I have no idea about these tunes, but I suspect they are Armenian or Georgian choral pieces.
At any rate, have a listen to this one, and if you speak Russian (Raffi?) let me know what it is I have stumbled upon.
UPDATE: In the comments, my Friend Raffi Aftandelian writes from Moscow:
I think this is Georgian. The music is from an Abkhaz site. The Abkhazians are another Caucasian ethnic group. Abkhazia used to be part of Georgia, now it’s in the neverneverland of not being part of Georgia and yet not quite recognized as a separate country.
Thanks Raffi.
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As a musician one of my favourite things about the web is the way we can trade music on it. I am a music junky and with the rise of file sharing technology, my ears have opened wide at what is out there.
I’ve been toying around with Webjay for a while, which is a way of compiling playlists of music all of which, in my case, is offered free and legally by artists, record labels and others. I have two playlists in the “Little Projects” section to the left, one which is a small collection of Canadian songs and another which is my ever changing top 40 of world music. To those I now add this playlist, the soundtrack of Parking Lot, in which you may find a nice variety of tunes offered somewhat in the spirit of my favourite radio show, Late Junction from BBC Radio Three.
And so I’ll launch this soundtrack with this piece called “Here we Come Around” from Dear Nora.
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The last of three parts on music.
We are talking about improvisation as a method for working with or being in groups – developing a set of practices that refine one’s ability to think on one’s feet and to see full opportunities in small hints (Blake’s “world in a grain of sand“). Improvisation, especially in a collaborative environment, produces material that would never otherwise arise.
And yet, it is worth pointing out that great improvisation is not simply making stuff up on the spot. Consider this from Becker’s essay:
When I used to play piano in Chicago taverns for a living, I dreaded the nights when guys who had been playing dances would come in, after their jobs had ended, to sit in with our quartet. In a traditional jam session, we would play well known tunes and everyone would have a turn to solo, improvising on the chords of the song. Why did I dread it? If there were, say, four horn players sitting in, in addition to our own, every one of them would play the same number of choruses. If the first player played seven choruses of “I Got Rhythm,” the other four would all play seven; I would have to play seven, whether I felt like it or not; the bass player, if his fingers help up, might play seven, and the drummer too; then people might start trading four bar phrases ad infinitum. That could easily add up to sixty thirty-two bar choruses of a song whose harmonies are not very rich (I was fond of songs, like “How High the Moon,” that had what we called “interesting changes,” harmonies that changed frequently and departed from the original tonality). Remember that the pianist mainly plays accompaniment for all these choruses and you can see how someone who had already played for several hours might feel like falling asleep as the procession of choruses–not very interesting ones, usually–went on interminably.It wasn’t always that bad. Once every several months, a lot of things, varying more or less randomly (although my colleagues and I often went in for theories that involved phases of the moon), would come together right, and the results would be extraordinary, we thought and felt. Usually that didn’t happen, and everyone involved was bored, not only listening to the other players’ choruses, but even to their own.Why was that? For one thing, most improvising was not quite so inventive as the language we used (and that most people still use) made out. In one way, it was in fact spontaneous, created at that moment, and not exactly like anything anyone had ever played before. But, in another way (as Paul Berliner has amply demonstrated), every one of those seven chorus solos was basted together from snippets the players had played hundreds of times before, some they had come on themselves, many slight variants of what he had heard on records (of Gillespie or Parker or Getz); among these collages, especially when it was late and we had heard it all over and over again already that night, one of us might do something that sounded to our ears really different and original, even though it might well be something we had spent a week working out in privacy rather than something invented on the spot.
Soloing in this context, the height of improvisation, does not happen out of the blue. The preconditions for excellent improvisation include:
- Practicing options and thinking about how they might work in performance
- Studying material and knowing the tradition and context of what you are doing.
- Being aware of etiquette of improvisation and understanding when to give an take.
- Being grounded in theory so that your improvised contributions make sense within the field of meaning.
In short, improvisation demands a set of highly refined personal practices that create the conditions for a perfect eight bar solo. The material payoff is miniscule in proportion to the amount of preparation, but the quality of the result can often be extraordinary, wildly out of proportion to any investment in practice.And there is another condition to take in account too, and this is tremendously overlooked. Improvisation happens on a ground which is prepared and maintained by tedious repetition and grunt work. The pianist endlessly comping chords is actually holding a harmonic space open for the freewheeling contributions from the soloist. This work is critical and it is hard. It is hard to sit through the slog and remain in the background. One wants to do something different just to keep things interesting, but to do so would change the field for the soloist. So this is the last practice of improvisation, the accompanist’s yin to the soloist’s yang: quietly maintaining the filed of play, holding space, inviting contributions and allowing people to be free while you remain both fully present and totally invisible.
In planning, facilitation and all kinds of group work, this lesson is perhaps the most important. It allows for a quiet space to be opened amidst the noise of messy brainstorming and creative endeavour. In every high performance engaged in generating amazing things, there is someone patiently comping the chords.
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Another post on music, this one inspired by a great essay on the etiquette of improvisation, by Howard Becker:
Collective improvisation–not like Keith Jarrett, where one man plays alone, but like the more typical small jazz group–requires that everyone pay close attention to the other players and be prepared to alter what they are doing in response to tiny cues that suggest a new direction that might be interesting to take. The etiquette here is more subtle than I have so far suggested, because everyone understands that at every moment everyone (or almost everyone) involved in the improvisation is offering suggestions as to what might be done next, in the form of tentative moves, slight variations that go in one way rather than some of the other possible ways. As people listen closely to one another, some of those suggestions being to converge and others, less congruent with the developing direction, fall by the wayside. The players thus develop a collective direction which characteristically–as though the participants had all read Emile Durkheim–feels larger than any of them, as though it had a life of its own. It feels as though, instead of them playing the music, the music, Zen-like, is playing them.
This is largely the experience I have making music when I gather with others to play traditional Irish tunes. In the traditional Irish session, the players sit in a circle, and call out tunes on the fly, changing from one to another as the tune sets evolve. It never takes long to get to the flow state described above, where small variations in the tune suggest other things.
When the session is really humming there is a chemistry that arises between the musicians. I have often thought of this state as one in which all the individuals in the group take a significant emotional investment in the music and place it outside of themselves, in the middle of the circle, like a glowing ball of energy that we all try to keep aloft. It feels on the one hand solid and on the other delicate and vulnerable. It can trigger powerful emotions, and I remember one session where, in the middle of the tune Over the Moor to Maggie (mp3 here), I had a sensation of 1000 suns exploding in my chest. I was weeping tears of joy at the immensely generous space that had opened up in between us.
This is one reason why I think that music, even played by people with a most elementary of technique, is a wonderful practice ground for all of the other areas of collaboration we face in life.
Tomorrow: the things you have to do to invite other to improvise.
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Every couple of weeks I sing with an evensong chorale, singing Gregorian chant and other liturgical music for a meditation service at one of our local churches. The whole experience is deeply spiritual for everyone who comes, including (and especially) the singers. Over the past few years we have focused on how to collaborate on a level that befits the experience we are trying to generate for the congregation. And it really comes down to sustaining flow.
Our director Alison Nixon, who thinks a lot about these things, usually has some wisdom to impart to us each week. On Sunday she said this:
“When you are singing you need to listen to others in much greater proportion than you are listening to yourself. Probably on the scale of 80 percent listening to others and 20 percent listening to yourself. That way you connect more fully with what is going on around you and the choir comes together.”
This small direction created a remarkable change in what we were doing on Sunday which was Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus (.mp3; not us!). When a choir is learning a new piece, people can be so into their own parts that nothing comes together. But choral music is all about the unity of voices, and so it will never work unless the parts blend. Only by listening outside of ourselves can we give attention to the whole.
Music is a great practice field for exploring what it means to bring a particular individual mastery to a collaborative project. Mastery of a particular set of skills is useful in a collaborative environment only if one also has a sense of how to fit those skills into a bigger whole, so that instead of eight voices, there is only one sound.