Safety First

must say i liked the ‘lecture’, in the sense that a lot of valid points were made, quite eloquently, and we seemed to have reacted with some good playing… (and pardon me for choosing E-Prime forms such as seems to, appears to be, as opposed to is.. i know it might result in heavy boring prose, but i still see it as good exercise, and generally closer to what i think and want to express than the is of identity)

Han’s indication of the tactic, his take on the Taylor/Oxley method and how it applies on group improvisation, finally got us out of the impasse we found ourselves in the last few classes.. from my angle it seemed like some kind of release finally happened, and applying the tactic gave us a bit of the confidence we were lacking up to this point

also the indication of the role of the audience in generating meaning seemed spot on.. i would add that we could include the musicians in the audience as well, in the sense that they too are listeners.. they listen to their own thing or to the sum of all things.. and some kind of filtering or interpretation goes on in their brains, this in turn resulting in attribution of some meaning…of course this meaning can manifest in a different way for each listener.. everyone in the audience will have a different experience and the music will mean a different thing to each one of them

i must say that when i was talking about active listening i was wandering about what kind of direct influence/impact can the audience/listeners have on the musicians and the music played by simply listening

(think Rupert Sheldrake’s research on the sense of being stared at.. how come we often turn our heads when there’s someone staring at us?  does listening to someone have the same effect? OK, im on a tangent.. will leave these questions for Safety First class of 2023/24)

what puzzles me is that i still can’t answer the question Han asked after Kevin and myself played trying to ignore him (on the 10/08/08 class)… what was wrong?

doing a different thing when the others make different thing seems a good working strategy..but what makes it better than a call and response strategy? or in other words, why shouldn’t we choose strategies on the go.. and use whatever seems appropriate to use at the moment, between say, listening/not listening, playing in response to others or doing whatever we want regardless of the others??

i think i find myself at the starting point again..some sort of moral dilemma i can’t seem to answer better than using the Hassan ibn Sabbah quote of the title of this post

it seems the only measure of how good or bad an improvisation was lies with the audience.. having a look at them (and their posture) during the performance, and listening to the reaction/applause at the end can possibly give a measure of how they felt during the piece.. this applies also if the musicians are the only audience present.. how did it sound?  good? or did it suck?

this leads to the other (huge) issue i feel coming… but won’t go deep into it now..

talking about music often leaves me with the impression of trying to play a 64bit 24million colour videogame with a shitty blackandwhite 8bit console..

well, time to let the fingers and the instruments do the talking, it seems..