Art as a model of humanity

Per Nørgård points out that one of the problems facing modern society is that everything is split up. Holistic thinking is rare: all decisions are decisions about particular, limited areas. This is partly due to the fact that our right brain hemisphere, which thinks holistically, is not available to us. Language is of course the province of the left hemisphere.

In another article, entitled, 'Dansk Underernæring 1980' (Danish Malnutrition 1980), Per Nørgård suggested the following:

Perhaps we should arrange a kind of 'peaceful voyage of discovery' to the silent half of our brain where we could cautiously listen to what is after all a very important part of ourselves. We could then attempt to express the results using the 'compelling' language of our intellect, and this analysis of the shape and form of our feelings would in all probability reveal an astonishing store of wisdom [...].
(Vækst... ).

The kind of wisdom Nørgård is referring to here is the ability to maintain a balance - understood here as a balance between the body's chemical processes at various levels. In this sense one could also call any homeostatic, or cybernetic, system or a work of art, 'wise'. In an answer to a critic, Per Nørgård wrote as follows in Svar til Poul Nielsen (Reply to Poul Nielsen), from 1973:

In virtue of its total, ecological balance, a musical masterpiece embraces wisdom in the same way as a creation of nature [..].
(Vækst... ).

This means that:

..in a work of art [..] we possess a wise model of our own humanity!
(Vækst... ).

Per Nørgård was thus able to conclude that:

[to provide] a constantly expanding knowledge of what Man is [...], art is an irreplaceable and equally ranked adjunct to anthropology, psychology, biology and all other relevant sciences. In this way we [...] are approaching the idea of art as a tool, an organ of understanding..
(Svar til Poul Nielsen)

Looked at in this way, art achieves a significance as something more than a medium of 'good experiences', or experimentation for its own sake. Art is thus seen as a phenomenon vital to our existence, precisely because it opens the door to otherwise inaccessible corners of the human mind, to places within us that contain a wisdom we humans sorely need to tap into.

Images

In an article entitled Modbilledet (Contrast) (Per Nørgård artikler 1962-82), Nørgård proposed a method to make us aware of the 'wisdom' immanent in a work of art.

Nørgård recommends the conscious use of images as a method to penetrate a musical work of art in order to elicit from it insights about the human mind. He suggests that we should form images, pictures, of what we hear, as in this way we can grasp and store information that is not couched in verbal language. Later, one can conceptualise this series of images by putting words to it; and if the series of images describes a musical experience, one can thus conceptualise this experience and attain the insights contained in the work of music concerned.

However, this requires that one train oneself to fixate the chain of images formed around a long musical sequence, in the last analysis even a whole work, in order to be able to 'get the whole picture at a glance', as Nørgård put it.

This exercise in grasping things as a whole not only makes it possible to form an overall view of a musical sequence: it also makes it easier for us to contact our non-verbal right brain hemisphere.

As Nørgård writes:

[information] that is basically grasped by the right hemisphere, i.e., which affects our emotions, [...] can be transposed into a conceptual language (left hemisphere) based on the understanding of images...(Svar til Poul Nielsen).

On grasping the irrational rationally

Here we have touched on a cardinal point for Per Nørgård: contact with the experiences contained in our unconscious right brain hemisphere. Nørgård attempts to draw these experiences into consciousness by bringing them into contact with the discursive thought processes of the left hemisphere.

These experiences are not simply to be grasped intuitively: they are explicitly to be understood. At the risk of reducing matters to a slogan, it could be said that Nørgård's 'project in life' has been to grasp the irrational rationally. This is not to disparage what is irrational, but because our irrational side, on account of its special wisdom, offers insights much needed by our rational consciousness.

The tension in this 'project in life' lies in the fact that in practice it is impossible. In the nature of things, any 'wisdom of irrationality' cannot be completely grasped by rational means. If it could, this wisdom would no longer be irrational.