On Friday November 24th, the Ottawa Bach Choir performed a concert based on Ventian Polychoral music: Gabrielli, Monteverdi, Bach, Handel, etc. This is my fourth season singing in the group and it just gets better. For me, this concert marked the end of a really busy period of work with Insignia: over 30 days with no time off.

I’ve noticed an interesting counterpoint developing in my work, a thematic playing off between teaching, research and writing that is getting more and more influenced by the music I’m singing. There is an exactitude required in Baroque music that goes well beyond the notes and timing. These pieces use a complex interweaving of words, music, themes, point and counterpoint, etc to convey experiences. They are, to use Victor Turner’s terminology, highly symbolically complex ritual components designed to cause changes in consciousness.

That they work this way was hammered home to me by comments from a couple of friends who were at the concert. One of them commented that sometime during the second piece, Dominus as asjuvandum me festina by Giovanni Battista Martini, he went into a trance state where he could see his emotions and begin to process them. He had just heard that his grandfather had died the day before and the music seemed to put hm into a “zone” so he could start to process his grief. The second comment came from a friend of mine who has never heard a Baroque concert and was raised as a Hindu. He noted that the first three pieces also put him into a trance state with heightened awareness.

I think it pretty clear that this type of music, when performed properly, evokes specific emotional reactions and mental states from people regardless of their cultural upbringing. Perhaps more importantly, the music also appears to pattern the consciousness of the performers; at least in some cases. I have certainly found this to be the case as I was working and rehearsing.

Let us consider a simple example: advertising a brand image. All brands are symbols, i.e. they are composed of one or more signs (signifiers) that point to something (the signified) and have an emotional accretion or what Korzybski called a “semantic reaction” associated with them. This is a pretty basic understanding of how symbols operate, but it is static and symbols are conveyed, maintained, changed and reinforced dynamically in much the same manner as music is.

So, how to convey a chosen brand? In particular, the most important component of a symbol is the emotional accretion attached to the sign. This is, after all, what advertising is all about: the manipulation of emotional acretions or semantic reactions to signs, and this is where the reasearch starts to get complicated.

Any idiot can construct a Likert scale questionaire and tell their clients “This is what people think”. Hah! Half the time they don’t even know what questions are meaningful inside the culture or sub-culture they are trying to research. Any Cultural Anthropologist can tell you horror stories of people building de facto meaningless questionaires that make their clients happy but have no real meaning for the culture in question.

Real research, whether done by Anthropologists or good market research companies like Insignia, starts with the assumption that most of what “we” assume is probably wrong and has to be checked out for current validity. This is why the best symbolic analyses start with ethnographies, even if they are only short, and moves towards the less qualitative (e.g. surveys) only after getting a immediate “feel” for the group.

This is why good research is like a good Baroque composition. It is a complex interwaeving of themes, point and counter-point, and having all the notes “right” is really just the first step in putting it all together.