29 June 2021
Start of second period of regular blogging (18 month gap)
My charge is to do some unfocused ‘freewriting.’ Don’t think of a topic. Just start. I don’t really care for the notion, but part of the role of being a student is to trust the teacher, or at least to give them a sporting chance.
Of course, I started out by ignoring the assignment. I did a number of focused freewritings. While I produced sizable chunks of text, that were reasonably coherent even though I wasn’t trying for that, I found them boring. Both in the production and reading. (On later re-reading, I did see bits of interest, but overall it was not a satisfying experience. And so I come to the assignment.
Or at least I approach it. I will note, although though many writers seem to be keen on writing by hand, I don’t care for it. I prefer typing. For me handwriting is physically uncomfortable, slow, and, afterwards, difficult to read. So I type, and try not to correct my errors, although when I feel an error happen, sometimes I just automatically backspace.
It’s interesting that one can ‘feel’ an error. It means that part of my brain has one intention, another part of my brain has another, and the two parts (or a third) know that they are not in accord. It is also interesting that when I feel an error I am generally quite certain it is an error. Often I know – in an automatic muscular sense – how many times I have to backspace to fix the problem.
It makes me think of the piano. I am learning piano, starting from scratch. I am in my forth year, and not yet at a point where I can play anything fluidly, at least without a lot of practice.
Today I was practicing, and my fingers figured out how to play through a series of broken chords. I often have the sense that as I learn, I am watching from the outside. My mind knows what ought to be done, but it does not speak directly to my fingers; or if it does, it is far too slow. What seems to happen is that somehow my fingers – which had thought they were playing an sequence of independent notes – recognize that they are really playing a broken chord. That is, that the posture of the hand is in a recognizable position, and with that all that needs to be attended to is pressing the fingers down in the right order and rhythm. Well, there is more to it than that of course, but still this feels like a step forward. Similarly, looking a larger span of notes, it may often be the case that they require just a few hand shapes, and that one handshape can shift fluidly to the next. So that really what looks like a long span of individual notes is really just a rhythmic pattern of presses with a few shifts of hand posture.
I am at the point where I recognize a common pattern of mistake-making – what is called a failure mode in systems analysis – related to my hand posture. I find when I stretch out my hand – that is, spread the fingers apart to play a larger span of keys without moving my hand — I want to return it to a more closed, comfortable sort of resting position, when I am done with that sequence. It is as though, I am going back to a notion I learned long ago when learning to type. There was a notion of home keys and a home position, and that your fingers ought to return to the home position, so that you, or rather your fingers, always know the path to each letter. But on the piano I am learning that there is no home.
On the piano your fingers are nomads. To learn the piano is to understand an entire territory, and not just its layout its logics: when it is sensible to take particular paths and dwell in particular areas. A song is something like a journey through a particular territory, with key signatures that define possible paths, particular series of notes where some are favored over others. It may also mean that there are particular rhythms that recur.
This morning, part of my learning involved getting a recurring rhythm right. The problem I was having was that because the transitions between series of notes was hard, my fingers had to pause while my brain figured out their destinations – and the pause sounded OK. And that was a problem. The song could have been written with the rhythm I wrongly played, and so my mistake didn’t sound like a mistake, at least to my untutored ears. Left to myself, I could have happily continued to play it wrong time after time. But, once a week, I play for me teacher. ‘No, that’s not it! Like this!’ I kept getting it wrong, of course, for the various reasons I mentioned, as well as the fact that by the time of my lesson I had a lot of practice in doing it wrong. But now I now, and can work at getting it right.
I once read that a style is really an unnoticed mistake, and, by virtue of the lack of notice, a repeated mistake. A mistake one repeats. I like that because it takes the mystique out of “style.” Style is just a coherent series of varying instance of one or a few mistakes. Perhaps what makes a style aesthetically pleasing versus not is that different mistakes have a coherence, a higher order structure to them. The brain likes to see patterns, and patterns that recur over time; even visual patterns which are simultaneous require time to notice, as the eyes dance across them and recognize their regularity
Patterns stretch out over time and over space, and are manifested through as sounds or colors or rhythms or pulses or touches. A line of flotsam marks the extent of a high tide. The concentric layers of a hailstone bear witness to its accretive formation high in the troposphere. The alignment of tabular plagioclase crystals in granite evince the slow flow of the magma. Patterns are the fossils of process.
So when I am learning a song, I am working backwards. I am learning a pattern, and trying to discover the process, the song, the flow of movements through the fingers as posture of my hands and arms shift more slowly. One day, I hope, I will know enough to work forwards.
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