Musicking - Episode 77.011 #shorts

The task of boiling down the sum total of the experiential effects of a collection of human-organized and generated sounds into a functional collection of words is daunting. To put it plainly: writing (and speaking) about music is difficult. It is nothing like listening to music, nothing like experiencing it. As Christopher Small teaches, “the gestures of musicking can articulate many kinds of relationships at once. Words, on the other hand, can deal with things only one at a time… they [cannot] be made to bear the cargo of multiple simultaneous meanings... the gestures of musicking [however] can...” (My italics). Small, whose terminology (“musicking”) I have adopted here, articulates a truth which most musicians instinctively know. Words are too slow to illuminate even the aggregated physical constitutive elements of the musicked event, let alone any emotional, cultural, socio-political, spiritual, mythological or mystical effects which might be experienced in the real-time totality of the event. Approaching writing about music in this way is analogous to explaining a forest by describing each tree individually, then each rock, then each fern, animal, smell, sound, etc. This is not to say that there can’t exist writing of arboreal or literary value which describes a forest in that way, but in that parade of descriptions is lost the immediate totality of the forest as received by the human perceptive array. There is a disconnect, indeed, a vast chasm between the experience and any subsequent attempt to describe the sum total of its reception.

#drums #drummer #jazz #groove #beats #music #progrock