Sunday, November 11, 2012
Music and Intention, Part 1 - Full Intention
Lately, I've been very interested in the role that intention plays in making music. As a bluegrass fiddle player, I spend a lot of time thinking about improvisation. I also spend a lot of time practicing. There is a certain vocabulary of licks and scales for bluegrass fiddle, pioneered by the likes of Benny Martin and Vassar Clements. A similar vocab exists for the other instruments in a string band, too. When you hear driving bluegrass, all these licks sound great, at first. But, pretty soon, they all start to meld into an endless, homogenous stream of clichés. You could argue that the creative arrangement of these licks and scales is what constitutes the solo, and their similarity is what defines the as "bluegrass" instead of something else. You could also take into account the Chris Thile quote posted on this blog recently, and come to the conclusion that many bluegrass pickers are serving as "museum curators" of earlier musicians' work.
But I think something else at work here, which is more basic than questions of historical influences. I've been to a lot of jams where "power pickers" spend the whole time trying to outdo one another, whether overtly or covertly. The banjo player picks a tough song as quickly as possible, with lots of melodic runs and/or bends. The mandolin player smiles as he rips into a spicy cross picking passage. The underlying message is: "look how good I can play!" Some players exude a voracious need to put their unique contribution into the music all the time, no matter what else is happening. I know I fall prey to it, chopping and filling through others' solos when there is already plenty going on in the texture. As Brian Eno puts it: "you watch any group of musicians improvising together and they nearly all play nearly all the time. In fact I often say that the biggest difference between classical music and everything else is that classical musicians sometimes shut up because they're told to, because the score tells them to. Whereas any music that's sort of based on folk or jazz, everybody plays all the time."
Driving this whole approach is an intense need to engage with the music. Musicians (and listeners) want to derive an intense feeling, a primal experience. Music sometimes gives it to us. Once the feeling subsides, we strive to recreate the conditions that brought it about. How do we find the path to get back there? That's one question, perhaps the question, at the heart of what it means to be a musician (or a mystic, for that matter).
Some people try to get there by the path of effort. It's the American myth of "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". The line of thought might go something like this: "That music made me feel amazing. It was so deep. It was so good. How can I feel that again? Listen to and emulate more good musicians. Like who? Chris Thile. I wish I was like him. What's he got that I don't have? Genius, and experience. How can I be more like him? PRACTICE! Try. Log the hours."
This line of thinking goes great until it's time to take a solo. Then it becomes all about how much of yourself you can put into it. You invoke all of the transcriptions, the scale and arpeggio patterns, licks, advice gleaned from interviews, and try to execute the same tricks that Thile does.
This is a bad approach. It cuts the musician off from expressing his or her own feelings. Music is a tool to express emotion. By trying to sound like someone else, you are not expressing your own uniqueness, but playing a mental game of trying to make your playing sound like something it is not. This need, and the attempt to achieve it, is totally rooted in mechanical thinking. According to this recent article on Huffington Post, you can't think mechanically and tap into your deepest feelings at the same time. If that's true, then the approach I'm describing will never allow you to truly express what is inside of you.
Brian Eno weighed in on the tension of thinking vs. feelings in a 1979 interview:
"One or two of the pieces I've made have been attempts to trigger that sort of unnervous stillness where you don't feel that for the world to be interesting you have to be manipulating it all the time. The manipulative thing I think is the American ideal that here's nature, and you somehow subdue and control it and turn it to your own ends. I get steadily more interested in the idea that here's nature, the fabric of things or the ongoing current or whatever, and what you can do is just ride on that system, and the amount of interference you need to make can sometimes be very small."
"The corollary point is that if you're not in the manipulative mode anymore you're not quite sure actually how to measure your own contribution if you're not constructing things and pushing things in a certain direction and working towards goals, what is your function?"
To me, solos are most interesting when they are unique, full of feeling and expression, and make use of space. How can one overcome the habit of approaching solos from a "manipulative mode" and just stand aside? Perhaps by tapping deeply into one's feelings,or going to a place of dream or vision, while trying to let the phrases just come. After all the practicing, the scales, arpeggios, and licks are already there. But hours and hours logged in mechanical thinking dig a very deep hole, and it can be hard to overcome the habit of a conscious, rational approach.
I am not suggesting that musicians should neglect learning the vocabulary of their music. That is a part of the means to get where we are going. There needs to be something more than overbearing mental intentions involved in music making for it to be truly satisfying.
Music is the quest for the intense feeling that I described above - catharsis. A place not reached by mental gymnastics alone, but through the opening of the spirit or the emotions of the artist to the greater space of humanity and the universe. It is the ultimate aim of art, according to Joseph Campbell: the sublime. He quotes Webster's definition: "that which arouses sentiments of awe and reverance and a sense of vastness and power outreaching human comprehension". The search for the sublime is synonymous with being a musician, an artist, and a human being. Campbell goes on to quote Nietzsche: "Art is the proper task of life, art is life's metaphysical exercise...Art is worth more than truth."
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Good post, Ben. I am reminded of something David Grier said--when he hears a guitarist just playing a ton of 16th notes (which a lot of bluegrass guitarists do), all he can hear is the pick.
ReplyDeleteBluegrass is interesting because even though creativity is the ultimate goal, you can't expect play the music convincingly without a certain amount of grounding in the traditional stuff. Jazz is the same way--most of the great fusion players, for example, have put in many hours studying old-school bebop.
So as for my personal situation--musically, I come from a background in a lot of different styles, most of which place a high value improvisation. But now I am trying (and struggling, quite frankly) to learn to express myself within the language of bluegrass. My approach is to learn from the masters--licks and breaks from Doc Watson, Clarence White, Tony Rice, etc., and spend many hours practicing them and getting them under my fingers--but when I improvise, I rarely try to replicate those licks, in the hopes that the vocabulary will just sort of permeate my playing. Unfortunately it ends up sucking, more often than not, but I suppose my batting average is improving gradually. I'm hoping to keep my nose to the grindstone and wake up one morning sometime before I die and realize that I can actually play this stuff.
Anyway, we should do some pickin' one of these days.
Hi Paul,
DeleteThanks for stopping by. Love the Grier quote!
I think if you want to play in any genre well, it's good to get a background. Learning the history and vocabulary gives you a better idea of what you are going for. Or it seeps in, hopefully, like you said here. It's also interesting that the people who do the best job of extending that vocabulary are generally quite well versed in it (like Thile or Grier). My discussion of studying the masters in this post was a way of getting at the effect that obsessive study can have on music making - it can get really cerebral. However, I still think that study is very important. But, for me, it needs to be a balanced part of a broader approach to the path of music.
Love this Ben!
ReplyDeleteI often think about what a particular passage is trying to say as well. I understand that each genre of music utilizes musical statements in many different ways and in Bluegrass, to me, it is more interesting when someone is versed well enough to explore the solo rather than outdo one another or just show off as you are alluding to. I find a quote by Frederic Rzewski particularly fitting: "In improvised music we can't edit out the unwanted things that happen, so we just have to accept them. We have to find a way to make use of them and, if possible make it seem as if we wanted them in the first place. And in a way, we actually did want them, because if we didn't want these unwanted things to happen, we wouldn't' improvise in the first place." So yes practice, log those hours indeed...
Finding a message in the components of volume, rhythm, articulation, silence etc...that resolves somewhere between virtuosity and artistry is what attracts me to a particular artist. In virtuosity the player has unlimited ability to accomplish what they are trying to say in an artistic way, few musicians are truly great enough to have both of these gifts developed in parts equal enough to transcend the performance, which in my mind is what we are all practicing for whether we are studying licks and scales or programming MAX/MSP.
I also like the opinions of Eno here and find that they do indeed help more fully illuminate this discourse. As I am sure you know, Eno is a master of what his critics dubbed ambient rock, which in many ways is the antithesis of Bluegrass in that it is by way of drone, entrainment and minimalism expressing a particular emotion. Yet, in the always amazing smorgasbord of music both styles are only simply trying to do just that: express emotion. In Eno's world an entirely different type of musical vocabulary is necessary to express the spectrum of emotion but in terms of artistry does Ambient Rock even differ from Bluegrass in the slightest?
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts.
Hi Austin. Thanks for stopping by.
DeleteWow. Nice thoughts! The Rzewski quote will be important in the next post I'm writing about this idea: Music and Intention - Partial Intention. Mistakes are key in my thinking about this.
A balance between virtuosity and artistry. Nice. That's a great, short way to say it.
I'd never heard of entrainment, so I looked it up on Wikipedia. What a cool concept! That idea can go very deep. Perhaps that's a topic for a future conversation.
To answer your question about the difference in artistry between Ambient Rock and Bluegrass, I would argue that they are very different processes, because Bluegrass is made on traditional instruments, and may not be recorded or mediated by electronic technology or screens. Ambient Rock, on the other hand, is a different process entirely, because it relies absolutely on the processes of recording, sampling, synthesizers, and electronic amplification. In a nutshell, Bluegrass is more kinesthetic and body-based, and it knows about its roots, which reach back into the history of British Isles and American folk music traditions. Ambient Rock is based around the intellect, with roots in similar places, but they are much more obscured than in the case of Bluegrass. Thus, not just the vocabulary, but the PROCESSES are very different. In-depth artistry is possible in both, but I believe that the way the musician approaches making the music is very different, and the desired outcomes are very different in some ways. In both cases, people want a cathartic experience. But Ambient Rock revolves around creating a physical atmosphere and an emotional mood. Bluegrass, in my mind, seems to aim for it by creating a "lonesome" emotion through lyrics, or else a laudable instrumental virtuosity. Do you agree? I'm not totally sure that I'm addressing your thoughts here.
Ben, you made so many good observations that I realize I can't really contribute anything to your discussion. Some of us have been privately complaining about for years about overplaying, bragadoccio, and one-upmanship. You merely said it in a more coherent and public manner.
ReplyDeleteI see your article, however, about much more than that. To me, you've drawn a sketch map of a giant musical roundabout. There are all sorts of great avenues and tiny alleys leading off that circle. Each one of those routes can lead to street corners where we can set up our soap boxes. Some of those neighborhoods are some pleasant, others dangerous. But through each of those various paths, we can come back to the some other point on the roundabout.
One of those avenues leads to a place where we can talk about a definition of the genre. What exactly IS bluegrass? In one respect, as much as I dislike it, overplaying itself might very well be part of the definition of bluegrass. At least at certain experiential levels. After all, every bluegrass festival is typified by screams and claps from the audience after every blazing break. In public performances, listeners commonly demand efforts to show every trick in the book.
But your article also sketched roads leading to other places where we can talk about vocal interpretations. And subject matter. And chord progressions. And how we preserve the genre. And how we extend it. And how we feel inadequate with our abilities. And so forth and so forth.
For me, the primary intention of unpaid jam sessions is selfish enjoyment. In those cases, I believe in trying to play well enough to be IN the group and to follow whatever "rules" the participants co-write. From that point forward, I consciously try to restrict my playing so I can listen as much as humanly possible. I selfishly want the best seat in the house. I personally prefer subtlety and style which, in bluegrass, is often a rare commodity. How can anyone hear subtlety if everyone is playing against a wall of sound at top volume?
When performing, intention is different and needs to be focused on listeners. What have they come to hear? Can I possibly achieve that? The best of both worlds, I think, is when musicians can successfully meld those two intentions. That seems a tough, tough thing to do.
Hi Terry.
DeleteI don't have much to add to your comments. I really liked them, especially the image of the "musical roundabout".
The one thing I will say, is that I have heard many pickers echo your sentiment: "I personally prefer subtlety and style which, in bluegrass, is often a rare commodity." Which begs the question: if so many people agree, why is subtlety a rare commodity?
Ben
I like the vocabulary/language analogy. Just as we need to keep acquiring new vocabulary to express our thoughts in writing and speech, we need to acquire new musical phrases mechanistically at times. However, that is not music, it is only practice for a later time to make music. Similarly, reading others’ work and engaging with others’ ideas can inspire our own writing. However, words alone will not compose a novel, and others’ ideas will not necessarily lead to creative thought. Instead, they are just part of a pathway - there is an iterative relationship between the ideas of others and our own ideas. They can help us create, but they should be cultivated to enhance our ability to implement our own intentions. Perhaps it is easy to get so focused on practicing others' licks and implementing others' musical ideas that it gets in the way of holding back from playing all the time, listening to the other musicians, and responding to them with thought, emotion, and creativity.
ReplyDeleteThat is exactly what I was trying to say. Perhaps I didn't emphasize the point about acquiring others' language as a way of informing our own expression enough. Your last sentence sums up where I was looking: "Perhaps it is easy to get so focused on practicing others' licks and implementing others' musical ideas that it gets in the way of holding back from playing all the time, listening to the other musicians, and responding to them with thought, emotion, and creativity." Thanks for your comment!
Delete