Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space: a draft toward thinking through Trinitarian ontological reflection, sensory integration, and the process of sensory integration as a metaphor for coordinating theories rather than setting them against each other (like sight against hearing)

This should be thought of as a first draft toward what "may" become a longer, larger-form project. I can't promise that it "will" but the idea of "Perichoresis in Musical Time and Space" has been lingering in my mind for about five years.  Consider this a first draft.   (7-2-26 OR consider this a new appendix for Ragtime and Sonata Forms)

(UPDATE 2/1/26, think of this as a direct sequel to the "four scripts for writing sonata forms using 12-bar blues" post from late 2025.  If you haven't read that one first that is why it's the first thing in this post. This idea of using Trinitarian doctrinal reflection on the concept of perichoresis among the Persons as a gateway to thinking of how humans conceive of intertwined time and space has been something I've been mulling over for years.  Although this may become a longer/larger project it should still be considered a continuation of ideas I started working out in 2020 in Ragtime and Sonata Forms)

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2025/11/four-scripts-for-writing-sonata.html

 

A few years ago I had a blast reading Jason Yust’s Organized Time: Rhythm, Tonality, and Form. The end of the book was a tiny bit disappointing, though, because Yust’s thoughts about musical time compared to lived time seemed so … mundane.  That music is a kind of emphatic time rather than a chronometric concept of time can sound deep to music theorists but the idea of emphatic time not being the same as chronometric time is so old hat to biblical scholars it can be tossed off as a casual observation by Niels Peter Lemche in one of his books, and he proposed that biblical literature should be read as often involving emphatic time rather than the chronometric time we modern Westerners generally take for granted. 

It’s one thing to rehearse some boilerplate notion that you are the music while the music lasts and that music is emphatic time rather than blah blah blah.  The question that should be asked and is often skipped is what the nature of this musical time is.  It is still music.  Someone like Roger Scruton can write pages and pages on the distinction between physically sounding music and the acousmatic space of music that exists within the mind of a listener.  But he never defined what that space is and the few gestures he made toward defining musical space made it all too one-dimensional.  We don’t hear music in one dimension and we are not one-dimensional people (never mind Marcuse). 

I have been struggling to articulate an idea that it seems scholarly theories and theorists tend to pit theory against theory as if something must either be this or that.  I appreciated L Poundie Burstein’s remark at the end of Journeys Through Galant Expositions that we live in times where we have multiple theories of how to understand sonata forms; rather than pit these theories against each other as academics so often want to do, why don’t we set them all alongside each other and make use of all of them? 

Sure, why not?

Last year I read an odious book called The Music of Theology, which is published by Routledge.  The whole thing lacks anything significant to say about either music or theology. The authors claim to talk about theology but don’t actually talk about theology so much as  about continental philosophers.  I have read Adorno for myself and I think the book makes a hash of Adorno and misrepresented him.  He had scathing remarks to make about John Cage and Boulez alike but the authors of The Music of Theology wrote as if Adorno conceded that Cage liberated music from the need to be heard as “music”.  No, he didn’t!  Adorno’s remarks about Cage were so scathing they deserve to be discussed in some other context.  The reason I mention this Routledge rubbish book is because of two canards its authors took for granted: 1) they present Christianity as if it were an essentially European religion and 2) they default to a dualism between “sight” and “hearing” in which they claim that music lets us move beyond the sight-fixated nature of Western theology.

Now for actual theologians who bother to talk about Christian theology such an idiotic claim would be a surprise.  I get that proponents of Third Article Theology say we need to move beyond or build upon the Logocentric constraints of Chalcedonian theology but none of them would claim that “sight” is above “hearing”.  But this academic propensity to pit sight against hearing is symptomatic of the kind of problem L Poundie Burstein alluded to in talking about how theorists pit theories against each other.  To pit sight against hearing is an easy example to run with because it is emblematic of the kind of pat dualisms that do not seem to account for primary sources and do not attempt to do more than articulate some impasse as a higher knowledge of “this is the way things are”.

Now in theology there is a concept called perichoresis or circumincession.  The idea is that the Father, Son and Spirit are of one substance yet three distinct persons who interpenetrate each other.  I am not proposing to elucidate Aquinas’ distinctions between paternity, generation, filiation, spiration and procession.  Instead what I propose is that if we go back and look at reflections on Trinitarian ontology in Aquinas or John of Damascus we can see that their capacity to make these abstract distinctions between persons of the Trinity and their capacity to understand that the Three Persons are nevertheless One God can be reframed in light of scientific observations about the nature of sensory distinction and integration.

In the real world people don’t generally pit sight against hearing but coordinate both to perceive and move within the world.  We proprioceptively engage self and other through the integration of the senses.  To perceive space we rely upon a fusion of sight, hearing and touch to navigate the world.  If we do not taste or smell most things we encounter this is generally not a problem.  If we are blind or deaf but have the other senses relatively unhindered we can still navigate the three-dimensional space of our lives and be ware of the space of our own bodies.  In fact this is possible even if a person doesn’t have binocular vision or may be deaf in one ear.  Edward Mannock was able to be a fight pilot in World War I despite being blind in one eye. 

IF someone wanted to speculate upon what the foundation of music is we could hardly do worse than Augustine of Hippo’s On Music. And how did he set about to discuss music?  He began with rhythm.  In fact he never finished De Musica and left the work incomplete after finishing no more than his treatise on rhythm. The treatises on melody and harmony were never taken up.   Roger Scruton casually dismissed Augustine’s work by saying that we know the neo-Platonic cosmology is tosh and that means the rest can be ignored.

That is the core of the problem I see in many academics these days.  Maybe you don’t subscribe to the Pythagorean or neo-Platonist elements of Augustine’s thoughts about music. His observation that our capacity to perceive, interpret and be moved by music are dependent on our bodily experience of it and our working memory has never been gainsaid in the history of the human race.

George Berkeley’s anti-materialism has been the stuff of mockery among philosophers for a while and yet the reality seems to be that the mind must interpret what the eyes see in order to create within the mind what it is we see.  The relationship between the eye and brain suggested by Berkeley can turn out to be provably true even if his “big idea” of anti-materialism is a laughingstock to analytic philosophers. 

Alert readers who know who Augustine of Hippo and George Berkeley were might be thinking “These were Christians, right?”  Yes.  I propose that in both cases these thinkers had second-level ideas that should be retained as we think about the nature of music and the possibilities that are before us for exploring new musical paths. Specifically, it has been thinking about these second-level ideas that I have been doing for years.  I am not interested in pitting sight against hearing at a theoretical level.  What I have been wanting to do is to develop a kind of perichoresis or circumincession of theoretical approaches. Let’s find a way for different theories of sonata forms to interpenetrate each other as ways to reflect on musical time and space—the endgame is to recalibrate concepts of sonata forms and fugue so as to provide a theoretical and practical basis for blues-based and ragtime-based approaches to sonatas. 

If we take Augustine’s axiom as a starting point then music begins in rhythm.  Pitch is subordinate to rhythm for the obvious reason that if A is 440 Hertz the very way we define that pitch is based on the rhythm (frequency) of the vibrations occur in a musical tone. Harmony is the coincidence of separately identifiable pitches.

To pivot to Trinitarian ontology as a parallel case for consideration, God the Father has paternity and generation, from which the Son proceeds. The Spirit proceeds from the Father (and the Son, in Western theology, though not in Eastern theology).  Christ is the Word and the Spirit touches believers with the power to give them faith and (in certain settings) provide spiritual gifts.  The kinds of relationships Christian theologians have been able to articulate about the Father, Son and Spirit can be likened to parallel inter-relationships between rhythm, pitch and harmony or between sight, hearing and touch.  We have the capacity to distinguish between seeing and hearing and touching but the gestalt of the world we perceive outside and within our bodies is the integration of all of these senses plus taste and smell.

If you need some kind of image to help you understand what I’m talking about let’s try this out:

As M. H. Abrams put it in his books on the Romantics The Mirror and the Lamp as well as Natural Supernaturalism, the theorists of the Romantic era were against what they called “optocracy”. They believed that sight, as a metaphor for rational linear thought, had been given a primacy that sidelined the other senses as metaphors for other ways of engaging the world and the life of the mind. Music became valuable as practice and as metaphor for an approach to human experience that could not be seen and was not beholden to the strictures of sight in the literal and metaphorical sense.

In the realm of hearing two pitches can coexist in the same space and be heard as such. Yellow and blue coexisting in the same space becomes green. This can be thought of as a metaphor for how music provides possibilities that are impossible within visual media.

Now I’m going to bludgeon you with a quote from Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory:

… Even in the nineteenth century, impressionist technique in painting was based on the rightly or wrongly interpreted scientific analysis of retinal processes. Of course the theoretical and reflexive elements in art seldom went untransformed. At times, art misunderstood the sciences to which it appealed, as is perhaps the case most recently with electronic music. Yet the productive impulse was little harmed by the rationality that was brought to bear on it. The physiological theorems of the impressionists were probably foils for the in part fascinated, in part socially critical experiences of the metropolis and the dynamic of their paintings. By means of the discovery of a dynamic immanent to the reified world, they wanted to resist reification, which was most palpable in metropolitan life. In the nineteenth century, natural scientific explanations functioned as the self-unconscious agent of art. The basis of this affinity between art and science was that the ratio to which the most progressive art of the epoch reacted was none other than the ratio of the natural sciences. Whereas in the history of art, scientific theories tend to wither away, without them artistic practices would no more have developed than, inversely, these theorems can adequately explain such practices. This has consequences for reception: It is inadequate if it is less reflexive than the object it receives. Not knowing what one sees or hears bestows no privileged direct relation to works but instead makes their perception impossible.  Pages 445-446 from Draft Introduction

ISBN 978-1-78009-3659-8

It doesn’t matter if the science of the eye and brain in the Renaissance turned out to be bunk, the point was that artists who engaged with the leading edge scientific theories of their time and attempted to assimilate and integrate those concepts into their approaches to the arts bequeathed to us art still worth talking about.

If you look at the history of Christian reflection on relations within the Trinity you could take the approach of dismissing it all as nonsense if you are not yourself a Christian. Or you can take an approach that looks at how the distinctions between the Persons of the Trinity as One God can be read as analogous to the distinctions between senses in the gestalt of the integrated sensory perception a person has of themselves within the world. 

That Aquinas or John of Damascus could grasp interpenetration via perichoresis or circumincession in the Trinity between Father, Son and Spirit was possible because these men had bodies within which the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell were integrated yet separable components of perceptual interaction with the world. Even our most abstract notions of time and space and self and other are mediated by our bodies and depend upon a proprioceptive fusion of sensory horizons.  If we lack one of the five senses we can perceive three-dimensional space.  If we have two damaged senses it is still possible to perceive the world we navigate as a fully three-dimensional experience because we can perceive how it impacts our own bodies.

Now within the realm of music as an art mediated by written scores there are still other possibilities. Musical scores “can” be ways that we explore music as both time and space. Chiara Bertoglio’s overtly theological and musicological Musical Scores and the Eternal Present played at length with the possibilities of using musical scores to reflect on time as both a diachronic and synchronic experience.  Musical scores constrain us by putting notes on the page but those constraints can invite patterns of thought that you might not so easily engage through hearing music as sound that permeates your body. 

But it is still within the body that we thoroughly experience music as a thing within time and space, whether it is the linearity of the timespace of the music as it journeys from start to finish or the spacetime of a music that we might be dancing to or working to. 

The concepts of “timespace” and “spacetime” are clunky and were articulated by the American composer George Rochberg in The Aesthetics of Survival.  The observation he made is a simple one, but a profound one, we can choose to orient all of our bodies to listen in a direction or as a being within space among others. 

But this still gets us back to Augustine’s thoughts on the nature of music being mediated by our bodily experience of it and memory. If you haven’t even read Augustine I’m not going to unpack his work for you here. I have already said that I don’t think it’s necessary to subscribe to Augustine’s ideas about neo-Platonic or Pythagorean notions of numbers to appreciate his central point of connecting music to our bodily experience of it and memory as the cognitive process through which we hear and interpret music.

For anyone who has been reading Wenatchee The Hatchet over the last twenty years I hardly need to spell out what my aims and interests have been.  I have been working toward the goal of writing sonata forms and fugues based on blues and rock and ragtime vocabularies my whole adult life. I was considering seminary at one point and grad school in music at another point in my life. I ended up going down neither of those paths for lack of money.  That didn’t stop me from thinking about how we think about music. It also didn’t stop me from thinking about the ways in which Christian theological traditions could be brought to bear on insights into human cognition, memory and sensory integration as a potential metaphor for how we can stop pitting theories of musical time, space and form against each other and integrate them. Instead of pitting the senses against each other in theory let us find a way to remember they are integrated in practice every day of our lives and use that as a guide for how to integrate theories that can be thought of as corresponding to the sense of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell in creating musical works.