Playing Together – Being Together

 

Is there something unique about the experience of playing music with other people? Is there a deep philosophical and moral lesson to be learned from just banging on some drums with a few friends? I want to say ‘yes.’

 

I’m currently playing caixa (snare drum) in a samba ensemble led by a talented Brazilian musician and academic visiting the United States for a semester. She studied in the oldest samba school in Porto Alegre for three years before beginning to teach samba ensembles at a local college. Here, our ensemble is made up of several music students, musicologists, and other people from the community. And what she stresses is that samba’s main lesson comes from playing together. The music only works when we listen not to our own parts, but those of everyone else. When that happens, when in sync with other people, there is a feeling of unity, and it is this feeling that drove her to want to teach samba to others.

 

 For anyone who has never had the experience of playing music intensely with other people it is quite easy to describe, whether you believe my description or not. In essence, in the process of really ‘grooving’ with other people, in really getting what you’re playing in sync with what they’re playing, the normal self-awareness which we often call ‘consciousness’ falls away and you become one with all the others. Or, to more precisely describe the experience, all awareness of self and other disappears – one simply is with others, there is no perceived distinction. All that exists in the moment is the music. One literally has the sensation that one has become the music itself.  This inevitably comes to an end, often to the mild shock of the individual and the detriment of the music. A sense of ‘where have I been?’ or ‘how much time has passed?’ belies the being-somewhere-else of the experience. But why might this be interesting?

 

In brief, I feel that in these experiences of the loss of the self we glimpse the being-with others that is always already our mode of being in the world. We are not, to contradict Descartes, isolated minds, each our own island. Instead we are only insofar as we are with other people. We think in a language we share with other people. We conceive of ourselves in relation to others. Our world is populated largely by those close to us. The world is not of our creation, but handed to us by others already filled with meaning. And I believe that this ecstatic experience one can have while playing with other people shows us that our being is always together with other people. By presenting an extreme version of our everyday being in the world, playing together shows us the world for what it is, and can help us be better people. At least, that’s what I hope.

 

So, if you can, find someone to play some music with. Join a local ensemble. Look for a choir or a percussion group in your area and see if you don’t then see the world differently: one, and not many. 

What good is musicology?

 

To disclose a musical understanding.

 

This is the answer, in brief, to a question endlessly posed in myriad forms by discerning granting committees, well-intentioned advisors, curious colleagues, befuddled friends and family, and, not least among them, ourselves. Why do we study the musical practices of others and our own? Why do we expose an otherwise enjoyable past-time – in our case – to excruciating dissection? Would the world be any different were we to desist? I have toiled with these questions as much as any other and I wish to suggest an answer. Musicologists, in the catholic meaning of the term, are no different from others in their ability to understand music, to learn to play instruments, or even to recognize the intricate interrelations music has with other spheres of human activity. In fact a stronger argument could be made to the contrary, that musicologists are too often cloistered in their world of theory and abstraction to really get to the heart of the matter as do unreflective musicians, performers, or listeners. Their skill, and hence utility, lies elsewhere. Musicologists make explicit that which we always already knew; they help us see, hear, and feel that which was always already present in experience and practice.

 

Musical understanding, musical being is, I maintain, not something privy solely to a few Bach specialists, sitar gurus, Bird devotees, or the like. It is, rather, a species of experience common to most all humans. Perhaps the Suyá of the Amazon’s Upper Xingo Basin spend more of their time singing than we do, but music as a meaningful experience pervades our lives nonetheless. Were alien anthropologists to live among the people of the cosmopolitan West, to take one example, certainly they would note that, while particular topics rouse the interest of only a few at any given gathering – some talk on the politics of paper versus plastic bags, others the statistics of a certain Cubs sporting team – all seemed possessed of adept knowledge in the realm of what they call ‘music.’ A small majority had some training as practitioners on piano, guitar, or another common instrument; many attended musical rituals called ‘concerts’ on a semi-regular basis – some in large, grandiose halls, others in dark, alcohol-soaked chambers; all were familiar with innumerable performers, historical events of musical import, and the correct behavioral norms specific to various activities. To boot, their daily routines were saturated by mechanically-reproduced music issuing forth from radios and iPods, computers and elevators. Music was everywhere and everyone an expert they would have to conclude.   But if musical understanding is so common a good, then it cannot be in its attainment that lies the distinctiveness of musicologists. Their skill, simply or not so simply, is to allow our musical understanding to disclose itself to us; to aid us in seeing what lies right before our noses.

 

Of course a visual metaphor will not do if the phenomenon is, in the first place, aural. To appreciate what is valuable in the musicological endeavor we must first clarify what is meant by the experience in question. What does it mean to experience music as meaningful? Why do unfamiliar musics often irritate or fascinate us, or at least leave us cold? In short, what does musical understanding consist in? Perhaps two brief tableau will make clear what phenomenon we’re after here. 

 

 

1. Sunday Jam Session

The Velvet Lounge on Chicago’s near South Side, 9:30 pm. The small, dark, intimate interior – last renovated in the 1960s, when wallpaper with large-print flowers in pastel pink, orange, and green was still en vogue – is populated almost exclusively by men is ‘casual attire.’ The house band, a handful of other musicians who have come to sit in, and ten or so familiar listeners are here, chatting and babying a $1.50 Schlitz or a bottle of High Life. No one’s really here to drink  – they’ve come for the music. Kobe, Josh, and Jim (drums, bass, and piano, respectively) take the stage and the already subdued crowd ceases to talk. The altoist Dennis Winslett climbs the three wooden stairs to the stage, inaudibly asks the band if “Cherokee” is ok, and they nod. Dennis closes his eyes, puts his horn to his mouth, taps his foot, and counts quietly, “a-one, a-two, a-one, two, three…,” and they’re off. The audience members smile appreciatively, bop their heads, feet, or hands along to the beat. One furrows his brow as Dennis begins his solo with a clever repetition of one tone in an unpredictable rhythm, waiting anxiously for the pending torrent of notes we all know is to come. Another focuses on Jim’s reserved, but way-out comping style, trying to jive the chord changes in his head with those emanating from the piano’s amplifier. When Kobe’s turn comes, all concentrate on the mixture of Art Blakey’s intensity and Roy Haynes’ inventiveness this ‘young lion’ embodies. People shake their heads in disbelief, but in truth they know exactly what to believe. This is ‘sick’ jazz, as Josh would put it, as good as it gets, and everyone feels it way down inside.

 

 

2.Mom listens to the BaAka

The built-in oak desk in the kitchen of my childhood home in Iowa, 9:30 am. Having cleared away the breakfast things, I boot up the computer at my mother’s desk and open a web site created by the ethnomusicologist Michelle Kisliuk on the BaAka pygmies of the Central African Republic. I navigate to the short video clip of the Mondimba dance and call over to her, “Hey Mom, could I show you something?” wanting to see what her reaction might be. She’s removed her apron and found a lukewarm cup of coffee; she comes and sits at the desk. The footage begins. A couple dozen people in little or no dress dance in a rough circle. Straw huts can be seen in the background on the red dirt earth. In the clearing formed by the short, dark-skinned men and women is a figure covered in a full-body cone-like mask made of leaved branches tied at one end and inverted over the head of the dancer beneath. He or she twirls in one direction, then the other with no discernible regularity. The other dancers sing in seeming disharmony; the song has no obvious structure; the words are indecipherable. The video ends. Mom doesn’t know what to make of it, and, having humored me, goes off to do her morning crossword.

 

In addition to what phenomenon I’m interested in here, I hope these two scenes have provisorily shown the degree to which music is entwined in a ‘web of culture,’ to use the anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1926-2006) well-worn turn of phrase. Beginning with something as artless as music the understanding situation quickly thrusts one into cultural domains once thought truly far afield. As though we were ever innocent of its kin, we find ourselves no longer talking just about ‘music,’ but about religion, bodily practice, and sexual mores. In short, in understanding music we may begin with music, but we soon find ourselves concerned with a whole way of life. This strikes me as a fitting metaphor. The existential philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1967, b. Meßkirch), with his passion for etymology, would surely have pointed out that ‘way’ comes from the German ‘Weg’ meaning a ‘path.’ Paths are connections between points created by habit, by wearing down the earth, by impressing the ground with the regularities of our lives. As individuals pass over the same route, one following the other, day after day, the grass – at first merely trampled and sad – recedes and dies, leaving the bare earth. More time passes and the barren path eventually becomes a deep scar on nature’s visage. Thus practice marks the landscape, just as the landscape of human activity is guided by the path, leaving its traces in our talk (“That’s the way to Erlangen.”) and our things (shoes, walking sticks, backpacks). Following the path is much easier than forging one anew. To understand walking begins with the path, but quickly takes us to speech about directions and equipment for the practice. They, in turn, take us to spatial arrangement of villages, forms of instruction, the material bases of leather production, and so forth. To understand means to understand a way of life, to be fluent in a practice.

Are iPods Antisocial?

A Short History of Recorded Sound: Part II 

Many of us remember the 80s and by far one its highlights was the advent of the Walkman. Seemingly ubiquitous overnight – well, I may have begun to form permanent memories at that point, so that’s just my take on it – the Walkman took what was already a good thing, the cassette, and made it that much better. A beautiful object of industrial design, the feeling of holding an early Walkman must have rivaled that of the iPod itself. A robust mechanical box a mere few times the size of the re-recordable cassette it held within, the Walkman was the ultimate in portability, even if it didn’t yet quite fit in your pocket. While radio and portable cassette decks had split the listening audiences into tiny splinters, the teens giggling in their rooms, dads rockin’ out in the garage, and mom with her NPR pacifier always in the background, the Walkman transgressed all remaining boundaries (well, except the shower). Now listening to music was possible not only in isolation, but as a force of isolation. The street, the sidewalk, the supermarket all were transformed from necessarily public spheres into semi-private ones, where you no longer had to fear eye contact or the possibility of someone asking you a question.  

For many – especially the shy and misogynistic among us – this was a godsend. And commuters, lawn-care personnel, and bus drivers around the industrialized world were partially relieved from the drudgery of their duties. But the flip-side of this was a diminution of social interaction. The Walkman made people antisocial. Our social interactions are based on many media – body language, facial expression, clothing, even an aura or mood, if you will – but prominent among them is the auditory realm of listening and speaking. The Walkman shut this off. With Michael Jackson deftly filling out Quincy Jones’ best-laid plans in your cans, honking horns, public announcements, and, primarily, speech was filtered out. That channel was turned off. Thus, in a certain regard the iPod was nothing new. Ok, its beauty matched the minimalist sensibilities of the 90s – desperately needed as the world itself became paralyzingly complex. And, yes, it prevented us from having to carry other tapes in our hip packs. Agreed, it fit in a pocket every so easily. But, these were not differences of kind. 

What I want to argue, however, is that beyond a certain threshold differences in degree become differences in kind. That it to say, yes, the Walkman was also a portable music listening device that removed people into their own isolated worlds, but the iPod’s ubiquity has pushed the social body into a new realm: publicness is disappearing, monism is on the rise. Lest you think I want to make some sort of logical argumet here about why such a threshold exists and what proves we’ve crossed it, let me disappoint you. To follow the advice of the philosopher Bert Dreyfus, I intend to “Stick to the phenomena!” Walk down the street (if you happen to live somewhere where people do that), or sit on some form of public transportation, or go even to a local mall or cafe and what you will find today are not people, but isolated persons. The martian from outer space would report that the humans seem unable to walk around in public without little wires streaming down from their ears. Is it fashion? Is the sound of the social just too scary? What has changed here on Earth? On my last visit they still seemed to be able to talk to each other, to look at each other, to stand the being of one another. 

That this is the case, I will allow you all to confirm or deny for yourself. Certainly this phenomenon is more developed in urban areas in the industrial West and less developed elsewhere. But, I contend, the trend is inexorable, for just as the Walkman was replaced, so is the iPod on the verge of its certain death. Approximately 120 million mp3 players of various sorts are estimated to be in use around the globe. Of our world population that is relatively insignificant. But roughly 1.5 billion people carry a cell phone, making it more common by a factor of ten. Thus when all those cell phones are traded in for new music-capable ones in the coming years, the phenomenon described above will only accelerate. Perhaps the public sphere will disappear all together. A recent article in the journal Technology Review spoke of contact lenses that would allow visual information to be laid over what the wearer sees. When we all listen to our smartphones and read email off our contact lenses, hopefully our bodies will still be able to guide us along the street. Maybe we’ll be able to go door-to-door without registering the existence of even one other being. Wouldn’t that be a relief?  

Are iPods Antisocial?

 

A Short History of Recorded Sound and Practice: Part I

 

Let’s face it. Until the middle of our last, wonderful century listen to music was a social activity. Cheap radios, Walkmen, and iPods have changed that. Now we listen alone. What have we lost?

 

Of course people have always sung to themselves, whether in the shower or the brook nearby, while musicians have sat alone and played only for themselves. Music as a solitary experience was not unknown before the 20th century. It was just rare. Edison invented the first working device to record sound in 1877. His cyclinder gramophone was designed as an early answering machine – for telegraphists unable to take down multiple incoming messages at once – but, as is so often the case, its revolutionary power was felt elsewhere. Indeed it wasn’t until more than 10 years later that a bright manager of his in San Fransisco decided people might enjoy listening to sounds for entertainment that its possibilities for music were even explored. In these so-called “sound parlors” one could pay a small fee to sit around a phonograph outfitted with five listening horns and hear the sound of animals, human voices, and music too. To these earliest of recorded media listeners the novelty and strangeness was the point. A player piano was comprehensible as a mechanical device that activated the keys, but how sound was captured on a small cylinder of cardboard and wax was a pure wonderment at the turn of the century.

 

Within a decade or two of the first sound parlors cylinder and disc gramophones became public commonplaces. Found in cafes and living rooms people quickly developed a taste for listening to Caruso or Bessie Smith – the world’s finest entertainers and musicians – in the comfort of their locales. But listening still remained a social activity. Slowly replacing the piano that had been the center of social activity, people were accustomed to gathering together for musical entertainment, sharing in the experience, and, presumably, singing and dancing along.

 

What began to change this was the invention of the transistor. Building on “borrowed” 1925 patent papers from the physicist Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, researchers at Bell Labs created the first working model in 1947, and production began soon thereafter. The transistor is, in essence, just an amplification circuit, but one much smaller and durable than the vacuum tubes it replaced. This allowed for the miniaturization of electronic devices which continues to this day. But its immediate impact was on the radio. Radio had taken off during the 20s and become a major source of entertainment, especially during the years of the Great Depression. Much as they did with the piano and gramophone, people gathered together for entertainment, dancing, and socialization in homes and cafes listening to live concerts broadcast over the air waves. But, as we all know from antique stores, vacuum tube radios were large, heavy devices that needed to be plugged into the wall. Transistors allowed radios to be made small, light-weight, and battery-powered. Listening was becoming a more solitary activity.

 

Not just for stealing away to one’s room or listening in the park on a sunny day, the portable radio had a significant role in the development of a separate youth culture. When only one device was in each house and families listened together there was a tendency towards compromise. Everyone listened to the same things, and you’ll bet the elders had more say. The transistor radio circumvented this necessity allowing the younger generation to listen to their own music and radio shows, whether the parents and grandparents liked it or not. It was no longer any of their business. Be it in pairs or huddled under the bed sheets late at night, listening to music had moved out of the living room, out of the larger social realm towards the private.

 

In the next part we’ll move on to the Walkman and the iPod. Certainly though if anyone has any comments I’d love to hear them.

Does Music Disclose the Temporality of Being? Part II

In the last post I introduced the extremely basic concept of temporality as experienced by human being, what the German philosopher Martin Heidegger called Dasein. In this post I want now to turn to this concept as applied to the experience of music. It is Heidegger’s wish that we return “to the things themselves.” A rudimentary understanding of phenomenology – the method used by Heidegger to uncover the nature of being – is that it claims we too often miss what is right in front of our noses. In this case not a set of keys we’re looking for, but the very nature of our experiences. His ultimate goal was to uncover the nature of being, but not by any active means, but by letting being disclose itself to us. The process of phenomenology is one of letting things speak to us as they are in themselves. Being, as simultaneously highly abstract and yet ever-present, is extremely difficult to attend to for precisely those reasons. It is my claim, then, that at least this temporal aspect of being – that of the past and future as immanent in the present – is most easily disclosed in our experience of music.

 

Let’s think about an example. Imagine listening to a piece of music, or playing one yourself. Whether you’re familiar with the piece or the tradition your ears attend to it as its patterned sound reaches you. (I’m assuming here that you’re listening to it as music, and as such you’re assuming that it is intentional and patterned.) You note as many aspects as you can, sounds, timbres, rhythms, phrases, anything that might be recognizable as an entity. When you find it you note it mentally. As you build an inventory of object in the sound you have a database against which you can reference the sound of the present, and given the successions heard in the past you hear new sounds and make guesses about where the music is going, what a phrase will do, how a rhythm will end. Thus, even in our brief example we see how, in listening to music, our experience may remain in the present – it can’t do otherwise – but our attention is split between the past and the future. The past gives the present meaning, tells us what we’re hearing, and allows us to listen for the future. But the future remains always unsure – at least until the piece ends – and thus we keep guessing what will come of our present.  

 

The usefulness of this aesthetic attention to music, then, is that is listening to music and letting our temporal experience of music speak to us, we gain insight into the way Dasein always already is. We are better attuned to how our lives are always in the present, but always constituted by the past, and oriented toward a future. Just as music is a pleasing tension between the known and the unknown, ever on a knifes edge, so is our being at once sure and unsure. Perhaps music lets us hear our being more clearly.

Does Music Disclose the Temporality of Being? Part I

One feature of Dasein according to Heidegger’s Being and Time is that, in contrast to the other two kinds of being, Dasein – the kind of being that people have – stands in a unique relation to time. Both objects of the universe and the equipment of our world (the other two kinds of being – Vorhandensein and Zuhandensein) exist in time, they were in the past and will continue to be in the future, but their being is not concerned with either; their being isn’t directed towards the not-now. People, on the other hand, are quite different. They are, to use Sartre’s rather obtuse expression, “not what they are and what they are not.” That is to say, for us the past and the future are always immanent in the present.   

 

The past is an issue for us because of our insistence upon the unity of the subject. Rocks and hammers are quite happy whether we think them unitary or not, but people/Dasein is convinced of its persistence through time. Bluntly put, we take “I” to stand for something that is the same now as it was when I was a child and that will remain so (at least) until my death. But this self is not stable or unchanging. We grow, experience new things, change our minds, move to new countries, even our very cells are replacing themselves constantly. Nonetheless, the past is for us constitutive of the present. Our being is at once now and simultaneously past; we are not what we are, but what we were. 

 

The case of the future is different, but similarly straight forward. Demonstrated by our willing of things to happen, our orientation towards doing things in the world, our outlook is also always ahead of itself. Except when reflecting on the past or when forcing ourselves to be truly conscious of the present our focus remains primarily not in the now, but in the future. We view our selves as projects moving towards some goal, be it so grand as becoming a world-renowned novelist or making dinner for the evening. From big to small our intentionality towards the world and towards ourselves is in the not-yet,  in the will-be.

 

That this is the case can not be proven in any scientific or logical sense. I can not write out a proposition regarding Dasein’s orientation towards temporality, but it can be disclosed. In the Heideggerian phenomenological tradition, if we pay sufficient attention to the phenomena themselves they will show themselves as they are in themselves. Proof can only come from hearing of similar conclusions reached by other people. Thus, if you can not sympathize with the explanation given above then you will have difficulty following the argument any further. But if this realization strikes you as strange, then that needn’t be cause for concern. Phenomena are not hidden from us, but we are all too often insensitive to their being as they are. We are too caught up in our own habits of the world to pay them sufficient attention. This is the core of the realization one has when walking around one’s neighborhood and paying real attention to the buildings, trees, etc. They have not changed, but we are shocked to see all that is there, missed because of lack of attention. I will leave it there for now. In the next part I want to move from Dasein – our way of being – to music as something that discloses this temporal aspect of being. 

Notes on Musical Understanding

 

 

1. Over Christmas (2007) I spent many of my morning hours reading and contemplating a seemingly rather obscure topic: what does musical understanding consist in? What is it to ‘get’ a piece of music and what is it to fail. Does it even make sense to ask this question? Must we retreat to the weak multi-culti view that everyone has their own understanding of music and that’s just fine. Philosophers of music – that rare breed – has taken this as one of their central questions over the past twenty years and some progress has been made, but the answers remain inchoate. It is not my purpose here to fill that lacuna – that I’m trying to do in a longer work, which I may share here later – but to ask some of the recurring questions and outline central areas of discourse. These are notes, thoughts, and, ultimately, a request for input.

 

 2. Understanding music is equivalent to getting its meaning. In understanding music we understand its meaning. Thus what understanding consists in is based on a conception of musical meaning. Ethnomusicologists have, in my opinion, the most interesting things to say on this topic as their view of the subject is necessarily so catholic. The historical musicologists and philosophers of music alike seem unaware of music outside the western European art tradition (except for a small cabal young enough to deal with rock music) and this myopia severely limits the scope of their thinking. Musical practices (musics, as many ethnomusicologist prefer) are each so very distinct that any inductive reasoning from such a small sample inevitably gives rise to dubious results. If we restrict ourselves to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms then coming to grips with a form of universal human practice will be as difficult as surmising the basics of human taste by visiting McDonalds, Wendy’s, and Burger King. 

 

The simplest and most reliable entry to this question is dictated by Ludwig Wittgenstein – one of the 20th century’s most significant philosophers – in his statement, Don’t think, but look! Musics are always practices; they are collections of sounds, actions, bodies, habits, instruments, dances, behaviors, and beliefs all mixed together into a multivalent happening and doing that we can see, hear, and experience for ourselves. To withdraw to the study and contemplate the meaning of music is to mistake meaning for thought. Meaning is in the world and so it is there that we must seek it. Now ethnomusicologists may not phrase their thinking quite this way, but their actions speak quite clearly. Still today, after more than two decades of sustained critique of the traditional ethnographic method as colonialist, imperialist, and just plain exploitative, no one has found away around the necessity of living among a musical practice in order to learn its ways. Thus, most scholars spend at least one full year in “the field” observing music making, learning to play an instrument themselves, noting the wider cultural, social, religious, economic, and gender practices, and boning up on the people’s history. The result of this is a fluency with a musical practice – albeit often rather rudimentary – that can be likened to basic fluency with a language. Understanding a music is like being fluent in a language.

 

3. Much has been made over the years of the similarities and differences between music and languages and I have no desire to repeat them here. It will suffice to say that anyone who thinks for more than 60 seconds about the platitude, “Music is the universal language,” can spot a leak or three. But however weak the similarities concerning how music means, the similarity of fluency seems to hold up. The philosopher Jerrold Levinson, to name but one person who comes to mind, has called this musical literacy. That is to say a piece of music doesn’t exist in isolation. Even when I sit down to listen to it by itself it is always heard in relation to other hearings of other pieces from the same tradition or in contrast to other, distinct traditions. But in the former, more usual case, it is by learning what to listen for, how to listen that I can knowingly, understandingly listen.

 

Think of listening’s first steps. Like those of the first words in a new language, they are awkward, one is unsure what is important, what should be attended to, what is considered a move, what a resolution. Nietzsche wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “Hearing something new is embarrassing and difficult for the ear; foreign music we do not hear well.” And here we are really at the root of the matter. Music, as a human practice, is largely arbitrary – in the sense that it could be otherwise – and largely learned – in that knowledge must be gained through socialization and experience. Thus, to understanding a music one must have spent a sufficient amount of time in the world of that music. One must learn to feel at home, to dwell, to know the way about to understand what a music is.