improvising guitar: Search results for society in miniature

Before a note of music has been played, the building and its mode of organization have created among those present a set of relationships, which are a microcosm of those of the larger… society outside its walls.

Small, 1998, p. 36.

Thanks to sjz and Peter, I got myself into a complete twist a while ago. The problem revolved around words like ‘diplomacy,’ and in retrospect that entry was prescriptive and consequently, ironically enough, totalitarian. Even in retracting my implicit prescriptions, however, there are still problems.
Many of these problems, I think, come from my gung-ho attitude to language. Some of the confusion stems from using ‘sociological’ terms such as ‘compromise’ and ‘diplomacy’ in discussing life on the stage, but the serious issues come, I think, from my use of the expression ‘society-in-miniature’ to describe the acts and relationships that take place on, and constitute, the stage.
Let me take that latter point first. I think, in retrospect, ‘society-in-miniature’ is, at best, a kludge, and, at worst, a discursive liability. It implies that the social (the world off-stage) is clearly separate from the stage. Consequently, what happens on the stage can only mirror the off-stage world.
So that’s what I’ve been saying all this time….

Oh, crap.

I’ve been implying that there’s some hard-edged border between the constitutive and the discursive; between the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’; between the off-stage and the stage.

Pure, 100%, distilled, idiotic garbage.

And, as a result of using this short hand—‘society-in-miniature’—I’d been implying a causal relationship between the macro-social and the micro-social (something that I had already disputed).
Okay, if I were smarter, what could I have said?

Stage as the place where the artist can be and function in any way the artist wants…. Being real…. A place to act 'as if' at the very least.
Stage as place where audience can be as concerned with the world as little or as much as they want.

sjz, Dec-6-2006

The stage is not separate from the social. The stage is not (necessarily) a fictionalized version of the off-stage world (there’s no ‘as if’). On the other hand, the off-stage world is no more real (non-fictional) than the stage. If I use ‘sociological’ terms to describe the stage it is not to make the stage mirror society, but because the stage, and what happens on it, is sociological: it is the (dis)orderings and (de)structurings of agents and relationships.

What happens in a ‘theatre’ or other ‘performance space’ is important in the context of the world ‘outside’. They exist in some sort of dialectical relationship with each other, rather than in separate compartments.

Frost and Yarrow, 1998, p. 3.

However, to put on my prescriptive hat back on for the moment, I don’t think that we do ourselves any favors by claiming any kind of political innocence on stage.

references:

Frost, Anthony, and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan).
Small, Christopher (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press).

Sunday, November 05, 2006

structur(e|ing): towards a music(ology) of verbs

I’ve briefly touched on the subject of ‘structure’ (October 11th and October 3rd). In regard to structure imposed from outside, as I said in limits and boundaries: wikiality that

I don’t believe that this particular understanding of ‘structure’ is helpful to the practice of improvisation. Nor do I have much affinity with the desire for this ‘structure.’

We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects.

Head to your library and look up musical structure or form and you are likely to come away with ideas of a framework around which the musical ‘surface detail’ somehow sits (although why it should generally be that way around, I’ve never understood). ‘Surface detail’ is noise to be filtered out by the analyst out to excavate the essential; never mind that the details might contain, in the terms of the vernacular, an iconic lick, the hook, swing or shuffle. It’s appropriate that traditional analysis, stemming from West European orthodoxy, should gravitate towards glorifying the inanimate musical skeleton, rather than tendons and muscle, seeing everything else as extraneous fat. This is, after all, a reductive tradition of scholarship and pedagogy with a hegemonic commitment. A tradition that is suspicious of the body, of real-time movement, and of the possibility of creation taking place during performance or reception. Structure and form, in this context, can only be teleological, it cannot exist either retroactively or in real-time. Traditional analysis sees objects; it has difficulty seeing processes.
John Law describes this difficulty. Here’s my paraphrase:

Perhaps it is obvious that the musical is a process? Perhaps it is something that we knew already? It sounds obvious, but I’m not certain about this, for large parts of musicology have found it difficult to handle processes. Perhaps this is a symptom of the desire to cleave to the purity of order and avoid the uncertainties of ordering. For one way of putting the point is to note that musicologists, like many others, tend to prefer to deal in nouns rather than verbs. They slip into assuming that musical structure is an object, like the scaffolding round a building, that will stay in place once it has been erected.

my paraphrase of Law, 1994, p. 14.

John Law was in fact talking about the social. Substitute ‘social’ for ‘musical,’ ‘sociology’ for ‘musicology,’ and ‘sociologists’ for ‘musicologists,’ and you’ve reconstructed the original text. (He is also defining sociologist broadly to encompass all of us who have a stake in how society functions (or not) and, here, I use musicologist in a similarly broad manner. We are, in a sense, all musicologists.)
Let me return to this idea of group improvisation as society in miniature. Traditional macro-sociology tends to see a top-down, ideology or system driven society. But is this the best way of accounting for social forces? Can we, for example, hold on to this top-down, monolithic ideological drive as being responsible for the recent anti-war demonstrations in which disparate groups including white bourgeois liberals, radical socialists, disenfranchised black activists, left-wing jewish pacifists, secular feminists and conservative muslim groups temporarily and uneasily made an alliance?
Similarly, traditional musicology tends to see a top-down, composition-centered structure. But is this the best description of the musical? Do the assumptions underlying this view point hold up to scrutiny? Are interpreters neutral? Is performance transparent? Are audiences passive? Is the composer the creator? Is structure pre-ordained? Can we hold on to this top-down, monolithic composerly process as being responsible for collective music making practices such as group improvisation (or the relationship between instrumentalist and instrument)?
Leaving aside, for the moment, whether this form of analysis—looking for the essential structure (object) in a piece of music (another object)—produces valid results, what are the political implications of it? If structure is unified, monolithic, has a single source—the composer or the score—and is located in the discorporate, non-real-time ‘music itself’ (Cusick, 1999, pp. 480–482, 491–496)—then difference and dissent can only express itself as noise (that should be filtered out by the analyst). Or, more likely, the other way around: West European orthodoxy assumes that dynamic, heterogeneous, interactive social networks cannot be structured, and thus concludes, I believe erroneously, that the only kind of structure must be unified, fixed, consistent and uni-directional.

We tend to see structure and form as things—as objects. But there’s another way to understand these words. Instead of seeing them as nouns, we can think of these as verbs; we can think of structuring and forming.

Thinking about structure as something we do has implications for the idea of group improvisation as society in miniature. Society (and structure) is, as Bruno Latour argues, “not what holds us together, but what is held together” (Latour, 1986, p. 276). There are some interesting possibilities in thinking about difference, dissent and resistance in this model (as well as some worrying libertarian implications).
Thinking about this bottom-up impulse in improvisation, this performative structure, it’s interesting to revisit the quote I started this blog with: “…Avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be” (Frost and Yarrow, 1990, p. 3).

There are racial, colonial, and gender dimensions to the orthodox West European approach to analysis, but that will have to wait for another post….

I may be shot down in flames for this, but… I sometimes wonder if the difference between composerly and performerly notions of structure are analogous to, say, how Creationists and Darwinists view biological organisms and ecosystems. The former observes the commonality and diversity, simplicity and complexity, and sees design, and concludes, well, yes, of course there is a Creator. The latter observes the same commonality and diversity, simplicity and complexity, and finds the results of natural selection. The former posits a top-down, engineered world crammed full of authorial intent, while the latter assumes a bottom-up, performative world teeming with emergence.

references:

Cusick, Suzanne (1999), ‘Gender, Musicology, and Feminism’ in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Frost, Anthony, and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan).
Law, John (1994), Organizing Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell).
Latour, Bruno (1986), ‘The Power of associations’ in John Law (ed) Power, Action and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge? (London: Routledge).

updates:

11–13–06: Patch in Cusick (1999) reference.
11–30–06: Correct editing errors from the last update.
02–05–07: Correct a reference.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

group improvisation: a question of leader(ship)

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Something interesting happened in class this week. The proverbial genie is out of the bottle, and I’m not quite sure how I’m going to handle this. I don’t mean to sound negative; I’m fascinated that this turned up, and, anyway, we’d probably have to deal with this issue at some point… I just hoped that that some point would have been some point in the future (like, quite a few months into the future).

The word that encapsulates this issue is leader(ship).

Don’t see the problem?
Well…
That is one loaded word.
Did I say loaded? I meant there’s full-scale, über-density, hyper-congestion embedded in that little word.
Do we mean commander? The executive? Administrator or manager? The MC? Or the referee? The prompter? Possibly we mean trailblazer or the pathfinder. That who-is-followed, perhaps? (Tautological, I know.) Or might we mean coach, midwife, guide, sage?
I suppose because of my own views about group improvisation, and the particular practices and traditions I operate in and around of, I think, naively, that I was expecting this issue to be inconsequential to the students as well.
There you have it. The teacher was spectacularly wrong, flummoxed, fill-in-blank.
Okay. Now the bright side of all of this is the idea, unspoken as such by the students themselves but articulated nonetheless, that group improvisation is in some way society-in-miniature. A big topic that I need to return to in the future, but let me say this much here: Somewhere hiding behind the question of the leader(s) and of leadership was that notion that we can parse, discuss, and maybe understand collective improvisation sociologically. That maybe there is no difference between creative, musical interaction and social interaction in general.
When asked to think of the social or the political, we maybe instinctively think of the macro-social, the party-political, of contests, votes, elections, and ‘tough decisions.’ Of leaders and leadership. (And I think this was what the students were doing.) But the social and the political may also be the small, the intimate, the informal, the ad-hoc. Perhaps all we have to do, for the time being, is to imagine social contexts in which the concept of leadership is peripheral, or even irrelevant.

Saturday, January 13, 2007

2007: improvising guitar new year’s resolution

Well, it’s nice to finally be back here. I would have returned sooner except for having to finish off that ‘real’ writing task, and then having to fish for funding (I don't expect anyone became a musician because of their love of bureaucracy and red tape). Anyway, I’m much better now, so let me gently break into 2007 with not, I think you’ll be glad to hear, another list, but a proposed outline of what I’ll be writing about….

Okay, as far as pedagogical topics go, I’ll continue with the studies in playing in position (with, despite my reservations, an excursion into talking about posture), with the eventual goal of returning to natural harmonics (which was really the exciting stuff), and then clusters.
In addition, I want to open a thread on group improvisation. Specifically, I’ll start with a set of schemes for quartet. These schemes hover somewhere between exercises, training and tactics. Nothing particularly original or earth shattering, but I have found these schemes useful, and they bring up, for me, problems of conceiving interactions and issues of pedagogy.
On the flip side, I will continue to discuss (or at least try and find out how to discuss) solo improvisation. (I say “on the flip side”, but of course that’s a false dichotomy.)
Back on sociological ground, I want to tackle in more detail the idea that improvisation is ‘society-in-miniature’. Topics that I hope to address are utopias and the distinctions between the micro-social and the macro-social. I got into a bit of a twist in regards to ‘diplomacy’, and I hope Peter, sjz and others will continue to keep me on my toes, and prevent me from making broad generalizations.
I also want to flesh out the subject of the body. Recently, MLM, PE and myself, among others, have got ourselves into rhetorical funk trying to talk about bodies in the context of music and performance. It’s tricky to avoid that neo-Cartesian impulse (our language conspires to reinstate that distinction and that hierarchy), but bodies, as Butler might say, surely do matter.

I’m sure more stuff will present itself as the year ambles on (I hesitate to say ‘progresses’), but as a starting point, these suit me fine… for the moment (and that’s the important thing).

Friday, December 01, 2006

society-in-miniature: diplomacy

Group improvisation is much more (a performative, structuring) diplomacy (including the cyborg variety) than the ordering of truth. It is not so much about empathy (and thus speaking on behalf of ‘those without voices’), but creating a social environment in which no one can be voiceless.
Let me return again to the quote that I opened this blog with:

What happens is what happens; is what you have created; is what you have to work with.

Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow (1990), Improvisation in Drama (London: MacMillan), p. 2.

However much we may desire the world to be a certain way, however much we want others to be like us, to like us, and live like us (although without coming over our borders for fear of replacing us), we cannot do this without one party doing violence onto another.

…avoid the reflex of trying to make it into somthing you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be.

ibid. p. 3.

To improvise in a collective context requires you to understand your own desires, understand that others have autonomous desires, yet know that together we share the same space and time—the same resources. We all have to compromise. We need to understand that the results may not resemble anything that you, or anyone else, initially dreamed of. The resulting settlement may be inelegant, ugly, and may have to be renegotiated periodically. The result will probably be a place of conflict and mutual misunderstandings, but violence done by one against the other can nevertheless be minimized.
If this sounds negative, it’s maybe because we were all brought up with the Field of Dreams notion that we will, despite insurmountable barriers, overcome and achieve our desires. It’s a classic story. Unfortunately, some of those insurmountable barriers may be people and their own dreams and desires. Accept that particular story as just a fairly tale (enjoy it, or not, for what it is), and you will find that there are richer, more complex, confusing, contradictory stories to be experienced in its place.