Instrument Matter in the Musician’s Mind: Part 1, Loosen Up

The “sex appeal” of the inorganic, like life, is another way to give voice to what I think of as a shimmering, potentially violent vitality intrinsic to matter.
—Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

We all know that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why? No, not ‘why “Lucille”’? Why is it named at all?

Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It’s one of his voices, it is, in some sense, part of him.

It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You can’t dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. You musicianship suffers.

As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. Of sure, I can guess, I can make up stories, and you might find those stories convincing. If you’re not a guitar player. But guitar players, the thoughtful ones at least, will know that I’m faking it.

I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.

The Claves

So let’s talk about the claves. The claves are a pair of short sticks that tend to be roughly eight inches long and an inch in diameter. They’re used in Latin music, indeed, they’re central to many genres, to produce a sharp penetrating percussive sound. They’re usually made of hard dense wood. Mine are made of fiberglass:

You hold one clave in your left hand and then strike it with the other one, held in your right hand (if you’re right handed). Simple, no? Well, yes. And no.

It’s more like you cradle the one clave (it doesn’t matter which one) in your left hand. You hold your hand palm-up, lay the clave across it, and grip it only so much as needed to keep it in place. You don’t need to grip it tightly, nor do you even WANT to grip it tightly. If you do that, then your hand will dampen the vibrations and dull the sound. The ‘crack!’ will no longer be sharp and crisp.

You must, of course, grip the other clave to keep it from falling to the ground. But, and here’s the subtlety, you do WANT it to fall, its natural response to gravity. It should fall to the stationary clave and bounce back from it. And it WILL bounce, not like a rubber ball, of course, but it will rebound. Let it. The quicker the two sticks separate after impact, the sharper and louder the sound. There’s nothing you can do with your will and muscle that’s more effective than simply getting out of the way. Let natural elasticity do its work.

Use your right hand to regulate how the clave falls. In effect, you’re dropping the clave and following the fall with your hand holding the falling clave loosely just so the fall is unimpeded. For a soft sound, start the fall close to the target clave. If you start the fall further away, you’ll get a louder sound. For a still louder sound, you can impart energy to the clave with your hand. Now you ARE gripping it and dominating it, just a bit. Only ever so little. Be gentle.

Played in this way it is easy to get a loud satisfying crack from the claves with little effort, an important consideration if you’re playing a four or five hour gig. But, if you don’t know this, if you’ve never been shown or never figured it out, you can exert considerably more effort playing the claves, and get much less, and less satisfying, sound from that effort.

I witnessed that several years ago when I was working a street gig in New York City. I mostly played trumpet, but had some bells and the claves for people to pick up and join the band. One guy—said he was a drummer—wanted to play the claves. I gave them to him and away he went.

What he did was grip each clave hammer-style, and then banged the free ends together with fairly considerable force. He hit them so hard that he managed to knock chips out of them (ouch!), as indicated by the arrows:

These claves were made of fiberglass specifically so they could withstand hard use; that’s why I bought them. And this guy managed to knock chips out of them while not getting much sound out of them at all. As I recall, he noticed that himself and was frustrated, but the situation wasn’t one where I could stop what I was doing and give him a claves lesson in mid performance. Nor was it obvious to me that he would have gotten the lesson quickly. He seemed determined to demonstrate his will and enthusiasm by expending maximum effort.

Wrong.

The Magic of the Bell

The same considerations apply when playing bells, such as these:

You hold the bell or bells in one hand and a stick in the other. But the bells have more options than the clave, which I’ve discussed here. Exactly where and how hard you hit matters, as does just how you grip the bell. You can also damp the sound with your fingers or by lowering the bell to your thigh (when playing while seated).

The bells really get interesting when played in a group, for now you have multiple bell sounds interacting with one another. I’ve described how this works in a post on The Magic of the Bell. This paragraph describes the basic phenomenon:

There were four of us at the sessions, as I recall, with Ade as the leader. Each of us had a wrought-iron Ghanaian bell with two or more heads on it. Ade assigned three of us simple interlocking rhythms to play. That is, each of us had a particular pattern of sounds we had to play. While one might have a stroke or two in common with another player, most of your strokes were different from anyone else’s strokes. But each individual pattern was designed to interact with the other patterns in a way which produced an overall sense of unity.

Once we established the basic patterns Ade began improvising a part beyond the fixed interlocking parts. Melodies began to emerge which no one was playing. By melody I simply mean a sequence of tones that hangs together in time. In these melodies played by all and by no one the melody tones came from one bell, then another, and another, and so on. No one person was playing the melody; it arose from the "cohesions" which appeared in the shifting pattern of tones played by the ensemble. Depending on the patterns he played, Ade could “direct” the melody, but the tones he played weren't necessarily the melody tones. Rather, they served to direct the melodic "cohesions" from place to place. Some of Ade’s tones would be melodically active, some would not. Even though Ade was the leader, he did not have a monopoly on the melody.

Those emergent melodies are important. They were and are clear and obvious. Anyone can hear them. Because no one person was playing every note in these emergent melody lines, we can take these lines as an expression of group unity. Indeed, if understand object-oriented ontology rightly, we can take the group, and its total sound, as an object in its own which cannot be reduced to the sum of its component parts, the individual musicians playing individual lines on individual bells.

In fact, those interlocking and emergent lines in Africa bell choirs and drum choirs have posed considerable problems for ethnomusicologist. It is impossible to figure out what the individual lines are simply by listening to the whole. At the same time, it is difficult for individual musicians to play a single line without the support of the whole group. But that’s a side issue.

Let’s get back to those bells. Now it gets interesting:

... when the music is really rocking, when spirits were high and a cool sweat begins to form, you begin to hear tones that no one is playing, high-pitched tones that flit from place to place like melodic butterflies. In talking about these tones, Ade assured me that these tones were simply “the magic of the bells.” They were familiar to him, these magic tones, friends who dropped in whenever, and only when, the music was rocking and the musicians locked solid into a deep groove. If you play bells with sensitive and competent musicians, sooner or later you will become part of the magic. That magic is thus nothing special. It is open to all.

It’s those magic tones, tones played by no one at all, but emerging in the group, that’s what I want you to think about—I certainly did, for years, and I’m still thinking about them. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said, straight up, that they were spirit voices, or some such thing. But I knew then that such spirits don’t exist, can’t exist. So I couldn’t say that.

And that left me pretty much without much to say.

I searched for written accounts of the phenomenon, but could fine none, though I found accounts of similar phenomenon. I made inquiries of other musicians, ethnomusicologists, and experts in psycho-acoustics. No one was familiar with the phenomenon, though some offered an opinion that the sounds may well have been real sounds that one could pick up with microphones and record on tape. That’s what I think, too. But none of us really knows.

The phenomenon is a mystery.

Given that, I will, in the next post, attempt to construe those sounds as spirit voices. Not that I think that explains anything, for it doesn’t, not really.

But I’m not after explanation. Following Latour, I’m after description, a description that I construct, step by careful step. The critical move in my construction—at least as I contemplate it, for I’ve not actually done it—will be to drop the foundational line between man and nature that emerged in the West on the eve of the scientific revolution.

Latour has convinced me that that line is an ideological formation. It arose in certain circumstances to enable certain modes of thought and action. On the whole it has served us well. But it’s in the way; we need to get over it so that we can get on with Getting Over.

As Charlie Parker put it: Now’s the Time.

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Next Time: How to Construct a Spirit