Wednesday, October 19, 2011

playing

I have just played a wonderful set of music with the Spoilers of Utopia Brass Band. The group has been put together by John Bell to play the music of jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler and some other brass band gems. I love this music. I hardly played a beat, as such, all night. I was able to range freely through the sound world of the drum kit in support of the music.

It was an excellently timed gig in relation to some persistent thought grooves I been jamming around - what is the relationship between music (or any discipline) and play? 

I keep coming back to this possible answer - master some simple fundamentals to get started, master them so you can forget them. The more "second nature" the techniques become, the more freely you can play. Up-skill as you go to make the game more sophisticated but never lose sight of playing. 

My not quite 2 year old daughter already knows how to play... it seems the essential ingredients of real play, when you are actually, really, forgetting yourself in the fun of a game, have to do with strong contrasts:

Now you see me, now you don't! 

Keep the ball and run with it or pass it to someone else. 

I have to get to there and you have to try and stop me.

It strikes me that in music we are presented with a series of contrasts that comprise the material of play, and the contrasts can be two extremes of a continuum - quiet to loud (silence/sound), slow to fast (tempo/frequency), sparse to dense (rhythm/harmony), low to high (pitch), rough to smooth (texture), relaxing to agitating (intentionality). 

The implications are profound. There are life affirming skills and attitudes to be gleaned from this process, the process being acquiring/exploring techniques and subsuming them in the service of play.





2 comments:

  1. I guess one thing you could look at, within the relationship of music to play would be the difference between play within music, and playing to music.

    I heard Norman Meehan talk about play in the context of rhythm and ictus (you don't hear that word much but I will use it anyway). Maybe this is most relavent to the ensemble which has both a drum kit player and a percussionist on stage? Talking about landing in the moment of the beat or in the accents of the beat. The analogy was to take a note on a manuscript, say a crotchet, but it doesn't really matter it could be a minim or a breve. Then look at the space between the top and bottom of the oval where it is greatest, in the (left-right) middle of the oval. This is the place where you are most likely to play the note at the right time. As you go to the extremes left or right, if you are skillful then you can still hit the beat within the 'note', but there is less margin for error. I guess you could describe this as the play in each note. It was also suggested however that in this context the oval space would be better alluded to as an eye shape, so that the relationship is exponential as you move from the beginning, toward the centre of the measure.

    I also picked up once playing piano that if the last note of the melody in any one bar is an 8th note or smaller, then it sometimes sounds better to play the chord of the next bar (which in theory lands on the first beat) in that 8th note space at the end of the preceding bar. I am guessing that this is something that at one stage old jazz masters may have done subconsciously, but it can also be achieved effectively after being made explicit.

    But what I mean by the relationship of play to music, is more like when the 'Spanish Bull' music comes over the speakers at the rugby (not sure if you have heard this) but it is a little horn riff which more typically might start a matador bull fight or something. The crowds have been cheering pretty regularly straight after, and I wonder if the rugby players are then induced to pick it up a notch?

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  2. "It strikes me that in music we are presented with a series of contrasts that comprise the material of play, and the contrasts can be two extremes of a continuum - quiet to loud (silence/sound), slow to fast (tempo/frequency), sparse to dense (rhythm/harmony), low to high (pitch), rough to smooth (texture), relaxing to agitating (intentionality). "

    I like this, because these continuum are transparent and fit on top of each other, over lap at the ends, and maybe interweaving a little bit. The other continuum I would maybe add would be energy - entropy, how much is absorbed into other products other than the purposed (be it sound). . . Like in a church organ the biggest pipe is not louder than the smallest but takes a powerful electric motor to generate enough of an air current, while the smallest pipe could be blown by a child.

    "The implications are profound. There are life affirming skills and attitudes to be gleaned from this process, the process being acquiring/exploring techniques and subsuming them in the service of play."

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