Can Music, as a Discipline, Contribute to a Conversation about Resilience?

As a guest speaker at The 2017 American Society for Cybernetics Conference “Resilience and Ethics: Implications,” held in Salem, MA, I gave a lecture/recital under the title "The Desired Solution" which featured my Autopoiesis for Piano and two works for fixed-media electronics: AURA (Mark II) and DIGILOG Suite.

The distinguished attendees of the American Society for Cybernetics 2017 Conference define resilience as the ability to respond to change. Scott M. Harris, founder of Recursionist Publishing, is one of these people. “Beneath this is a form of reason based not only on logic but also on...beauty,” he says. Dr. Allenna Leonard, American cyberneticist, Consultant and Director of Team Syntegrity, Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, internationally specializing in the application of Stafford Beer's Viable System Model and Syntegration, thinks the conservation of Art (including Music) is vital to the resilience and, therefore, the survival of our species. Other attendees think of Music as just one of many disciplines that can be enabled to broaden and expand their respective understandings of resilience. Music Composition, for example, can be defined, like resilience itself, as the removal of non-knowledge resources from the process of deciding ever more wisely. Social worker, turned college professor, turned "artivist" Dr. Jude Lombardi thinks one way to design real change is through language and the arts. To her, these are alternative ways of thinking about the necessity of resilience. Lombardi says, “I currently think that in a late age one has to be an artist in order to provoke social transformations.” She also says that conflict and tension are potential dialectic opportunities for addressing differences. Finally, Lombardi speaks of the circularity of needs, equating conflict with resilience when she says, “Needs must be met so they can happen again and again, so when peace is a need, conflict is a necessity and conversation an invitation.” This is not unlike the tension and resolution that occurs in music compositions and all other artworks.

ZANE GILLESPIE

After six years as Minister of Music at Mount Pleasant United Methodist Church (UMC) in Holly Springs, MS, I was recently called to continue to work to address public engagement in music participation as Director of Music Ministries at First UMC in Water Valley, MS. I am a Composer, Theorist, and member of both The College Music Society as well as The Poe Studies Association (PSA). I am also an active pianist and vocalist, specializing primarily in church music. My paper entitled ““Mesmeric Revelation”: Art as Hypnosis” has been published by the international, peer-reviewed journal Humanities. In addition, another paper of mine entitled “A Model of Triadic Post-Tonality for a Neoconservative Postmodern String Quartet by Sky Macklay” has been submitted to the peer-reviewed Music Theory journal Perspectives of New Music. At the end of February 2015, I served as Chair for the session entitled “Aesthetics and Philosophy” at The Fourth International PSA Conference in New York City. On June 21, 2014, my Quartet for Alto Saxophone and Strings, a commission from concert saxophonist Walter Hoehn, was performed as part of Concert V of the Eighth Annual Belvedere Chamber Music Festival held at Grace-St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Memphis, TN. Characteristically neo-romantic (in the original sense of the word), my music earned me the Nancy Van de Vate Award for Composition three times from the University of Mississippi Department of Music. A native of Pontotoc, MS, I hold degrees from the University of Mississippi (BM; MM), and the University of Memphis (DMA) where I was the 2011 recipient of the Rudi E. Scheidt School of Music's Smit Composition Award. I live in Memphis, TN.