Monteverdi
“Monteverdi’s scores reveal a worldview where his role as composer was less central, where the oral tradition still mattered and the ephemerality of music was a given. Mahler’s worldview considers the composer a creative god and the score his granite tablets, awaiting the interpreter prophets. The incompleteness of the score is clearly a matter of frustration for Mahler. Yet incompleteness is embraced by Monteverdi—the mark of his greatness, humbly viewing humanity as a cooperative condition. Rather than handmaidens for a composer, interpreters are a composer’s collaborative partners.
— Yuval Sharon, A New Philosophy of Opera (New York: Liveright, 2018)
Meredith Monk: The Monteverdian Spirit
“That notion has inspired the most interesting contemporary composers, even if it places their work in a precarious circumstance. Meredith Monk’s ATLAS was written on the voices and the bodies of her original cast, and until my production in 2019, a fully notated score did not exist. Making a score was an essential part of ensuring the work’s longevity, but the process wasn’t easy for Monk, since the act of pinning down a performance in notation is antithetical to the spirit of her work.”
— Yuval Sharon, A New Philosophy of Opera (New York: Liveright, 2018)
Robert Ashley: the Monteverdian Spirit
"The collaborative aspect of the work follows principles I have used for many years in search of a new operatic style. The collaborators are given almost absolute freedom to develop characterizations from the textual and musical materials I provide. . . . The collaborators in all aspects of the work are free to interpret, ‘improvise’, invent and superimpose characteristics of their own artistic styles onto the texture of the work. In essence, the collaborators become ‘characters’ in the opera at a deeper level than the illusionistic characters who appear on stage."
- Robert Ashley (composter as quoted in: Sharon, Yuval. A New Philosophy of Opera
A Relational Universe
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) conceives reality as a collaborative process in which pure potentialities (eternal objects) become actual only through finite, time-bound decisions made by actual entities, and in which Beauty emerges as the mutual adaptation of form and feeling. His philosophy simultaneously offers a way of thinking about music as a living process rather than a fixed object—an art in which patterned form and felt emotion are realized only through performance and participation. The music does not reside in the score as an autonomous object, nor in the sovereign intentions of the composer, but in the event of enactment itself: in the dynamic interplay of notation, performers, bodies, spaces, listeners, and momentary decisions.
In A New Philosophy of Opera, Yuval Sharon proposes that Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), often regarded as the first great opera composer in the Western tradition, composed scores that embody a distinctly Whiteheadian spirit - or, to put the matter in more historical terms, Whitehead's philosophy has a Monteverdian feel to it.
Like Whitehead's realm of eternal objects, Monteverdi's scores are not overly determined and intentionally leave space for the imagination, judgment, and creativity of performers. Sharon further argues that contemporary composers Meredith Monk (born 1942) and Robert Ashley (1930–2014) exemplify this same Monteverdian spirit, emphasizing performance as a collaborative act that does not merely execute a score but adds something genuinely new.
Monteverdi composed both religious and secular music, and there is no need to read him as mirroring Whitehead's notion of God. Nevertheless, read through Whitehead’s metaphysics, the musical practices of collaborative composers such as Monteverdi, Monk, and Ashley disclose a vision of God who, while possessing wisdom exceeding that of the world, nevertheless composes with the world in an ongoing process of improvisation rather than exercising unilateral control. The very soul of the universe, too, is a poet of the the world, says Whitehead, and perhaps also, in this sense, a composer in the Monteverdian spirit.
In A New Philosophy of Opera, Yuval Sharon proposes that Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), often regarded as the first great opera composer in the Western tradition, composed scores that embody a distinctly Whiteheadian spirit - or, to put the matter in more historical terms, Whitehead's philosophy has a Monteverdian feel to it.
Like Whitehead's realm of eternal objects, Monteverdi's scores are not overly determined and intentionally leave space for the imagination, judgment, and creativity of performers. Sharon further argues that contemporary composers Meredith Monk (born 1942) and Robert Ashley (1930–2014) exemplify this same Monteverdian spirit, emphasizing performance as a collaborative act that does not merely execute a score but adds something genuinely new.
Monteverdi composed both religious and secular music, and there is no need to read him as mirroring Whitehead's notion of God. Nevertheless, read through Whitehead’s metaphysics, the musical practices of collaborative composers such as Monteverdi, Monk, and Ashley disclose a vision of God who, while possessing wisdom exceeding that of the world, nevertheless composes with the world in an ongoing process of improvisation rather than exercising unilateral control. The very soul of the universe, too, is a poet of the the world, says Whitehead, and perhaps also, in this sense, a composer in the Monteverdian spirit.
Music
Alfred North Whitehead had a Platonist side. He understood the universe as including pure, timeless potentialities that are real and objective—more than mere human projections—yet not actual until they are taken up and realized through the concrete decisions of finite beings. He called these potentialities eternal objects and distinguished between two kinds. Eternal objects of the objective species concern potentials for spatial, quantitative, and extensive relations—shape, pattern, proportion, intensity—while eternal objects of the subjective species concern potentials for feeling: emotions, moods, tonalities of experience that creatures may embody as they respond to the world. These subjective eternal objects are not feelings themselves but possibilities for feeling, awaiting realization in lived experience.
The genius of music lies in its distinctive capacity to actualize these two kinds of possibilities in combination: patterned relations of pitch, rhythm, harmony, and timbre that exemplify objective eternal objects, together with lures for feeling that invite joy, sorrow, tension, release, intimacy, or awe. Music does not merely represent emotions, nor does it merely arrange sounds in abstract patterns; as performed and heart, it offers structured possibilities that become emotionally actual through performance and listening. In this way, music becomes a site where Whitehead’s metaphysics is enacted rather than explained—a living medium in which objective form and subjective feeling meet, and in which potentiality becomes actuality through collaborative, time-bound experience.
This is the case not only in music as heard but also in music as danced and rendered into narrative form. In opera and musical theatre, for example, musical structures are inseparably entwined with bodily movement, gesture, character, and story, so that possibilities for feeling are intensified, differentiated, and shared across a community of performers and listeners. Here the score functions less as a fixed object than as a field of potentialities—awaiting enactment—through which music, movement, and narrative together become occasions of experience, each performance a fresh concrescence of form, feeling, and meaning. The performers and the listeners/viewers 'actualize' the possibilities. They participate and help complete whatever possibilities for beauty is available in the score, which itself functions as a prompt. And in the case of improvisational music, they help create the score. So it is with the world and, so Whitehead suggests, with the very soul of a living universe, with God.
The genius of music lies in its distinctive capacity to actualize these two kinds of possibilities in combination: patterned relations of pitch, rhythm, harmony, and timbre that exemplify objective eternal objects, together with lures for feeling that invite joy, sorrow, tension, release, intimacy, or awe. Music does not merely represent emotions, nor does it merely arrange sounds in abstract patterns; as performed and heart, it offers structured possibilities that become emotionally actual through performance and listening. In this way, music becomes a site where Whitehead’s metaphysics is enacted rather than explained—a living medium in which objective form and subjective feeling meet, and in which potentiality becomes actuality through collaborative, time-bound experience.
This is the case not only in music as heard but also in music as danced and rendered into narrative form. In opera and musical theatre, for example, musical structures are inseparably entwined with bodily movement, gesture, character, and story, so that possibilities for feeling are intensified, differentiated, and shared across a community of performers and listeners. Here the score functions less as a fixed object than as a field of potentialities—awaiting enactment—through which music, movement, and narrative together become occasions of experience, each performance a fresh concrescence of form, feeling, and meaning. The performers and the listeners/viewers 'actualize' the possibilities. They participate and help complete whatever possibilities for beauty is available in the score, which itself functions as a prompt. And in the case of improvisational music, they help create the score. So it is with the world and, so Whitehead suggests, with the very soul of a living universe, with God.
Beauty
Whitehead proposes that the universe unfolds within an all-inclusive life—God—who prehends these eternal objects in their full range and relevance, ordering them as lures for becoming while never coercing their realization. Actuality arises only when finite creatures (concrescing subjects) respond, creatively and selectively, to these lures and to lures coming from other creatures, In this sense, reality itself is cooperative, improvisational, and incomplete until embodied—a metaphysical vision that resonates strongly with what might be called the Monteverdian spirit: an openness to indeterminacy, an embrace of embodied participation, and an understanding of form as something that comes fully into being only through performance, response, and relational enactment.
Indeed, at the very outset of creation—and for Whitehead, there is no single outset, since the universe has no absolute temporal beginning—the divine reality orders the eternal objects in a spontaneous act, rendering them capable of becoming relevant for actualization by worldly creatures in due season. This ordering is a primordial decision made by God and occurs within the divine life itself, apart from God’s concrete relations with any particular world.
Yet this side of God remains incomplete until the world responds by actualizing these possibilities, whether in desirable or undesirable ways, thereby bringing into existence a world that can be felt. This divine feeling of the world—which unfolds in time rather than standing outside it—is what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God. It is not timeless but infinitely temporal, or everlasting. If we imagine God as a composer, God does not create or impose an overly determined score; rather, the divine score is general and open-ended, awaiting the world’s concrete realizations of possibility. The world, in this sense, is not a passive performer but a genuine collaborator with God in the ongoing composition of reality.
In moments when this fullness emerges, and insofar as it does, the result is what Whitehead calls Beauty. This Beauty is something the world can create and also something in which the world can participate. In Adventures of Ideas, speaking of finite actualities as “occasions of experience,” Whitehead writes:
Indeed, at the very outset of creation—and for Whitehead, there is no single outset, since the universe has no absolute temporal beginning—the divine reality orders the eternal objects in a spontaneous act, rendering them capable of becoming relevant for actualization by worldly creatures in due season. This ordering is a primordial decision made by God and occurs within the divine life itself, apart from God’s concrete relations with any particular world.
Yet this side of God remains incomplete until the world responds by actualizing these possibilities, whether in desirable or undesirable ways, thereby bringing into existence a world that can be felt. This divine feeling of the world—which unfolds in time rather than standing outside it—is what Whitehead calls the consequent nature of God. It is not timeless but infinitely temporal, or everlasting. If we imagine God as a composer, God does not create or impose an overly determined score; rather, the divine score is general and open-ended, awaiting the world’s concrete realizations of possibility. The world, in this sense, is not a passive performer but a genuine collaborator with God in the ongoing composition of reality.
In moments when this fullness emerges, and insofar as it does, the result is what Whitehead calls Beauty. This Beauty is something the world can create and also something in which the world can participate. In Adventures of Ideas, speaking of finite actualities as “occasions of experience,” Whitehead writes:
“Beauty is the mutual adaptation of the several factors in an occasion of experience. Thus in its primary sense Beauty is a quality which finds its exemplification in actual occasions: or put conversely, it is a quality in which such occasions can severally participate.” (p. 252)