Required Reading?

Reading for pleasure; I find more and more that it is a luxury. I've enlisted for a life that requires more than an epicurean appreciation of language. There are more than words wandering in this world, there are great settlements of subjects to be mastered. Not only do I spend a good deal of time surveying contemporary literature (a good deal of which I either do not like or to which I discover I have feelings of simple hostility) in order to better understand my own fiction's orientation, but, as long as I choose to write about music, I also continue to look for new plateaus from which to gain perspective, and new tools to measure my distance from being a musician: an individual who both serves and commands music.

And so I read a good deal about the science of musical production. By science I mean not only hard science, such as mathematics and physics, but also softer science, such as psychology. So, being infatuated with the vague as only a Humanities guy can be, I end up reading a good bit of very technical writing about music. Another Whitney Balliett article, however poetically wrought and insightful, leaves me feeling more stuffy-headed (cotton in the inner ear) than inspired or enlightened. On my musical reference shelf are frequently consulted volumes such as:

• Benade's Fundamentals Of Musical Acoustics (2nd rev. ed.);
  
• Nicolas Slonimsky's Thesaurus Of Scales And Melodic Patterns, as it sat famously on Coltrane's bookshelf;
  
• Sudnow's Ways Of The Hand, that mind-wrenching exploration of the cognitive states that the author experiences as he learns, not just how to play a specific instrument -- the paino -- but to improvise on it as well;
  
• Helmholtz's On The Sensations Of Tone, important for what it tells us about the form of attention we call "hearing";
  
• Thom Holmes' Electronic And Experimental Music, an excellent, single-volume hisotry / reference resource that I read in high school and which is now available in a second edition;
  
• Berliner's massive, transcription-happy Thinking In Jazz;
  
• Fux's Study In Counterpoint;
  
• Bart Hopkin's Musical Instrument Design: Practical Information For Instrument Making, less for pure instruction than for the ideas ("adjustments") the author suggests;
  
• and more, like studies on Indian classical music [ICM], histories of musicology, treatises by composers from Schoenberg to George Russell.
  

Gaining more than a strictly personal comprehension of music has meant that I live with it, the way I reside with language, in steadily more awkward intimacies. There are those who see guidance as a prerequisite for self-propulsion, then there are others who are comfortable sitting by the banks of the river, waiting for guidance -- a felicity, after all -- to float into their field of vision. Intuitionism vs. Empiricism? Perhaps. Don't you have to know where the oracle is before you can seek its wisdom?

How much knowledge is necessary? I own the books, but do I possess what is "in" them? Music has so many metaphysical realities, I find. Some of them consist of numbers, alone or in formulas; others are traceries (made by blowing dust into a shaft of light) of waveforms and other typically invisible motions; others are purely historical, costumed tableaus whose anachronistic perseverance is interpreted as a kind of immortality; while still others are planes and colors like those that Kandinsky distilled from the air vibrating around him. I am convinced it is folly to seek a unification of these things. I also see the virtue of dispersing one's understanding of it "all". That which refuses to cohere can never be conquered.

Besides, there's a more practical difficulty here. Reading often forms a glut that blocks one's writing. The writing life too easily slips into a certain rhythm: wild vascillations between being in the world and being out of it, or hungrily accumulating interactions and then longing for the solitude in which to make sense of them. Writer's block -- which is not my real subject here, honestly -- may just be a symptom of information overload. Too much data. The mother board becomes heavy and obdurate and black with the carbon discharged from too many made connections. Cut, splice... contemporary musicians understand these procedures well, and they understand how vital, perhaps even universal, they are as activities, much as "play" is… but are the cords of thought infinite in their divisibility?