Grape or Raspberry? (This post is about jamming.)

On the Nerdist podcast the other day, Divine Fits members talked about jam bands, a newer research interest of mine.  In explaining why they didn't like jamming, the guys speculated why fans like repetitive improv, bringing up the drug culture as one explanation.  Even allowing that many modern fans stick to alcohol or even stay completely straight during concerts, there is a party vibe at many jam band concerts.  The band becomes a tapestry, a reason to gather rather than the focal point of all attention.  Like club music, the primary goal of jamming is to inspire dancing, physical movement instead of complex emotional movement.  There are different flavors of jamming, often associated with different bands.  Some jams might focus more on collective consciousness, bringing everyone together into an awareness of each other and how we all interact. Other jams could be about inspiring creativity, or to make political statements. Length is directly related to the purpose.  A thirty-minute jam will lose any connection to politically-minded lyrics of the head tune, and if the jam hasn't changed the groove, the hypnotic effect will wash away any conscious inspiration.  But a short burst of jamming between verses of DMB's "Everybody Wake Up" can be social commentary, and a five-minute closing jam can send audiences home ready to create new worlds.

Isn't it beautiful?

This post is precluded by a bleg to go vote for me at the Spring For Music Art Blogging Contest.   It seems that you can vote at least once every day.

When I was in college, I took a course on the Psychology of Music, mostly as a lark.  It fulfilled part of my liberal arts requirements, while still standing one foot in my beloved subject of music.  Little did I know that the things I learned there would stick, waiting to surface five years later when I started the graduate program in music theory at Eastman.  I still have a vivid memory of that first day in Psychology of Music, when Professor Rew-Gottfried asked us to define "music."  I offered up the definition, "Sound organized to be beautiful."  Some of my fellow music majors disagreed, saying they had heard and played plenty of ugly music.  But that is not an argument against beautiful music, that is an argument against pretty music.  I believe that beauty does not preclude ugliness.  Instead, artistic beauty is that which touches us emotionally.  We can be horrified by beauty, challenged by it, envious, sad, or angry because of it.  So, is there unbeautiful music, music which does not create an emotional response?  I believe there is not.  We humans are not emotionally monolithic.  One person's garbage, another person's treasure, etc etc.  As long as someone hears some organized sound and feels something because of it, that sound is music.

This definition requires an unpacking of "organized sound."  Someone might be eagerly raising their cyberhand with the example of John Cage's 4'33", the notorious silent piece.  Or perhaps they have examples of purely randomized sound used in a piece. In any case of a composed piece, there is a person who came up with an idea and notated it in some way.  This is a means of organization.  With 4'33", Cage had the idea of chopping an audience's attention into three sections of time, organizing our perception in this way.  And the piece is not really about silence, but about environmental sounds.  When audiences are forced to keep themselves silent, focused on what they are really hearing, all the little creaks and squeaks become obvious.  Cage could not control what particular sounds are heard, but he made sure the audience did hear these sounds, within an allotted time period. 



In the case of an improvised work, the performer is the organizer.  It may be completely unplanned, and yet the performer is making choices of what to play and what not to play.  Even a computer generating randomized (or seemingly random) bursts of noise has been programmed by someone.  And as long as someone listening to those bursts has an emotional response, it is music. 



So when I wrote "the major point of the program, to bring beautiful music to the people who need it most," I meant music that maximizes a) the number of people with an emotional response, and b) the magnitude of the emotional response.  I'll admit that I have a predilection against music that creates only a "horror" response.  But sprinkling pain with pleasure, horror and ecstasy, can be a powerful and moving experience.  I'm talking about music here, people!  Now, go vote for me.

Proud to be a Larry

My alma mater, Lawrence University, is pushing social media hard, as is my employer, DePauw University.  DePauw's School of Music has started a streaming radio program (and podcast), Music For Life, which will not only help make connections with the rest of the campus, but will also be a means of outreach into the larger community.  Lawrence's Conservatory of Music has an active blog.  Both schools have Twitter feeds and Facebook pages, which will end up being more important than direct mailings for the coming generation of students. 

Anyhow, when Brian Pertl shared a link to the Lawrence Con's blog on Facebook, I discovered a post there I had somehow missed, on the importance of improvisation.  We have also been pushing improvisation at DePauw, for the same reasons Brian mentions.  Our cello professor, Eric Edberg, leads an improvised chamber music ensemble, our viola professor, Nicole Brockmann, teaches improvisation within a first year seminar on Eurythmics, and wrote a book on improvisation games for chamber ensembles, and we have an active jazz program, including a weekly performance venue at the local campus restaurant, The Fluttering Duck.  This weekly series, Jazz at the Duck, has started including open jams interspersed with established acts.  And I have developed a core of collaborative composition/improvisation activities for our musicianship sequence, which I wrote about here (you need to purchase the article from the Dutch Music Theory Journal.)  By the time DePauw music students have finished their studies here, they will have had at least three semesters of personal experience with improvisation, and countless exposures to improvisation by their colleagues and professors.  Because improvising is fluency in the language of music, and musical fluency is both a professional necessity and a important part of being human. 

New Year

I've discovered that the most difficult thing to do is to start writing. When I am in the habit of posting every day, it is rather easy. But when I take a break, trying to come up with a good idea for the restart is daunting. Figuring out the mission of the blog, whether the opening post should be personal or academic, a summary or new material, causes paralysis by analysis. But it is a new year, and time to shake the cobwebs off of this blog that I've spent so much time developing over the last 4+ years. I hope that I haven't lost too many readers to newer, shinier classical music blogs.

First up, improvisation as a learning tool. I've promised Eric Edberg that I will write a guest post for his blog, so consider this a brain storming session. While there is much debate on whether music truly is a language or not – with concerns about grammar and syntax, efficiencies of communicated meaning and the like – I feel strongly that the performance of music is the same as the performance of a spoken language. An actor reciting Shakespeare is not convincing if he does not understand the words he is speaking, either singlely or in context. Likewise, I am convinced that a musician cannot perform Beethoven without understanding the notes in the contexts of melody and harmony, at most hierarchic levels of organization. Some of that understanding comes at the theoretical level, working through analyses with Schenker graphs, motivic sketches, and formal diagrams. But, just as the actor is not expected to be be consciously thinking "subject, predicate, adverb, verb, object, adjective" and "iambic pentameter", the performing musician should not be consciously thinking about Roman numerals, intervals, and motivic design. These facts should be ingrained, allowing the music to flow forth naturally, with all these structural elements combining organically to create the emotional and aesthetic content that is conveyed to the audience. This is where improvisation comes in as a pedagogical tool. If a musician can extemporaneously create music in a given idiom, I am convinced that she has been able to absorb the rules of that idiom into her subconscious. In this regard improvisation is a diagnostic tool: improvise 8 measures in D minor to prove you understand tonality. But improvisation can be a developmental tool as well, practicing to gain more understanding. Just as young children combine rote repetition and extemporaneous speech to learn how to read and speak their native language(s), musicians can combine performing from notation with improvisation to develop their sensitivities to the given musical idioms. Please give me your thoughts.

This is Your Brain on Jazz

Mind Hacks has written about a new study of the neuroscience of jazz improvisation. Six pianists' brains were scanned while they performed a scale, a memorized jazz melody, or improvisations of either the scale or the melody. "For Scale's improvisation condition, subjects improvised in quarter notes only, selecting all notes from within one octave and from the C major scale notes alone..." "For Jazz's improvisation condition, subjects improvised using the composition's underlying chord structure as the basis for spontaneous creative output..."

The brain scans (fMRI's) showed that one area of the brain had reduced activity during improvisations. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is associated with self-censorship and other inhibiting behaviors, suggesting that jazz improvisation requires a lack of inhibition. Another area of the brain showed heightened activity during improvisation, the medial prefrontal cortex. This area is associated with actions of individuality or self-expression, "such as telling a story about yourself."

Thus jazz improvisation is about revealing yourself, and requires you to be less inhibited to do so. I wonder if other types of improvisation - aleatory, free improv, embellishments - would have similar results.

Charles J. Limb and Allen R. Braun, "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation" Public Library of Science One [an open source journal], Feb. 27, 2008.

Teaching Creativity

In both of my main classes, theory and musicianship, I incorporate creativity through composition and improvisation activities. This creativity is a crucial aspect of being a musician, regardless of the primary role a musician will have in life. I have a pretty good handle on how to coach students through improvisation, but with stylistic composition I sometimes have trouble getting some students to treat the assignment as an act of creation. Today I gave the sophomores their semester-long composition assignment, and we practiced composing a period together. Many of the students were joyful in creating a new work, or excited about the idea of composing their own works. But there were some who were scared or reluctant about the project. So, how do you light the creative spark in these types of students?

Hey buddy, where's the fire?

In honor of my first 5K race (28:10), here is William Sethares playing on a recreation of Helmholtz's double siren.

Het zoete huis van het huis

My apologies for the dead air this last week. My parents were visiting, requiring serious house cleaning. And then I had to finish my paper and get packed for the conference. But I've traveled to Holland and back, slept long enough to be mostly over my jet lag, and ready to start writing again. I got back just in time to see DePauw get in the national news. I'll only comment that two of my students get on the air, Lynsay Moy and Kim Lee. And a few other music students are in the background of the Good Morning America story. Kim is a music education major and a good flutist, Lynsay is a double major in voice performance and studio art and an excellent student.

The conference was quite good. I was scheduled to play in two jam sessions on the night before the conference officially began, but was also roped in at the last minute to mimic a bombard on my decidedly twentieth-century trumpet for the first piece of the concert. I was too jet-lagged to say no, though I had to fight a sticky first valve for that performance. The conference itself included sessions on jazz improv, early music improv, British free improv, and improv pedagogy (including my paper). Being a European conference, there were plenty of coffee/tea breaks, which we had to use very specific little tickets to get. And being in the Netherlands, the lunches and one dinner provided were nothing to write home about, unless you really want to hear about the Dutch version of chinese food. There was a round table discussion at the end of the conference, during which a retired local professor announced that jazz music was banal, crappy, and not worth analyzing. That provided plenty of conversation for a group of us at a restaurant afterward.

Due to a canceled flight, I ended up "sleeping" in the Philadelphia airport one night and arriving home a day later than planned. But now that the conference is done, I can get back to writing my sabbatical articles. I'm sure I missed all sorts of interesting issues in the classical blogosphere, but I'm not going to try to catch up. Don't take it personally.

Heading to Groningen

I just found out that my proposed paper was accepted to the 9th International Conference of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory. As the link indicates, the subject of the conference is Improvisation: Analytical, Theoretical, and Critical Approaches". I'll include the abstract for my paper below, and would appreciate any questions or comments.

The ultimate goal of any improvisation pedagogy is the engendering of quick creativity. The ability to create with innovation and coherence is developed through the development of various cognitive skills. The improvisation pedagogy presented is based upon recent
cognitive studies, identifying what skills are necessary and how best to develop them. This method for stylistically-neutral improvisation is intended to fit within a core two-year aural skills sequence in post-secondary studies. Students learn to improvise in a collaborative environment, one that also encourages the development of keyboard skills. Working in pairs, the performers trade soloing and accompanying duties. This provides a safer environment for exploration, and frees the professor to evaluate performances. It also provides varied experiences from the different duties and from the alterations and imperfections inserted by the partner during practice. Studies such as Pressing (1984), Berliner (1994), Sarath (1996), Johnson-Laird (2002), and Mendonça and Wallace (2004) have stressed the importance of temporal cognition in improvised performance. Thus rhythmic and metric accuracy is placed at the forefront of this improvisation pedagogy. Memory is also a key component of improvisation. Performers must be able to remember what they already played and the form of the improvisation. Kenny and Gellrich (2002) describe eight cognitive processes during improvisation, including three temporal levels each of recall and anticipation. Memorization of self-composed melodies and mimicking exercises help to develop these skills. Sarath's (1996) concept of cognitive event cycles is taken as an important measure of improvement. Greater frequencies of cognitive events, as measured through numbers of possible solutions to a given musical event, give rise to more creative responses to stimulus from the improviser and from collaborators. This is evidenced by variety demonstrated in multiple performances of the same exercise. Pressing (2000) provides an estimate of the expected limits for "improvisational novelty" at ten actions per second, based upon error correction times measured by Welford (1976). This paper summarizes the various cognitive models of improvisation and the framework for the pedagogical system. Sample exercises are demonstrated for both instructional and assessment purposes.

Berliner, Paul. 1994. Thinking in Jazz.
Johnson-Laird, P.N. 2002. How jazz musicians improvise. Music Perception 19(3), 415-442.
Kenny and Gellrich
Mendonça, David, and William A. Wallace. 2004. Cognition in jazz improvisation: an exploratory study. 26th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Pressing, Jeff. 1984. Cognitive processes in improvisation. In Cognitive processes in the perception of art, (ed. W.R. Crozier and A.J. Chapman). North-Holland, Amsterdam.
Pressing. 2000. Improvisation: methods and models. In Generative processes in music.
Sarath, Edward. 1996. A new look at improvisation. Journal of Music Theory, Vol 40, No. 1, 1-38.
Welford, A.T. 1976. Skilled Performance.