Arranger Game

Do you have a creative project on the back burner, waiting for the right time to be born?

I do. Lots of them. But this is the one of mine that has been waiting the longest. I'm a little concerned for this baby, because it's been waiting so long to be born.

There's a reason it hasn't come out of the oven yet. I've taken it for a drive here and there, but it always seemed to have more potential. It's the most original and the most tricky to decide which form to put it into.

It's a music arranging game. Originally it was designed to make it easy for large groups of musicians of differing skill levels to play together. But it could have many other uses, now that I've seen its potential.

I'm thinking of working on this project now, to take it further. How shall I decide which direction should I go with it?

It's one of those inventions that are so original that it's tricky to form into a product.

It has some interesting features. You know how jazz or rap or "Island style" evolved as a form of music? It could be used to invent a genre of music because one outline could be infinitely varied.

You know how tricky it is for musicians to discuss how to arrange parts? It could be tailored to be used as a shorthand for bands to talk about music arrangement. 

You know how groups of people who play music get together to make some music? When they finally find a "groove," they have a hard time going anywhere else so their music ends up being a formless one-groove jam.This way of outlining could allow groups of people to play together and it would sound great!

 It will take a bit of effort on your part to check this out. You probably wouldn't be interested if you weren't already a musician or theater person. But I'm hoping you might see possibilities enough to make a suggestion about which way I might take this little project. Maybe you'd like to get involved?

Oh, no worries - take your time... 

http://www.franis.org/out4improv/


I'm thinking for starters, perhaps making it into a kit of terms that could go into a presentation, accessible for use at an open mike situation. Then I could introduce the idea to local musicians.

Where is my troupe?

 

Real Natural

Do you have a claim to fame?

It's one of my standard fallback questions that I developed from my days of hitchhiking in the quest of becoming an entertaining conversationalist. If the person can say yes to this question, it never fails to yield an interesting tale about who they are and what has been important to them.

A former teacher of mine is someone who claims he's the inspiration for the character made famous by R. Crumb in the hippie comics era. In fact, he even changed his name legally to become Mr. Natural. This confounds those who have him fill out forms because his first name is Mr.  That's right - not Mister, but Mr. with a period.


But Mr. Natural as a real person has further claims to fame beyond his name and how he became famous for having assumed it. For instance, under his previous name, he personally fought and he won a case as that shaped landlord/tenant rights in San Francisco.

Natural has written a book about his own way of teaching music. It's a sort of reverse engineered jazz theory for beginners based on "do-re-mi..."  He and his business partner Angel have published a pretty easy-to-understand disambiguation of a college level music theory course called "Music Theory Decoded - Strictly by the Numbers". He's uploaded many group courses on music from classes he recorded and put on youtube for many instruments. He even invented a short-cut for composers to sketch their musical ideas before the song makes it into notation that's an improvement on what's known as "Nashville Notation."

 So - do you have a claim to fame?
If you don't yet, what would it be when your ship comes in?

Stories Drive Invention

 Since the art of telling stories is so essential for the articulation of almost anything that is communicated, I thought I'd bring forward the continued inspiration for new creative inventions that I get from the field of screenwriting. What fascinates me about screenwriting is how it is the art of selecting what is relevant to a story that "drives" the plot line forward - and of course, what is left out as extraneous. For this reason, I'm always curious to look at movies that are inspired by much longer and more detailed books to bring forward this selection process, scene by scene.

One point that's not obviously revealed by merely watching movies is how movie viewers have been educated over the years to figure out what is happening in a story. Viewers are shown what has been determined by producers to be relevant to the story in the scene action of the actors, set and events. Of course this also includes indications of time frames, foreshadowing of later events, suspense, drama, character building, etc. Movie watchers are, to a great extent, completely unaware of how much work they are doing to construct the plot, events and characters as a story unfolds - and good storytelling never disturbs the illusion of how a viewer must continue to be tracking these elements to make sense of the illusion that is being created as an experience.

But how to put an ability to observe and analyze into becoming a new invention? Comparing to reveal differences is my favorite means. Then the differences can be used as a model or form, plugging in the different content from an unrelated area that then becomes related.

Recipes are an obvious example of this. You can take the form of a casserole, for instance - which is some sort of grain or starch in a container that is baked, containing some sort of vegetable or meat and a type of topping. Now you can take a genre of food, such as Lasagna which is a baked dish - and switch the contents to another country's food style - and you can make a Mexican food casserole instead of an Italian one and have an original combination that wasn't obviously apparent.

To apply this idea to music and screenwriting, there's a fascinating parallel that imagines a piece of music as if it were a story. This suggested to me how musicians could be playing roles in carrying out what this story will become using their ability to improvise. If you'd like to see the result of this invention that was inspired by this parallel thinking of marrying the genre of screenwriting to musical performance, check out the unique advantages of playing with the arrangement and instrumentation of a musical piece as if it were a story.

http://www.franis.org/out4improv/

Any invention takes a bit of investment to wrap your mind around, and this one is no different. It's unpredictable what happens when you take one genre and use it to inspire unique characteristics in another arena. It often creates a synergy type combination, that is often useful for more functions than could be originally expected. Using and playing with a unique combination of genres will make these characteristics apparent. Projects need to be "born" and brought to maturity by figuring out what they are good for. Any baby is lots of trouble and not really good for much of anything until it grows up into a person who can do stuff - ideas are similar.

In this case, what started out as a convenient way to combine the differing abilities and involvement level of a large group of performers turned out to have other uses. As I used this newly invented system to describe existing characteristics of musical styles that already existed to see if it was relevant to them, I realized it could be used as a way to invent a completely new musical style that could be infinitely varied. It can also be used for one person to compose arrangements of a performance piece...as a way for a music teacher to have all of their students to improvise together, as a way to discuss musical arrangement in general...how to give form to generalized "jamming" among musicians who do not know each others songs. Possibly it could be crafted into a composer's game with some programming - but I would think that the experience of making music together with other people would be it's most interesting and fun application. Of course, that means you would need a "troupe" of people who played music on instruments or performed and were interested in playing together with each other, which may be a unique situation to find in this day of virtual reality.

For instance, a business application of such descriptive function in common with the A-Game I invented is apparent in the "music genome" of Pandora.com. Musicians working with Pandora listen to music and describe the characteristics of common factors such as instrumentation, style, use of harmony and rhythm and these descriptions are correlated to other "similar" songs. These commonalities are now organized into a database, so now any user of the site can specify a type of music they like and a whole radio station is generated from these descriptions, containing songs that the user would not normally become exposed to knowing about.

I'd love to know how you think the field of screenwriting could be applied to your favorite project.

Where's the Music?

 Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
        Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
    While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
        And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
    Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
        Among the river sallows, borne aloft
            Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
    And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
        Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
        The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
           And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

(The last stanza of Keats's "To Autumn." when he was dying of TB.)

When I read a poem, I wonder..."where is the music to this?" For me, unless a poem has a tune and is sung, it's not complete. When I hear poets read their poems, or rappers rap their lines, I think, "that person really wants to express themselves and they haven't learned to sing yet."

 I love it when poetry is lyrical or when poetry is an expression of meaning that has additional images or experiences in context with it. But by itself, usually poetry just doesn't do much for me. Part of the reason I don't really get into poetry is probably because there's no music attached, or I'm not connecting with the emotional content that's being expressed.


Words and grammar structure meaning - and poetry is where words become free of their structure. Poetry is how you can rub words together and they can become something original that hasn't been meant before. But unless you're skillful, the reader won't know what you're really saying and will read things into what you wrote that you didn't mean. Understanding is constructed by the person who is experiencing it. Their assumptions and perceptions trump your intent as an artist.

Sometimes poetic words will be so delicious on the page that I can actually imagine them complete without a tune attached. But usually that is when I can imagine images that go with the words instead of a tune, as I can do with this stanza from Keats. The poetry that goes beyond this "lack"of no music will evokes its own images that completely affect me. If a poem doesn't "do it for me," then usually it just doesn't contain enough of what it's hinting at. It's not "juicy enough." Hints are OK, I guess, for those people who like them, but I'm after experiences, or the hints of experiences that I have yet to embody.

Oddly enough, this is also the reason I listen to mostly instrumental music. It's also the reason I carefully select the films and video content to which I expose myself. If I listen to music with lyrics without selecting the content of it, (the radio, for instance) I am often so disappointed with how much drivel is out there. It's that I'm so affected by any art that I must be deliberate. When there is a song with words worth listening to, I never get tired of hearing it and may even take the time to learn to play and sing it. But frankly, most of what my culture imagines is valuable to say in a song or violent movies are ...not what I want to program into my psyche by repeating it. We humans seem to be preoccupied with the sounds of our own self-indulgences - we're verbal and like to blab - even when we don't have anything to say.

Being an artist, how can you tell if what you have to say is going to be considered notable by others unless you say it? Any expression seems to find it's audience. It's always interesting how "great" works of art continue to grow in meaning as the culture changes. People continue to find new meanings in "timeless" artistic vision. What is most personal becomes the most universal, as it is artfully expressed.

What do you think?

Tacit Agreements

Like my musician friends here, tacit agreements coming from a shared subculture can sometimes give the conviction of bonding by how easy it is to “read” each other's intentions and needs in the context of circumstances. The challenge in tacit agreements is to make ways to determine how much it matters if the agreements are or are not done, so another tacit agreement can be substituted or created to take the place of an outdated one.

It is this feature that can make tacit agreements can be tricky to manage. Often they are made below the awareness level of their long-term effects – as if the people involved are playing a role that may or may not fit who they really are – or who they are becoming or have become. In a sense, being able to do this artfully will avoid the ritualistic ways of fulfilling the expectations of a relationship that most people must fall back on. Instead, by being able to make these agreements purposefully, the people involved have delightful surprises and potentials that change with the times.

With the context of your every action concerning the other person, it's easy to evolve a tacit agreement of how people are supposed to treat each other. Problems come when you tacitly agree to match slightly different cultural standards, causing what could become endless confusion where these differences overlap.

At some point, you'll want to find out how it matters to the others involved in proportion to how much trouble it is for you. Tacit agreements may require you to do more than you really want to continue doing, or to accept or assign a meaning that you don't want your actions to have. If either person can't make changes for implied or expressed agreements with their partner, it’s not good for either of them or the longevity of the relationship. Either way tacit agreements can lead to big disappointments when people figure out that the deal they thought they were making or definitions of bonded love was quite different for their partner than they expected.

If you could foresee a problem coming about tacit demonstrations, it would be handy to know how to avoid problems.. Something you will do, have already done or are about to do for each other could become troublesome, (or the business you have together. These ideas can be applied to any close partnership.) It would be an eventual problem to be expected to continue or indefinitely expand your intention to do for your partner or with them. The problem for the demonstrator, is you wouldn’t really know how much it matters to them that you do those demonstrations of for them. (Or in the case of a business partnership, they may not acknowledge or agree on the need for what you might think should be done to expand the business to make more money.) Because you don’t really know, you can’t tell if it makes any difference to them how you continue to expand your demonstrative actions, or change them. So this can become a real puzzler for the later stages of the relationship, and make people who are perfectly suited for each other go their separate ways.

Seeing Order in Chaos

We notice order by giving attention to chaos, without leaving it — by staying with it, laying with it, as long as it takes, until a new order emerges. Regina Bensch-Coe

Yes, seems that creativity is involved, and also patience. As an example of this, I'm reminded of the my childhood fascination with listening to a repeating skip in an old recording of my mother's voice on a phonograph record as it had run out at the end. She had been saying a partial phrase that was repeated by the loop. As I listened, my ear transferred the emphasis to another syllable in the phrase, and suddenly, I could hear her saying a completely different meaning. The most amazing thing was, that as I transferred my attention to a different sound in the sequence, it changed again - and even a third time! Later I read something about this phenomena, (which I'm sure has a term but I do not remember what it had been named. Anybody here know what that's called?) Evidently, the younger a person is, the more variations of meaning they can hear in the tape loop of a human voice.

Once had some roommates who encouraged many of their musical cohorts to come over every day and play at our house. This led me one day to stop as I came out of the bathroom. There, and only there, I could hear the sound of one person practicing in the bedroom equally with the other two people who were playing in the front room. I stood there for quite a long time listening for the commonalities between the two entirely different things going on, fascinated by my knowledge that they couldn't hear each other and yet I could hear their "accidental" correlations. So, in my case the "how" was to notice that something interesting could be going on.

I'm also reminded how a movie scene will pick and choose what scenes are relevant to the storyline. There are many running "storylines" in my long term curiousity about what may happen far apart time time, but are related as I regard their inter-relatedness over very long periods of time. So, I would also say that in making order out of chaos, sometimes you must compensate for time of arrival for making these seemingly unrelated correlations of order from what appears to be chaotic happenstance.

There must be other factors too... any thoughts?

Musical Emotions

I'm thinking about using the linguistics of music to reveal the assumptions of how you can put meaning into words. So much of what can be said become fused with the words you use to say it with. Music lets pure emotions be freed from whatever words that were used to describe feelings. The emotional experiences that music brings out can reveal how someone can use the sequences of what is presented for a certain emotional effect. Emotional experiences are filled with meaning only hinted at by words.

In a sense, it's a little like learning the skills for making a movie/a story affect people emotionally. In words, how can you present a sequence of what you choose to talk about, and how you talk about it to have certain emotional effects that you'd like the meaning to carry?

It's not something many people would imagine, but there are some people who already have made the connection that music is really another language, with its own syntax, etc. It helps to know how to play any musical instrument. Just like it helps to know two languages well so you can compare them to reveal their differences.

My instrument designer friend Bill Wesley says that everyone agrees on the qualities of music, so that's why he agrees that music is a language. People differ widely on whether they want to experience any particular quality or not that music can provide. There are many people who are very arrogant of which music is "real music." He says they are really only opinionated about whether they want to feel a certain way or not.

Once you start looking for these qualities of music, then you can begin to notice what they have in common with the way people use language.