Klarinet Archive - Posting 000246.txt from 2002/06

From: "Forest E. Aten Jr." <forestaten@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] A (musical?) game
Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 22:43:56 -0400

Tony,

Sounds like an a great exercise....sounds like life to me. Living day in,
day out...always interesting, mostly predictable. Hopefully when things
"shift in an unexpected direction", the shift is in a positive direction.

Once "upon".....

Forest

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tony Pay" <Tony@-----.uk>
Subject: [kl] A (musical?) game

> When I was at school, I sometimes played a word game with a friend. It
> can be played with a larger group of people too.
>
> The game is to spin a tale (often beginning "Once upon a time...") as a
> collaborative enterprise. One person begins, and if there are only two
> people involved, they contribute words alternately. With more people,
> you go round and round in a circle. You can do it in writing if you
> want.
>
> I've often thought that this constitutes a (highly simplified) model of
> the essence of what happens when you play music in a group. The reason
> is that in both situations, at any one moment everyone has a more or
> less vague idea -- a mental model, if you will -- of what the story, or
> the piece, is 'about'. But because these models aren't quite the same,
> you have to keep on updating your model to include what someone else has
> just added.
>
> In the musical analogy, what you're adding isn't different *notes*, of
> course. You have to play the notes and phrases that are in your part.
> But you might, and good players do, make contributory modifications of
> dynamic, slight (or even larger) changes of tempo or atmosphere,
> slightly heavier or lighter interpretations of the articulation, and so
> on, all without going so far as to be arguably contradicting what's
> written, but so as to have the piece 'be alive', in its own terms.
>
> In the word game, if it happens to be my turn at that point, I mostly
> think of my job as being to make it possible for what has just been
> added to be *retrospectively right*. Part of that is giving the next
> person the chance to say something that 'fits', too.
>
> Of course, it's more than that. Because the fun of the thing is when
> someone makes the whole thing shift in an unexpected direction, by
> contributing an unexpected word, but without losing grammatical
> coherence. Then everyone has to make big mental shifts in order to
> recover.
>
> I suppose you could think of it as a sort of virtual ouija
> board, because when it works well, the story seems to take on a life of
> its own.
>
> But -- and here's what I think is interesting -- the whole thing can be
> totally wrecked by one person. I gave up playing this game with my
> children a few years ago, because they wanted to do things like, "Once
> upon a time, there FISH!" They found that funny, you see, whereas I, in
> my spoilsport way, was after something that I knew could be entertaining
> in a more subtle, and therefore funnier way.
>
> It was like saying, "Mornington Crescent!" at the wrong moment, for
> those of you who know that game.
>
> I thought that I could explain this to them, but I found that actually,
> it was quite a deep divide. They just thought I had no sense of humour,
> and was trying to control everything.
>
> I think I similarly want music to take on a life of its own, and that's
> perhaps why I sometimes resent playing that seems to rub the nose of
> something that's 'trying to grow' in the ego of one particular player's
> choice, and moreover in a way that it's impossible to recover from.
>
> Has anyone else tried playing this game? And had similar experiences?
>
> "Once..." :-)
>
> Tony
> --
> _________ Tony Pay
> |ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
> | |ay Oxford OX2 6RE http://classicalplus.gmn.com/artists
> tel/fax 01865 553339
>
> ... Death is proven to be 99.9% fatal to all laboratory rats.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>

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