Klarinet Archive - Posting 000834.txt from 2000/12

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Performance [was, Peplowski continued]
Date: Fri, 15 Dec 2000 07:27:50 -0500

On Wed, 13 Dec 2000 22:00:59 GMT, I said:

> I think that there's a useful way to think about creativity that is a
> bit different from your [Mark Gustavson's] usage.

[snip]

> .. One somehow lets a wiser, unconscious part of oneself take over,
> and instead of asking what one should do and then doing it, one 'asks'
> (in a more metaphorical use of the word) what's required *at the same
> moment as producing the answer*.
>
> Mozart said he simply wrote down the tunes he heard in his head that
> most pleased him, and that *he* had nothing to do with it. I'd like
> to think that when everything is a-flowing, we -- jazz players and
> 'classical' players alike -- simply play what pleases us, and we have
> nothing to do with it either. That we can't be Mozart doesn't mean
> that we aren't being creative, in this sense.

And Jennifer wrote:

> > As for Tony's argument that performers are creative in a certain
> > sense, I'm not sure I understand completely. It seemed to me to be
> > a bit of a stretch at first, but it worked once I divorced my
> > thinking from creativity only in the sense of composing. The
> > situation of performers then appeared to be on a rather fuzzy
> > borderline between creativity in terms of composers and the
> > imagination to show how pieces "live" another person referred to
> > earlier. But then, my thought went full circle and made me ask if
> > composing wasn't the imaginative assembly of many preexisting
> > isolated elements to synthesize a "new" pattern? Thus performance
> > would be analogous in that it is the imaginative assemblage of a
> > performer's previous experiences and knowledge of music to
> > synthesize a new performance.
>
> Blech, that was as clear as mud and I don't think it is even
> reclaimable. Unfortunately, I can't try now as I must return to
> studying for an Ochem final this Saturday. Right now, I think the
> above should be taken as some idle unrefined thoughts.

As nobody really has a clear picture of what goes on when we write
music, or solve puzzles, what you say here is, I think, as good as any
way of putting over the essential idea. There's an interesting book by
Douglas Hofstadter called Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies, in
which he has a good go at picking apart some of the processes that may
go on when we solve simple puzzles. I recommend it.

But a better way of going ahead for us, I think, is to think of the
matter in the way that Gregory Bateson put it in his essay, 'Style,
Grace and Information in Primitive Art', reprinted in 'Steps to an
Ecology of Mind'. In it, the concept of 'Grace', and what it may mean,
is central.

Five or six years ago I wrote a couple of pieces for a mailing list
called 'Taking Children Seriously', which was about non-coercive rearing
of children. In the course of the argument, I tried to say something of
how Bateson's ideas fitted in with the experience of playing music, and
how they might fit in with the ideas of the list. Here are two quite
long extracts that give something of the flavour of the idea. But
Bateson's essay 'Style, Grace and Information' goes deeper, and is very
well worth getting hold of.

The essential point, which is a very old idea, is that we live in two
different worlds simultaneously, that Bateson calls the 'Newtonian' and
the 'Communicative' worlds, and that we are creative when we choose to
operate in the second of those worlds.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

The world of communication

I have mentioned Gregory Bateson several times before in this forum.
I need to say again that it is very difficult to do him justice in the
space available here. What I am trying to do really needs treatment
in greater depth to be satisfactory. I advise anyone who finds
difficulty with my much simplified and abbreviated account of him to
read his collection of essays, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind", or
(particularly) chapters 7 and 8 of his "Communication - the Social
Matrix of Psychiatry" (with Jurgen Ruesch, Norton Books).

Bateson makes a clear distinction between the world of communication
and the world of things. A 'thing' *can* be a communication - but it
requires a context. Indeed, in a context, 'nothing' can be a
communication. (Bateson's example is the tax return that you *don't*
make.) You can see fairly easily that the crucial thing about
communication is that it involves the transmission of *difference*.
This difference is the difference between what is transmitted and what
might have been transmitted. If only one thing can be transmitted, then
communication cannot take place. And a difference is not a 'thing', but
an 'idea'. It does not require substance, force or energy. (Think of
the non-existent tax-return, which is a communication, in the context of
the world of tax law and tax officials.)

On the other hand, you only need two things (which can be 'nothing'
and 'something'), and a suitable context at the receiving end, to be
able to communicate words, pictures and music. This is the basis of
modern telecommunication. It offers what you may well think to be an
impoverished model of we normally think of as communication.

But Bateson pointed out two further things about human communication
as we normally understand it, and for me, these observations move his
analysis into an area appropriate for the generation of some of the
'right questions' for our purposes.

The first observation is that we customarily communicate on several
levels at once. For example, our tone of voice and body gestures may
send additional messages about what we are saying. Usually this has
the effect of clarifying the message, but it *may* negate it.
Bateson was the inventor of the term 'double-bind', his name for a
characteristic element of family pathology. A double-bind occurs when
contradictory messages are sent to the person in the double-bind,
together with a dismissal as 'crazy' of any attempt to comment on the
contradiction. The situation occurs most commonly between parents and
children. It is possible to detect forms of this pathology in which
the prohibition on discussion is milder and implicit in many human
relationships, and I think it would be a good idea if it were more
generally recognised.

When we have a multi-level message that involves a particularly subtle
relationship between its component parts, we may well describe the
result as *artistic*. There is a particularly powerful essay in
"Steps" which comes as close as I know to describing the processes
involved in the performance of music or dance, without in any way
de-mystifying or trivialising the magic spell cast by a masterly
performance. The power of the essay is drawn from Bateson's second
observation, which is the central idea I want to throw into relief in
this post.

Bateson's second observation is that the path traversed by what he
calls "the news of difference" in the world of communication is in
general a *closed* one. For him, our crucial mistake in life is to
treat such a path as open, with a beginning and an end, which turns
it into something like a manipulation. By speaking of the path as
open, we perpetuate a tendency to ask 'wrong' questions, and block the
asking of 'right' ones. We mix up the world of communication and the
world of things.

What does this mean?

Bateson at one point uses the example of a man cutting down a tree
with an axe. He subjects it to analysis *in the world of
communication*. He gives us a view of a simple series of events from
an unusual standpoint. This standpoint will prove to be a very
suggestive one for more complex events. Bateson says, in part:

"Each stroke of the axe is modified or corrected, according to the
shape of the cut face of the tree left by the previous stroke. This
self-corrective (i.e. mental) process is brought about by a total
system, tree-eyes-brain-muscles-stroke-axe-tree; and it is this total
system that has the characteristics of immanent mind.

"More correctly, we should spell the matter out as: (differences in
tree)-(differences in retina)-(differences in brain)-(differences in
muscles)-(differences in movement of axe)-(differences in tree), etc.
What is transmitted around the circuit is transforms of differences.
And, as noted above, a difference that makes a difference is an *idea*
or unit of information.

"But that is *not* how the average Occidental sees the event-sequence
of tree-felling. He says, "*I* cut down the tree" and he even
believes there is a delimited agent, the 'self' which performed a
delimited 'purposive' action upon a delimited object.

"It is all very well to say that "Billiard ball A hit billiard ball B
and sent it into the pocket"; and it would perhaps be all right (if we
could do it) to give a complete hard-science account of the events all
around the circuit containing the man and the tree. But popular
parlance includes *mind* in its utterance by invoking the personal
pronoun, and then achieves a mixture of mentalism and physicalism by
restricting mind within the man and reifying the tree. Finally the
mind itself becomes reified by the notion that, since the "self" acted
upon the axe which acted upon the tree, the "self" must also be a
"thing." The parallelism of syntax between "*I* hit the billiard
ball" and "The ball hit another ball" is totally misleading.

"If you ask anybody about the localization and boundaries of the self,
these confusions are immediately displayed. Or consider a blind man
with a stick. Where does the blind man's self begin? At the tip of
the stick? At the handle of the stick? Or at some point halfway up
the stick? These questions are nonsense, because the stick is a
pathway along which differences are transmitted under transformation,
so that to draw a delimiting line *across* this pathway is to cut off
a part of the systemic circuit which determines the blind man's
locomotion."

In this example Bateson does not say anything about the part of the
circuit within the brain. Elsewhere, though, he points out that it is
impossible for us to be conscious of everything. (A television set
cannot depict *everything* on its screen, including its inner
workings.) Therefore, the part of the circuit '(differences in
retina)-(differences in brain)-(differences in muscles)' will
typically pass into, and out of, the subconscious. There are
important consequences for artistic performance, which mostly has
powerful sub-conscious components; we shall return to this later.

An unusual aspect of the example is its restriction to a man plus what
we would normally call a 'thing', namely the tree. It shows clearly
that in the communicational universe, our self-imposed division from
the world is an arbitrary one. However, the tree itself has systemic
connections with other living things. The word "Ecology"' in "Steps
to an Ecology of Mind" is suggestively echoed.

There is another suggestive point to be made about coercion. Bateson
indicates that confusion arises in the example with the axe when we
ask about the boundaries of the self. He then immediately passes to
the example of the blind man. But according to where the boundaries
of self are drawn in the 'axe' example, we can see that the man can
see himself as part of a system of interaction with nature, or
alternatively coercing or being coerced by nature. These experiences
are a result merely of 'punctuation' rather than of reality - they are
false simplifications of the reality of the interaction.

Two worlds

Throughout his work, Bateson goes out of his way to make it clear that
the systemic, communicational view of the world stands as an
alternative to the Newtonian view of the world. We live in *both*
worlds. Elsewhere, he says, in part:

"It is necessary first to insist that in the world of communication
the only relevant entities or "realities" are messages, including in
this term parts of messages, relations between messages, significant
gaps in messages, and so on. The *perception* of an event or object
or relation is real. It is a neurophysiological message. But the
event itself or the object itself cannot enter this world and is,
therefore, irrelevant, and to that extent, unreal. Conversely, a
message has no reality or relevance, qua message, in the Newtonian
world: it there is reduced to sound waves or printer's ink.

"By the same token, the "contexts" and "contexts of contexts" upon
which I am insisting are only real or relevant insofar as they are
communicationally effective, i.e., function as messages or modifiers
of messages.

"The difference between the Newtonian world and the world of
communication is simply this: that the Newtonian world ascribes
reality to objects and achieves its simplicity by excluding the
context of the context - excluding indeed all metarelationships.....
In contrast, the theorist of communication insists upon examining the
metarelationships while achieving simplicity by excluding all objects.

"(In) this world of communication....relevance or reality must be
denied not only to the sound of the tree that falls unheard in the
forest but also to this chair that I can see and on which I am
sitting. My perception of the chair is communicationally real, and
that on which I sit is, for me, only an idea, a message in which I put
my trust......

"In this world, indeed, I, as a material object, have no relevance
and, in this sense, no reality. "I", however, exist in the
communicational world as an essential element in the syntax of my
experience and in the experience of others, and the communications of
others may damage my identity, even to the point of breaking up the
organisation of my experience."

This might seem rather mystical, but in truth it is just more than
usually explicit.

We can also see that a chair is a 'chair' only in the communicational
world. The communicational world is *our* world. And the Newtonian
description of a video game is incredibly complex, even at the
relatively high level of description of the computer language it is
written in. Yet we deal with it communicatively with relative ease.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Art and Music

I entitled these posts "Taking People Seriously". I think that taking
people seriously has much more in common with art than it does with
science. I also think that probably the actual practice of science has
much more in common with art than it does with science.

The communicative universe is most clearly demonstrated in artistic
and creative behaviour. Artists are people who have trained
themselves to be especially sensitive to the communicational world in
a particular area. In this area they have also developed their
unconscious abilities, by practice, so that they have a skill which is
partly conscious and partly instinctive.

But they reach out to us because we are all creatures of this sort.
Consider the elegance and flexibility of someone beginning to fall in
love with someone else, say, at a party. Suppose such a couple begins
to be engaged in intimate conversation. Consider the unconscious
modulations of voice that each of them uses, and the way these are
unequivocally decoded as signs of interest in the other person, by the
other person. These skills are partly conscious and partly
unconscious, too. But consider also, by contrast, what occurs to us
in these circumstances when we try to manipulate our behaviour, and
try in a self-conscious way to be interest*ing* to someone else. In
this case, instead of being a natural part of a whole interaction, we
are trying to *do* something. We lose all our grace when we
concentrate too closely on what we should *do*.

I would like to make some observations about how musicians operate, in
order to draw some analogies with the world of communication in
general.

As a performing musician I spend some of my time teaching people who
play the clarinet. One of the main difficulties that inexperienced
musicians have is that they ask a 'wrong' sort of question: being
inexperienced, they want to know what they *should do* at a particular
point in a piece of music. It's quite difficult to persuade them that
they are better off *not knowing* what they should do, and that the
best performers don't think in this way. Of course, there are certain
general things that one can say one should or shouldn't do, but the
details aren't fixed. They may be rehearsed; but it is quite normal
that an actual performance will contain unexpected features. You
could say that the rehearsal is for the *rehearsal*, not for the
performance.

This is because musicians in performance allow themselves to be
prompted not only by their subconscious instincts but by what their
fellow-performers do. In other words, they *listen* to themselves
and the others at the same time. Bateson's systemic circuits are
operating, and though the context is limited in classical music by
what the composer has written, it is nevertheless a context in which
something is being brought to life.

The music is brought to life by being moved from the Newtonian
universe, in which it is just black marks on pieces of paper, into the
communicational universe, *our* universe. Simple, rule-governed
translation into sound results in lifeless, mechanical execution. If
in a creative performance something happens that 'kills off' the
living thing the performance has seemed to be until that point,
everyone's commitment will be to make that something *retrospectively
right*, which will give a different life to that particular
performance. Even in a solo piece, a performer is responsive in this
way to the small things that are different on the night, by accident
or subconscious prompting. The experience of doing this is very often
like giving up judgement, and going with the flow.

Sometimes this can be difficult. A common pitfall is to try not to
play wrong notes. Now obviously, good performers seldom make
mistakes. But this does not mean that their concern at the time of
performance is not to make mistakes. In fact, quite a good way of
making mistakes is to try not to. A good performer is operating in a
different sort of universe from the universe of mistakes. This
universe is the universe of context and meaning rather than the
universe of right notes.

Mostly, performers could be said to be asking themselves *questions*
as they play. They may not do so in words, but their state of
being is a 'questioning' one. The fundamental question is probably,
"What does this piece of music require, now, from me, in order to
live?" Then there are lower-level questions, to do with character,
atmosphere, style and so on. A question directs our attention to the
'whole', and allows us to contribute what is appropriate, not just
what we may have decided to do previously.

Of course, some things have to be fixed. The composer has fixed the
very low-level things in the score: on the first page, here, at the
beginning, we must play *these* notes. And we can decide ourselves in
rehearsal that *this* chord will be short, and so on. These are
things we must agree on for any acceptable performance.

On the highest level, too, we may say, "all of this section should be
dreamy, light and delicate, so that when we get *there*, we will have
a contrast." If such matters are too open to question, the result is
incoherent.

It seems that it is in the *middle ground* between these two extremes
that we have to leave the questions open, to be asked and answered
in performance, and that to answer them specifically beforehand is in
some sense 'wrong'. We have a high-level intention, and a low-level
medium of expression; but in between we have to trust ourselves to the
mutual interplay of our communicating selves.

The sort of question which is wrong to ask and answer beforehand, is:
"Should I play to the end of this piece exactly in tempo?". One might
want to say, yes, but don't *not slow down*! (The mystery of how you
may do something without *doing* it is clear to any attentive member
of an audience.) Or someone may say, "Are you going to play that bit
as loud as that, tonight?" The only proper answer may well be, "I
don't know. I shall be listening to all of it at the time. *And so
will you*."

A very important and seemingly paradoxical aspect of this is the
realisation that, if everybody is listening simply for what everybody
else does, no initiatives are possible. (I am now thinking of chamber
music, in which there is no overall director.) And if there are no
initiatives, a performance will be pale and unsatisfactory.

A good chamber group has to achieve a balance between what is
organised between the players, and what an individual player can do to
turn the performance in another direction. In this case, going with
the flow is, for that player, to do something different, perhaps
in some cases violently different, which his or her colleagues are then
forced to accept in order to continue.

How much can it be different, we want to ask?

We cannot say, because any reply is predicated on the internal
dynamics of the group, the nature of the piece of music and many other
circumstances, including details of the performance up to that moment.
In fact, there are many different styles of chamber group. Some
groups are highly confronting in their internal dynamics. Their
performances are dramatic, exciting and original. Other groups are
blander, and seek to give a more neutral reading of a piece.

It was Bateson, in fact, quoting Aldous Huxley, who said that artistic
behaviour was part of mankind's search for 'grace'. He argued, with
Huxley, that mankind has lost the grace that animals have, and that we
need to find our own grace by integrating the reason of the mind with
the reason of the heart. But he also said that the heart has precise
algorithms, and that emotions were the outward manifestation of the
algorithms of the inner world of relationship. (He often quotes, "A
tear is an *intellectual* thing", and "Le coeur a ses raisons que la
raison ne connait point." (Pascal)) His analysis leaves the essential
mystery of art intact (as, of course, any worthwhile analysis must).

Grace includes many possible behaviours. It includes making demands
on others, as well as collaborating with them in a supportive way. If
we approach others in the communicative universe, we stand a greater
chance of achieving grace. In the creative arts, these approaches and
conflicts are mirrored in a metaphorical way. In the performing arts
they are represented and embodied.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN family artist: www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

... Is that seat saved? No, but we're praying for it...

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