sophistication? Think of it as if I were a painter in a big loft with lots of things that I’ve collected lying around — big things, little things, things that I love for one reason or another. Keeping the painter analogy, I put something up on a big ‘canvas’. Then I look at my collection and think, what might look good (sound good) with that? And if that works, what would be the next element and so on… Thinking about it this way, one gets away from having to relate to the categories of particular musical styles. It’s not a ‘jazz’ canvas; it’s not a ‘classical’ canvas; or a ‘techno’ canvas. It’s anything that’s in the air that one finds beautiful.
In discussing a painting or sculpture, one can actually touch or point to an area and say: “this is quite Picasso-like” — it’s visible to all. We share a common, quite broad, database for visual culture. But music is invisible, one of those facts that is so obvious as to be invisible itself.
Who can say what another person is actually experiencing when listening to music? It exists only as an interior experience in an individual.
Of course one could say that it’s impossible to know exactly what someone is ‘seeing’ internally also. That’s true but we can at least agree on where the visual stimulus is located: it’s there, on the wall. The ‘database’ for sonic experience is not possible to be shared as widely as the one for visual experience.
painting by Mati Kalrwein
When I try to figure out why some people luxuriate in a Gil Evans texture and others merely ‘enjoy’ it (or don’t get it at all), I think the term ‘musical literacy’ might apply too, i.e. the ability to combine the more usual mode of horizontal listening (what’s happening NEXT) with the more subtle psychological process of listening vertically (what’s happening NOW), where you let your
ears scan up and down the sonic spectrum being created in a given instant.
We may try to come as close as possible with word descriptions but that is essentially a language experience about a musical experience. Wherever this degree of fuzziness between ‘thing’ and ‘description of thing’ exists, opportunity knocks for a Babel of opinion – and marketing.
A critic says this is great or that’s not. That opinion becomes viral and you and your friends begin to buy into the media echo chamber, the big music corporations fan the flames by supplying those ‘missing’ visuals via music videos and movie soundtracks. Then — instead of having your own experience, your listening takes place inside the box of those images and those verbal descriptions.
My idea of the pleasure of – let’s call it ‘deep listening’ – involves a surrender to an interior soundscape that is beyond words, one that is kaleidoscopic and prismatic, that refracts everything that you’ve ever been thrilled by, be it Scriabin or Marvin Gaye, Ravel or Gil Evans, Couperin or Joao Gilberto, Javanese Gamelan or a folksong by a campfire.
But if your listening experience has been conditioned by the corporate music of today — a handful of well-worn templates of meaning (lyrics) set in a few well-worn templates of musical background (the verse-chorus form using the same 4-5 chords) — the shapes in your interior kaleidoscope will tend to be more familiar and somewhat monochromatic. Of course, with the right chemical boost, one can simulate that deep listening mode in experiencing most anything (see Magical Mystery Tours). But that’s just a trip, and that’s cool, there’s no reason to diminish that experience. But there’s so much more! So many new shapes…
What would it look like if all the best painters appeared in a show in which the work exhibited the same narrow range of variation as exists in the currently accepted category of popular music? A sameness that would appear shocking in the visual context.
SEMINAR 1: What is Vertical Listening?
SEMINAR 2: Around the question, “What is the musical equivalent of a Gaudi?”
This question highlights the issues in the essay above on the invisibility of music – asking those with a visual sensibility refined enough to appreciate the surreal, storybook aspect of Gaudi’s
architecture to also think about what in their musical universe is conceivably equivalent? All of us, including those of visual literacy and refinement, have grown up with a corporate-supplied background track to our adolescent years that loops forever in movies and television. Without a real effort at broadening the experience of music, they (we) have no idea of what a Gaudi could sound like in the imagination (Charles Ives? Ravel? Gamelan?). It’s this gap between visual and musical sophistication that is the subject here.
The kind of musical taste that has arisen in the corporate music sphere – if expressed in architecture – would be something like being a fan of the Top Ten façades of various fast-food franchises. Sure, that can be fun and instructive too but this attitude easily hardens into the acceptance of the ‘new normal’ – living in a world of irony, avoiding the deeply beautiful.
© 2013 Jon Hassell
