I seem to be stuck on a thread of impossible societal problems lately, or maybe I'm just starting to notice, but today's mini-sermon is on a paper discovered by accident in the British journal The Psychologist, and a right on the button 1999 address by John Sloboda on the peculiar puzzle of how, while it is well known that we human beings have an innate propensity and skill for learning music from a very early age, and well documented that our direct participation in the creation of music is highly beneficial to both body and soul, the fact remains that very very very few people will take up the challenge to put forth that minimal discipline and practice to get to that therapeutic level. Why should that be? Sloboda muses on three causes of this contradiction:
- "In an earlier age, one could expect to hear and join in music sung and played in the home. There would be sing-songs at the local pub or at village festivals where all and sundry could join in at their own level ... people might receive a structured learning environment within a church choir or a brass band, where there woudl be a level of discipline and correction of blatant errors together with a regular cycle of rehearsals and concerts ... [these] allow a gradual progression in skill and accomplishment ... unusual family environments are necessary these days to replace the scaffolding that local communities no longer provide.
- "The Second barrier to achievement is the increasing framing of official discourse about music performance in terms of talent, achievement and success, rather than community, fulfilment or transcendence ... attainment targets are more salient than any notion of why it might be interesting or personally relevant to achieve these targets ... Art is often seen as of no value except as a commodity to be purchased by consumers for 'entertainment' in exchange for hard cash. Therefore musical expertise is only valued to the extend that it can earn money for the purveyors of entertainment ... and so the impossibly polished outputs of musical superstars are rubbed in the faces of young people ... it is unsurprising that young people are discouraged from participating in an activity where there are so few winners and so many losers -- the notion that music could be engaged in purely for personal fulfilment, for the building up of community and friendship, for the sheer joy of making beautiful sounds together, is a strange, almost reprehensible concept in many people's minds. Music is the poor relation in many schools -- what has it got to do, after all, with the 'real' business of equipping people to contribute to wealth creation?
- The third and final barrier ... the barrier of elitism or high art ... The 'academy' in most of its manifestations promotes the classical performance tradition as the paradigm and paragon of what music really is and what it is to be a musician ... the traditions and forms of the academy are, despite what some apologists claim, inaccessible to most people -- they do not reflect to most people the values and identities that they bring to music [and] core exemplars of the forms demand such a level of individual and corporate proficiency and resource to execute that they have almost no points of contact with the levels of music making that still survive in our culture.
There's a great deal more in his address that is well worth the PDF download to read. For example, the simple and obvious observation on how psychologically it is impossible to divest music from the human emotional response to the art and yet most 'academy' approaches to the music are completely divested of all emotional content! Go figure.
Welcome to Jamboree Country
But back at saving the world here, John's three strikes against musical culture sound grim, but the first thing that occurs to me on reading John's paper is a sympathy for him and his world. Because they have no Sunday Afternoon Jamborees.
It's my guess the majority of you reading this now have no Sunday Afternoon Jamborees, and you may be wondering what that means, and that is sad too. What it means is this: 200 mostly-seniors descending on a Legion Hall (because they own it) and some in bring fiddles and guitars and whatever else they have and there's a rickety PA and a few mics the players take turns as featured performers for 3 songs each, backed by the rest of the players and everyone dances to the music; this goes on for 3 hours and then stops for a pot-luck dinner (typically assembled by the ladies). And here's the very important part: EVERYONE IS WELCOME (within the old-time genre) and anyone willing to play will be fed for free (the rest pay some token sum). Jamborees attract hot-shot champion fiddlers, they attract housewives who just know the words to a few songs, but the thing is, the EVENT is the thing, it is a community-development exercise, and academic proficiency is not only unnecessary and irrelevant, but even quietly discouraged. "Save it for the back room" as that is the place to cut each other up with hot licks. Here you are here to play, to provide a functional dose of community remedy.
The kids are alright too
Because music is a cultural imperative, common folk, the sort I think John didn't consider, could care less about the elitism of the academy, and while the academy subscriber numbers (both musicians and audience) continue to dwindle from their collective non-relevance, stats tell us the business of selling gear and selling music lessons is burgeoning everywhere -- all those guitars, all those cheap keyboards and $100 fiddles must be going somewhere, and while I do suspect there are significant portions being sold like Silvan classes, naive parents hoodwinked into Chopin drills as the path to a Superior Race, that doesn't explain the grunge-deco guitars and Nirvana songbooks. Those are going into garage bands and circles of friends who just want to make some joyful noise.
While I do feel the pain of those who wish they could find gainful employment through a return to music relevance in the schools, I think we just have to accept how that academy has also lost all relevance to our culture. Once again, the kids see the obstruction and route around it. I remember once upon a time reading an interview with Canada's chief astronomer, and he was asked if he was disappointed that astronomy was not taught in the schools. "Not at all," he replied, "By the time someone gets out of school, chemistry and biology are the last things they ever want to read about again in their lives. Teaching astronomy in school would poison them against it." -- is it was, and that was circa 1979, you'd only study the stars as a labour of love.
Community Arkestras
Sloboda also laments the collapse of the community bands; I am subscribed to the Community Musician mailing list on Yahoo, and I can tell him directly that community bands are still alive with new groups opening up all the time -- one of the most requested files among the group is the manual for starting a community orchestra that a group member had put together many years ago. It is true the community bands are hurting, they find it difficult to pay the necessary royalties on arrangements and performances, they scrounge for instruments, players and sponsors, but they keep on because, quite frankly, there is no experience quite like being in an acoustic ensemble like that.
Nonetheless, what I also observe is how very many of these community music events fall into that trap of elitism John cites as the poison meme that rots out the rungs of the ladder between novice and pro. Many don't care how badly you play so long as you seek to improve, but there are others I have heard of and experienced where there is a snobbery around the right way vs the wrong way, and all that tells me, personally, is that this troupe is eying a dollar prize, a would-be circus show, with community and medicinal magic way last on their list.
What we need are community arkestras, bridges between these two worlds of what we know (that is boring) and what we do not know (that is out of reach), with a new skill challenge to the arrangers and band leaders to accommodate and assimilate all who would join to help make the unit fly. That can be an Irish music jam at a too-quiet local pub, it could be a retro-grunge-jam in a basement, it could be a hip-hop jump-up or a 22 piece jazz improv ensemble, it just needs to happen.
Only its not that simple ...
You may already be involved with an informal jam group of friends who meet and belt out old 'standards' and have a few and meet and catch up and that is way better than doing nothing, but you may have also noticed how it doesn't appear to go anywhere and that starts to get discouraging. Fortunately there's an out, and as Sloboda notes from the research (and Sun Ra would tell you similar),
"music is represented in the mind in terms of the structures ... when such structures cannot be detected, it is impossible for people to process and store the information ... if people cannot discover the structure, they cannot become experts"
if the structure is ill-defined, it becomes like a game of Calvin-Ball, a fluid rule-base tug-of-war eventually determined only by the most obstinate and obnoxious players ;) and the other truth of music is it has value only when it is the music we want to produce.
Discipline and arrangement become the social contract.
There has to be an attention to discipline and arrangement. There has to be a coordinated sound, or the sound is just a sound, just a noise. It is the roots in cultural musical structure that does it. Not just whamming a 12-bar progression, but a weave and texture where everyone knows their place. I think it was Son House who said, "The roots are the fruits" -- the thread must be retained unbroken to give it a ground. This was the case with New Orleans Jazz folk forms and with Chicago Blues, both of them extended through into present forms of Jazz and (through Electric Mud) to Rock grooves.
Experimentation is welcome, but we do need to remember who we are. We find that children by the age of 7 can clearly distinguish between a well formed musical sentence for their local culture and a 'mistake', and adults can repeat any arbitrary phrase with remarkable accuracy (esp rhythm and phrasing) and spot a 'bad' note or harmony, so we know we are hard-wired to 'find our place' in the idiom at hand. Artists like Charlie Parker and Sun Ra also show us that there are fuzzy edges at the frontier of those perceptions, and that is how they make the music grow, because just preserving the thread, even a very good thread is going nowhere.
John Sloboda has done us a favour outlining where we need to make these societal repairs; if we simply repair those rungs on that ladder up to the cosmos, I'll wager people will climb them again because they are hungry for this participation. We will need to give up a few things, though, like our obsession with producing 'product' beyond the societal collateral of the music-making itself, we need to give up the divisive competition for slots on stage and airplay, because it doesn't matter if anyone outside the band even heard you, it's the playing that's the real thing.
And we need to also abandon the corporation mindset that says this particular company has only these particular employees and roles, and instead we should just roll with what we've got and fill the air with sound. Everyone is in the music, every band is a Nature Theatre.
The Good Book says "You shall make a Joyful Noise unto your Creator" -- it says nothing about making that noise go double platinum. For a last word, I'll hand the podium back to John Sloboda and his closing remarks:
"The evidence reviewed above indicates to me that performance potential could be unlocked in millions of people if we could recreate the social institutions that focused on musical enjoyment, and personal and communal fulfilment, rather than on the need to be best, or to meet the taxing performance requirements of a professional elite."
amen
Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.