Klarinet Archive - Posting 000938.txt from 2000/12

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Performance [was, Peplowski continued]
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 09:14:27 -0500

On Sun, 17 Dec 2000 20:06:56 -0700 (MST), AnneLenoir@-----.net said:

> Dear Tony,
>
> The "duh" was because I don't have the type of intelligence or
> intellect to understand what you were talking about.

I very much doubt that, Annie, but anyway.

> Creativity in improvization and in phrasing, as well as in teaching my
> students, is very important to me, more than just about anything I can
> think of. I wish that Charlie Parker, John Coltraine and maybe Dizzy
> Gillespie, maybe Robert Marcellus, Ralph McLane & Daniel Bonade --
> were around to give us their opinions of Peplowski, maybe shed some
> light on it.

I think the point of what I wrote, and what I take Bateson to have been
saying, is that the matter is very simple when you actually do it. So
*when done*, it isn't intellectual at all -- far from it. Bateson's
description contrasts communicative description (how we take the music
to be alive) with 'scientific analysis'; and because he makes that
contrast, he has to include bits of scientific analysis, which is
probably what makes it look complicated to you. But it isn't really.

I think another aspect of it is, what do we think the performers you
mention above are doing? Or, how do we think what we ourselves do, when
we are beginning players, compares with what they do? (once we have got
beyond the first stages, of course.) I suggest that it's helpful to try
to make it real for young performers that what they do can be, in an
important way, *the same* as what those performers do. And that to
achieve that isn't something that you have to work towards, but
something you start with. Bateson's 'two worlds' helps with that side
of it, because it makes clear that it's not that you have to *do*
something different -- you have to be with it in a different way, 'in a
different world'.

Of course, lots of young performers do that naturally anyway. But some
don't, or forget to.

I often tell students that one way of having the music be in the
communicative world is to think of it as though they were telling, or
reading, a bedtime story to a child. Even children know what it is to
do this, as when they read to their younger brothers and sisters. When
we read a bedtime story, we see the story as alive -- how we speak the
giant's words is different from how we speak the fairy's words, and how
we describe the journey through the haunted house is different from how
we describe the picnic on the river. All those differences live in the
communicative world, and are made by us largely unconsciously and
instinctively. You don't describe the sorts of tongue positions you use
to sound mysterious!

When we begin playing music, particularly if it's simple music, it's as
though *we already know the story*; but that we don't really yet know
very well the language in which we are telling it. But we do know that
musical *stories* work, because we can appreciate those great performers
you were talking about.

Imagine that you have to tell a bedtime story in French, a language in
which you are merely a beginner. You could concentrate on getting the
verbs and the vocabulary right, and making sure of the right gender of
the nouns, leaving the characterisation of the story to look after
itself. Or -- and of course I want to say that this is the better way
of going about it -- you could make sure of the characterisation, and
have *what was important about the story* get across to the French kids.
(Naturally, you'd go on cleaning it up day by day as you got better at
speaking French.)

Now, I suggest that at a very fundamental level, children who play music
understand the sorts of story that there are to be told, if we don't
get in their way too much. (And of course we give them very simple
stories to tell.) There's this piece of music, and it's pretty, or sad,
or cross, or playful, or....whatever. And because the audience *can't
read it* (why else do we read bed-time stories?) we have to tell it to
them.

I don't have it to hand, but an example of how a grown-up came to change
how he thought of what he was doing, in a different discipline, is the
story of how Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists, learnt to
draw in later life. His description (in, 'Surely you're joking, Mr
Feynman!') of what his teachers said to him, and how he didn't
understand what they were talking about at first, is very relevant to
this discussion, I'd say. Feynman subsequently got good enough to have
his own exhibition, under a pseudonym.

> Creativity is supposed to be an outlet for all of us, not just those
> who are capable of reading Peplowski or Bateson. If I felt that
> creativity was reserved strictly for an elite class of intellectual
> musicians, then I think I would be most disappointed, think that maybe
> my life had been a waste.

Well, I think so too, it isn't so reserved, and don't be disappointed,
and your life hasn't been a waste!

Best,

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

...... Answers: $1, Short: $5, Correct: $25, dumb looks are still free.

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