Chord Theory, Part 2

I once dragged a friend to see Glenn Branca's symphony for 100 guitars.

One hundred guitar players. Eight bass players. All their amps cranked to eleven, arranged neatly on stage like your typical symphony. A conductor stood in front, no tuxedo, directing only pitch, volume, and intensity. Everything else — how each player chose to express those directions — was up to them.

Concerned docents handed out earplugs. The only symphony I've attended where that's standard protocol.

The best way to describe it: what it must sound like sitting inside the turbine of a jet engine.

I thought it was glorious.

Beautiful Noise

Anyone can take a 2x4 and press down a whole block of keys on the piano at once. While I might find some beauty in that, most people would call it noise.

Then again, I'm one of the rare New Yorkers who can find musicality in the screeching of subway wheels as the train rounds the bend into the station.

But that doesn't mean I want either of them on my Spotify playlist.

Western music theory divides an octave into 12 tones. Indian music recognizes 22 — the 12 main tones plus 10 microtones that float between them. To the Western ear, those in-between tones sound screechy. Nails on a chalkboard.

In the Eastern tradition, they're called shrutis. Divine sounds.

Every Key Belongs

The beautiful thing about notes is that they all bring something to the chord. Some notes go together naturally — they're consonant. Others create dissonance, tension, a little sourness.

But when a particular note doesn't fit the current chord, we don't remove that key from the piano. Foresight tells us that note might be essential for the next chord, or the next composition entirely.

If we eliminated every annoying key that didn't serve our immediate purpose, we'd eventually end up with just one note. And one note isn't really a chord, even if you play multiples of it.

The wellness industrial complex has sold millions of people on the idea that uncomfortable experiences should be optimized away. Downloaded. Processed. Medicated. Manifested out of existence.

But those discordant notes — the irritations, the struggles, the things that don't fit your current vision of how life should sound — aren't errors in the system. They're part of the composition you haven't heard yet.

Full Spectrum

We want to be on a trajectory of appreciating and incorporating all the notes, even the microtones.

This is a hallmark of expanded awareness: the ability to be open to all possibilities, to discern minute details, to develop a love and understanding that helps incorporate even the Shrutis into future compositions.

Vedic philosophy tells us that anything that exists is relevant. And it exists not just for one reason, but for all reasons.

We may not know the particular relevance of something in a given moment. It may not apply to our current use case. But there are infinite possibilities available. The point is remaining open to embrace them, instead of trying to eliminate them.

Most personal development operates like someone trying to simplify the piano. Get rid of the black keys — too jazzy. Remove the bass notes — too heavy. What remains is pleasant, predictable, and utterly incapable of creating anything that moves the soul.