Too much going on at once

Frédéric Chopin

In a recent post about alliterative effects in poetry I mentioned a sort of effect which "gets under your skin, or beneath your analytic defences; it sneaks into the brain directly like perfume, or music with too many things going on at once." This type of too-much-going-on-at-once is beautifully described by Douglas Hofstadter in a piece he wrote about Chopin:

"In that same year, Chopin wrote what some admirers consider to be his greatest work: the fourth Ballade in F minor. This piece is filled with noteworthy passages, but one in particular had a profound effect on me. One day, long after I knew the piece intimately from recordings, a friend told me that he had been practising it and wanted to show me "a bit of tricky polyrhythm" that was particularly interesting. I was actually not that interested in hearing about polyrhythm at the moment, and so didn't pay much attention when he sat down at the keyboard. Then he started to play. He played just two measures, but by the time they were over, I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside. This "bit of tricky polyrhythm" had undone me completely."

He goes on to describe that at one scale there is a rhythmic pattern of 2-against-3, but that by accenting every fourth triplet this creates a simultaneous pattern of 3-against-8 at a larger scale. This seems to me to be an excellent example of a general principle about the role of technique in the arts. And the principle is this: the conscious mind under normal circumstances intermediates reality, constructing what is perceived and including its own interpolations and interpretations as part and parcel of our experience of the world.  Thus the role of the conscious analytical computing mind serves to slightly distance us from what we experience: experience is not direct in normal circumstances. When experience is direct we are swept off our feet by the force of it; in this category of experience we might well find certain religious experiences, love at first sight, various psychotic episodes, moments of inspiration or insight, sudden epiphanies, and so forth. Technique is art can so overwhelm the analytical, keeping-track, I-know-what-I-am-experiencing brain that the consructing/interpolating/interpreting processes become overloaded and simply give up and the perceptual experience bypasses all the filters and hits us directly. This is what Hofstadter describes when he says "I felt that someone had reached into the very center of my skull and caused something to explode deep down inside."