Stanislaw Hansel
Composer and teacher of music in and around Peterborough
Although the twentieth century has seen an enormous push to use new psychology in music, it seems to me even more important to consider the psychology of music. Most in particular, we should be looking at the psychology of what happens in a musical silence or near silence. An allied question may be 'what is the mental response for someone viewing a blank canvas at an art exhibition?’This becomes even more relevant when one considers that notated music representing silence can, in some circumstances, be a sheet of blank paper. This is to go further than John Cage’s view that one should become more aware of extraneous sounds during performance or ,in the case of the canvas, Rauschenberg’s view that we notice the light and shadows on the canvas. To confine myself to the musical case, it seems to me that mental expectation is part of the issue: if there has been music and a silence ensues ,the listener is left to feel, or even hear ,the previous musical directions. If I can take it at its simplest point, it really is like a psychological torture apparently used during the Second World War. A prisoner is put in a bare cell with the sound of a tap dripping innocuously at regular intervals. Over a period of time the innocuous sound amplifies itself within the prisoner’s mind and, in extreme cases, can lead to insane moments.
For the musician this is a very interesting perception for it can lead us to consider the effect of a regularly repeated brief musical sound may also have a psychological build up.This effect may be manipulated through the use of musical condition and reflex. The psychologist Pavlov showed in the early twentieth century that dogs could be conditioned to expect food. Briefly, dogs may be trained to expect food when hearing a bell.After a while their physical response to food, that is of salivating, is still in evidence even when no food appears after the bell.