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Music and Categories (V):
Interstitiality and the Deep–Structural Soul
By Warren Senders
I started out with a normal rock and roll childhood, playing air guitar next to the stereo and trying to decipher the lyrics on the records I'd bought. But somewhere, somewhen, I fell out of fascination with rock, and turned my ears outward. Over the three decades since I graduated from high school, I've been a professional jazz bassist and bandleader, an avid (and unpaid) student and performer of West African drumming music, a composer of string quartets, brass ensembles, big–band charts, and many different kinds of chamber music, an instrument–builder, an ethnomusicologist, an acoustical theorist, a recreational guitarist and folksinger, a musical epistemologist, and, most crucially to my artistic life and livelihood, a professional teacher and performer of Indian classical singing.
In every one of these fields I am somehow anomalous: to my jazz colleagues I am an odd duck because of my background in Indian music (and because I listen to country music for pleasure); and to my colleagues in Hindustani music I'm an eccentric for a lot of different reasons (starting with the simple and unavoidable fact that I'm not ethnically Indian, and moving outward from there). Years ago, the father of a friend listened to me babbling enthusiastically about all the different kinds of music I liked, and said, not unkindly, "you know, Warren, you'll have to choose sometime."
I did choose. I chose to change my perspective on music so that regardless of which hat I was wearing, I was always, at some level, doing the same thing. Hindustani singing is behaviorally different from African drumming, to be sure — but over the years I've found a place to stand which lets me know them both as "musicking" (to use Christopher Small's apt verb) and to apply the lessons learned in one to the understanding of another.
Professional linguists (the kind of people who learn Serbo–Croatian over their spring vacations) know that after a certain critical number of languages is learned, core structures become evident, making subsequent tongues easier and easier to acquire. New languages can be related by analogy to others; common patterns and transformations are easily recognized, and an underlying unity is ever more evident. I think it was Joseph Conrad who said that "to learn another language is to acquire another soul." From this perspective, all those carefully acquired "linguistic souls" retain their individuality, but are also felt as variegated manifestations of something larger; to grasp the deep structure of languages as a pan–cultural human behavior, then, is to have a deep–structure soul; a meta–soul.
Of course, I can't speak for the linguists I'm speaking about; I'm not one of them. I am only barely bi–soular, for my Hindi is atrocious, but I do believe Conrad's dictum applies to my field as well: to learn another music is to acquire another soul, and to understand the deep structure of music as a pan–cultural human behavior is to learn something rich and powerful about one's soul and one's self.
The phenomena of interstitiality are the phenomena of multiple and overlapping viewpoints, the phenomena of deep structure, the phenomena of one's many souls interacting and feeding one another — questioning, understanding and expressing. True, I'm an oddball to my colleagues and friends in any one of my fields of interest, but this polyphony of perspective lets me transcend any single default taxonomy. If I may versify briefly in the manner of Edwin Markham:
They call me eccentric, they view me with doubt,
From inside their circles, my music is "out."
But meta–taxonomy gives me the room
The circles I draw don't exclude — they subsume.
Warren Senders
Medford, Massachusetts
October 7, 2003
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