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april 13, 2004
The Etiquette of Improvisation
The Etiquette of Improvisation, av Howard S. Becker, innehåller en hel del intressanta tankar om jazzimprovisation som naturligtvis kan överföras till andra områden. Speciellt tankarna om självorganisation är fascinerande.
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Why did we torture ourselves and each other that way? The etiquette of jam sessions required it. This very strict etiquette told us that the number of choruses the first player played set the standard others should follow. To play more would be rude, pushy, self-aggrandizing; to play less hinted that the first player had gone too far and, worse, that the following players who played less had less to say. (It usually happened that the fist soloist played too many choruses, hoping to get something going even though he had started slowly.)
No one taught us these rules, nor had we read them in an etiquette column in Downbeat. We learned them by quietly observing, as youngsters, what older players did, and noting what happened when someone (usually a novice or some other unsocialized type) failed to obey these rules.
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A rudimentary sociological theory suggests that etiquette is a way of providing for the systematic, formal expression of recognized and accepted relations of rank. That includes unequal relations, as when children are told not to speak until they are spoken to or when southern blacks were required to get off the sidewalk for whites or poor people were enjoined from wearing clothing that was "beyond their station." It also includes relations of equality: fictitious, as when good party manners require people to pretend that everyone present is of the same social class whether they are or not; or real, as in the obligations of friends to one another. Etiquette is particularly important when people think that everyone involved in some situation ought to be equal but really isn't.
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The agreement to keep some things fixed and vary others made it possible for a group to sound like it knew, collectively, what it was doing: to not get lost, to have some idea of what might be coming next, to interpret what the others did as hints of a direction the collective effort might take. Equally important, agreement on these matters made it possible for a knowledgeable audience--whose members knew the songs the players used as a ground for improvisation and the limits of current performance practice--to listen to what was played and appreciate it, understand how the players were creating variations within a body of rules and known elements.
Consider what happens when all the participants ignore the past, ignore reputations, ignore everything but the contribution people make to the collective effort. The rule in conventional improvisation is to treat everyone's contribution as equally good. The rule in these situations is to treat everyone's contribution as potentially better than all the others. Whenever anyone does something clearly better, everyone else drops their own ideas and immediately joins in working on that better idea. People do not move gingerly, gradually converging on some sort of amalgam of hints and implications, thus respecting the fiction of equality.
To be able to do that, everyone involved must have much the same idea of what the better looks like, a common criterion for knowing it when it appears. That suggests that they will have shared a past in which those criteria and their application have been worked out and applied in many cases, which in turn suggests their long-term participation in an organized world in which the kind of activity they are improvising is common, probably a professional or quasi-professional world in which ties of occupation bring people together in joint projects.
Becker har skrivit andra intressanta essäer, t.ex.
Italo Calvino as Urbanologist
Children's Conceptions of Money: Concepts and Social Organization
"Foi por Acaso": Conceptualizing Coincidence"
Posted by hakank at april 13, 2004 01:02 EM Posted to Komplexitet/emergens