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