Hey! You’re one of those beings that possesses free will, aren’t you? Strange then, that at a high jump contest those of your kind will have leg twitches as they watch a jumper. Just at that moment, that very moment when the high jumper takes that step to jump, people in the crowd make a slight yet obvious miniscule jump. Mirror neurons at work. Don’t feel bad. So, what if your species sometimes acts in simply reflexive, highly imitative, and vicarious ways? It makes rational decisions at other times. The species appears to have free will.
 
Can’t escape what you are physically. Can’t escape more than hundreds of millions of years of neuron development. Your neuron ancestors were busy getting ready for you to twitch during a high jump. But what about all those other moments when you are definitely-positively-very-convinced-sure that you belong to a species with free will?
 
Darn! That nagging twitch. Darn! Those mirror neurons. What are you supposed to think? Now, there’s a question. Do mirror neurons play any role beyond twitching muscles? What about gathering in groups organized around a “cause”? Is that a mirror activity? What about your time spent as an “impressionable youth”? And, even after you reach brain maturity, probably sometime in your twenties according to neuroscientists, are your neurons so imprinted that independent decisions are merely reflections? I know. You would never admit that. You’re one of those beings that possesses free will, aren’t you?
 
For thousands of years your species has discussed free will. The talk bounces between fate and freedom. It occupies your literature and movies. Tragedy means fate. Comedy means freedom. Never thought of it that way? See or read a tragic story to find that choices, even those that seem to be made freely, inevitably lead to a bad ending. As you read or watch, you see the ineluctable march to a fated conclusion. It’s as though Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos are still at work, making the threads of life from the axons of neurons, connecting those threads at synapses, and cutting those threads just before they become woven into free will. The tragic hero is doomed. But in comedy, ah! The happy ending of a comic hero results from independent, creative thought that turns any set of circumstances into a statement of free will.  
 
Then, maybe I’m wrong. After all, while you empathize with a comic hero during a happy ending your mouth twitches into a smile. 

Far be it from me to question the work of neuroscientists. It’s not as though I have a working brain or something. Shouldn’t we all leave the findings of experts to experts? Then, maybe some nagging question cycles through my brain like people performing a “wave” around a stadium. Think about that.
 
Where else can a stadium wave go? It certainly doesn’t extend into the parking lots, city, or countryside beyond the confines of the arena of sports activity. So, in my brain some question keeps circling with more or less intensity, crests of attention and troughs of inattention. Am I supposed to be up or down? Wait. Here comes the crest. The neurons join in, section by section, resting at the bottom like the crowd taking seats in turn before jumping up again in an enthusiastic cheer.
 
Look to a 2016 article in Science by T. A. Engel and others who wrote “Selective modulation of cortical state during spatial attention” (Someone must have lain in a trough to miss the idiosyncratic “a” before “cortical”).* Engel and fellow researchers probed “columns of neurons” in the brains of monkeys to see how they paid attention during waves of inattentive and attentive neurons. You know what they discovered?
 
But before I answer, let me interrupt…
 
Oh! What was I writing? Yes, the researchers discovered that neurons cycle through “awake” and “sleep” stages, or focused or unfocused stages, or active and inactive stages, or…Okay, you get the point. The monkeys sometimes did and sometimes didn’t pay attention to a stimulus. And according to the online write-up about the research, “The team found that the higher and lower activity states relate to the ability to respond to the world.”**
 
Here comes that crest again: So, what I was saying was that even with regard to the space around us and the events in that space, we don’t always pay attention to the details. Duh!
 
“Not fair,” you say. "The neuroscientists demonstrated an important principle, that parts of the brain can fall at least momentarily asleep while the overall brain is awake."

​You’re right. I’m glad (trough approaching) they did the…What was I saying? (Crest approaching) yes; Yes, I’m glad they did the research. No, I know that we don’t pay attention when we don’t pay attention, even if it means we don’t pay attention to our surroundings and the stimuli in them.
 
Is that why I have missed so many details in so many places? Back to the findings: As one of the researchers reportedly states, “There is a metabolic cost associated with neurons firing all the time.” Again, duh!
 
Sorry, I don’t mean to demean their research. I’m glad they could pinpoint columns of neurons and note that they sleep and wake, use more energy or less energy, and fit into an overall pattern in the brain. Now I learned…what did I learn?
 
Point: Sometimes we learn something very specific about what we already know; and even though it makes little difference in what we know, we never know when some part of our brain will discover something very specific that might lead to something we really don’t know. There’s an approaching wave crest. Surf ’s up.
 
*T. A. Engel, N. A. Steinmetz, M. A. Gieselmann, A. Thiele, T. Moore, K. Boahen. Selective modulation of cortical state during spatial attention. Science, 2016; 354 (6316): 1140 DOI:10.1126/science.aag1420
 
** https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/12/161202101326.htm
 
 
 

In an age of scientific acoustics, we control sound in theaters, opera houses, and concert halls electronically. Not so during the 150 years or so of baroque music. Whereas acoustic engineers can tweak sound to place, baroque composers lived in a time when place tweaked sound. Thus, Giovanni Gabrieli (1556?-1612), upon hearing how sound reverberated within Venice’s St. Mark’s, composed music that took into account the building’s echoing effects. Within a large echo chamber like St. Mark’s a quick harmonic change is difficult to discern because one harmony can overlap another. Compositions meant for such large stone buildings, required a composer to account for the “reverberation time.” In contrast, today’s sophisticated acoustics allow composers and performers to make abrupt changes in both volume and harmony.  
 
If you want to get a sense of that baroque “echoing,” listen to the brass instruments in Canzon Francese  detta ‘La Carissima’ a 8 – antichi organi by Adriano Banchieri (1568-1634), a contemporary of Gabrieli.   (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BInY7cNUaY&list=PL0BevI8_8TCzUEFVYCCkaOtLIz2uO29hs&index=5 ) . Of course, not all baroque music was played in massive edifices. Smaller venues served for the sites of chamber music, and within more confining rooms, performances were a bit quieter. Crescendi and decrescendi weren’t in vogue. We seem to like more contrast, especially abrupt contrast.
 
But this isn’t about the music. It’s about you, the composer whose “music” reaches people in different venues, some large, others small. Most of us, of course, play to small houses in which abrupt changes in volume are highly noticeable. But in almost every venue, we need to account for the architecture of reverberation. Sometimes our performances reverberate. That can be both good and bad. All of us have to take into account both the purpose and the venue of our performances if we want others to appreciate our compositions.
 
Baroque musicians performed in three venues: The theater (opera house, ballet), chamber, and church. The first and third were very public; the second was quite private. The quieter performances without exaggerated crescendo and decrescendo were effective in chamber. In the larger venues, reverberation was a problem to be overcome by clever manipulation of harmony.
 
What are the acoustics of your performances? Do you find yourself having difficulty with reverberations overwhelming the sounds you wish to play? Do the walls (or the audiences) interfere with your lyrics? Do you create your compositions with the architecture and the audience in mind? Maybe we can learn something about communicating from the music of Gabrieli, Banchieri, and their contemporaries. Study the architecture before you compose.

From our earliest days we have all been cartographers. In the crib we mapped our hands, our caretaker’s face, our sleeping area. As we became more aware and independent, we mapped our dwelling in an ever-expanding worldview. From our homes we mapped outward to property, neighborhood, district, region, and world. All our mental maps bear the marks of associations: Details, thoughts, events, and emotions have all attached themselves to our mental maps. This is where I played. This is where I shopped. This is where I met my friend, or lover, or enemy. This is my route from point A to point B. This is one of my favorite spots. 
 
In our active brains mental maps change. We revise our maps because of real and false memories, rational thinking, episodic learning, enculturation, study, attitude, affinities, and by the infusion of current or changing circumstances, emotions, concepts, and attitudes. We also alter our mental maps by forgetting details, a process that makes unreliable records of our personal historical geography.
 
However flawed they are as representations of reality, mental maps still serve as templates for behavior and attitude. We act as we have mapped. In certain settings we are assertive; in others, deferential. In a place we have mentally mapped we are cognizant of a “proper attitude” associated with that place: Wildness on the beach at spring break, reverence at the worship site, trepidation in the “bad neighborhood,” sophistication in the “ritzy neighborhood,” fear near the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster.
 
The places we have mentally mapped are those whose details we learned through either direct experience or vicarious experience. I never, for example, visited Chernobyl, but I would not visit the site because I know it was contaminated during the nuclear accident. My mental map of Chernobyl comes with a warning.
 
So, how have you mapped your life? What are the attitudes you associate with the places you know either directly or indirectly? How have those attitudes been shaped by time, experience, and forgetfulness?
 
All of us believe we are meticulous cartographers until we revisit those places we originally explored. We change, and our maps change with us.