beyond the catalogue

A biologist among the musicians,

a first draft reflection

collecting is understanding

finding is keeping

We can't help it. We observe things, experience them and immediately start putting them in categories. The reds and the blues. The soft and the hard. The quadrupeds and the birds. The trains and the bicycles. We have to organise our world of experiences in order to survive. And we are very good at it because we have a language as a useful tool to label things. If we wouldn't do so, we would be lost in a world of seemingly infinite variety.

By labelling we force ourselves to think why we put something in a certain category. Is the tomato a fruit or a vegetable? (Culinary speaking, we rank it among the vegetables, botanically speaking it is a fruit.) Beer and wine are both alcoholic beverages, but the former is made from seeds, the latter from fruits. (That's why saké is fundamentally a kind of beer.) And they both belong to the fermented drinkables. There is only one human race Homo sapiens, therefore racism is biologically impossible. Racism is just the wrong word for the discrimination of ethnicities. So you see, categories and labels interfere with all things human, on an everyday basis.

And that we don't need our eyes for this encyclopaedic work is beautifully demonstrated by Geerat Vermeij a Dutch limnologist who is blind from his third. When he says "seeing" he means "feeling". And he feels sea snails and determines species by the form of their shells. He is one of the leading specialists in his field. Give him a snail from wherever in the world, and he'll tell you which one it is.

He charted the evolution of all these species. One of his fascinating conclusions is that ecosystems are more productive, create more diversity and numbers of species if it is under pressure. By feeling the form of the shells in his fingers, he deduces the grant logic of nature.

It shows how collecting things and putting them in categories is impossible without deeply and pragmatically reflecting on the criteria to be used while doing so. And by thinking about criteria, we have to think about the reasons behind them. That's why cataloguing things leads automatically to investigating these things. Only understanding differences and similarities, relationships and connections can form a workable basis for any systematic inventory of things.

Look up at the starry night sky. All those suns burning away millions of years away. They have been grouped in constellations since time memorial. These have been used as signs of the zodiac, supposedly determining the lives of earthlings. In reality, the stars of Libra or Pisces have no real configuration whatsoever. There is no Big Dipper in the sky, except when you look up to it from our very peculiar spot in the universe. A random distribution of stars at very different distances make up an image in our minds and eyes.

But is as inevitable as it is useful. Cataloguing things - be it objects, sounds, processes, colours or sounds - stimulates us to reflect on the essence of what they do to us, what they mean, how we use them. Any collection says as much about the collected items as about the collector.

Look at your bookshelve(s). How are the books ordered? By colour? Alphabetically? By author or by title? By size? Thematically, or by country? Is the fiction separated from the non-fiction? Did the poetry get a different shelve?

The diversity is bewildering and complex. And no system is good enough to arrange everything in a 100% satisfying manner. Always there is some particular example that evades categories. Even the most simple categories become fuzzy and fraying at the edges.

It may seem easy to discern the living from the non-living, a tree from a stone, for example. But even the definition of 'life' runs biologists and philosophers into problems. It is not clear on which side of the border between animate and inanimate a virus sits.

But having to decide, begs us the question. It not only forces us to define our criteria, it forces us also to look more clearly. What is the matter? Which differences and which similarities are meaningful? And that is where science comes in. Science as the never ending endeavour to gain trustworthy knowledge. It is a never ending activity, as each new answer leads to another question. The circle of knowledge may grow bigger, but at the same time its circumference, where known and unknown touch, grows longer too.

The horizon beckons and recedes. By looking beyond the objects themselves, you bump into the relationships between them. How they interact. How they fit together in networks.

The science that studies these systematic interactions in living systems is known as ecology. It is the scientific discipline that studies systems and complexity on four different, but interrelated levels.

Look at a forest. There's the individuals. The behaviour of a squirrel or a beetle, the growth and fall of trees. But individual organisms never come alone. There is a population of squirrels and beetles, there is the forest that you can see from the trees. As a group they have characteristics that differ from those of the individual. Males and females, migrants and residents. Next to study is how all these living things interact. With each other, and with their geochemical surroundings, with the soil en the air, with thunderstorms and forest fires, with seasons and climate. They are all bound up in one complex whole by the continuous stream of energy and information linking them up in a multilayered network. Finally these three components are surrounded by a bigger whole (there is always something bigger). Any forest fits within a wider landscape, any group finds a place in a society, any piece of knowledge or ritual is part of a culture.

With this crash course in ecology in mind, now look at a band playing music. The same ecological framework can throw some light on the structure and the functioning of people playing music together.

There's the individual band members, with their bodies and minds, their own idiosyncratic histories, backgrounds, hang-ups and fascinations. There's the interaction between them as members of a group, any group of animals follows some unwritten rules. People cannot escape the psychosociological ties that bind them. By playing together they exchange information and energy. That's what binds them together, it's what makes the band into a whole, the reason why they play together. And of course they play somewhere, in a studio, on a stage, on a rooftop, just on their own, within a framework of music production and consumption, embedded in a society with values and options on what music is or can be, that go far beyond the top-20.

One aspect of systems in this ecological approach should be stressed. These systems are dynamic. They are always in flux. Change is forever. Any forest is different the day after. Nature stays never the same. The old Greeks already realised that you can never step into the same river twice. The curious thing is that we still recognise the forest a day later. Just like we recognise a musical theme even when played slower of in a different mode. Like we recognise a Chinese opera and a Lady Gaga song both as music. There is also some resilience in the disturbance, robustness in the shifting systems.

This ecology thing may seem a long way from a Songbook. But if you think of a songbook not as a static book but as a living process, build from words and letters, movements and gestures, sound and visions, then it might start approaching the multilayered complexity of the real world of musicianship.