The Matrix Revisited: Letter 1 Stuart Wood
The Matrix Revisited
Letter 1
Hi.
You won’t mind if I use my first proper sentence to break the literary fourth wall and address you directly, will you?
In the ten years since I wrote the Matrix book, I have sometimes struggled with, sometimes played with, and always been highly conscious of, the register in which I write about music work. There are several reasons for this, which may crop up later, and if not, which you can read about here. For now we can say that I have come to prefer writing in letter format. So here we are, and thank you for reading.
Anyway, recently I felt sufficiently curious and emboldened to pick up my mother’s copy of my book A Matrix for Community Music Therapy Practice (2016). Tellingly unthumbed, I noted. I don’t have a copy myself, but I found myself wondering if there was a dialogue to pick up ten years later. So up to the farthest shelf in the corner cupboard of her spare bedroom I went.
The Matrix book started off on the modest, unhyperbolic premise that, “everything is music” (p.13).
Here’s what I wrote in Chapter 2:
“Far from being limited to coded texts on manuscripts or even to organized sounds, music is increasingly being viewed as an organising principle of life. What makes something music, or musical, is complex organization across material, semantic, symbolic, and social domains. The order, type, and reach of this organization are multiple. In this way, music is a matrix for action, as well as often being the sounds of that action coming into being. Music, as a mode of organization, is a matrix for how we make sense of the world; it is also how the world hangs together independently of us, our ears, or indeed our piano hands.
The way we meet the world is musical; the way the world offers itself up to be met is musical, too. We experience that meeting in countless different ways, most of which we wouldn’t normally call “music”. All the same, the world makes sense to us because of things we can only use musical understanding to describe.” (p.13)
Bold claims, I hear you mutter. And if you want to see them being worked out, I’m going to have to self-plagiarise and refer you on (Wood, 2016).
Another way of saying this however might be that I had what was called at the time an ecological approach to music and musical work with people. What I meant here was that an ecological approach considers how individuals, groups, and communities are part of systems that interact with each other and with their environments, and how music work emerges out of these systems in a co-produced way (Stige, 2002). In other words, a de-centred approach to personhood, music, and what I - pointedly - called notions of ‘clinical need’, all of which are emergent manifestations of a widespread and ever-changing set of entanglements.
From the top, I think I’d like to revisit a word here, because although I used the term ‘need’ critically at the time, it just requires a lot of explanation, and it expects you to give me the benefit of the doubt, which is an indulgence I won’t crave until I really have to. So for now let’s say the Matrix approach involved a critical de-centred gaze on music, people, and practice.
What I came to recognise more clearly since the publication of the Matrix book is that this former ecological stance on music work can map quite sympathetically onto what we now call a decolonial agenda. Until very recently this agenda was rightly becoming a priority across the many organised forms of music work that folks in the WEIRD world do such as therapy, band leading or workshop practices (I thank music therapist and scholar Davina Vencatasamy for bringing this fabulous acronym to my attention: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic.).
Suddenly as I write this in March 2025 decolonialism is in process of being undermined and contested due to the pernicious influence of US owned multinationals and their obeisance to the erasure of DEI values under the current US administration. So to be clear: the decolonial turn in music work is not a virtue signal, nor a symptom of ‘wokeflake’ liberal anxiety. It is neither at its roots a matter only of contested musical idioms, nor of professional representation - although these are significant branches. From my point of view at least, it is a fundamental statement of interdependence, saying that music, people and practice are not separate entities which we line up in some kind of Newtonian causal row, but they are organic, more-than-human entanglements that we, literally, find ourselves in.
Decolonisation, whilst already active in my personal life, was not nearly sufficiently part of my professional lexicon or discourse in 2016. The main drive in coming back into conversation with what I wrote ten years ago is so that I can catch myself up (and not least put down the delusion that there is any major difference between my personal and professional lives). Ideally, a decolonial gaze strips me - a cis white male of European settler descent - of my centrality, and of my entitlement. I write “ideally” because this re-positioning of my white male optic requires ongoing work, and there are no shortcuts to be had via intellectual wordplay or virtue signalling. So I aspire to a state where there is no pile, and I would not be at the top of it while one persists. My actions alone don’t cause things to be done, except perhaps harm, and I have no essential being or neutral gaze.
Back in 2016, the way I thought about ecological approaches to music work involved two bits of scaffolding. They were that the mechanisms by which things happen are ‘emergence’ and ‘performativity’. I can say this with confidence because the first of the Hansel and Gretel crumbs I kindly left myself in the conclusion of the Matrix book was this line:
“…it is possible that an enhanced concept of emergence and performativity in particular will be central parts of our theory in the coming years” (p.159).
Thanks, Stuart.
I went on, as if giving a leg up to my ten-years-later self, for which, much thanks, me:
“Emergence is in some ways about how something comes from nothing. It is a very creative concept, concerning the way forms (such as neuronal configurations, swarms, cities, or indeed music) manifest out of their constituent parts. You might imagine it to be like a ‘Magic Eye’ image, seemingly a mass of coloured elements until your focus shifts and out pops an elephant or a battleship.” (p.159)
Further Socratising myself, I wrote:
“What does it mean to suggest that an individual is performed by the network they are in at any moment? To think that significant aspects of how a person is in a given context are created by the context itself? The same may be asked of an organisation itself, of a company or charity performing its own personhood, and of those with whom it connects. The impact of CoMT within that personhood may be significant. Perhaps there is further exploration to be done in uncovering aspects of how any organization (a brain, a body, a duo, a hospital, a care company, or a culture) is integrated or made coherent via musical processes and how CoMT is placed to contribute and inform those processes.” (pp.159-160.)
Another glaring revisiting: in the ten years since I wrote the first Matrix, I stopped being a music therapist. I’m not a music therapist, and I no longer practice music work with people. As a scholar I research the broader topic of what I tentatively call Music Work, which is something that will circle about a bit possibly in future letters. But for now, let’s just say that where I used the term ‘Community Music Therapy’ or the acronym ‘CoMT’ back then, we might apply this thinking to any music work, regulated or not, identifying in diverse ways, which shares the signatures I talk about here. Many types of music therapy do not share these signatures, and many types of other music work do. This may make you itch, and that’s OK.
So we know where to start: what was I thinking about music, people, and the practice of music work?
The last piece of signposting I’m thanking myself for is a set of five paradoxes that I saw as being the mysteries out of which some new thinking about this topic might yet emerge. I’ll leave them with you for future chewing.
The Essential-Contingent
One of the main parts of current thinking about music work is that music is multifaceted and co-constructed. This view would say that music comes out of contextual interactions and conditions; music is not a “thing-in-itself”; it holds no universals or essentials across time or space. The problem is that while this makes a sort of sense and might feel intuitively right to many, music work is also based on the belief that when we play music together, we both feel something. Whether we then attribute that to Vitality Affect, to entrained heart rate or to immunoglobulin, or to empathy or to anything else, music workers base quite a lot of their assertions on the idea that within this contingent playing, we have found something essential together.
This is of critical importance when we start working from a decolonial point of view, because highly distinct, sensitive, cultural musical objects are made - in the moment - out of shared building blocks, such as pulse, tone or metre. If an idiom of music emerges contingently between us from building blocks we share essentially, how do we then square that with the use or status of the cultural object it becomes, its heritage or historic connotations? And are music workers the prime choice makers in characterising the type of music that does emerge, or is it more complex than that?
The Single-Multiple
A useful tool for exploring the essential-contingent mystery is what theorists such as Bruno Latour, John Law, AnneMarie Mol, and others have given us in their work on the ‘multiple’. How do we think about music if it is more than one thing (contingent) and yet less than many (essential)?
John Law writes (2004):
“…if we attend to practice, we tend to discover multiplicity, but not pluralism. For the absence of singularity does not imply that we live in a world composed of an indefinite number of different and disconnected bodies. It does not imply that reality is fragmented. Instead it implies something much more complex. It implies that the different realities overlap and interfere with one another. Perhaps we should imagine that we are in a world of fractional objects. A fractional object would be an object that was more than one and less than many.” (pp. 61-62) italics in original.
This might apply to more than just music. A key component of this Matrix thinking is that people also are not atomised, separate, auto-functional entities, but constructed communally. Perhaps we can understand music as a process of becoming, of leaning into the future, and we can understand people in the same way.
Can a sense of the fractal help us rethink ideas about where our music comes from in music work, how it is framed as treatment, how we think about clinical causation, and about how we talk about musical meeting?
The Material-Semiotic
Speaking of, how do we talk about musical meeting?
In the first book I suggested that the context in which music work happens is co-constructed amongst a vast order, type, and reach of elements. The act of playing music with people is the product of interactions that have been both material (cells, bodies, hands, sticks, and drums) and semiotic (thoughts, words, languages, meaning, and understandings). Some of what we know about music work comes out of these interactions with (apparently) inanimate objects.
Materials matter. But language and discourse matter, too. In fact, the point I would suggest is that in music work, they are not so separate. They are multiple interdependent knowledges. So what is the knowledge world in which the music work of the future will happen? Will it be mindful of the more-than-human? Will it be careful about what types of experience it includes, excludes, erases or promotes? Will it exist for itself, or only within algorithms of usefulness?
The Intrinsic-Instrumental
In 1890, following the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray, a reader wrote to its author Oscar Wilde, asking him to explain a now-famous line from the preface. The quote was, “All art is quite useless”. Part of Wilde’s response read, “A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy…Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower.”
Music work makes brilliant use of art’s uselessness, actually. This is not me being provocative. The process of aesthetic becoming is by definition aimless. It is not fixed to a single cause, nor is it linked to a single intention. Aesthetic production between people, and in materials, is the emergence of intrinsic fractal encounters that occur just as flowers occur.
Many would argue however that what makes music work unique (especially music therapy perhaps) is that it usually takes this aesthetic becoming and gives it a purpose, gives it aims, both before and after the fact. The claim would be that music work is a balance of music’s intrinsic property of flowering on the one hand and our instrumental strategic use of it on the other. Is there a future conversation to be had between the notion of allowing change, and of aiming for it?
The Clinical-Communal
What emerged at the end of this journey was this: across understandings of music, people and practice, the clinical and communal are in a complex relationship. What we call the “clinical” is not a universal value. It is contextually and socially produced, often based on limiting and changing ideas of treatment or medicalisation. Conversely, what we call the “communal” benefits enormously from the rhetorical world of the “clinical”. It is increasingly professionally framed, and often makes use of clinical research literature and rhetorics for validation.
I suggested that they at least mark out the same playing field, and for that reason, they remain in an important, albeit complex, relationship. I tried to tie things up by saying they are each part of the matrix that produces what, and how, we play.
However…
It doesn’t tie things up, does it?
In fact look at me blithely invoking Carolyn Kenny (1989) with these artfully dangled words…field…play…and not even mentioning her…
…and have I even mentioned ‘performativity’ since hailing it - as scaffolding, no less - at the start of this letter?
And what of all these authoritative blocks of prose? I really make myself sound like I know what I’m talking about. How do my own words about material create material about words?
Maybe that’s where to start next time. Thanks, Carolyn, for keeping us open even now. X
References
Kenny, C. (1989). The field of play: A guide for the theory and practice of music therapy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company.
Law, J. (2004). After Method: Mess in Social Science Research. London: Routledge Publishers.
Wood, S. (2016). A Matrix for Community Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.
Stige, B. (2002). Culture-Centered Music Therapy. Gilsum, NH: Barcelona Publishers.