Composing For Improvisers: 2011

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

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.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

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

Antonio Machado

Sunday, January 2, 2011

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.

Robert Bly