One of the most important books to have influenced my thinking about music and music-making is Christopher Small’s book, Music, Society, Education. Among the many things it helped clarify for me, one thing that probably drew me into his thinking was that he used Grateful Dead concerts to demonstrate the growth of community in shared listening. Of course, the thing about shared listening, if you are aware of its power (or not), is that people are very much drawn into a common experience. This phenomenon can be used for ill intent, of course, but one way or the other, it manages to bring people into sync with each other.
Small points to Dead concerts as especially community-based, as they famously collected fans who followed them from concert to concert, financing their travels through sales of items in parking lots before and after concerts. And they allowed, actually encouraged individuals to tape their concerts and freely share them with others. Rather than restrict such activities as infringements of copyright so more money could be made, they had a conviction that the music was what they were out to make, and loved the fact that people loved their music. The results include the Dead developing into one of the most successful touring acts of all time, the emergence of business models based on sharing, the beginning of the Internet Archive, and much more.
But for my part, it’s the sharing of an experience. I attended several Dead concerts, not nearly so many as others did, and I preferred to sit back where I could watch the impact of changes in the music on the crowd. Jerry Garcia was a master of tone-color. He would step back to his amplifiers, adjust a few settings, and when he entered again with a new sound, waves of recognition would roll immediately through the crowd. Similarly, the Dead were known for “drums – space jams”, in which incredibly experimental music was on tap for 15, 30 minutes or more. And when the group settled back into a unified groove, the chorus or beginning of a song — the instantaneous effect of the crowd was amazing.
In recent years, with the developing SEA theory, I’ve made numerous on-the-fly analyses of these situations, how Jerry and the band used simple, standard musical parameters to ratchet up energy over a period of time to deliver a moment of utter clarity on arriving at a threshold of energy. (One of these will appear in this blog in the near future!) These guys were using the phenomenon of moving apart and coming together in a highly sophisticated way that grew out of their long experience with improvisation and playing with sound.
So how does this relate to my other work? The Just Listening paradigm, whose motto is “shared listening creates a sound haven that awakens compassion for self and others”, is very much based on taking advantage of how shared listening, especially listening to the same thing repeatedly (something Dead fans would certainly have done!) and how that puts a shared energy in the soul. I got the motto for the workshop from a friend, Dr. Claire Garebedian, who is a pioneer in the Music as a Healing Art movement. As a result of what she simply calls “playing cello for people with dementia”, she has discovered and named that sound haven, and has become adept at creating it. And next week I head to Los Angeles to enact a realization of Groundhog Night – a composition based on these same precepts but goes even further by employing audience members as co-composers – with residents of Housing Works.
These experiences, these phenomena are real. I am interested in discovering and making known the many facets of how this happens, and my conviction that it is fundamentally due to the power of sound carries me beyond the mysteries of pitch — profound and deep, without doubt — and into the complexity that other aspects of sound create by interacting with the energies of pitch and rhythm.