A Meditation on Robert Bly's "Form that is neither In Nor Out" While Thinking of Composing For Improvisors Part Three: Form

Robert Bly in 1975

Form is likely even more mysterious than meaning and content. The mind can visualize the 12 bars of a blues. How many bars for the I chord, how many bars for the IV chord, etc. - but this is not form. The number of bars in a particular blues is simply the fact that the forest is populated by a certain amount of trees; poplars, old oaks, clearings are mapped.


The overall shape of the forest is harder to see. Especially if you’re in it. Form not only includes the shape of the animal but the magnetic field around it, the aura. Some people claim to be able to see the aura, but that is rare and it doesn’t make things less mysterious.

So form includes shapes we can see and also what is invisible. And inaudible.

Next: Examples of composing for improvisers.                                   

Copyright 1995 - 2011 Jack DeSalvo

Content, Meaning and Form, Part Two

A Meditation on Robert Bly's Form That is Neither In Nor Out While Thinking of Composing For Improvisors

Part Two: Meaning

There is an occult flavor to the word meaning. Truth and meaning come from a mysterious source. It may come through a teacher or intuited or maybe from a master you’ve only met through the medium of recording or the printed page.

Meaning is what is handed down through a lineage. Not the tricks of the trade, rather let’s say Pythagoras did pass down technical information relating to where the nodes on the monochord are, but to his most intimate students he passed on something more. This something more is meaning.

To approach meaning is to begin the journey inward and downward. Jungian analyst James Hillman says we need to grow down.

Antonio Machado said,

Mankind owns four things

That are no good at sea

Rudder, anchor, oars 

And the fear of going down

To do this we need much patience. The alchemists said that haste is the devil. In his sonnets to that primordial musician Orpheus, Rilke wrote this:

All that is hurrying

Soon will be over with

Only what lasts can bring

Us to the truth

It is clear that ancient works of art were constructed or written with layer upon layer of metaphor. This is most evident in myths and fairy stories, but it is there, analogous to the chakra system, in the ancient writing from the Vedas through Shakespeare.  We won’t even touch number symbolism that runs through these writings as well as through music, particularly Bach’s.

What this all means is that in a work of art there is the surface level which simply tells the story in a literal way, but as you delve deeper into the work more and more subtle  meanings appear. Gurdjieff, in speaking of his three volume masterwork All and Everything, suggested that it should be read at least three times. First, as one would read any book. Second, aloud, as if reading to someone else and third for real understanding.

So we are associating with content words like grief, mortal, friends and with meaning we see words likes truth, master, patience. Form is perhaps the harder of the three aspects to understand.

Next - Part Three: Form

Copyright ©1995 - 2011 Jack DeSalvo

Antonio Machado

Content, Meaning and Form, Part One

A Meditation on Robert Bly's Form That is Neither In Nor Out While Thinking of Composing For Improvisors

Part One: Content

Content can sometimes be your materials, a piece based on the interval of a fourth, for example. Content is also the story you are telling, the personal details. Robert Bly says that content is what is closest to us, even closest to our bodies, perhaps nearest the chest. 

Content can be what we often mistake for meaning or form. It can be a short chord progression from a pop song, an old standard or even from a baroque piece that always moves us a little, tugs at an emotion. It has a taste of nostalgia. That is not meaning, that is content.

A blues is a blues because of its content. It's form is maybe harder to detect. A song's content is easy to detect when there are lyrics. Lyrics are words you recite accompanied by the lyre. In ancient times and even in some societies that still exist, poetry was never conceived of as a separate art from music. 

The content of a real blues can, even without words, seem inescapable. Bly also said, "I associate content with the griefs we have experienced since birth, that is, the so-called accidents of our genetic inheritance, our relationship to our mother and father, the sorrows of friends and lovers, the knowledge that we are mortal".

Next - Part Two: Meaning

Robert Bly's Form That is Neither In nor Out, An Essay can be found in Of Solitude and Silence, writings on Robert Bly, edited by Richard Jones and Kate Daniels, Beacon Press.

Copyright ©1995-2011 Jack DeSalvo

                                                                            

Robert Bly

December 22, 2010: The Heritage of Artist Revelation

Our heritage of artistic revelation stems back many thousands of years to the cave paintings of places like Dordogne and Southern Africa and beyond to even older more advanced civilizations of which archeologists are just now finding the most remote, ephemeral traces.

There is a phenomenon related in a historical sense to the development of human culture and in a transcendental sense to consciousness itself. Coltrane referred to this as a reservoir. This reservoir supplies shapes and possibilities for composers and improvisors. It’s important to add that when all composers are improvisers and vice versa, the level of artistic expression will be at an unprecedented level.

The consciousness of certain individuals in a particular temporal period affects the possibilities that emerge from this reservoir in a certain time and place. There must have been very high consciousness in the time of Bach.

At times a certain musician will draw something from this reservoir that refreshes generations of musicians. Sometimes, though, ideas can petrify and become pale imitations devoid of inner life. This occurs when musicians simply imitate innovative artists without drinking at the source themselves.

The ancient concept of the Akashic Field is a good analogue for the reservoir locus. It would be floating above the Earth, maybe just above the atmosphere. At a slightly higher level would be the repository of possibilities from the entire future and past of humanity. Like Jung’s collective unconscious, it can be accessed in dreams, visions and by the cultivated artist.

An explanation of an artist’s so-called “style” could be that the wine from this reservoir will take on the shape of the vessel that it is poured into.

This phenomenon is far from a Western conceit, though the concept of a temporal period may well be. In Bengal today there are still wandering holy men called Bauls that improvise songs based on sacred texts or their own spontaneous poetry. West African Griots are more well known, not to mention the master improvisers of the various Arabic, Iranian and North and South Indian traditions.

Ever since the Cartesian phrase Cogito Ergo Sum was first put into print, the belief that humanity is discreetly separate from the natural world has infected culture. On the contrary, the composing of music, on paper or extemporaneously in performance, is as natural to humans as speech or walking upright. We learn to speak from listening to others but we learn what we want to say by listening to something deeper.

Copyright © 1993-2010 Jack DeSalvo

December 20, 2010: Finding Your Own Voice

It's an ancient premise that you can't actually teach someone to truly compose music or write poetry or create in any of the arts. The reason being that humans already have the access to this knowledge. This brings to mind Plato's story of Socrates coaxing a young boy to give correct answers to complex mathematical questions.

Why then should anyone bother to write about composing music and especially music for improvisers? First there's the aforementioned coaxing, and for thousands of years we have been acculturated to view only things occurring in three dimensional space as real or valuable and to see things that occur, or at least originate, in the other dimensions as fantasy. A treatise on the process of artistic creation can show that it is indeed possible to bring information from unseen sources and what some of the possibilities are.

The quest, then, is to find the essential area of ourselves where this knowledge is. Clearly, it doesn’t exist in the ego or personality where we have easy access. It is rarer than rare when it reveals itself full blown as with Mozart. It can appear in snippets when one works in earnest. It then becomes crucial to recognize when this happens. When you recognize your true voice it appears more often.

This is the alchemist translating mediaeval Arab texts and encountering a moment of illumination. This is Bach coming upon the exquisite architecture of his ideas, later to be notated, while improvising on the organ. This is John Coltrane finding a spiral of infinite melodic shapes through his relentless search.

The improvising musician, composer or serious listener who is following an improvised solo through its contours can distinguish what is coming from the player’s own voice and what are patterns, however well crafted, taken from recorded or transcribed performances of other musicians.

After monumental artists like Charlie Parker or John Coltrane opened doors to worlds of possibilities, untold numbers of players mimicked the results without inhabiting those worlds in a way that the music could enfold through their own voices. This results is a degradation of apparent possibilities.

Transcribing or studying transcriptions or studying by ear alone need not lead to new performances filled with constant quotes from famous solos. The player who uses fragments of other players’ solos to construct his or her own “style” is contributing to a more and more limited future for improvised music, no matter how well executed the mimicry may be.

The composer/improviser cultivates something as natural and a part of us as our skin or our hair.

We must use cunning and a passionate search for consciousness to provide a vessel for the music and all its aspects to emanate from deep within ourselves rather than from the surface of our intellect or from imitating an outside source.

Next: The Heritage of Artistic Revelation

Copyright © 1993-2010 Jack DeSalvo

December 18: Modal Inexactitude and Overarching Specificity

Certainly not every measure of every piece written with the expectation that improvisers will elaborate on the material should adhere to some kind of modal exactitude. Let's imagine a scenario where in a measure the harmony spells out a Dº triad with the tone G, the 4^th, added. The melody, however, contains both a b7 and an enharmonically spelled major 7^th (Db), neither being in passing. This really suggests the simultaneous superimposition of different harmonies. This kind of superimposition occurs spontaneously in advanced improvisation as well.

There are occasions where no chord or modal symbols are present at all. The possibilities for improvised solos include freely improvising over the pedal tone that’s implied throughout.

Sometimes it's preferable to use  the modal name in addition to chord symbols, especially  if you envision the chords coming from the same modal source and they could easily imply more commonly used modes. If we have repeated alternating measures of Ebsus2/A and F(add2), a knowledgeable improvisor may assume Eb Lydian over the Ebsus2/A and F Lydian over F(add2)/A. The composer may want to project a specific harmonic atmosphere and sees these two sonorities as being derived from A locrian. Yes, A locrian is identical to Eb lydian (as it would be with F mixolydian), but in this case the A bass note is the unifying factor between these two chords and it give a single reference point to the improvisor.

Even in those rare instances where a composer gets to write music for improvisors that he/she knows well, where it may be possible to indicate less in a chart to that individual, written music should be created for any future performances that clearly shows what the composer has in mind for the harmonic, melodic and rhythmic atmosphere of a piece of music.

Next: Philosophical considerations 


Copyright © 1993-2010 Jack DeSalvo

December 16, 2010: The Symmetrical Augmented Scale, Giant Steps and The Whole Tone Scale

Symmetrical Augmented Scale

The symmetrical augmented scale is a hexatonic scales, meaning it has six tones. Like the symmetrical diminished scale, it only has two modes, which are repeated at equidistant points. Here is the structure of the first mode and the triads it produces with C as root:

R,#2(or b3),3,5,#5(or b6)and 7

Extended arpeggio:

R,3,#5,7,#9 and a natural 5

Triads:

C+,C,Cm,Eb+(or D#+),E+,E,Em,G+,Ab+,Ab,Abm and B+

What makes the symmetrical scale eccentric is that for seventh chords it colors three distinctive chord qualities from the same root and repeats it at equidistant intervals of a major third:

Cmaj7#5, Cmaj7 and Cm(maj7)

Emaj7#5, Emaj7 and Em(maj7)

Abmaj7#5, Abmaj7 and Abm(maj7)

If, as Slonimsky tells us, the symmetrical diminished scale separates the octave into four equal parts as represented by Bartok’s Pole Theory, the symmetrical augmented scale divides the octave into three equal sections. The three interchangeable points can be imagined as three points of a triangle. If C is the initial root then C is at the top point of the triangle, E is at the bottom left and Ab(G#) is at the bottom right.

It then becomes clear that this was the model for Coltrane’s Giant Steps where the three equidistant points are B, Eb and G. In fact, the same symmetrical diminished scale can be player over the Bmaj7, Ebmaj7 and Gmaj7 in that composition, though that is not what Coltrane does on his recording of the same name.

Whole Tone Scale

With the exception of the chromatic scale, the remaining symmetrical scale with no interval larger than a minor third and that repeats every octave is the whole tone scale. This scale was perhaps the first symmetrical scale to find its way into the ears of European listeners via the works of some of the Impressionist composers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Again, it was taken up by the innovators of the BeBop period in jazz.

This structure of the whole tone scale is:

R,2,3,#4(or b5), #5(orb6) and b7

Extended arpeggio:

R,3,#5,b7,9,#11

The whole tone scale divides the octave into six equal parts, so the chord qualities repeat at every chord tone.

Next: Modal Inexactitude and Superimposition

Copyright © 1993-2010 Jack DeSalvo