Side by side, in any bar in the world, are two types of people, drinking alcohol for opposite reasons. Some people are searching for experiences, to collect moments of happiness or euphoria: for them alcohol functions as an aid to heighten sensation. Others drink to kill all sensations, to forget their past, to forget who they are and to knock themselves out. This is a well-documented phenomenon. A fact self-evident to anyone who has ever drunk alcohol. Talked about far less are the two types of concert goer sat side by side: one in search of new extremes of emotion and one wishing to hide from emotions forever.
In his essay, Anaesthetic Ideology, Mark Grief describes the point where people shift from searching for experience to searching to avoid it:
‘You reach points in life at which you can no longer live like other people, though you don’t want to die. Experience becomes piercing, grating, intrusive. It is no longer out of reach, an occasional throb in the dark. It is no longer a prize, though it is the goal everyone else seeks. It is a scrouge. All you wish for is some means to reduce the feeling.’
Anaesthetic Ideology – Mark Grief
Aesthetics is a term used to describe subjective matters of taste and beauty; anaesthetics is a term used for drugs which induce a lack of sensation. In the countless books about the aesthetics of art or music, it is amazing how little the term anaesthetics comes up. The term anaesthetic has become almost exclusively associated with medical procedure and lost almost all relevance to its antonym. Could it be the case that music, like alcohol, is capable of inducing both a heightened experience and a total lack of sensation?
A concert, although ostensibly a sensory experience, could be the dullest moment of someone’s day. By ‘dull’ I don’t mean to make a judgment of the music but rather mean that there are no flashing lights or targeted adverts and that for a couple of hours you are forced to sit still. It was in a performance of Wagners Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (for which I stood still for nearly four and a half hours) that I experienced the strongest anaesthetic effects of music. There were huge swathes of time which seemed to last forever and no time at all. At the end of the performance, I could remember almost nothing of it. This was punctuated by moments of intense beauty in which the music suddenly brought me back to reality. Reality felt far more beautiful and intense after I had disappeared off for a couple of hours and I can’t help but think that this contrast of anaesthetic and aesthetic quality was a deliberate technique employed by Wagner. I had a similar experience with Jesus Blood Never Failed Me Yet by Gavin Bryars. I saw the first 6 hours of a 12-hour version of the piece performed at the Tate Modern. The piece features the same short tape of a tune looped hundreds of times with evolving accompaniment. The 6 hours I was there seemed to disappear strangely quickly. When walking home at 2 am I couldn’t recall the tune at all. My friend who watched the performance with me reported a similar experience, saying that in the blink of an eye three hours seemed to disappear. The UFO spotters which Louis Theroux interviews in his Weird Weekends explain this phenomenon of ‘lost time’ with alien abduction. Perhaps we were all abducted by aliens for 3 hours then had our memories wiped or perhaps we were in a state of music-induced anaesthesia.
The idea that music can change our perception of time is generally accepted as it is something we have all experienced. There are many subjective parameters which could affect our perception of time. Boring music may pass slow and exiting music vice versa. Repetitive music may pass quicker than varied music because there is less new information for the brain to process. The extent of music’s time-shifting capability would be difficult to test as our perception is so reliant on taste. Could music stop time forever? Could music make time speed by so quickly that your entire life disappears in the blink of an eye? I think it would be an interesting musical experiment to try to pinpoint the musical features which affect your perception of time and then compose a piece which pushes time to its extremes.
The Royal Opera Houses current advertising campaign features the tagline ‘feel something new’. I wonder how effective the tagline: ‘be free of feelings for a few moments’ might be. Although this seems ridiculous, it occurs to me that it is worth letting the public know that music can have this effect. After watching a performance, people may be too embarrassed to admit they were in a state of anaesthesia: “yes, I loved the opera, I lost all sensation and awareness” or “it felt just like when I was under general anaesthetic; it was as if I had been sat there for forever and no time at all”.
There is no wrong way to experience music. I see no reason to be embarrassed about this lack of sensation; this could be misconstrued as an insult to the performers or reflect you’re own inability to follow a plot. A state of anaesthesia is not simply being bored to sleep by subpar music. In fact, in my experience, the opposite is true. If the music is disappointing then I will be present for the whole performance, critiquing it and getting annoyed by it; if the music is of a high quality I can relax enough to begin to disappear.
I have focussed on music as this is what I have most experience of but it’s possible that everything which has aesthetic quality could also create an anaesthetic effect. I experimented with this idea by wandering around the Tate Modern for a while to see whether paintings and sculptures could have the same anaesthetic quality as music. Strangely, even the imposing Rothko room with its dim lighting didn’t come close. It occurred to me that the art gallery was never going to achieve the same sensory reduction that a concert hall does. There would always be the noise of people around me and it would still be socially acceptable to take my phone out. In an art gallery (unlike a concert hall) one always has the choice to walk out and in my experience, I have always walked out before being dulled into a state of anaesthesia. Interestingly, I did manage to recreate the feeling by making a quick sketch in my notebook. The need to finish the sketch functioned like the closed doors of the concert hall: something was stopping me from getting distracted and walking away so the art had time to take effect on me.
In The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams, the character Tom spends all his time and money going to the movies to the detriment of his relationships and his work. Addiction has destroyed his life but rather than heroin or gambling, Tom is addicted to films. The world’s addiction to art is endemic. People pride themselves on having seen an incredible amount of music, art and films. The implication is that this cultured life is full of exciting experiences we should all aspire to. With an anaesthetic view of the arts, a cultured person is someone who has dulled their perception for more time than the general public and in that sense, they aren’t too far away from alcoholics.
I do not mean for this to be a criticism of music but rather a celebration of another one of its brilliant capabilities and a pubic service announcement that music can function as an anaesthetic. I dare any arts organisation to run the tagline ‘‘be free of feelings for a few moments’ in their next advertising campaign.
Nicholas Hann 