The last of three parts on music.
We are talking about improvisation as a method for working with or being in groups – developing a set of practices that refine one’s ability to think on one’s feet and to see full opportunities in small hints (Blake’s “world in a grain of sand“). Improvisation, especially in a collaborative environment, produces material that would never otherwise arise.
And yet, it is worth pointing out that great improvisation is not simply making stuff up on the spot. Consider this from Becker’s essay:
When I used to play piano in Chicago taverns for a living, I dreaded the nights when guys who had been playing dances would come in, after their jobs had ended, to sit in with our quartet. In a traditional jam session, we would play well known tunes and everyone would have a turn to solo, improvising on the chords of the song. Why did I dread it? If there were, say, four horn players sitting in, in addition to our own, every one of them would play the same number of choruses. If the first player played seven choruses of “I Got Rhythm,” the other four would all play seven; I would have to play seven, whether I felt like it or not; the bass player, if his fingers help up, might play seven, and the drummer too; then people might start trading four bar phrases ad infinitum. That could easily add up to sixty thirty-two bar choruses of a song whose harmonies are not very rich (I was fond of songs, like “How High the Moon,” that had what we called “interesting changes,” harmonies that changed frequently and departed from the original tonality). Remember that the pianist mainly plays accompaniment for all these choruses and you can see how someone who had already played for several hours might feel like falling asleep as the procession of choruses–not very interesting ones, usually–went on interminably.It wasn’t always that bad. Once every several months, a lot of things, varying more or less randomly (although my colleagues and I often went in for theories that involved phases of the moon), would come together right, and the results would be extraordinary, we thought and felt. Usually that didn’t happen, and everyone involved was bored, not only listening to the other players’ choruses, but even to their own.Why was that? For one thing, most improvising was not quite so inventive as the language we used (and that most people still use) made out. In one way, it was in fact spontaneous, created at that moment, and not exactly like anything anyone had ever played before. But, in another way (as Paul Berliner has amply demonstrated), every one of those seven chorus solos was basted together from snippets the players had played hundreds of times before, some they had come on themselves, many slight variants of what he had heard on records (of Gillespie or Parker or Getz); among these collages, especially when it was late and we had heard it all over and over again already that night, one of us might do something that sounded to our ears really different and original, even though it might well be something we had spent a week working out in privacy rather than something invented on the spot.
Soloing in this context, the height of improvisation, does not happen out of the blue. The preconditions for excellent improvisation include:
- Practicing options and thinking about how they might work in performance
- Studying material and knowing the tradition and context of what you are doing.
- Being aware of etiquette of improvisation and understanding when to give an take.
- Being grounded in theory so that your improvised contributions make sense within the field of meaning.
In short, improvisation demands a set of highly refined personal practices that create the conditions for a perfect eight bar solo. The material payoff is miniscule in proportion to the amount of preparation, but the quality of the result can often be extraordinary, wildly out of proportion to any investment in practice.And there is another condition to take in account too, and this is tremendously overlooked. Improvisation happens on a ground which is prepared and maintained by tedious repetition and grunt work. The pianist endlessly comping chords is actually holding a harmonic space open for the freewheeling contributions from the soloist. This work is critical and it is hard. It is hard to sit through the slog and remain in the background. One wants to do something different just to keep things interesting, but to do so would change the field for the soloist. So this is the last practice of improvisation, the accompanist’s yin to the soloist’s yang: quietly maintaining the filed of play, holding space, inviting contributions and allowing people to be free while you remain both fully present and totally invisible.
In planning, facilitation and all kinds of group work, this lesson is perhaps the most important. It allows for a quiet space to be opened amidst the noise of messy brainstorming and creative endeavour. In every high performance engaged in generating amazing things, there is someone patiently comping the chords.
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Another post on music, this one inspired by a great essay on the etiquette of improvisation, by Howard Becker:
Collective improvisation–not like Keith Jarrett, where one man plays alone, but like the more typical small jazz group–requires that everyone pay close attention to the other players and be prepared to alter what they are doing in response to tiny cues that suggest a new direction that might be interesting to take. The etiquette here is more subtle than I have so far suggested, because everyone understands that at every moment everyone (or almost everyone) involved in the improvisation is offering suggestions as to what might be done next, in the form of tentative moves, slight variations that go in one way rather than some of the other possible ways. As people listen closely to one another, some of those suggestions being to converge and others, less congruent with the developing direction, fall by the wayside. The players thus develop a collective direction which characteristically–as though the participants had all read Emile Durkheim–feels larger than any of them, as though it had a life of its own. It feels as though, instead of them playing the music, the music, Zen-like, is playing them.
This is largely the experience I have making music when I gather with others to play traditional Irish tunes. In the traditional Irish session, the players sit in a circle, and call out tunes on the fly, changing from one to another as the tune sets evolve. It never takes long to get to the flow state described above, where small variations in the tune suggest other things.
When the session is really humming there is a chemistry that arises between the musicians. I have often thought of this state as one in which all the individuals in the group take a significant emotional investment in the music and place it outside of themselves, in the middle of the circle, like a glowing ball of energy that we all try to keep aloft. It feels on the one hand solid and on the other delicate and vulnerable. It can trigger powerful emotions, and I remember one session where, in the middle of the tune Over the Moor to Maggie (mp3 here), I had a sensation of 1000 suns exploding in my chest. I was weeping tears of joy at the immensely generous space that had opened up in between us.
This is one reason why I think that music, even played by people with a most elementary of technique, is a wonderful practice ground for all of the other areas of collaboration we face in life.
Tomorrow: the things you have to do to invite other to improvise.
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Every couple of weeks I sing with an evensong chorale, singing Gregorian chant and other liturgical music for a meditation service at one of our local churches. The whole experience is deeply spiritual for everyone who comes, including (and especially) the singers. Over the past few years we have focused on how to collaborate on a level that befits the experience we are trying to generate for the congregation. And it really comes down to sustaining flow.
Our director Alison Nixon, who thinks a lot about these things, usually has some wisdom to impart to us each week. On Sunday she said this:
“When you are singing you need to listen to others in much greater proportion than you are listening to yourself. Probably on the scale of 80 percent listening to others and 20 percent listening to yourself. That way you connect more fully with what is going on around you and the choir comes together.”
This small direction created a remarkable change in what we were doing on Sunday which was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus (.mp3; not us!). When a choir is learning a new piece, people can be so into their own parts that nothing comes together. But choral music is all about the unity of voices, and so it will never work unless the parts blend. Only by listening outside of ourselves can we give attention to the whole.
Music is a great practice field for exploring what it means to bring a particular individual mastery to a collaborative project. Mastery of a particular set of skills is useful in a collaborative environment only if one also has a sense of how to fit those skills into a bigger whole, so that instead of eight voices, there is only one sound.
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Rob Paterson is blogging some fierce (as they say down east) about John Holt and unschooling.
Rob quotes from Holt:
“Education, with its supporting system of compulsory and competitive schooling, all its carrots and sticks, its grades, diplomas, and credentials, now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and “fans,” driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve “education” but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and let people shape themselves.”
If you want some starting points for getting into unschooling, here are a few of my favorites:
- Google index of John Holt and unschooling
- Complete text of Deschooling Society by Ivan Illych
- John Taylor Gatto’s Seven Lesson Schoolteacher, an essay about what schools really teach. I used this essay to write about why people have a hard time experiencing actual freedom in a paper called “Open Space and the Legacy of Education” (.pdf)
[tags]John Holt, john taylor gatto, ivan illych[/tags]
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Doug Manning at Proactive Living quotes a study from the Us Department of Labor that says that there are more college graduates taking unemployment than high school dropouts. Although percentage wise, high school dropouts outnumber their college graduates, the stats point out to a myth about education: that you can buy your way to prosperity:
This is a sobering new reality of the 21st century, one that is partially of our own making. We have successfully encouraged and enabled more young people than ever to obtain a four-year degree. However, we have done little to help them evaluate the commercial value of those same credentials. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the supply of some degrees exceeds their demand, particularly for those that have no direct application in the workforce.In a perfect world, this would cause adults to stop blindly advising all capable students to “go to college”. Instead, we would encourage them to: (1) identify educational pathways that have personal meaning, and (2) evaluate the supply and demand for the educational credential they are considering.
Those of us who are autodidacts, and who are proponents of unschooling have already jumped to Doug’s conclusions. The most important thing we can offer children, whether in school or not, is an ongoing reflective conversation that facilitates their own understanding of their own learning style. This meta-learning trumps all the content we can stuff into their skulls because it encourages them to engage with the act of making meaning out of the world, a critical skill for evaluating one’s own place in society, and the contexts in which one operates. If we had more people aware of their own agency then we might have fewer people – whether high school dropouts or college grads – trapping themselves in the feudal remnants of the consumption society. We might see universities then as learning experiences, rather than the contrived rites of passage that they have become. Simply graduating with no self-awareness is not going to land you in the promised land, and in fact, dropping out of school, if it is done with the right intention, may in fact be the best choice a kid can make.
For more on intentional dropping out, visit Grace Llewellyn’s website, and check out this interview with her. A lot of the lessons in her book, The Teenage Liberation Handbook, are useful for adults too.