A Beginner's Mind
getting started with Substack
Contemplating Music
Contemplating Music with JHM aims to explore a holistic, contemplative conception of music and life. The focus is on musical energy, how it’s created and received, the many influences on our perceptions, and the connections between acoustical energy and mental energy. A contemplative, phenomenological theory of music is underneath it all, the Sound-Energy Aggregate (SEA).
For several years, I have posted monthly essays in my blog, Contemplating Music, which will continue. Here I will post new thoughts, shorter thoughts than the essays, and older blog posts. Current blog posts will also go here, on the same day that blog posts go up. For the time being, posts will remain free, since my primary focus is spreading the word about a transformative way of thinking about music.
I am a composer who has been thinking about musical energy for a long time. I’m making this Substack to spread my thinking and engage others in the thinking. As a teacher at the college level for more than 30 years, for the last 22 I have taught a class using SEA principles, and now teach a class in the theory itself. I realize more every year that the theory is not only about music, but the unity of music and life.
The SEA approach seeks to spur honest, open-minded thinking about music, starting from the premise that people of all sorts have a lifetime of experience with music and thus are ready and able to engage on a profound level. By starting from the phenomenon of musical energy itself, we can bypass reliance on knowledge of vocabulary and technical issues to facilitate fresh encounters with music as it is, as it sounds. From those fresh encounters emerge new insights, insights of value for the future of music, for one’s own musical world, for life itself.
Please subscribe! I’ll set up the pledge option for future paid subscriptions, but have no plan to move in that direction as I begin the Substack.