I am so grateful that I can make music. It’s a language that allows me to speak in the pure vocabulary of emotion with people. It allows me to relate to people in a way that is totally different from every other form of social interaction, even sport, which comes closest. And it allows me to connect with myself as well.
A bunch of musicians have put together a short film that aims to tell you why they make music. If you are not a musician, it’s almost impossible for me to tell you WHY I make music, but I can always give you an experience of what it feels like. No one needs to be laden with the identity of “musician” to make music. I can show you right now. They next time you meet me, ask me to make music with you. We will do it on the spot and you’ll taste what it is that all musicians chase with this language.
I found that by following a link from Patti Digh to a site about creativity.
A screen cap from the video of Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière playing Bach together with tremendous groove.
Brian “Ponch” Rivera writes a lot about the OODA loop, learned from his experience as a fighter pilot. His latest post dives into the OODA Loop basketball and Constraints Led Approaches to coaching in sport. I like most of what he writes about but one thing kind of sticks in my craw is his use of the word “harmony.”
I’ll quote him here:
Before we go anywhere, we need to kill a common mistake.
Most coaches and leaders in highly interdependent activities — basketball, soccer, rugby, business — think the goal is synchronization. Get everyone doing the right thing at the right time. Run the play. Execute the plan. Sync up.
That is not harmony. And Boyd was very specific about the difference.
Synchronization is rigid. A scripted play synchronizes five players into a predetermined pattern. It looks clean. It breaks down the moment the defense does something unexpected, which is every single time against a good team.
Harmony is something else entirely. Boyd described it as the “power to perceive or create interaction of apparently disconnected events or entities in a connected way.” He listed it as one of five essential ingredients for survival and growth, alongside insight, Orientation, agility, and initiative — what we now call IOHAI.¹
Think about a jazz ensemble. Miles Davis didn’t hand John Coltrane or his session players a script. He gave them a key, a tempo, a direction, and trusted each musician to interpret what they heard in real time and respond. The result wasn’t chaos. It was coherent, adaptive, and unrepeatable. That is harmony. That is a reciprocal team. That is what high-performing organizations look like when they’re actually working.
A high-performing team works the same way. Every player reads the same environment, operates from the same principles, and responds to what actually unfolds rather than executing what was planned in a locker room thirty minutes ago. The connection between players isn’t mechanical. It’s mutual understanding.
Okay…I’m not sure about that. When Ponch says that getting everyone doing the right thing at the right time is not harmony, I think he’s wrong. That exactly what harmony is. If I play a C and you play an E and someone else plays a G we have a very nice C major triad. If we want it to sound as a chord (which creates overtones and a richness in the sound) we have to get everyone doing the right thing at the right time.
In his work, I believe John Boyd uses the term “harmony” to point to a kind of coherence and alignment that allows different actors to act as a coherent whole. In music, especially jazz, from which Ponch draws an example, we call that groove, not harmony.
When Miles Davis handed out music, he did in fact hand out a kind of script, with a melody line and chords which contained the harmony. The tempo and direction might be indicated on the lead sheet (but not always). Even tempo and direction are not groove. Groove is what they create together in the playing of the piece. If the band was really smoking hot that night they might play the piece fast and hop to it, or they could take some tempo off and play looser. But what they were doing in the moment was groove, not only harmony, and I think groove is what Boyd and Ponch are trying to get at.
This matters because how you KNOW what the groove is very different than how you know what harmony is. Groove is so very embodied. You know it when you have it and you know when you don’t. Harmony is captured right there on the lead sheet. You merely need to sound two notes together to hear it. It’s actually pretty mechanical, and has very little to do with the musicians themselves. What they bring to the work is the groove.
The other day at a music rehearsal, after we were finished, the young daughter of a friend of mine sat down at the piano and started improvising some music. She was playing on the white keys, not paying attention to the melody, but more just practicing independent fingering. The music made very little sense. It was random, harmonically and rhythmically, but there were patterns. It sounded a bit like Bach, runs of eighth notes heading in different directions, but without the harmonic relationship that Bach writes.
I was trying to have a conversation and what started bugging me was not the dissonance, but the lack of time feel. So I sat down beside her and just played a gentle pulse on a C note, quiet enough that it didn’t get in the way of her playing, but I asked her to just listen to the beat and play along with it. Immediately, her random meanderings continued, but we both started nodding along with the groove, intuitively, naturally. Her lines started becoming a little more funky. She improvised some syncopation, threw in some triplets, and left space. Instead of a wandering set of kind-of-eighth notes, she started improvising with time as well. Harmony wasn’t big deal. She played lots of “wrong” notes, but what we were doing was WAY more musical. It was coherent, aligned and coordinated.
So I get what Boyd and Ponch are saying, but harmony isn’t the right term for it. What they are pointing to is different and much more important than harmony in the context of dynamic decision making, because it is an ineffable, felt sense of togetherness that arises in the space of dynamic interactions between people and is perceived socially and corporeally.
The other thing that kind of sticks in my craw is that Ponch only allows comments on his substack from paid subscribers which means I have to post this here and hope he finds it with some trackback ping. I have no idea how Substack works, but remember, paywalls break hypertext.
And if you want to witness a bit of what I am talking about, check out Bach’s Goldberg Variations arranged for two guitars, performed by Thibaut Garcia & Antoine Morinière. You can hear the harmony that Bach wrote, but you have to watch and feel the groove these two fellows create together. It’s intimate, sensual, deeply responsive, kind, perceptive, generous and spacious. Bach didn’t write that.
Back in 2007 I was working one week a month in Victoria, missing my family and needing to cleanse myself of some of the really difficult work we were doing while working on big systemic Indigenous child and family services issues on Vancouver Island. My evenings were spent trying to find things to do that would bring me joy and one of those was packing my flute and whistles and trundling along to one of Victorias vibrant Irish music sessions for a night of traditional tunes.
One of those sessions was led by Daniel Lapp at the Irish Times Pub. Daniel is a most generous session host, welcoming, encouraging, curious and full of joy. I remember a few evenings and Sunday afternoons where we shared tunes and variations and talked about the difference in repertoire between the Vancouver sessions and the Victoria sessions. It’s rare to meet a musician that treats everyone, from beginner to experienced hack to absolute monster professionals with kindness, encouragement, and fun.
Although I don’t remember playing with him, one of the kids that hung out there was Lapp’s student 10 year old Quinn Bachand. Quinn started playing with Lapp and had a meteoric rise, quickly becoming known as a prodigal young Celtic guitar player, and he’s only gotten better.
It has been 19 years or so since I saw Lapp, but last night he and Quinn graced the stage at Tir Na nOg on Bowen Island, as part of Shari Ulrich’s “Trust Me” series.
It was possibly the best show I’ve seen in the ten years or so that Shari has been curating that series.
Lapp and Bachand are a magical duo and are celebrating the release of an album of music they have just recorded together of a bunch of Daniel’s original tunes. The first set of the night was tunes from the new album written for friends and family members in styles ranging from traditional jigs and reels to cajun two steps and Normandy waltzes. Both players are virtuosos but it must be said that Lapp’s compositional range is incredible and Quinn brought a dense palette of harmonic exploration. These are tunes that seem straight forward on the surface, but can at times be complex and colourful, dippingg through unexpected key changes with Quinn’s reharmonization flying around beneath. All set on top of impeccable timing and groove.
From the very first set of tunes, the audience was hooked and the energy in the room was locked on intense joy, from which is never wavered. barely minutes into the show I think everyone could tell this would be a special night.
After a break, the second set of the night was looser, more tunes called on the fly, more improvisation. Daniel got to talking more about his life going project to gather and publish his collection of the extensive BC fiddles tunes repertoire, which consists of more than 3000 tunes. He drew on much of this tradition in teh second half, which began with Quinn and him playing tunes on harmonica and which also featured a lovely new song Daniel composed, in which he accompanied himself on trumpet. A firy collection of BC tunes followed before Lapp called for an Irish set that meandered through tunes that he and Quinn played together 20 years ago. They explored these tunes together at pace, barely holding on, drifting into improvised patterns, calling up snippets of memory that put me back on that stage with their session at the Irish Times. It was like watching clouds fly past a mountain top. Hints of melody, a tunes started and then abandoned, the pair carried by spirit and flow.
The verdict at the end of the show was the loudest round of applause I’ve yet heard in that theatre which elicited an encore of gypsy jazz, showing of the Berklee-educated Quinn’s swing chops.
The room was full of Bowen Island musicians last night and we all filed out into the night infected with astonishment and joy. Nights like that make you simultaneously want to give up music altogether while inspiring you to go home, pick up your instruments and play all night long. Nights like last night remind you what music is for.
Carmina Bowena warming up before our concert on Monday
I sing in a choir here on Bowen Island called Carmina Bowena. We focus our attention on Rennaisence European music, singing sacred music, madrigals and modern inspirations of the same. We also sing folk music and more traditional music from Italy, France, Spain and the British Isles. We are an impressively eclectic group of people, under under the leadership and joy of our director, Nicole Thomas Zyczynsky.
We like to craft an atmosphere with the music we sing. It’s already transcendent music to begin with but when we perform we want to make it less about a concert and more of an immersive experience. We usually perform in small theatres or churches with good acoustics, from a stage, to an audience.
Monday night though was the first of what I hope will be a series of contemplative experiences that we co-created with the congregation of Cates Hill Chapel here on Bowen Island. We sat in a circle in the centre of the room, which has phenomenal reverb, and around us were a couple of circles of chairs. Candles lit the room and the participants were invited to be in silence for an hour as we sang four sets of music interspersed with poems about light and dark. It was not explicitly a religious experience, but for a contemplative person like me, it was a very good way to be in Lent.
The program began with a couple of Gregorian chants and went through songs by Byrd, Palestrina, Duruffle, Rossi, Lauridsen and Gjello. There was no applause between pieces, just a transition from one to the next, as we stood and sang in candlelit darkness. My friend Kathy played a beautiful clarinet solo a set of variations on a theme by Kodlay. I played a slow air one my flute from the Irish tradition called “The Fire in the Hearth” from an album by John Skelton.
The experience was co-created. Asking the audience to hold silence throughout the hour or so, in a resonant room light by candles, created an atmosphere of deep compilation. More importantly it was an atmosphere that was held by all of us, the choir, the readers, the hosts and the “audience.” It doesn’t;t even feel right to call them an audience.
To me this is the high art of participatory container work: when people all have a role in creating something together. To paraphrase Christina Baldwin, it is not one person’s job to create a container, but a group creates a dialogic container together. And when there is some coherence in that group – perhaps some shared experience, or a shared aspiration or even a shared curiosity – the container can be one in which transcendent experiences happen, where beauty emerges, or novelty, or flow. When we get out of our own way, feeling that it is our job solely to host and create, something else becomes possible. These are communal experiences can be full of beauty, like our concert, or of intense emotional joy like I have experienced when my teams have won important matches. They can be collectively healing, as my friend Linda Tran has begun to discover in her sound bath practice. Today we were talking about the way in which a sound bath session – where she plays crystal bowls and offers gentle meditative and awareness guidance – becomes a powerful collective experience when the participants have all done it before and have set aside their anxieties and worries and deeply rest in the experience. Something else is possible.
We live in a world of performance and consumption. Being an audience member in most places assumes a detachment from the experience. The fourth wall is intact. We passively consume what is put in front of us. We forget that we are also participants. It is becoming more and more clear to me that we NEED to find places of the participatory and collective practice of beauty, even in what is traditionally thought of as as an audience-performer context. May we never lose that ability.
As a tenor in two choirs, I do find this article: “How to solve the tenor shortage” to be funny, but perhaps also true. At any rate, it’s a fanciful speculation with some excellent turns of phrase, published in The Economist of all places.
Ideally the stock of tenor singers would be larger, not merely allocated more efficiently. It would help in the long run if schools made singing more of a priority, especially among teenagers. Many boys stop singing after their voices break, not only because they struggle with a new instrument but also because they are rudely thrown from singing the tune into singing harmony. In the short run, choirs that can afford it would do well to consult voice coaches. They might discover that some of the men who have assigned themselves to the bass section can sing tenor, as can some of the women who sit with the altos. Tenor voices are like gold, and not only because they are rare and valuable. They need to be dug out of people and worked on.
Everyone should remember that choirs do not demand singers who sound like Mr Bocelli. An ordinary tenor in a chorus is seldom if ever called upon to reach a high b, or to sing with anything approaching his power. Of course, a tenor might briefly imagine that he or she sounds just like an Italian opera star, when hitting a tricky entrance correctly and when—miracle of miracles—the rest of the section gets it right, too. It is not the world’s most harmful fantasy