Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in MusicAuthor(s): Guerino Mazzola

Source: Perspectives of New Music , Vol. 57, No. 1-2, Perspectives on and around John
Rahn (Winter/Summer 2019), pp. 431-439
Published by: Perspectives of New Music

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.57.1-2.0431

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 CONSCIOUSNESS, CREATIVITY, AND
COMPLEX TIME IN MUSIC

GUERINO MAZZOLA

1. TIME IN PHYSICS

in modern
Ophysics of the twentieth century was the revolutionary reconceptu-
NE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC ONTOLOGICAL CHANGES

alization of time. It started with Albert Einstein’s special relativity,

where he embedded time in a four-dimensional space-time. Einstein
had adopted the space-time approach of Hermann Minkowski, who, in
a famous statement stated that “[h]enceforth, space for itself, and time
for itself shall completely reduce to a mere shadow, and only some sort
of union of the two shall preserve independence.”1 Time then became
a multiple variable, the Newtonian singular “divine” time was replaced
by a plurality, one in every frame of reference, and different frame times
being related to each other by the Lorentz transformation of space-time.
The second revolution of the time concept was introduced by
Stephen Hawking (among others) in order to solve singularity
problems of the Big Bang model of the evolution of our universe in
the initial moment some 13.8 billion years ago. Hawking’s concept of
time steps from the real time axis to the plane of complex numbers:
Time now has two coordinates t = tR + i tI, the real time tR and the

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432 Perspectives of New Music

imaginary time tI. This complex ontology has also been proposed and
studied by physicists Itzak Bar and John Terning (2010).
These two revolutions in the concept of time, however, did not apply
to the human cognitive reality, except in Einstein’s case for the meta-
phorical and vague popular statement that “everything is relative.”2
In what follows, I will introduce the thesis that complex time could
be a key to some of the most virulent problems in the artistic reality of
music, namely the nature of artistic consciousness and creativity,
especially from the perspective of musical performance. This thesis is
also in the spirit of John Rahn’s unique proactive spirit in music theory.

2. CONSCIOUSNESS AND CREATIVITY IN MUSIC

The performing musician, whether rendering a composed work from a

score, or creating in a more-or-less free or improvisatory fashion—in
jazz for example—faces a complex combination of memory, technique,
gestures, and the balance in the famous temporal καιρός (Kairos)
between past and future moments. Successful musical performance is a
highly creative and complex activity, at the very center of which is the
sophisticated consciousness of the artist which manages the harmo-
nious collaboration of the above-mentioned components in real time.
“In real time” means in every moment of the performance; more
precisely, in every infinitesimal point of physical time. I know as a per-
forming free jazz pianist what every good performer experiences: the
complex processual unfolding of musical performance is a rich machinery
that defines and is happening in a big space of consciousness and
presence. This configuration is described in Mazzola (2011, ch. 4.12).
This artistic complexification is however a miraculous phenomenon
since it happens in “no time,” in the physical moment of presence. We
are confronted with a big “space” of consciousness that occupies no
time in the physical time line. This makes evident the problematic
status of creative artistic consciousness, and of consciousness in
general: How can it be that a rich processuality is construed in no
physical time? It seems that this type of phenomenon is enabled by the
existence of a huge “space” of consciousness that is attached to every
moment of physical time. This situation in its acute extremism in
performing arts questions a classical rationale for understanding and
even defining consciousness in cognitive and neuroscience. If no extra
“space” is added to the classical physical ontology, consciousness
cannot cope with its performative quality. So let us present the
following thesis:

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 Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in Music 433

Thesis: Any workable concept of consciousness, and in particular

artistic consciousness in the performing arts, must be built upon a “space-
time” that is added to the classical physical spatio-temporal ontology.

3. CARTESIAN DUALISM

The above thesis is given a familiar philosophical perspective if we

review the Cartesian dualism which Descartes set up in his Principia
philosophiae (Descartes 1983), where he describes the three substances
of being: res extensa, res cogitans, and God. Human existence is
comprised of res extensa and res cogitans, and their mysterious
interaction. Res cogitans is strongly associated with consciousness. It is
not clear where this interaction should happen (Descartes’s idea of the
pineal gland being the crossing locus simply locates the interaction in
the physical, which would negate the dualism, but which would also
make res cogitans secondary to res extensa, thus res cogitans would no
longer be a substance). For Descartes a substance is something that
can exist without the existence of any other substance and can stand as
the indubitable foundation for knowledge and science, which means in
particular that the substance of res cogitans is not comprised in the
physical ontology of res extensa (and vice versa).
Cartesian dualism is derived from this double substantiality of
human existence; we are “split” into the physicality of our embodi-
ment and the mentality of consciousness. This configuration is not
only related to a dual metaphysics, but more specifically to a double
locality: there is a physical space as well as a mental space, and both are
irreducibly separate from each other. Let us be clear about the still-
valid dualism that is opposed to the often erroneously claimed
reductionism of mentality to physics in neurosciences. The partisans of
radical neuroscience (see Gazzaniga [2018], for example) claim that
ultimately, our thoughts are (however complex) neuronal activities:
i.e., that thinking is the surface of physical activities. This argument is
invalid for the following reason. Suppose we could, for example,
explain mathematical thoughts by neuronal activities. Then the
description and analysis of such activities would necessarily be enabled
by complex mathematical formulas, such as those difficult partial
differential equations that describe the axonal transfer of electrical
voltage. In other words, the explanation of mathematical thoughts
would presuppose a sophisticated mathematical machinery, which is a
vicious circle: explaining math by use of math has no added value.

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434 Perspectives of New Music

Cartesian dualism therefore is a second argument for our above

thesis that consciousness in creative artistic performance must occur in
a “space” of consciousness that is added to the physical space-time
ontology.
But we have to understand that this dualism is not the solution of
the question about the ontology of consciousness, the question of how
the mental space is added to the physical reality.

4. INTRODUCING COMPLEX TIME IN MUSIC: A SOLUTION?

My proposal regarding the added mental space of consciousness relates

to complex time. The fundamental idea is that time has a real and an
imaginary coordinate, as suggested by theoretical physics. When we
consider space-time with complex time, we get a five-dimensional real
vector space ST = ℝ3 ⊕ ℂ that is the union of two four-dimensional
subspaces, ST = RST + IST = ℝ3 ⊕ ℝ + ℝ3 ⊕ iℝ, the physical space-
time RST and the mental space-time IST; see Example 1.
The physical and mental subspaces have the spatial part in common:
RST ∩ IST = ℝ3. This is what replaces Descartes’s pineal gland. This
configuration separates res extensa from res cogitans, but it also gives
them a shared subspace.

EXAMPLE 1: DESCARTES’S DUALISM RESOLVED

IN A SPACE-TIME WITH COMPLEX TIME

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 Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in Music 435

The next step must be a theory of interaction between these four-

dimensional subspaces which comprises the laws of physics and the
dynamics of consciousness. No such model has been proposed so far,
but we have nevertheless initiated research that models musical
performance as a transformation of symbolic reality (of a score for
example) to physical reality, see Mazzola (2018, Vol. III).

5. SYMBOLIC AND PHYSICAL GESTURES IN PERFORMANCE

In my previous performance theory, I dealt with the transformation of

note symbols, as given in a common score, to physical (acoustical)
events. This is also the approach that is taken by contemporary per-
formance theory as initiated by the Swedish school of Johan Sundberg
(1991). My theory used quite sophisticated methods of differential
geometry (see Mazzola [2018], Vol. II). It was one of the most
important results of my research that the refinement process of
performance involves Lie derivatives of performance vector fields.
In view of the union of physical and symbolic/mental realities as
suggested by the above model of space-time, it became necessary to
also represent the performance process more as embodied than as the
acoustical rendition of abstract note symbols in performance. In Mazzola
(2018, Vol. III), I set forth an embodied performance theory which
instead of note sequences deals with musical gestures, configurations of
curves in space-time that may be realized by the movements of parts of
the human body: the limbs, arms, and hands of pianists, for example.
This gestural approach is also paralleled by the attractive physical
theory of strings. String theory does not describe elementary objects as
points that move in space-time, but as parametrized curves which move
through space-time and thereby trace a “world-sheet” (instead of the
well-known “world-line” of traditional particle dynamics). In my
musical performance theory, the string would be a musical gesture, for
example an up-down movement of a pianist’s finger (Mazzola 2018,
Vol. II) Its world-sheet would be the surface that is spanned between
the symbolic finger movement as described on the score and the
physical movement in performance, where a real physical gesture is
happening. See Example 2 for an illustration of such a world-sheet.
The left blue rectangular line is the symbolic gesture, while the right
red curve is the physical realization thereof.
The performance theory of musical gesture strings parallels the
physical theory in that the shape of such a world-sheet is determined
by the minimization of a Lagrange potential that is associated with a
world-sheet (see Mazzola [2018, Vol. III] for details).

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436 Perspectives of New Music

In this model, the symbolic gesture evolves in imaginary time of

consciousness, while the physical one evolves in physical time. This
means that we have a world-sheet of time from the symbolic/mental
time line to the physical one. In our theory, this world-sheet turns out
to be a conformal mapping in complex space. Example 3 shows the
temporal world-sheet and its intermediate levels when viewed as a
function of real/physical time.
Here we face a completely new research into time when morphing
from mental to physical time.
One of the important new results of this theory is completely parallel
to the result mentioned above from classical performance theory
regarding the role of the Lie derivative in the refinement process of
performance vector fields. Again, there is an operator of Lie derivative
type that captures refinements of gestural performance.

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 Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in Music 437

x
4 6
0 2

s 0

-1

6
4
2
y
0

EXAMPLE 2: WORLD-SHEET OF AN UP-DOWN MOVEMENT

OF A PIANIST’S FINGER

fixed
fixed
intermediate states
intermediate states
at initial real time open
at real time t
intermediate states
1.0
at real time t

a(s) 0.8
0.6

0.4

0.2

a(0) 0.0

-0.2
0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0 1.2

initial real time real time t

EXAMPLE 3: THE WORLD-SHEET OF COMPLEX TIME OF A GESTURE

AND ITS INTERMEDIATE STATES

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438 Perspectives of New Music

NO T E S

1. Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time,” in Hendrik A. Lorentz,

Albert Einstein, Hermann Minkowski, and Hermann Weyl, The
Principle of Relativity: A Collection of Original Memoirs on the
Special and General Theory of Relativity (Dover, New York, 1952),
p. 75.
2. In the case of complex time, I repeatedly emailed Hawking, but never
got an answer. I also discussed the issue with other theoretical
physicists, but they consistently thought of the imaginary component
as being a mathematical method, not an ontological or even
human cognitive topic.

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 Consciousness, Creativity, and Complex Time in Music 439

REFERENCES

Bar, Iztak, and John Terning. 2010. Extra Dimensions in Space and
Time. Heidelberg: Springer.
Descartes, René. 1983. Principles of Philosophy [Principia philosophiae].
Translated and edited by Valentine Rodger and Reese P. Miller.
Dordrecht: Reidel.
Gazzaniga, Michael. 2018. The Consciousness Instinct: Unraveling the
Mystery of How the Brain Makes the Mind. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux.
Mazzola, Guerino. 2011. Musical Performance. Heidelberg: Springer.
Mazzola, Guerino, et al. 2018. The Topos of Music, Second edition in
four volumes (Theory, Performance, Gestures, Roots). Heidelberg:
Springer.
Sundberg, Johan. 1991. “Music Performance Research. An Overview,”
in Music language, Speech and Brain, edited by Johan Sundberg,
Lennart Nord, and Rolf Carlson. London: Palgrave, 173–183.

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