A Familiar Refrain: Making Meaning in Groups

I found this article on interactive learning in a journal on learning science. The article is by Gerry Stahl (full citation below).

His interest is in the interactivity that online classroom technology can facilitate, though what he says is relevant for all creative enterprises in groups. I found the idea very attractive for its analogy to group improvisation:

"This 'sharing' is not a matter of individuals having similar understandings, but of them participating productively in a joint meaning-making discourse within a communal world. A group has achieved intersubjectivity if the members of the group interact well enough to pursue the group’s aims."

In other words, these individuals (students, in this instance) are not just sharing information with each another, desirable as that may be: they are creating something. Making discourse within a communal world should be existentially fulfilling.

The relevance for jazz and improvisation hardly needs to be underscored.

Stahl's ideal, applied to performing music, would be that groups make not just music, but meaning. Think about it. We've heard the notes before, but what does it mean (to us, our audience, to future improvisations).

And in the case of classroom dynamics: students are not just pooling their effort and exchanging information. They are making something that would not have been made otherwise, and is unique, and not replicable by individuals. I take Stahl to mean he will settle for nothing less.

By the way, I understand "intersubjectivity" to simply mean, you know what I'm talking about, and I know what you're talking about. There is sufficient grounds for real communication. (The US House of Representatives would be a negative example.)

Of course, Stahl does not see this dynamic as mere play:
"Intersubjectivity must be built up gradually through interaction and repaired frequently."

Fair enough. I commend you to this article, then:

Stahl, Gerry. “Conceptualizing the Intersubjective Group.” International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 10, no. 3 (September 2015): 209–17. doi:10.1007/s11412-015-9220-4.

A working version is available free! The magic of open access publishing. 

The Problem of Sonny Stitt

The problem is not with his playing. Few would question that he was a master of his instrument and possessed the highest musicianship. The problem is whether people really hear—and truly recognize—Sonny Stitt.

Stitt uses melodic material that seems to have originated with Charlie Parker. It’s hard for listeners, even knowledgeable ones, to refer to Stitt without referring to Bird. If you sat down and transcribed enough solos by both of them, you would surely find some of the same notes, or rather the same melodic figures, turning up on the pages. The basic problem is one Stitt himself may have played into by paying explicit tribute to the slightly older man, who was a friend and mentor.

Stitt and Parker don’t have the same tone on their instrument, though, nor the same rhythmic approach, nor the same way of putting phrases together, nor do they hit the same kind of groove within a combo setting. They’re different musicians.

In fact there is a great deal, even on paper, that Stitt plays and that Parker did not play and probably never would have. I can suggest what those are in another post, but the point is that there are real and important differences. Different riffs. We who can hear so much in the discourse of jazz cannot hear these valuable and intriguing differences in the gestalt of their playing if we are too focused on the similarity between discrete musical figures as they might appear abstracted out of the flow of a performance.

The soul of jazz, and the root of its soulfulness, is that it is not intended as a fixed work following the standard of paper notation. It is not a music of texts, but of performance. European art music developed around the idea of a finished, notated text whose existence stood outside of any individual performance. (That idea has come under criticism from many sides, but when true “classical” music was germinating, the idea was explicit and normative.) Jazz motifs, licks, or tropes are not handed down from God, and then communicated to us, qua mortals, through the vessel of Great Men like Parker, as the notion of the "supremacy of the work" might be (and has been) applied to jazz. The idea that music represents some absolute truth that is out there ignores the participatory and public nature that most music thrives on, to name only one problem. The opportunity for audience members to say “amen” to a performance is a key motivation to attend. But that requires a performer. 


Try instead watching the many videos that exist of Sonny Stitt, reading first-hand accounts of his performances or his activities as a musician, or looking at pictures of him. Then go back and listen to both Parker and Stitt; the more solos by each one the better. I guarantee you will hear Stitt in a new light, and in his own light, if you had not before. It happened to me when I saw him live in 1982, which sadly is not possible today. But the point is that I myself was converted in the way I am now preaching.

Stitt and Parker are different people, they’re different performers. Improvisation only has its own musical value if it is viewed as a “performance,” in the sense of the word both as an execution of a task, and of the dramatic realization of a compelling idea. Each solo is—and should be understood as—an action, an act, an actualization of self in the moment.  It’s a performance as well in the sense of performance art: a representation and realization of self in a dramatic setting, in the case of jazz pitched as a heroic struggle against the onslaught of group pulse and resulting entropy. Please allow Vijay Iyer to speak on this: “Musicians tell their stories, but not in the traditional linear sense: an exploded narrative is conveyed through a holistic musical personality or dramatic attitude.” Chorus by chorus, note by note, Stitt had another narrative, and alternative explosions. 

So it is not only the flamboyant Stuff Smith or Sun Ra but the suave, controlled Sonny Stitt as well who highlights the performative dimension in jazz as music and as art form. Stitt artistic identify poses this problem for us, and represents a critical challenge: to evaluate a jazz artist not as producer of a fixed work, or a static set of melodic tropes, but as a performer. 

Improvising architecture: the jazz club as objet d'art

Call me a sycophant. Because I have worked there and will in future. So I have, let’s say, a certain interest in the place. But I just really like this room. I would like to say more: that this new club in a typical Village basement space is an art object. It’s a thing.

Mezzrow Jazz Club was made by someone for an expressive purpose, which others can enjoy and think about in turn. It expresses what he thinks a jazz piano bar should be like. It will last. It’s an art object with a difference, though.

This is an artwork in which artists can actually go into and create their own original, independent art. It inspires art.

If you had not previously thought of a jazz club as an artwork, think “architecture.” Like Brunelleschi’s dome or the Guggenheim, it’s noteworthy as a construction, as a space, yet it also channels and allows other artworks to speak for themselves and structures our experience of art objects as some kind of continuum past the discrete item.

We need to think about venues for jazz and improvisation in this way, as spaces that shape what can be heard and known and enjoyed. Spaces that, unlike our conventional understanding of art venues like museums or galleries, are specifically social spaces, that shape how we interact with each other as patrons of the music, but also who we are, at least while we’re there. Each venue is different as each one who comes.

We go to hear music, but we hear collectively or communally. So this frisson of tension between the highly fluid realm of improvisation and the supposedly stable, monumental world of architecture dissolves when you consider a venue as a space that will be available past any one particular gaggle of listeners, staff, and artists creating in the moment.

Others would do well, then, to think how those that built Mezzrow (or Smalls, Smoke, FatCat and many other joints) in what was basically a man-made cave created something, and the immense, lasting value of such creation. 

Why (you think) music can't help you: you're not doing it the old fashioned way

Some musicians see their art form as a force for good in the world. It can make you a better person, soothe, make rational, etc. Music has, in this sense, an ethical effect: it is a guide and incitement to right conduct. Pharaoh Sanders and Cornelius Cardew think so, or thought so.

To those who respond to this saying, "come on: music is attractive, but it's wishful thinking to suppose that it directly makes people better," musicologist Edward Lippman would say in turn that they are living in the wrong century. We're too acclimatized to abstract, specialized musical performance. In effect, we progressive moderns may, just may, have lost something--which we don't even know we've lost.

We need to get back to ancient Greek philosophy of music.

"Inherent in the nature of ancient music," Lippman writes," was its existence in the context of a specific social or ritual occasion, the presence of words as an intrinsic part of the music, and the prevalence, finally, of participation over listening. When these features are taken into account, the ethical and emotional force of music, together with the defned character of this force, is not difficult to understand." A History of Western Musical Aesthetics (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 15.