In my teaching, I have a habit of getting people to draw their account of a piece. Since I call virtually everything into question, a natural thought arises: what’s that drawing all about?
Drawing asks for an embodiment of a visual sort, which helps a person put the thoughts they may have about a piece into a form that is not verbal. That helps because words are traps, and in many of the settings where I teach, not everyone has the same command of the same language. Every word has a concept, or a group of related concepts, and using words to account for musical energy only goes so far. Words can confuse as much as enlighten. Of course, visual images only go so far as well, but they’re not words!
A shape has implications that words struggle to convey. It may suggest direction of movement, a tactile quality, heaviness, lightness, or a number of other metaphorical characteristics of sound. A color carries energies for some people that are directly connected to music. Shapes or colors gradually transforming can capture musical transformations in an elegant way. And having someone use words to describe what they’ve represented in shapes and colors brings out things that neither alone could match.
For discussing music in a group, a drawing allows people to have something to point to without using measure numbers, times, or descriptions of nearby events. There is a unifying aspect to that, for while people describe the same event or sound in different ways, a visual representation often conveys the sound energy more viscerally, and people can relate to it even when they describe it differently. When a number of people use similar shapes to represent the music they hear, it suggests underlying commonalities to be explored. At the very least a person can point to an image and everyone knows what they refer to! Drawing is also something that occurs in time, so seeing a person draw an aspect of the music discussed allows some of the musical energy – the pacing, the gesture – to be visualized as well.
And for developing a sense of community, seeing another’s visual account in fact displays something of their personality, which may not show in their verbal expressions. Simply what a person chooses to represent is also informative, since no one can get every aspect of a piece into a drawing. Time and again in class, a group will have a flash of insight just from seeing that someone thought the same feature was important that they had in mind. Or it turns out that everyone included something very much the same, showing extremely clearly that the thing was important!
Drawing has an advantage over writing about music in that writing entails so much description getting to the point of making the commentary one has in mind. A drawing puts the event quickly in mind, and if accompanied by a verbal account, allows a much more elegant point to be made. Much as with music itself, drawing is a form of expression distinct from words and language, calling forth a reliance on intuition that turns out to be very valuable. Especially in a setting where a group talks about their analysis, relying on intuition to respond to music often exposes ideas that one might be hesitant to verbalize otherwise. One of the great benefits here is that obvious things get pointed out much more than people are generally willing to do in words, pre-judging and thus failing to speak of the most important factors.
So, far from simply being a fun way to get at musical discussion, drawings offer a very meaningful and potent method of getting the ball rolling toward musical understanding.