Makeup for 11/22/25: Using Music To Round The Corners Of A Digital World
- john koenig
- Dec 6
- 3 min read
One of the trickiest roles of any musician involved in collaborative projects (which is pretty much…all musicians…hopefully) is learning to mediate relationships. This is true not only of musicians, but of just people being people in general. Obviously, the political and social times in which we live make this abundantly clear.
One of the greatest barriers to finding understanding is our current state of what I call “digital interactions.” I’m not talking about digital, i.e. social media or otherwise electronically aided, communication and interaction. I’m referring to one of the fundamental principles upon which digital computation is founded. I’m not a computer scientist, but I have been led to believe that digital computation is based on intricate patterns of zeros and ones. This so-called binary (only two numbers) language means that there are only zeros and ones, there are no middle areas. When I say “digital interactions,” this is what I mean; people are dealing with people and ideas as if they are zeros and ones, as if we are the same or different, as if we either must agree whole-heartedly or disagree vehemently. We have developed a digital approach to an analogue (or if you’re hip with modern developments in computing, quantum) existence.
This digital approach leads people to place their flags of opinion in very strange places. When an opinion flag is stuck in the ground, it creates a situation where we place ourselves in boxes and limit our ability to deal with the intricacies of interactions with other humans. It is as if we are faced with a multitude of geometric holes and choose only to have access to square pegs. Through our own choice, we are left forcing square pegs into round holes, leaving ourselves with the need to round the corners.
Learning to empathize with and legitimately understand other people allows us to begin breaking out of the molds imposed by our current “digital” society, helps us round those corners, and begins to bring us back to a more analogue or quantum understanding of social interactions. To summarize some of these ideas in song, I would direct you to Bob Dylan’s anti-protest music tune “My Back Pages” from 1964’s Another Side of Bob Dylan.
But, you say, this is a music blog. Why is he rambling about computers and social interactions? Well, part of that is because this blog is also a way for me to try to connect some of the seemingly disparate ideas that are floating around my noggin. The blog itself is neither a zero or a one. It’s in many ways many things, all at the same time. But I would like to try to focus it back on music for a moment. For me, the connection between these ideas and music lies in the power of music to facilitate relationships and understanding across social divides and time itself, if we allow it to.
I think an interesting illustration of this idea comes from the music of Anton Webern. Webern was adamant that all the music he wrote was a direct result of his emotions related to the death of his mother. However, Webern’s music can be incredibly thorny, and for many is difficult to listen to. It is also highly mathematically structured, making it prime for analysis by academics who exist in a world where quantifiable data in research reigns supreme, which often leads to some of the more subjective, analogue properties of Webern’s expressivity being lost to an objective, digital master. But if we remember that Webern was a human with human emotions living a life filled with deep personal trauma (the loss of his mother was just one in a series of unfortunate events in his life) as well as larger world traumas (see World War I), the desire to force a new, personally formulated order into existence that rejects much of the old order that got us into the problems in the first place, we can begin to see ourselves in Webern and we open the door to empathy across time and can being a personal relationship with a stranger that helps us round the corners of our current digital understandings of social interactions. For those of us who are really into this stuff (and I hope if you’re not, you’ll consider joining us) this is what music can do for us, every day.
Bob Dylan, “My Back Pages,” from Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964):
Anton Webern, Passacaglia, op. 1, Pierre Boulez, conductor:
Anton Webern, Symphony, op. 21, Pierre Boulez, conductor:
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