Voices in our heads

Peter Pesic on polyphony

Polyphonic Minds: Music of the Hemispheres (The MIT Press, 2017), Peter Pesic examines the shift in Western history from monophonic music — music with one melodic line — to polyphonic music, which has two or more parts to it. This happened around the 9th century in the Roman Catholic Church, according to Pesic, and it wasn’t without controversy. As a faculty member at St. John’s College, Pesic has discussed this historic transition with his students regularly since the early 1980s. They are consistently struck by the drastic change that happens when their study of monophonic Gregorian chants gives way to medieval music — which has many voices and can sound dissonant and even modern to their ears.

Though like all St. John’s faculty, he teaches across all disciplines at the college, Pesic has published dozens of papers about the intersection of music and science. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write Music and the Making of Modern Science (MIT Press, 2014). Polyphonic Minds is an attempt to synthesize the work of numerous ethnomusicologists, philosophers, historians, composers, neuroscientists, and other thinkers to pursue a fuller understanding of how the human mind might create the experience of the self. The e-book version includes sound examples that should help elucidate the text for readers. Pesic talks about Polyphonic Minds on Wednesday, Jan. 31, in the Great Hall at St. John’s. A question-and-answer session and book signing follows the lecture. Pasatiempo talked to him in the college’s Peterson Student Center.

Pasatiempo: Polyphonic music is easy to define, but what is a polyphonic mind? Peter Pesic: As I discovered, polyphony in the Middle Ages became a way of talking about the mind itself. According to Aristotle, the human mind can only think of one thing at a time. A number of medieval thinkers said God and the angels can think about many thinks simultaneously. Though they never state that they’re talking about polyphony, it certainly sounds like that’s what’s going on. My book goes from ancient times to the present. The later part concerns ways in which neuroscientists are trying to understand the human mind as being polyphonic in the sense of many things going on at once. You feel like you’re one person, but that one person has got to be assembled out of an incredibly complex polyphony of billions of neurons that group together in centers and communicate with each other to constitute consciousness. Pasa: Though your approach in the book is very much from the Western music tradition, you mention that other cultures have always had complicated polyphonic music. Pesic: Early on I started to wonder if the interest that Western music has in polyphony was unique. I found out very quickly that it is not. Polyphony is spread throughout the world, but not in an equal way. Most of Chinese music is monophonic; classical Indian music has a single melodic line. But Southeast Asian and Balinese music loves very complicated textures of many lines. African music is complex. Georgian music is very complex and polyphonic. But a lot of European music tends to be monophonic. The curious thing is why polyphony was excluded for so long, and then after about nine centuries it was embraced by the church. But it was controversial. Pasa: What is controversial about music with multiple parts? Pesic: Polyphony was probably something people were doing all the time outside of church, in the fields and the taverns. So the controversy, which had many sides, was about polyphonic music being secular or frivolous. It became a question of the music having a playfulness that departed from the seriousness of singing in church. Partly it might have been that polyphonic music obscures the sense of the word in a single melodic line — in which every word is being put forward to you very strongly. Pasa: What aspects of your book will you cover in your lecture? Pesic: I hope to give people a sense of the argument of the book and play sound examples. A lot of the book happens in the Middle Ages, but then a lot happens in