By Steve Tromans

This essay brings together ideas from the field of process philosophy and the field of music (in the areas of process music, free jazz, and free improvisation) in order to demonstrate that a form of philosophy of process can be undertaken via music. I begin with a brief overview of each of the musical and philosophical terms in question, before moving on to case studies highlighting examples pertinent to my focus on a musical-philosophical means of understanding process in interdisciplinary (hence musical-philosophical) terms.

1. Overview of the fields

Process philosophy is a branch of philosophy that is concerned with the investigation of the dynamic nature of being. A well-known early example is Heraclitus’s 6th-century BCE maxim that “everything flows.” Nothing much survives of his work, but his legacy is notable across the centuries right up to the present day—certainly among thinkers who consider change and impermanence to be the fundamental basis of reality. Fast-forwarding to the early 18th century, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s 1714 Monadology crafted a process-based ontology via the dynamic interaction of “monads,” which he considered as the fundamental entities of existence. For Leibniz, monads do not exist in stasis: they are, at essence, dynamic beings that reflect the universe in its entirety, however obscurely. They are all connected; they are all perceptions of the world at large in an immense cosmic harmony that has an active force for change at its center—that center being the monad. And in the early 20th-century, Alfred North Whitehead’s “philosophy of organism” posited events as the underlying bases of reality through which novelty emerges in the world. Whitehead thought of events as nexuses of “actual entities”: “drops of experience, complex and interdependent” (from his 1929 Process and Reality).[1]

Process music is the term employed to describe an approach to music composition in which the compositional structure of the work is explicitly apparent in its performance. Notable examples are certain of the early works of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and Alvin Lucier. In Reich’s Come Out (1966), two open-reel tape machines gradually move out of phase with one another while playing back a recording of the spoken phrase “come out to show them.” In his Piano Phase (1967) for one pianist and a recording of the same piano part, the pianist moves slowly out of phase with the recorded version. Glass’s Two Pages (1968) explores an additive- and subtractive-rhythmic process unfolding unevenly-grouped lines of a collection of five notes. In his Contrary Motion (1969), a solo organist performs an ever-increasing expansion of a basic pattern in contrary directions along the keyboard in each hand with an underlying tonic-dominant movement in the bass pedals. In Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), a seminal work for voice and room, the work consists of the lengthy process of repeatedly recording a solo voice reading a short text (explaining the work’s compositional process) through the playing back of the recording into the room and recording and layering it again and again, until the resonant harmonics inherent in the room’s architectural structure are amplified to the point where they (eventually) obscure the listener’s ability to discern the spoken words, leaving only the speech rhythms as a means of articulating and amplifying the ambient sound of the room itself.

Free jazz is a movement in the music that emerged in the late-1950s and 1960s via the likes of Ornette Coleman (for example, his 1959 quartet album The Shape of Jazz to Come, and his double-quartet 1961 album, Free Jazz), Albert Ayler (for instance, on the albums Spiritual Unity and Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe, from 1964 and 1969, respectively), and the late works of John Coltrane (in particular on the albums Ascension, from 1966, and Interstellar Space, recorded in 1967 and released posthumously in 1974). At its core, free jazz represents a move away from fixed compositional structure into the territory of free-flow improvisation. Such improvisation thus becomes the means via which the resultant structure of the music emerges after the event of its performance, not in advance. This does not necessarily mean that free jazz utilizes no pre-prepared material (all three of the artists referenced above used fragments of musical material to drive the improvisations conducted across the instrumentation of their bands), but that pre-organized structure is radically limited in comparison to earlier movements in jazz—such as in 1940s-1950s bebop, for example, which relied on repeated cycles of harmonic forms over which soloists would improvise their lines.

“Free improvisation” refers to both a field of music and also a method of music practice. As a practice, it is relatively self-explanatory: the performers have no pre-existing materials with which to make the music that follows. The free-improvising guitarist Derek Bailey (in his ground-breaking 1980 study, Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music) called this method “non-idiomatic improvisation”—as opposed to improvisation that is a constituent element in such diverse music idioms as jazz, flamenco, Indian classical, and Baroque. Free Improvisation as a field of music emerged in the 1960s through such pioneering artists and groups as AMM, the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME), and Bailey himself. All three had their roots in jazz, moving rapidly from recognisably idiomatic, established jazz practices to free jazz (which was very much still a cutting-edge movement at the time) to means of making music that could not be considered to derive from jazz.

AMM (formed in 1965) achieved this by introducing all manner of sound-making devices into their performances (their use of transistor radios, for instance, owes much to the avant-garde composer John Cage’s use of radios in certain of his compositions from the 1940s and 1950s) and novel ways of playing their instruments (notably, the guitarist Keith Rowe, a founding member of AMM, revolutionized the electric guitar by laying it flat on a table and finding a variety of unusual methods to articulate its strings and pick-ups other than the traditional plectrum).

SME, founded by the jazz drummer John Stevens in 1965, was committed (as was AMM) to a collective approach to improvisation and a downplaying of any notion of leadership (although Stevens does loom large as a key figure and inspirational educator and proponent of free improvisation as process). In addition, Stevens’s own interest in the early 20th-century atonal experiments of Anton von Webern helped give SME a sound that was not noticeably related to jazz (even the free jazz that was developing at the same time, although Albert Ayler was another strong influence on Stevens).

Interestingly, Derek Bailey was also hugely influenced by Webern’s experiments in atonality, and dedicated his career from the mid-1960s onward to a continual search for new ways to organize sound via the strings of his guitar (unlike Rowe, he retained the traditional way of holding the instrument and the use of the plectrum to sound its strings), and new music partners with whom to practice the process of free improvisation (his Company Week sessions, running between 1977 and 1994, are the thing of modern-day legend, bringing together musicians from disparate fields in new configurations of artists exploring the process for its own sake). Across the work of these three artists/groups, there is the noticeable influence of early and mid-20th century avant-garde composers, European and North American, alongside a background in jazz and most certainly an interest in free jazz.

2. Process across the fields via event

The four fields that I have briefly outlined above, one in philosophy and three in music, are all connected by an interest in process. With regard to the fields of process philosophy and process music, that interest is explicitly manifest in the name given to the enquiry. With regard to free jazz and free improvisation, the focus on process is just as relevant, despite its not being an aspect of the naming of the movements themselves. In the latter two, freedom is, clearly, the primary concern: in free jazz, it is a freedom from the perceived constraints of pre-established musical form (at the time of its inception, typically used in jazz performance as a structure over which improvisation takes place); in free improvisation, it is a freedom to move beyond any reference to an established idiom in the music that is made.

The manner in which these freedoms are practiced, though, is through an attention to process: process as a way of expressing life in its immediacy, in its fluidity and spontaneity away from pre-established formulations. This is not, of course, to suggest that other fields of musical and philosophical inquiry are not interested in these concerns, but rather that they are not the primary focus. When process becomes the primary focus, immediacy, fluidity, and spontaneity come to the fore. And these have important implications for a consideration of process as a musical-philosophical project.

The musicians referenced above had/have their own reasons for making the music they became noted for: free jazz moving away from the strictures of structure; free improvisation moving away from the need to be part of any established idioms; and, in the case of the process music practitioners, laying bare the compositional structure of their works in performance, i.e., making performance the medium through which the compositional process at the heart of the work is blatantly made apparent to the audience, rather than being hidden behind the workings of the twelve-tone or serialist techniques that were still hugely dominant in so-called serious music in the 1960s. (It is interesting to note that it is precisely the music of the atonalist/serialist and experimental composers of the early to mid-20th century—Webern and Cage in particular—that inspired the free improvisers mentioned above to shake off many of the influences from jazz that were prominent in their musical backgrounds.) The key underlying element in all of this attention to process is a conception of “event.”

Event is everything when it comes to process. Without the event, free jazz and free improvisation cannot exist. Without the event, process music remains a mere idea on paper or in the mind of the composer. Without the event, process philosophy is devoid of the very essence that gives it its unique place in the history of philosophical thought. To return to Heraclitus’s “everything flows,” in combination with Leibniz’s cosmic harmony of monadic dynamism and Whitehead’s event-based complex of interdependent “actual entities,” we begin to get a sense of the novel implications of a consideration of the coming-together of the practices of certain musical and philosophical ideas grounded in process via event.

2.1. Heraclitus, Bailey, Lucier, Coleman

If, as Heraclitus asserted, everything indeed flows, it is the event through which everything flows: the flowing of things is itself an event. It cannot be otherwise, since the event is the special condition that allows for such becomings. The dynamic nature of being is to become. In fact, we can go so far as to say that our understanding of being as static is, ironically, itself grounded in the dynamism at its heart. We really do not need to have the static notion of being as our default position on existence, but it is a curious side-effect of the workings of becoming that we attend oftentimes to the stasis of our own conception of ourselves as continuing through time as if we were distinct entities from the outset. It is the nature of events to occasion change. In conceiving everything via the event, process pre-exists product.

Derek Bailey exists as a name across the time of his existence and his career, but that name denotes a ceaseless force for musical change: his unerring determination to ever put himself into new and unusual circumstances for music-making, his deep commitment to free improvisation as the method by which the allure of the novel took precedence over the already-played—these are the traits of an artist determined to value process over product. The product of his work is available on many recordings; the process of his work eludes capture on any of these audio and video documents. His process belongs to event, and event has nothing to do with that which it leaves behind in our documentation of its passing.

A performance of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room is singular in its emergence as event: never the same room twice, never the same voice twice (to allude to that other often-cited maxim attributed to Heraclitus: “We never step in the same river twice”). Different rooms and different voices—and even the “same” voice in the “same” room—occasion different unfoldings of the work, and its process retains its specificity beyond the event-ual product (a product that is only a shadowy capture of the event in its singular novelty). So many factors play into a specific performance of the work that it is guaranteed that no one performance stands for all possible. This is true, of course, for all performances of artistic works, but when the focus is on process (in this case, process music as a field of experimentation), we are missing the point of the impetus of the work if we attend only to a notion that the “I” that is sitting in a room is ever the same “I.” The dynamic nature of being immediately refutes this easy solidification of the “I” into a concrete identity. Lucier is, also, specific in his indication of “a” room. We are concerned with the “I” as event, “a” room as event; the coming together of an “I” and “a” room become the everything of the work’s essence—an essence that knows only process as its essential reason for being [sic], i.e., becoming.

Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz stands as a pioneering experiment in collective becoming: group improvisation on a series of brief, basic themes. The instrumentation consists of two quartets of a reed instrument, a trumpet, a double bass, and drums, doubled in each of the two channels of the recording, so that two quartets are employed to make the music manifest (one quartet in the left speaker, the second quartet in the right speaker). The time-feel of the rhythm sections in each quartet operates at two different tempi, providing an extremely complex rhythmic flow over which the four horn soloists improvise their lines in turn. Aside from the thematic fragments that announce each of the solos over the course of the thirty-seven minutes of the music, everything else is freely improvised.

The music of Coleman’s Free Jazz, despite its apparent delineation of soloists-plus-rhythm section, breaks down barriers between the importance of each in ways unprecedented in jazz at that time (a listen to a majority of the hard bop releases around the same time confirms this bias in terms of soloists on top, rhythm section on bottom as background). When the rhythm section is liberated, freed, from the perceived constraints of accompaniment, the hierarchy of roles in each quartet becomes the subject of the unfolding of the music. The hierarchy is flattened: every member of the double quartet has a voice of equal relevance in the collective. The collective’s being becomes a becoming: everything flows together in its bold statement of event. The process of realizing Coleman’s vision for the double quartet unveils a new direction for jazz: a singular group identity that has for its basis a reconfiguring of a vertical stasis of instrumental status into a horizontal temporal flux of univocity, from which emerges a collective “I” existing only for the event of its folding-unfolding.

2.2. Leibniz, Glass, SME, Coltrane

For Leibniz, monads are everything; everything is monadic. Monads populate the world as a series of singularities, each expressing the world in its entirety via an infinity of folds at the heart of their finite forms. Each monad is unique in its expression, bringing difference to the fore rather than similarity at their foundational level of existence. Monads affect one another, and it is through this affective process that our perceptions of reality become, or are taken to be, real. We may consider our and others’ bodies and the various things around us everywhere to be real but, argued Leibniz, it is actually only monads that have absolute reality. Our bodies and everything we interact with are the effects of monadic interaction.[2]

Philip Glass wrote Two Pages in 1968, which is representative of his early “minimalist” works: works that have the processing of minimal musical elements as a core aspect of their compositional consistency. The premise of Two Pages is very simple: five notes are articulated via a process of addition and subtraction, with asymmetric groupings of notes being developed as the piece unfolds. If it has a time signature (there is not one displayed at the outset of its score) it is 1/4: the crotchet is the piece’s basic pulse. There are no changes in dynamic and the flow of even crotchets perpetuates the work. The rhythmic diversity of the piece is attained through the asymmetry of the notes’ groupings. At its outset, for instance, the five notes are repeated a number of times, before being expanded to nine notes (5+4) consisting of the initial five plus the first four of those five. This nine-note grouping is repeated a number of times before a twelve-note grouping is introduced (5+4+3), consisting of the first five plus the first four of that five and the first three of that five. Following a number of repetitions of this new twelve-note grouping, a fourteen-note grouping is introduced (5+4+3+2) that is made up of the first five, the first four of that five, the first three of that five, and the first two of that five. This process of addition is then reversed, subtracting the most recent additions to present repetitions in patterns of 5+4+3, 5+4, and 5, thus returning the series to its original configuration of five basic notes. The remainder of the piece explores different groupings via the addition and subtraction of sub-groups from within the original five-note grouping.

Glass’s Two Pages is, then, an extended exploration of a technique of folding and unfolding the simplest of elements via asymmetric additive and subtractive processes eluding confinement to the basic metrics of time-signature standardization. The monadic simplicity of Glass’s five-note set, and the simplicity of the rhythmic processes of addition and subtraction, belie the complexity of the work’s folding-unfolding as it is experienced in performance. Via the additive-subtractive process, the initial “monad” of five notes is put in relation to monads of longer and shorter groupings of notes, with each grouping reflecting the “world” of its genesis uniquely, differently, in spite of sharing the same basic units of construction. The ultimate reality of Two Pages, in its composition and in its performance, emerges from the complex interactions of its monadic elements—it doesn’t predate them. It is very much a product of its process, monadological in its grand design from minute particulars whose large-scale effects create the world of its being from the becoming-world of its intimate encounters in the rhythmic convolution of melodic lines.

In its work in improvisation (and especially in its educational work as to the unique virtues of the method of improvisation), John Stevens’s Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME) took a decidedly monadic approach to collective free improvisation. In an interview with Derek Bailey as part of the aforementioned Improvisation: Its Nature and Practice in Music, Stevens gives an excellent example of a monadic approach at work in free improvisation, despite not using that term to describe the process. Stevens draws attention to the basic elements of free improvisation with regard to encouraging anyone (musicians and non-musicians, amateurs and professionals) to participate in its process. Taking the phrase “a phrase,” Stevens demonstrates how even this simple two-word phrase can be in itself a world of improvisational possibility given the right approach to its articulation. As he explains: “if you say ‘a phrase,’ accenting the ‘a,’ you have already provided at least a rhythmic element. And that might seem better, more complete, if you say ‘a phrase is.’ In which case, you’ve improvised.” From the basic monad of “a phrase,” Stevens has proven that improvisation is possible for all, for anyone to participate in its genesis. The monad begins the work of improvisation, and the inevitable variations of its basis unfold a world of variety. Everything that follows from that simple articulation is an effect of the creative power of its core monadic element. It is a beautiful example of free improvisation in its purest, most perfect form.

The saxophonist and composer John Coltrane, in collaboration with the drummer Rashied Ali, left the world a perfect example of monadic development as the basis of free jazz with the posthumously-released 1974 album Interstellar Space. Across the four tracks of the original album, Coltrane and Ali articulate a masterly organicism of motivic cells and fluid tempi that ties saxophone and drum-kit together in complex unity. Each instrument complements the other admirably, setting up a sax-kit symbiosis that blurs the duo’s presumed duality, sounding at times as if the drums and cymbals provide an extension of the saxophone’s melodic lines, taking the melodic motifs below and above the horn’s instrumental registers. Through the accumulation of tiny monadic cells, Coltrane patiently builds the four worlds of the four tracks (“Mars,” “Venus,” “Jupiter,” and “Saturn”), utilising the full range of the tenor saxophone’s capability; through a rhythmic conception beyond mere chronometry, Ali powers his kit in polyrhythm, layering times, folding temporalities, saturating the pulse with multiple candidates for the “one” of a downbeat that is not needed in this extrapolation of the instrument’s typical function. The sax-kit amalgam operates at the level of minutiae, taking care of the monads of the motivic; the monads, in turn, take care of the composition of the macro-level worlds which they birth into being via becoming. The kernels of each of the four worlds reside in the monadic interactions of saxophone and drum-kit: they express the unlimited possibilities of the worlds they engender in the tiniest of details, their finitude containing an infinity of convolution.

2.3. Whitehead, Reich, AMM, Ayler

In 1929, Alfred North Whitehead published Process and Reality, his late-period metaphysical work detailing a conception of the world as composed of experiences (“each actual entity is a throb of experience”), common to both lifeless and living organisms that become by means of events (which he describes as “a nexus of actual occasions”). Following Whitehead’s lead, the uniqueness of experience is not at odds with the processual nature of experience’s becoming: it is, rather, enriched as a result. The throbbing of experience is grounded in affect: actual occasions are the mechanisms by which entities become actual, and events are the means for this process of actualization via affect. It is through events that occasions of experience are self-creating, and it is through affect that experiences are felt as experiences. Experience is the fundamental underlying constitution of the world; affect is its everyday symptom; event is its coming into being by virtue of becoming. Process is reality because the real is processual; experience is everything (“apart from the experience of subjects, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness”) and experience knows nothing but process.[3]

Steve Reich came to prominence in the 1960s as part of the early minimalist movement that included the likes of Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young. In similarity to the others, his work is marked by a deep interest in process as a means of musical focus (see, for instance, his 1968 essay “Music as a Gradual Process”). In his 1967 Piano Phase, Reich brings together the recorded and the live. A tape recording of a pianist playing the work is combined with a live pianist performing exactly the same work but differently. It is through phasing that that difference is made audibly manifest. The event of the work’s performance becomes its actual occasion as a work, through that difference, through the affective temporal process that gives the piece its name. To begin, a simple five-note motif is articulated across the two hands of the pianist (three in the left hand, two in the right hand) in a pattern of twelve quavers. The live performer gradually increases the tempo of the five notes’ articulation, creating a phase pattern between the recorded and live versions that eventually displaces the identical pattern by a quaver. At this point, the two pianists are playing exactly the same pattern, but out of sync by one quaver. The phasing process continues until that displacement is two quavers, then three, then four, and so on until it has moved through all twelve. Further configurations of the basic material ensue, and the same phasing process is employed until the work is concluded some twenty-or-so minutes later.

The experience of performing Reich’s Piano Phase, and of listening to it, is one of encountering affect as the means of engaging with the work’s actual occasion as musical event. The pulsing throb of the simultaneously steady and unsteady flow of quavers between the four hands provides a sonic canvas for the music’s exploration of phasing as a way of connecting stasis and change via something entirely new: process in its ideal event-al form. The nexus of actual occasions particular to the piece proliferate across its musical body; each phase change is an event it itself, but also an event within the larger event that is the work’s ultimate unfolding as process. One’s experience of Piano Phase knows nothing but process as the grounding reality of its affective power as musical event.

The improvising collective AMM began life in the mid-1960s and was founded by the jazz musicians Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, and Eddie Prevost—who were joined quite early in the group’s history by the avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew. AMM quickly made the process of event, or the event of process, its prime mode of musical experience, conducted via free improvisation as the necessary method of ridding (or earnestly attempting to rid) its members of their prior professional associations with the fields of jazz and avant-garde music practices. For AMM (and other free improvisers), the process of improvising is more important than the product of its activity. In his 1971 essay, “Towards an Ethic of Improvisation,” Cardew echoed this attitude, writing: “It’s not what it sounds like that interests me, it’s what it is.” The reality of AMM’s existence (despite having amassed a large discography over the decades since its inception) is a reality grounded in process: in what its improvising practices are, rather than what they ultimately sound like. In performance, AMM has always been interested in the location in which the improvisation is taking place (“the room extended,” as Keith Rowe has called it in two of his solo projects). This interest brings together the human and the nonhuman in a manner that brings to mind Whitehead’s conception of the event as a nexus of actual occasions common to the living and the lifeless.

The event of an AMM performance is a complex of the room and its occupants; the contents of an AMM improvisation are the things, human and otherwise, that become through its emergence. Although to speak of “things” in respect of a process-philosophical understanding of an AMM improvisation is to undervalue the processual grounding of such an event. The things in the room belong to only one conception of the AMM experience; at the heart of the AMM experience is room-experience itself: experience as the throbbing coming-into-being of entities from the maelstrom of the affective potential of the room itself. The room extended is an extension of the standard conception of a room as a relatively static entity, as a mere container for the things which populate it. The room extended is the real star of AMM’s show; it is the event that births each incarnation of an AMM happening anew in each and every performance via the medium of free improvisation. The room extended is the universe in which the happening happens; it is the force that forces the existence of the things that remain after the event into being via their collective becoming.[4]

In his all-too brief career, the saxophonist, composer, and vocalist Albert Ayler came to prominence in the 1960s as a vital force in free jazz. Ayler’s impact on jazz lies in his fusion of some of the oldest and the newest elements in the music. His use of spiritual and marching band themes alongside free group improvisations drew together aspects of jazz’s early history (for instance, in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century) and the intense emotions of what was, at the time, the “new thing” of sixties free jazz. “Music Is the Healing Force of the Universe,” declared Ayler in the title and title track of his last studio album before his untimely death in 1970. The force of Ayler’s saxophonic vision was complete: it was not for the faint-hearted, and it received little critical acclaim during his lifetime, but it was a complete commitment to music as a force for change. (John Coltrane notably requested Albert Ayler’s group to perform at his funeral in 1967, alongside Ornette Coleman’s group—such was Coltrane’s firm belief that Ayler and Coleman were at the forefront of the new music and its most important prophets.)

Ayler’s sound alone was a healing force in itself: a spiritual cry from the depths of human feeling that reached beyond the limitations of the union of body and instrument; a call out to the cosmos that sang of the pain and ecstasy of existence, of experience enfolding the everyday and the eternal, the particular and the universal. It presented a nexus of experiences both human and cosmic, visceral and otherworldly, spiritually pure yet imbued with the rawest of emotions. There is no middle ground in Ayler’s sound. Other than the fierce cry of one who knows, with intimacy, the temporary-ness of the flesh and the atemporality of the spiritual, there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness (to paraphrase Whitehead’s assertion from above). Ayler’s universe is everything and it is a universe founded in the process of its becoming as human-spirit. Ayler’s human-spirit amalgam transformed the music he made into a vessel for enlightenment. It was free jazz in its freest yet most coherent expression, in its summing up of elements of jazz from its earliest days and its most present (at the time) innovations.

Ayler achieved a rare phenomenon in his short stay on Earth. His music found a paradise of possible musical futures (free jazz as a cornucopia of new musical expression) in combination with certain practices from the roots of jazz’s past (the collective improvisation of New Orleans-style articulation before the soloist-plus-rhythm section model took hold via Louis Armstrong et al. through to the beboppers and hard boppers of the 1940s and 1950s) at a time when many things seemed imminently and immanently doable (let us not forget the high watermark that was the 1960s in terms of the potential transformation of everything: radical art, radical politics, radical everything). Its process was its reality, and its reality was a self-creating novelty that still to this day furnishes a philosophy expounded in musical sound that few, if any, have bettered in terms of its amplification of the affective forces of the emotive as motive, the intensive as extensive, the process-ive as progressive. Albert Ayler offered us a way to feel the universe in its raw process and become (better) with it; whether or not we have paid due attention to his message is a matter for serious reflection.

3. Some Conclusions

Tying together process philosophy and the three fields of music in the manner I have practiced above allows for some interesting conclusions. The first is that analyses of process music, free jazz, and free improvisation, in terms of certain of the ideas from process philosophy bear fruit beyond mere passing resonance. Framing the musical processes of the artists in question in this manner brings to the fore the deep connection between music and philosophy in a way that unites words and sounds via the conceptual. A concept can exist as other than a linguistic construct, and music can provide fertile ground for conceptual exploration. Each of the musicians highlighted above certainly approached their art from a deep conception of the power of music to do something different in the world that is not a mere copy or repetition of what has already come before—and, more, to create fresh musical-philosophical worlds as a result (as I will now discuss).

The second conclusion that can be drawn from this musical-philosophical amalgam is that music can practice a form of philosophy in its own right. Process (and its concept) is an ideal key to bridging the gap between music considered simply as music, and philosophy considered simply as philosophy. Process draws each discipline together via a shared focus, despite the diversity of approach, and the case studies I have chosen to feature stand in their own right as process-philosophical undertakings worthy of note. They are interdisciplinary in their purview, existing in that fascinating hinterland of the “and/as”: being possible to be considered as musical, as philosophical, and as exponents of a musical-philosophical mix that blurs disciplinary boundaries in order to birth the novel through its becoming in process, as process.

My hope is that this essay has drawn attention to such an interdisciplinary becoming, and that—beyond the examples highlighted as to its possibility—the reader/listener will be inspired to seek out other instances of musical endeavor that deliver something new in the terms explored above.

Notes:

[1] For a comprehensive overview of the history of philosophical investigation into process, see Johanna Seibt’s excellent 2022 entry under “Process Philosophy” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/process-philosophy.

[2] For an excellent overview of Leibniz’s life and work, including his conception of the monad, see Bradon C. Look’s entry under “Leibniz” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz.

[3] The entry under “Alfred North Whitehead,” written by Ronald Desmet for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, provides a useful overview of the different periods of his work, including the late metaphysical writings of interest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/whitehead.

[4] There is a nice resonance here with the focus on the room (or a room) as nexus of experience in Alvin Lucier’s above-mentioned I Am Sitting in a Room, even though the results are different.

(Image: Stephen Pusey’s Nexus (2014))