It is the next note that makes sense of this note. It is the shift, the transition from one note to the next that makes the melody. If only now exists, if the past is no longer here and the future is just a projection of past experience, what is music? A representation of the ephemeral if there was ever any. It is memory that makes the melody. If we did not remember the previous note, there would just be this eternal note, just this one, the only one we would know in this precise instant. Memory is essential for our narrative of music and of the world. A process.
This note alone is not music. It is just stasis. Or is it? Where did it come from? How did it start? If there is only this instant – now – and this note, what is silence? Are they mutually exclusive if there is only now and the note is already present? Silence is the background. I can hear silence even while I hear this note. Strange… Maybe not hear it, but sense it or imagine it, somehow. It’s here. How else, where else, would this note appear?
Is it possible that this single note contains everything, that it is the tip of an iceberg, not just a promise but a manifestation of everything else there is below? Maybe this note is here to tell me that silence exists. Ironically, without this note I would never have noticed silence. The note reveals the background.
There cannot be something like ‘just the background,’ just an absence. The note and the silence in which it appears are one. They need each other to exist. Is it the same with consciousness, is it the content of consciousness that makes consciousness? Are they one and the same? Would conscience exist if there was no content?
The Introverted Tree 