The rise of DIY rituals in the 21st century

YouTube:

Can Rituals Save Us? | Robert Wright & Bruce Feiler

0:00 Teaser
0:52 Bruce’s new book on ritual, A Time to Gather
3:12 The "Lifequake" that led Bruce to study ritual
8:10 The current "shadow ritual" renaissance
12:42 What is a ritual?
15:26 The origins of the shadow ritual renaissance
18:25 Forest bathing and the essence of ritual
26:11 Ritual as the original human algorithm
31:39 Honor walks: a quintessentially modern ritual
36:23 Rituals across Christianity
42:07 What rituals do
46:47 Heading to Overtime

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I discuss ritual in my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, pp. 79-82:

Subjectivity is an aspect of neurodynamics, and neurodynamics is open to the world through sensory organs and through the motor system. When people are coupled with one another through musicking, each steers her own raft of subjectivity in the collective sea of neurodynamics. The motions of each raft are transmitted to the others through the sea, as Huygens’ clocks transmitted vibrations to one another through the walls. These subjectivities thus adjust themselves one to the other, for they are all components of the same process.

Let us reconsider, then, the musicking with which we opened this chapter. We were at a party where lots of musicians were jamming. Near the end of a jam on Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” several people spontaneously joined in on the refrain. It wasn’t planned ahead of time, nor did those singers discuss it among themselves while the rest of us were playing.

When I originally told the story I talked of my deliberate intention to “drive” the group by playing a simple line and “bearing down.” That decision was a conscious one, though not as clear and differentiated as it may seem when I spell it out in words, and it resulted in a certain shift of my consciousness. “Bearing down” is something I do quite often when playing. It involves attending to and adjusting the tension in my trunk musculature but has no specific differentiated effect on the music beyond a certain intensity and emotional tone. In this case I was playing a very simple melodic line, but I will also bear down while playing the most complex lines. In that situation, my fingers and tongue may be spitting out 10s of notes per second, but they’re on their own; I’m still attending to muscles in my abdomen, shoulders and back, and my buttocks. Those are the muscles that most strongly affect the overall airflow, and that’s what I care about when I’m bearing down.

And that, by our conception of consciousness, is where my nervous system is reorganizing and making minute adjustments. I have no introspective awareness, of course, of just what neural areas are reorganizing, but I’d guess that we are dealing with circuitry involving both emotional expression and voluntary control of large muscles. Even as I am attending to those muscles, I am always listening to the sound, not just mine, but the group’s. I’m bearing down just so in order that the sound I hear may also be just so. But my sound is only a part of the group sound and, at this particular point, it was a subordinate part. What this means is that my nervous system’s reorganizational activity is responsive to the sound made by each and every person in the musicking group. I am attuning my motor and emotive system to the sound that is the joint activity of this group. And each one in the group is, in turn, doing the same thing. Each one, merely by being a conscious musician, is making minute adjustments to his nervous system in response to the sounds that all are creating.

We are now in territory explored by Walter Freeman in a recent essay on music and social bonding. Freeman is interested in those rituals where a core group of celebrants move from one status in society to another, as from child to adult or single to married. In these rituals, as individuals are conveyed from one social status to another—recall our discussion in the previous chapter—they require changes in the collective neuropil. Funerals, of course, are also in this class. As the bodies of the dead are conveyed to a final resting place, the living must disengage from their attachments to those who are no longer among the living. In this case, and entire persona (see Figure 1 in the previous chapter) must be disengaged from active use in the collective neuropil. Conversely, when a child is born, the group must undertake a ritual that creates a new persona in the collective neuropil.

In all of these situations the bonds between individuals must be altered in fundamental ways that require considerable neural reorganizing. Freeman suggests that such rituals involve a neuropeptide called oxytocin. He asserts that oxytocin "appears to act by dissolving preexisting learning by loosening the synaptic connections in which prior knowledge is held. This opens an opportunity for learning new knowledge. The meltdown does not instill knowledge. It clears the path for the acquisition of new understanding through behavioral actions that are shared with others.” As the oxytocinated individuals are moving to the rhythms of well-established ritual, their synaptic connections are restructured in patterns guided and influenced by the events in the ritual. Obviously, the microdynamics of each individual will be unique; but they will be shaped by rhythmic patterns common to all . These rituals provide a space in which individuals can mold themselves to one another as the infant molds her actions to those of her mother.

Such ritual would likely have benefits on less extreme occasions than those requiring the restructuring of social relations—think of our little jam session. Social life is difficult and taxing. Hostilities build up. Such ritual may well help take the edge off of growing tensions, reconciling individuals to one another and allowing them to “reset” their relationships on more favorable terms.

Thus we have another core hypothesis:

Freeman’s Hypothesis: By attending to one another through musicking, performers attune their nervous systems to one another, restructuring their representations of others. This results in more harmonious interactions within the group.

Each individual consciousness may be an island of Cartesian subjectivity, but in the close coupling of musicking, those subjectivities are intimately and delicately conditioned and regulated by one another.

Perhaps such rituals play a role in helping to establish and maintain the subjective continuity of the neural self. By entering into a wide variety of emotional states (with their various neurochemical substrates) in a socially controlled situation, individuals in a community ritual create an "equal access zone" in mental space where each can experience and contemplate extremes of joy and anger, tenderness and hate, and know that all these feelings have a place in their shared world.

A Letter to Mary Douglas about God, Religion, and Music

I’m in the process of thinking through my next column for 3 Quarks Daily. I’ve given it a provisional title: “My New-Found Patriotism: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, Music, and Apollo.” I’ll probably include something from a letter I wrote to the late Mary Douglas some years ago. As you may know, she a well-known anthropologist best known for her book, Purity and Danger (1966). She’d been kind enough to blurb my book about music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Once the book was out my editor, William Frucht, gave me her email address and we began corresponding.

While the book was reviewed in both Science and Nature, and other places as well, it was not the smash success I’d hoped it to be. But it did get me some speaking invitations, one of them at Goshen College, which is a Mennonite College in Indiana, Pennsylvania. The Mennonites are conservative Christians. How do I, an atheist, talk to devout Christians (about music)? Since Douglas was a devout Catholic, I asked her about it in a letter I wrote in October of 2002. I’ve appended my letter in full (though I’ve corrected a typo or two) along with her brief response.

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Dear Mary,

I feel the need for a different kind of conversation. I’ve been asked to deliver an address at Goshen College in Indiana in the Spring of 2003 and I’ve accepted the invitation. Goshen College is a small school (c. 1000 students) affiliated with the Mennonite Church. Music is very important to the Mennonites, which is I why I’ve been asked to deliver an address. I can speak on any musical topic I wish but, given the nature of my book, on the one hand, and the importance of music to the Mennonites, on the other, the whole confused business of science and religion is going to be lurking in the background.

I don’t know much about the Mennonites, but I’ve been doing a bit of reading. As I said, music is important to them; they see it as a way to communicate to God. In particular, they have a long tradition of a capella four-part singing. This music is relatively austere. I note, however, that Charlie Keil has heard recordings of African Mennonites who sound like they’ve just invented four-part harmony. There are about 1,000,000 Mennonites world-wide, with c. 450,000 in North America and c. 350,000 in Africa.

Mennonite doctrine is fairly conservative. In particular, they believe in the “literal” truth of the Biblical account of creation. They are pacifists and also believe in a strict separation of church and state, so, for example, they refuse jury duty. They look at the world rather differently than I do. But the professor who made the invitation observed: “While I simply accept your scientific arguments on faith, I am entirely convinced that you and I 'hear' music the same way.”

When I say, in the first chapter of B’s Anvil, that I’m firmly anchored in the Western scientific view of the world, I am, of course, quite serious. When I said that, however, I was quite aware that I spend a great deal of time in the book discussing experiences that have little “purchase” within that worldview. I think that’s a real problem and that not only do such experiences need to be discussed, but that we need to reconsider how we think about cultures and groups. To the extent that that book is “science” (not something I fret over) science is seeming stranger and stranger to me.

When I started writing the book I wasn’t looking for the attractor stuff that I eventually put into it. That came late in the process, and something as a surprise. But it does mean that things like “group minds” are no mere metaphors; they are entities as real as quarks and dark matter, and equally strange. I can almost see my way to saying that, when Leonard Bernstein “becomes” Mozart, Mozart’s soul is, in fact, taking up residence in Bernstein’s body. If I admit of that, then it’s but a step to say that the same pretty much happens when anyone performs Mozart well, or listens to such a performance. As the same line of reasoning pretty much suggests that nothing remains of Mozart’s wife, not even her soul, I doubt that it would bring much comfort or satisfaction to a standard sort of religious. 

“If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.” 

But nonetheless I find it a rather striking and remarkable argument to make. In part what makes it so remarkable is that it follows directly from my insisting on treating the brain as a physical phenomenon, albeit an astonishingly complex one. Those musical attractors are beings most strange, remarkable in that once they come into existence, they can be passed down from person to person, group to group, generation to generation, yet they are, by nature, fluctuating and evanescent in the extreme. How can we comprehend that, when first a group of apes began to dance, they changed the world forever and began the trek to us?

And I find myself feeling a bit of sympathy with those fundamentalists who’ve been battling for years to have their view of human history presented in the schools, alongside Darwin’s view. It seems to me that one thing that’s going on is that they look out on the world in a commonsense way and see that man is quite different from animals. When they look at science, they see science telling them that, no, man is an animal, no more and no less. They cannot reconcile these views and so they reject science. I think that the science they are rejecting is wrong on that point and so I’m sympathetic with their rejection, even if I’m not sympathetic to creationist biology. And, given the time and energy this particular conflict has taken in America over the last century I’d be seriously inclined to allow creationism into the public schools, along side modern biology, just so we can stop wasting time with this particular squabble.

As you know, there is a well-established body of thinking on the vexed relationship between religion and science. I’ve read a little of this, and dip into it every now and then. But don’t mind much there to engage me. But those musical attractors, they are strange things to form in groups of human brains. As strange as spirits and gods.

I have no idea what I will tell the Mennonites about music. But whatever it is, I’ll be most interested in what they have to tell me in return.

Regards,

Bill B

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Good luck with the Mennonites.

I don't really see the problems that loom in your mind about science and God. If we are his creation, we should be this complicated and exciting, especially the brain.

Have you come across the poetry of Fred Turner? especially a book of essays on Beauty. I find it inspirational about your kind of work.

Thanks for writing,

Mary

The Busy Bee Brain

With artificial neural nets (ANNs) all over the place these days, this post from March, 2013, warrants a bump to the top of the queue. Perhaps the chief difference between real brains and ANNs is the fact that each neuron in a real brain is a living agent, albeit of a very small scope, hence the metaphor, the brain as a bunch of busy bees within the skull. The neurons of ANNs are passive bits of data.

Ordering Mark Moffett’s Adventures Among Ants got me to thinking about a science fiction novel that knocked my socks off when I was 12 or 13: Man of Many Minds, by E. Everett Evans. It’s about George Hanlon, a man who had the ability to project his mind into other creatures. At a critical point in the book, when – I believe – Hanlon is about to be tortured, he projects his whole mind, every last bit of it, into a swarm of bees, thereby escaping the pain of torture. [See excerpt below.]

I thought that was pretty neat.

But what does it have to do with Moffett’s book? That’s pretty simple. Ants, like bees, live in groups, and it’s not unusual to think of such groups as being some kind of superorganism – a notion that, according to this blog entry, Moffett subjects to a critical workout. That swarm of bees in Man of Many Minds is such a superorganism.

But when it “absorbed” Hanlon’s mind, what did it become then? The question is a rhetorical one; after all; it’s about something never really happened. It’s just fiction. But a very suggestive fiction.

Could the human brain be something like a hive of bees?

Yes.

There is now a pretty strong consensus that the cerebral cortex (which is, by no means, the entire brain, but it is likely that this is where culture is carried) is organized into small columns of neurons. In a 1978 essay Vernon Mountcastle called these minicolumns and suggested that they have about 100-300 neurons each. He estimated that the neocortex consists of 600,000,000 of these minicolumns. He also suggested that these minicolumns are organized into macrocolumns, about 600,000 of them -- implying that there are hundreds of minicolumns per macrocolumn. (Mountcastle was clear that these numbers were just order of magnitude estimates & that is all I need for my purposes.) That makes these macrocolumns roughly the size of a typical invertebrate nervous system of 10K to 100K neurons. So, here’s my metaphor: Your neocortex consists of 600,000 buzzing bees going about their business.

 

The point of the metaphor is that, just as individual bees are autonomous agents (which must, nonetheless, feed and reproduce in a group), so the macrocolumns are autonomous agents (which are physically coupled to many other such agents). Bees go about their business by sensing optical and chemical gradients and features and by moving their bodies and excreting chemicals. The macrocolumns are not directly connected to the external world, but they have extensive inputs and outputs to other macrocolumns and to other regions of the brain and nervous system. From a purely information processing point of view, they are as capable of action as are bees. They “sense” neurochemical gradients in the intersynaptic space and act on their sensations by excreting chemicals into that space.

This loose metaphor really gets interesting, however, when we begin to think about human interaction, which of course implies interaction between brains. Some interactions are pretty loose, such as those between people strolling the aisles at a supermarket. Other interactions are tighter, such as people having a conversation over a meal. And some interactions are very tight, such as musicians making music with one another. And that brings us back to insects, fireflies in particular.

Allow me to quote a passage from Chapter 3 of Beethoven’s Anvil:

Physicists do understand one element of dance, simple repetitive rhythm. This understanding has been applied to many biological systems, one of which is male fireflies in Southeast Asia. These fireflies gather in large groups on river banks, flashing on and off in unison to signal their availability to females. When they begin gathering around sunset their flashings are uncoordinated. But, as dusk darkens into night, regions of synchronized flashing emerge and spread until whole trees are cloaked in fireflies flashing in synchrony.

That is to say, in some sense, the nervous systems of those flies have become temporarily coupled together into a single physical system where some some signals are transmitted within nervous systems through electro-chemical means while other signals are transmitted from one nervous system to another by energy transduction (sending: chemicals → photons, and receiving: photons → chemicals) and light (i.e. photons). I go on to say:

There is no reason to believe that this activity is directed in the way that a conductor directs an orchestra. There is no lead firefly setting the pace of the others. The flashing simply emerges; it is self-organized. Each firefly is making his own decisions about when he’ll flash, influenced by the activities of his neighbors. This activity has been analyzed as a system of coupled oscillators, a phenomenon first noticed by the seventeenth century Dutch physicist Christiaan Huygens, who invented the pendulum clock—the pendulum being a prime example of an oscillator. One day Huygens saw that the pendulums of two clocks on the same wall were swinging in perfect synchrony. He disturbed one of them so that the synchrony dissolved, but it returned within half an hour. After a bit of experimentation he concluded that the clocks were affected by the vibrations each transmitted to the wall behind them. These vibrations led them to synchronize their periods and thereby minimize their collective energy expenditure.

Any phenomenon common to systems as different as pendulum clocks and fireflies must be very general.

I then go on to develop an argument that music works like that as well. As I say in my review of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals, “what musicking does is bring all participants into a temporal framework where the physical actions - whether dance or vocalization - of different individuals are synchronized on the same time scale as that of neural impulses, that of milliseconds. Within that shared intentional framework the group can develop and refine its culture. Everyone cooperates to create sounds and movements they hold in common.” While making music, I argue, we may consider the nervous systems of individuals as being physically coupled together so as to constitute a single dynamical system that is distributed across separate individuals. When the music-making stops, the distributed system dissolves into its individual components; individuals, that is to say, their brains, are free once again to operate independently of one another.

The point of this exercise is that, by (the reductive step of) insisting on thinking of brains as physical systems, and therefore insisting that interactions between brains is physical interaction, we can arrive at a concept of a very special human group – one engaged in music-making – as a single distributed nervous system. That is possible only because the fundamental coupling requirements are very simple, simple enough that fireflies and neurons can meet those requirements.

If fireflies can teach us about how we can make music, than surely ants have much to teach us as well. I look forward to reading Moffett’s book.

Virtual Fly Brain

If you're at all curious about what a bee brain might actually be like, well Nature Precedings has something similar, an account of the brain of the fruit fly:

Virtual Fly Brain: An ontology-linked schema of the Drosophila Brain

David J. Osumi-Sutherland1, Mark Longair & J. Douglas Armstrong

Abstract:

Drosophila neuro-anatomical data is scattered across a large, diverse literature dating back over 75 years and a growing number of community databases. Lack of a standardized nomenclature for neuro-anatomy makes comparison and searching this growing data-set extremely arduous.

A recent standardization effort (BrainName; Manuscript in preparation) has produced a segmented, 3D model of the Drosophila brain annotated with a controlled vocabulary. We are formalizing these developments to produce a web-based ontology-linked atlas in which gross brain anatomy is defined, in part, by labeled volumes in a standard reference brain.

We have developed new relations that allow us to use this well-defined gross anatomy as a substrate to define neuronal types according to where they fasciculate and innervate as well as to record the neurotransmitters they release, their lineage and functions. The resulting ontology will provide a vocabulary for annotation and a means for integrative queries of neurobiological data.

The ontology and associated images, queries and annotations will be integrated into the Virtual Fly Brain website. This will provide a resource that biologists can use to browse annotated images of Drosophila neuro-anatomy and to get answers to questions about that anatomy and related data, without any need for ontology expertise.

Man of Many Minds

 

8.31.20: It turns out that the Evans book is available on Project Gutenberg. And that I mis-remembered the incident. Such is memory. It turns out that he sent most of his mind into pigeons:

Hanlon didn't struggle when they bound him firmly in the chair with manacles on hands and feet. He knew it would be useless anyway. He let his body slump into his chair, and again directed his mind through that vent. He must not let them defeat him! He had to survive—to get word—to the Corps!

Then his searching mind contacted another—a weak, primitive one, but a mind. Avidly he fastened onto it, merged with it ... and found himself inside the brain of one of those Simonidean pigeons.

Ah! This is wonderful! Pigeons seldom fly alone. Where you find one you almost always find a number. Activating the bird's brain he sent out a call to others of its kind that it had found food in abundance. Soon more and more of them flew down to where the now enslaved pigeon was standing, and as each one came, Hanlon sent into its brain all of his mind it would hold.

He summoned the birds to his aid, to no avail. One of them was shot. He had to withdraw his mind from it and then...

The other parts of his mind were flying all about the enclosed park that was a part of the great palace, searching, desperately seeking some other form of life that could be used as a housing for the dying part of Hanlon's mind.

Suddenly one of them uttered a cry that drew the rest to it on swift pinions, to see attached to one of the trees a huge swarm of Simonidean bees.

"Will the queen do?" the one mind-portion asked anxiously.

There was a convulsive shudder in all the minds, for the birds knew—and Hanlon had heard—how deadly poisonous these native bees were; how they were hunted down and exterminated when found. They were twice the size, and many, many times more vicious and deadly than Terran bees. Even now two gardeners were running toward the tree with a great metal net and flame-throwers.

But Hanlon was desperate. "She will have to do," the aggregate mind decided.

And he got the queen to relieve him of his torturers.

Three Against Two the Tumbuka Way

I'm bumping this to the top on the principle that I need to do more posts about music. This doesn't actually add a post to the blog, but it brings one out of the past and into the present.

 

Western music is based on so-called duple rhythms, patterns of two or multiples of two. There are triple rhythms as well, the waltz for example, but they aren't as prominent. What Western rhythm rarely does is superimpose the two.

Not so in much of the third world, where three against two is a way of life. Here's a passage from Beethoven's Anvil (pp. 116-117) that describes a technique for learning three-against-two that is ascribed to an origin myth. Imagine that, a culture that makes rhythm part of it's origin myth.

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The Tumbuka of Malawi, in southeastern Africa, have an origin myth that is coupled with a thigh slapping routine. The myth concerns Mupa, who discovered the rhythms used in vimbuza music, the music played for the trance dancing central to Tumbuka healing. Mupa discovered the rhythms while slapping his thighs. He began with a simple alternation—slap the right thigh with the right hand, left thigh with the left hand, in even alternating strokes—but that quickly grew boring. So he began figuring out more interesting ways to generate rhythms. I won’t recite the whole story—you can find it in Steven Friedson’s book, Dancing Prophets—but I will briefly describe the thigh-slapping routine that Mupa developed.

First, take a comfortable seat with your feet resting on the floor. Gently slap one thigh (say, the right thigh with the right hand) and then the other; do this repeatedly with an even rhythm at a comfortable tempo. Now, group your strokes into groups of three by slapping your knee on the first of each group of three. You will probably have to count to do this. You could use number names and say “one two three” but any three syllables will do. Just repeat the sequence over and over and slap your knee on the first syllable in the series. Not only is the physical gesture a little different from before, so is the sound. Notice that the initial stroke in your groups—set in bold type—will alternate between your right and left knees:

(1) R knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh (1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh

A full cycle is thus six strokes long, divided into two groups marked by initial knee slaps. Emphasize the knee slaps so that they are just a little louder, thus strengthening the triple grouping. Practice this at a comfortable pace until you can do it with little or no thought. then you may want to pick up the pace and see how fast you can go.

Next we are going to superimpose THREE (two-stroke groupings) on the TWO groupings that consist of three strokes each. We will do this merely by thinking. Continue the same pattern but now concentrate on only one hand at a time, perhaps your right. I find it helps simply to look at the appropriate thigh. In the following representation the right strokes have been set in bold type while the initial strokes of the two groups of three have been set in italics:

(1) R knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh (1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh

One could also choose to concentrate on the left-hand strokes:

(1) L knee (2) R thigh (3) L thigh (1) R Knee (2) L thigh (3) R thigh

Either way, get six beats in two different ways. When you use knee slaps as your marker, the six beats are divided into two groups or three beats each. When you use left or right side as your marker, they are divided into three groups of two beats each. Further, you can switch your concentration back and forth from the right-hand strokes to the left-hand ones.

If you are not already practiced in this sort of thing, you should be slow and deliberate. As you become comfortable, pick up the pace. You will reach a point where you no longer explicitly think in six, with overlays about how each stroke must be executed, and think instead in three/two.

The pattern of physical gestures you establish by practicing this exercise can then be applied to playing the ng’oma drum, the lead or master drum of Tumbuka music. The thigh stroke and knee stroke of the exercise become two different ways of striking the drum. But the basic pattern the Mupa left his people forms the core pattern of Tumbuka drumming; all other patterns derive from it.

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See also: Three Against Two: Splitting the Mind in Two.

Louis Armstrong and the Snake-Charmin’ Hoochie-Coochie Meme

Another bump to the top, this time (Jan. 26, 2023) to acknowledge the examples appended to the end.

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Another "old time good one", as Pops used to say. This is about a little tune I learned as a kid, but which might well be hundreds of year old, if not even older. And I'm now (August 2016) bumping this to the top of the queue because I'm about write about my early education in jazz,

Some years ago I was looking for a way to open the final chapter of a book I was writing about music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. The chapter was to be a quick tour of black music in 20th Century America, starting with jazz and blues and ending with hip-hop. So, I thought and thought and, finally, an idea crept up on me.

I had this book of Louis Armstrong trumpet solos that I’d been practicing ever since my early teens. The solos had been transcribed from recordings Armstrong had made in the late 1920s and had been circulating ever since, all under copyright, naturally. These were classic Armstrong: “Cornet Chop Suey,” “Struttin’ with some Barbecue,” “Gully Low Blues,” “Muggles” (nothing to do with Harry Potter, muggles was Armstrong’s favorite inhalent, the one that President Bill Clinton never took into his lungs) and a few others. One of those others was called “Tight Like This” – an open-ended title that asked you to use your imagination. During his improvisation in “Tight Like This” Armstrong quoted a certain riff, not once, but twice.

 

How did I know it was a quotation? Because I was familiar with the riff from other contexts. For one thing, it showed up in cartoons, often to accompany a snake charmer, but also as general all-purpose Oriental mystery music. For another, I knew it as a children’s song that me and by buddies used to sing, with lyrics to the effect that the girls in France didn’t wear underpants – hotcha! But how did Armstrong know this tune? He recorded “Tight Like This” in 1928, the same year that Walt Disney produced “Steamboat Willie,” generally regarded as the first cartoon with a fully synchronized soundtrack. So Armstrong’s recording predated the tune’s use in cartoon soundtracks. Did he learn it as a kid growing up on the streets of New Orleans?

I made a few phone calls, sent some emails to friends, queried a trumpeter’s listserve (sponsered by TPIN, Trumpet Players’ International Network), and information began trickling in. In the first place, other people remember this tune from their childhoods. One Eric Johnson. from the TPIN list, told me that his daughters remember these lyrics:

All the girls in France do the hokey pokey dance,
And the way they shake is enough to kill a snake.

Karen Stober, also from TPIN, tells me the tune was sung by two children facing one another and clapping hands to the lyrics:

On the planet Mars all the women smoke cigars.
Every puff they take is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead they put flowers on its head.
When the flowers die they say 1969! [whatever year it is].

We’ve moved from France to Mars, but there’s that snake again, and now we’ve got cigars – a regular Freudian wonderland of sub-rosa implication. What fun. I found a somewhat fuller version on the web where the dance was characterized as a “hookie-kookie dance.”

I then followed a lead from my friend, David Bloom, who suggested I check out the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. It was a major event in American cultural life. It was the first large-scale use of AC electricity, and the first Ferris wheel. The exposition hosted delegations from all over the world, including Japan, the first chance Americans had to experience that nation and its people – who were here, of course, to learn about us as well. This is when and where hamburgers became all-American fast food; Pabst Blue-Ribbon Beer flowed freely on the midway; Kellogs Cornflakes debuted here as well. And, wouldn’t you know it? Elias Disney, Walt’s father, was a carpenter on the construction job. But all this is beside the point.

The point is about the entertainment on the midway. Yes, we had Wild Bill Cody, and we had John Philip Sousa. But we also had a lithe young woman who danced as “Little Egypt.” The exposition’s press agent, Sol Bloom, claimed that he had written our little tune just so Little Egypt could dance to it. The tune was a hit and was subsequently copyrighted under various names, including Dance of the Midway, Coochi-Coochi Polka, Danse de Ventre, and The Streets of Cairo. Just how it was copyrighted several times is a bit of a mystery, but the fact that several folks claimed it as their own testifies to the tune’s popularity. One of those folks, W. J. Voges, included it as the Koochie-Koochie Dance in the second edition of Pasquila Medley published in New Orleans in 1895. We’ve now got the tune in New Orleans at a date prior to Armstrong’s birth.

Rahsaan Works the Crowd – August 7, 1935 to December 5, 1977

Rahsaan Roland Kirk is one of my favorite musicians. I first heard him on his album, Rip, Rig, and Panic, probably in the summer of 1966 or perhaps that fall. I heard him live three times, once in Baltimore in 1969, once a couple years later (but before I went to Buffalo in 1973) and then finally in 1977, in Buffalo. This is about the first time I saw/heard him live. It's from my book, Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (Basic 2001, pp 4-6).

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Sadness and tenderness are certainly not the only emotions elicited by musical performance. Joy and exaltation demand our attention as well. Rahsaan Roland Kirk was the most reliably joyful performer I have ever seen. I first saw him at the Morgan State Jazz Festival in 1969. It was outdoors, and at night. Bright searchlights beamed onto the stage. As Rahsaan walked onto the stage the light splintered from his black vinyl jump suit and from the complex textures created by the mantle of musical instruments Rahsaan wore like liturgical vestments. He began by rapping to the audience as he walked onto the stage, “They can keep us off the radio, but they can’t keep us outa’ the air!” He then took his band into the first number, “Volunteered Slavery,” a raunchy blues proclaiming that “If you want to know what it is to be free/ you gotta’ spend all day in bed with me.” Rahsaan did not have much of a singing voice, but he delivered the lyrics with force and vigor. He then took up his tenor saxophone and began to conjure a solo up out of the ground.

Rahsaan was a skilled and muscular saxophonist able to perform in a variety of styles from 30’s swing to 60’s freak-out. On this occasion he played straight-ahead all-out blues that achived lift-off. Rahsaan was playing a multiphonic riff on three horns at once and then simplified it to playing just the tenor sax, while his side men were riffing away. Rahsaan settled on one note and held it as the riffing grew louder. The drum figures became more complex, the piano riffing more insistant and, above all, Vernon Martin let loose a mighty thunder on the bass. As the thunder crested Rashaan began playing the concluding riff from the Beatles’ tune “Hey Jude” on his tenor sax. The musical thickness cleared away, Dick Griffen switched his trombone riff, and the audience let out a gasp. We rose to our feet with some standing on their seats. People were clapping in time to the music and swaying back and forth, together. Rahsaan had us and we were pleased to have him.

Who orchestrated this activity? In one sense the question has an easy answer: Whoever organized the 1969 Morgan State Jazz Festival. But that isn’t quite the question I’m asking. In a different sense, Rahsaan and his musicians orchestrated their performance. How did they do it? Part of the answer is traditional and banal: they practiced. Through that practice they’ve developed routines, signals, and an intuitive sense among each of them of how each of the others shapes, moves and reacts to musical flow. For all its rhetoric of spontaneity,jazz is a highly rehearsed music. The sequence of events in “Volunteered Slavery” might have been fully scripted before Rahsaan first played it with the group, though I doubt it. On the other hand, it may simply have happened that way in performance or rehearsal and worked so well that they made it their standard performance. The routine may reflect a self-organizing process typical of such musical collaboration. In either case, the performance rests on hours upon hours of rehearsal and practice by these musicians, individually and as a group.

Whatever happened among the musicians accounts for only part of the event’s orchestration, the part that happened on stage. Who organized the audience so that they knew when to gasp and rise to their feet? No one. That’s the most interesting component of this orchestration.

Of course there are conventions one follows as a member of a concert audience. You sit in your seat; you don’t talk during the performance; you applaud after a solo—this was a jazz concert, and applause after solos has been the convention for decades. And you applaud at the end of a number.

There were no conventions regarding gasping. As for clapping to the music, and standing, there certainly were people in the audience for whom those were conventional responses, as this behavior is common in churches that favor enthusiastic song from the choir and parishioners. But this was not such a church; it was a jazz festival. Beyond that, there are no conventions governing standing on one’s seat. That just happened in the enthusiasm of the moment. What I find so interesting is that so many people got enthusiastic at the same time, a time that made musical sense. People rose to their feet and then to their chairs at a point in the music where there was a major shift in the energy.

Such behavior needs to be explained—something we’ll think about later in this book. For now I would like simply to note that the distinguished historian William H. McNeill has argued in his book, Keeping Together in Time, that coordinated rhythmical activity is fundamental to life in society. By dancing together to music, by marching together in military drill, we bond with one another and become a group. In McNeill’s view human society would not be possible without such activity. Music and dance are not mere luxuries consuming resources. They are every bit as fundamental to our life as hunting or childrearing, but fundamental in a different way.

Maya Deren describes what spirit possession is like

This is an out-take from Chapter Eight, "The Protohuman Rhythm Band", of Beethoven's Anvil.

Shortly after the end of World War II a young Russian emigrant journied from her new land, the United States, to the Caribbean country of Haiti where should would become a participant observor in the religious rituals of Voudoun. Maya Deren documented these rituals on film and sound recording and in a book, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti. As a participant in these rituals, she knew what it was like to become possessed, to be ridden by the god as the horse by a rider--the metaphor used by the practitioners themselves. She describes the experience thus:

It is the terror which has the greater force, and with a supreme effort I wrench the leg loose--I must keep moving! must keep moving!--and pick up the dancing rhythm of the drums as something to grasp at, something to keep my feet from resting upon the dangerous earth. No sooner do I settle into the succor of this support than my sense of self doubles again, as in a mirror, separates to both sides of an invisible threshold, except that now the vision of the one who watches flickers, the lids flutter, the gaps between moments of sight growing greater, wider. I see the dance one here, and next in a different place, facing another direction, and whatever lay between these moments is lost, utterly lost. I feel that the gaps will spread and widen and that I will, myself, be altogether lost in that dead space and that dead time. With a great blow the drum unites us once more upon the point of the left leg. The white darkness starts to shoot up; I wrench my foot free but the effort catapults me across what seems a vast, vast distance, and I come to rest upon a firmness of arms and bodies which would hold me up. But these have voices--great, insistent, singing voices--whose sound would smother me. With every muscle I pull loose and again plunge across a vast space and once more am no sooner poised in balance than my leg roots. So it goes: the leg fixed, then wrenched loose, the long fall across space, the rooting of the leg again--for how long, how many times I cannot know. My skull is a drum; each great beat drives that leg, like the point of a stake, into the ground. The singing is at my very ear, inside me head. this sound will drown me! “Why don’t they stop! Why don’t they stop!” I cannot wrench the leg free. I am caught in this cylinder, this well of sound. There is nothing anywhere except this. There is no way out. The white darkness moves up the veins of my leg like a swift tide rising, rising; is a great force which I cannot sustain or contain, which, surely, will burst my skin. It is too much, too bright, too white for me; this is its darkness. “Mercy!” I scream within me. I hear it echoed by the voices, shrill and unearthly: “Erzulie!” The bright darkness floods up through my body, reaches my head, engulfs me. I am sucked down and exploted upward at once. That is all. [Divine Horseman, pp. 259-260]

Note that, while Deren danced, she did not play a musical instrument nor did she sing. Those tasks belonged to others. As we will see, this is typical. The participants in ritual have different roles to perform. Being host to a deity--in this case, Erzuli--is only one of these roles, albeit the one that commands the attention of all the other participants. To paraphrase an African saying popularized by Hillary Clinton, it takes a village to make a god.

What is (musical) pleasure? [Csikszentmihalyi's flow]

I had to confront that question when writing my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil (2001). Ever since the late 1950s there has been talk about “pleasure centers in the brain.” If that talk is valid, then pleasure is simply the stimulation of those centers. There are problems with that view, however, and I found myself forced to a more subtle conception. Here it is, in a section entitled “The Pleasures of Music: Inner Motion” (pp. 82-86):

The most important aspect of our subjective musical experience is, I believe, pleasure. Why is it a pleasure to make, dance, and to listen to music? I am as curious about ordinary musical pleasure as about altered musical states. Music can be quite compelling and pleasurable even if you don’t enter into some heightened state of awareness and self loss.

If you had read, or heard about, pleasure centers in the brain, you might suggest that music stimulates one or more of those centers. This is presumably what Stephen Pinker had in mind when he asserted that “Music appears to be a pure pleasure technology, a cocktail of recreational drugs that we ingest though the ear to stimulate a mass of pleasure circuits at once” in his recent book How the Mind Works. The reasoning is obvious:

1. The brain has pleasure circuits.
2. Music is pleasurable.
3. Therefore music stimulates the brain’s pleasure circuits.

Problems arise, however, when we start searching for the pleasure circuits music stimulates.

The first so-called pleasure centers were discovered, quite by accident, in the mind-1950s by James Olds and Peter Milner. Crudely put, they found that there were small areas in the core of the rat’s brain that seemed to give the rat pleasure when they were electrically stimulated. But that formulation—“give the rat pleasure”—presumes a nonexistent intimacy with the rat’s subjective state. What they observed is that if a rat could stimulate one of these areas simply by pressing a bar, it would do so, time after time after time, for hours. That was taken to indicate that the stimulation is pleasurable. But of course, we couldn’t ask the rats whether they were experiencing pleasure. Some surgeons did implant such electrodes into patients who were suffering from epilepsy, in the hope that they could afford their patients some relief. The result, suggests Walter Freeman [neurobiologist at Berkeley], does not sound much like the delirious pleasure Pinker suggested:

In different places they reported feeling pleasure, sometimes sexual, but mostly rather bland. Some other patients, who were afflicted with chronic pain, reported that they got temporary relief from their suffering. They were given the opportunity to go home with a battery and a switch, so that they could treat their own pain by stimulating themselves and adjusting their own dosage of electric current.

But no one wanted to keep the wires. Some doctors feared that a black market might grow, with pleasure addicts going to third world countries to get implanted with wires and stimulators. That didn't happen, because whatever the pleasure is, it doesn't last, and it isn't happiness.

These so-called pleasure centers are involved in regulating appetitive behaviors such as eating and drinking. Karl Pribram has argued that self-stimulation has the effect of tricking the animal into thinking it has satisfied one of these desires. Pribram thus suggests that “the self-stimulation process would be something like repeatedly adjusting and returning to its original location the setting device on a home thermostat in a room that is already warm. The furnace turns on briefly, only to go off again as the setting is returned to its baseline.” The pleasure is thus not some generalized pleasure, but the virtual satisfaction of a virtual need.

More recently Jaak Panksepp has noted self-stimulating animals “did not have the behaviorally settled outward appearance of animals consuming conventional rewards. Self stimulating animals look excessively excited, even crazed, when they work for this kind of stimulation.” They look like they are exploring and investigating, not basking in the enjoyment of needs well-satisfied. Panksepp believes these neural centers are components of an exploratory system.

If these “classical” pleasure centers aren’t really pleasure centers, maybe we have to look elsewhere. Panksepp, for example, does look elsewhere, to the homeostatic systems that directly regulate the body’s energy balance by attending to such things as thirst, hunger, and temperature. Perhaps the centers regulating these variables yield pleasure when the variable reaches the desired level. Thus Panksepp asserts that “most of our feelings of sensory pleasure pleasure arise from the various stimuli that signal the return of bodily imbalances toward an optimal level of functioning.” But what does that have to do with music? Are we to believe that music provides virtual satisfaction for virtual thirst?

The notion of “pleasure circuits” thus begins to unravel as soon as one examines it. It isn’t clear just what these circuits are or how and why music might affect them. Still, I have no a priori reason to deny the existence of specific pleasure circuits accessible to music. Who knows, maybe we will discover them. But I would like to suggest that there is a different way to think about pleasure. The “pleasure circuits” view of pleasure asserts the existence of centers which monitor certain variables. When the variable assumes the desired value—you’ve consumed enough water, you are no longer cold, whatever—the center detects that desired result and signals “We’ve got it.” That signal is experienced as pleasure.

There is, however, another kind of pleasure. John Jerome was interested in the pleasures of athletic excellence and proposed an informal theory about what he calls the Sweet Spot Theory of Performance. By sweet spot he means that spot on a baseball bat, tennis racket, or golf club that affords the squarest contact with the ball, transfers energy to it most efficiently, and thus minimizes jarring transmitted back to the hands. That spot, he assures us, is not myth but a mechanical fact. Generalizing from that, he argues that the superior athlete “is the one who in effect reaches the sweet spot of the arc for each segment of his or her skeleton as he or she goes through the athletic motion.” The pleasure of sport—at any rate, the pleasure that derives from the activity itself, rather than from beating someone else in competition—is simply the feeling one gets when the body is working at its best.

The pleasure of music, I submit, is like that. Musicians certainly know the kind of physical pleasure that Jerome talks about, as do dancers. But so do people who only listen.

Jerome is focused on the smoothly functioning athletic body. But muscles cannot contract and flex in just the right way unless the nervous system controls them just so. The smooth motion is in the body, but the pleasure is in the nervous system. Even if a listener does not move his body, his nervous system does have to follow the sound. I am suggesting that a great deal of the pleasure we take from music lies in overall dynamic character of the activity itself—it is a property of the neural weather. Some weather feels better than other weather. This is not a matter of some brain center detecting some property in the neural weather and signaling good or bad. Rather, we are talking about the overall state of the brain. You don’t need to detect this state because this state is you; it is your mind.

We are now in familiar territory. The idea that music is linked to motion is an old one, one explored by Charles Keil in his essay “Motion and Feeling through Music” and validated by studies that show activity in motor areas of the brain when people are listening to music. Musical pleasure is an example of flow, a term coined by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow is not special either to music or athletic performance, but is a capacity inherent in the nervous system and can happen during a wide range of activities. In Csikszentmihalyi’s model, flow is a function of the conditions of task performance. Where one’s skill exceeds the demands of a task by a considerable margin, the task is boring. Where task demands exceed one’s skill by a considerable margin, the task provokes anxiety—which we’ll examine in more detail in the next section. One feels flow only when the task demands are just a little beyond one’s current skill. In that situation one must be fully alert and attentive in order to perform the task and, if one is so, then it is possible to perform the task well. Thus flow represents a style of action, not some specific set of activities.

The idea of musical pleasure as flow does not preclude the possibility that music stimulates specific “pleasure centers.” Any such centers that are activated through music will contribute to that music’s pleasure. But musical pleasure does not depend on such centers. In general I would expect that music is pleasurable in proportion to its capacity for exercising the inherent properties of the brain, especially the rhythmic properties. Thus:

Pleasure as Coherence: Musical pleasure is the subjective awareness of overall neural flow where that flow is well-timed and coherent.

Further, this musical flow is not under the control of any particular brain system but reflects the joint interaction of all active neural systems, at all levels of interaction. The pleasure-center view would have us believe that musical flow is regulated by those specific pleasure centers. If musical pleasure is not localized in a few centers, it follows that musical flow is not regulated by those centers. We have mutual adjustment and interaction here and there, indeed everywhere, but no omniscient master dictating the terms of the neural dance. Music’s pleasures have no master.

Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (at Howard’s Party)

Bumped to the top of the queue in honor of Dylan's 80th birthday.

 

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I'd originally posted this on April 3, 2011. Last night, April 14, 2018, I attended Howard's jam, again. And we played “Knocking on Heaven's Door", just like we had that time almost 20 years ago that I wrote up in my book. Another good version. Some of the same people were there, I'm sure. And some new ones. A good time was had by all. [Just so we're clear on this, the following video is not from Howard's birthday jam.]

Last night was Howard’s Annual Jam and Birthday Bash. He’s been doing this for twenty-five years, though I’ve only been going for about ten or so. As always, a good time was had by all.

And this year was especially good, perhaps the best I remember – though I don’t remember everything that happened this time, so it may have been even better than I think it was. Here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil, my book about music, that recounts an incident from ten about years ago (pp. 69-70):

A couple I know threw a big party to celebrate their new house and her pregnancy. As he is deep into the Hoboken folk-music scene, about a dozen guitars were there, and some other instruments as well: a flautist, a few pianists, a woman who brought a dozen or so shakers that folks could play, a soprano saxophonist, and me, on flugelhorn and clavé. We played one or two songs as old as dirt, but also lots of Beatles, van Morrison, Bob Dylan—very Sixties.

The front room on the ground floor served as the music room. The music would start and stop, musicians of all levels of ability came and went, and the boundary between players and others was wonderfully fluid. The music was ragged and rambling and occasionally confused and the rhythm would get lost every now and then and all that. From an evolutionary point of view it was just a bunch of apes hanging out and grooming one another while munching on some choice leaves and termites.

But there was at least one moment quite unlike anything exhibited by bands of apes. It was 1:30 or 2 in the morning and we were jamming on Bob Dylan's “Knocking on Heaven's Door.” I took a flugelhorn solo early in this long jam and then, when I was done, went to the bottom register of the horn and started a simple repetitive swelling figure which I played more or less continuously to the end. The soprano sax played harmony to my line, and I to his, and sometimes did a little obbligato, and a guitar solo floated up here, a piano solo there, vocal choruses and refrains happened as needed. At some point I decided to see how much I could drive this train by leaning on my simple line and bearing down. A half minute or so later, four or five or six voices chimed in on the refrain at the same time. A lump came to my throat. There we were, knocking on heaven's door.

Frameworks for Identity [in America]

This is from my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture (2001), pp. 269-273. I’m working a new post on identity and this will be useful background.

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African Americans were naturally offended by white America’s obsession with their sexuality. Denunciation of such foolishness was one of Malcolm X’s themes. But this recognition is older than the Civil Rights era. After the Titanic sank in 1912, blacks began reciting a narrative poem in which a mythic black boiler man, Shine, escapes from the sinking ship and swims safely ashore. The ship’s captain attempts to keep Shine on board, first offering him money and then offering the sexual favors of white women, including his own daughter. Shine rejects all offers and remains steadfast in his determination to swim ashore. The poem thus rejects white evaluation of black character by depicting a white authority figure as being so depraved as to offer his daughter up to a boiler man for no rational purpose. This obsession, it implies, is a white folks’ problem and it’s about time they dealt with it.

Thus we have a white obsession born out of emotional repression and the black critique of that obsession. That critique reflects common sense grounded in a black frame of reference, not a white one.

The black rejection of white mythology is grounded in a black sense of cultural and social identity that is different from the identity assigned to black folks by whites. Identity in this sense is about how individuals feel themselves connected to the broader currents of history. Few of us ever become one of the “great men” whose acts get recounted in history books, nor do many of us have personal acquaintance with them. But we identify with nations, and national histories are typically told through stories of the deeds of these great men, both real and legendary. Our national identity is our means of connecting with history.

This realization of identity emerges with striking force in Ken Burns’ recent documentary history of jazz. Much of the narration and expert commentary is about how jazz is America’s music. Not only did jazz originate in American but, as Wynton Marsalis says at the opening of the first episode, “jazz music objectifies America” (Episode One, Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns). With that statement and with countless others that follow we’re told that jazz captures some American essence, that it is what Americans are as a people. When you listen to jazz, you listen, not only to an American voice, but to the voice of America.

This nationalist concern with the nature of America and its people dates back to the early 19th century, when American intellectuals began to weave a new mythology about “an individual emancipated from history, happily bereft of ancestry, untouched and undefined by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self-propelled,” an individual who was thereby separated from Europe (Lewis, American Adam, 1955, p5). As David Stowe has shown, jazz became woven into this fabric during the 1930s, in part as “a musical thumbing of the nose at fascism, whose Nazi theorists regarded swing as a debased creation of Jews and blacks” (Swing Changes, 194, p. 53) Once installed in the temple of Americanism jazz remained there.

But not without considerable tension and, with the publication of Amari Baraka’s Blues People in 1963, open conflict and dissension. Baraka, a very angry, militant and brilliant black poet and playwright, saw African-Americans as blues people and jazz as a son of the blues. As such it was essentially black music, but one “that offered such a profound reflection of America that it could attract white Americans to want play it or listen to it for exactly that reason. ... It made a common cultural ground where black and white America seemed only day and night in the same city...”(Blues People, 159-60). The ethnic and national character of jazz has been a matter of open contention ever since.

As I suggested above, the question of jazz’s “identity” is insoluble precisely because it is framed in nationalist terms. Long before it became assimilated to the concept of the nation-state, “nation” was used in English to designate a racial group. In come contexts, it still retains the sense of racial or ethnic identity. The concept of a nation thus tends to work against the cultural plurality that has been critical in the origins and development of jazz and its descendants.

There is no doubt, for example, that Ellington thought of himself as a “race man,” to use the term of the times. It was as a race man that, in 1943, he wrote “Black, Brown, and Beige” as a musical portrait of (in the terminology of the day) Negro America. Like many African Americans, Ellington had little difficulty in thinking of himself as simultaneously a Negro, a race man, and a patriotic American citizen. In the words of Hannah Nelson, who was interviewed by John Langston Gwaltney for his study of “core black culture,”

I think it was Frederick Douglass who said we were a nation within a nation. I know that will probably bother your white readers, but it is nonetheless true that black people think of themselves as an entity. . . . We are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation. This ground we have buried our dead in for so long is the only ground most of us have ever stood upon. . . . Most of our people are remarkably merciful to Africa, when you consider how Africa has used us. (Drylongso, 1993, p. 5)

Clifford Yancy, “a prudent grandfather in his later fifties” also interviewed by Gwaltney, expressed the practical significance of this separateness:

White people and black people are both people, so they’re alike in most ways, but they don’t think the same about some things. Your white man might be a little weaker, but that’s just because they generally have easier work. I think they are probably as smart as we are because I have seen them doing any kind of work that any of us can do. Now, some of these young white boys might get a job they can’t handle just because they know somebody, but, I mean, an experienced white man can do anything an experienced black man can do. I go by what I see going down out here and that’s the way it looks to me.

This statement is perfectly matter of fact in its assumption that black performance is the standard by which all performance is to be judged. Yancy is not worried about what white people think about him. He has his own frame of reference. That is what it means to be a member of a nation within a nation: it means you have your own frame of reference.

That’s what the discussion of jazz, black, white, and America is about: What is the framework for discussion, analysis and judgment? Who says so? The history of jazz is also a history of arguments about the nature of jazz. Is swing real jazz, or is New Orleans the only true jazz? Is bebop jazz or is it just a commercial stunt, as some of its detractors thought? Is Ornette Coleman playing jazz, or is he playing all those wrong notes because he can’t play the saxophone? Does jazz-rock fusion qualify as jazz or not? At every point in its history, critics, journalists, fans and scholars have argued about the nature of true jazz. Blues, rock and hip hop have occasioned similar arguments. To the extent that these discussions have taken place in trade journals, fan magazines, and the commercial press, they shade into the need to commodify the music so that it can be marketed to the appropriate consumers.

These arguments are rarely merely about separating apples from oranges so you can price them right. They are moral arguments. Jazzers argued that rock was inferior and immoral and rockers countered that jazz is old and dried-up. These arguments are passionate because they are about personal and cultural identity.

Such arguments are impossible in the social and culture worlds we looked at in Chapter 9. Those societies may have recognized differences between children’s and adult music, men’s and women’s songs, songs belonging to particular clans, and so forth. But all of the songs are in the same tradition, the only one members of these homogenous societies feel they must answer to. Their identity is not at issue—an innocence that is rapidly vanishing as these societies become absorbed into the political life of larger nation-states. In complex cultural pluralities like the United States, people have to negotiate a new identity for each arena in which they function, home, church, work, social club, political party, whatever. They have many bodies of music to choose from. Musical preference thus becomes a matter of personal choices that imply specific connections to the larger currents of history.

This is the world in which jazz has sought its way. Not only did it emerge from a diversity of rags, blues, tangos, marches, ballads, Broadway tunes, and so forth, but it feeds into a similar diversity. Beyond this, we must consider the evidence presented by Charlie Keil and his students, who have found that individuals listen to a variety of different kinds of music. Someone who likes jazz may also like country and western and a bit of classical. This variety of musical interests is no doubt abetted by the ready availability of recordings, which didn’t happen until the first quarter of the 20th Century. But it is quite clear that the musical ensembles in the 19th century—brass bands, string bands, minstrel shows—all played a variety of musical styles.

Frameworks of ethnic and national identity set up social boundaries. Even as memes migrate across these boundaries to serve people’s emotional and physical needs, thereby reducing the differences between groups, the need to maintain boundaries asserts itself. It also results in new musical styles as black Americans continue to create music they can think of as specifically theirs. This is the mechanism that Amiri Baraka identified in Blues People. It is the mechanism that has been driving American popular culture through the 20th Century and into this one.

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Note: I have elaborated on Baraka's dynamic in my article, Music Making History: Africa Meets Europe in the United States of the Blues, in Nikongo Ba'Nikongo, ed., Leading Issues in Afro-American Studies. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press. pp. 189-233,  https://www.academia.edu/8668332/Music_Making_History_Africa_Meets_Europe_in_the_United_States_of_the_Blues

Memes as Data: Targets, Couplers, and Designators

Bump to the top of the queue on general principle (the discussion of designation is important) and to remind myself that this material is here and that I need to think about it some more.

While these posts have been quite critical of Dennett’s use of the concept of information, that should not be taken to mean that I see no use for such a concept. There is, of course, the technical usage established by Shannon and Weaver, but that is of limited use in these discussions. The challenge is to make use a less specialized, indeed an informal, concept. I intend to do so by identifying memetic information with the formal concept of data, as employed in computer science, and in particular with the concept of a parameter.

The Wikipedia defines parameter in this way:

In computer programming, a parameter is a special kind of variable, used in a subroutine to refer to one of the pieces of data provided as input to the subroutine. These pieces of data are called arguments. An ordered list of parameters is usually included in the definition of a subroutine, so that, each time the subroutine is called, its arguments for that call can be assigned to the corresponding parameters.

Memes are arguments in the sense of that definition. The parameters for which they are values are components of “subroutines” in the mind, where, for the purposes of this discussion, the mind is considered to be a rich and sophisticated computational device whose characteristics are unspecified.

Memes as Targets

Our first task is to reconcile the current explication of memes (as arguments for mental parameters) with the explication I’ve been developing: memes are culturally active observable properties of objects, events, and processes. That is to say, those properties serve as arguments for parameters in mental processes.

For example, one wishes to make a stone ax head of the standard sort. Using an existing ax head as a model, one can treat its size and shape as targets against which one can judge progress in fabricating a new ax head. In this case a target is a parameter in a fabrication procedure that defines some aspect of the fabricated object.

Then there is the fabrication procedure itself. Apprentices, of course, observe master craftsmen at work and so can use their observations as a source of targets for their own activity. In some respects the master may give explicit instruction, Do it this way, thus helping the apprentice to identify more precise targets.

Memes as Couplers

Let’s consider my favorite source of examples, music. Here’s a passage from Beethoven’s Anvil (pp. 177-178) in which I present a just-so story about the origins of music:

So now we have bands of proto-humans using their animal calls, and their animal moves as well. Group musicking would surely be common. I can imagine it starting more or less spontaneously around significant events. A lion is beaten off, a female comes back from the bush with a new infant, a death, a fresh kill, a water hole is found after a two-day search, a quarrel breaks out and is resolved. I'm imagining a group of folks going about their business and then something dramatic happens that captures the attention of more and more individuals; they begin milling around while chattering and gesturing. Then gestures, footfalls, and cries begin intersecting one another, creating ever denser patterns of sonic and gestural coincidence—the dynamics might have been a bit like those of the clapping we examined at the end of chapter 3. That, I believe, is how group musicking emerged.

For generations upon generations, this musicking may have been opportunistic and haphazard. But the particular patterns of group interaction became easier and easier to trigger, the catalytic requirements less and less, and somehow the activity began happening without any particular catalyst at all. It just happened that on this or that occasion enough individuals gathered together in a small space, one of them began a rhythmic stomp and the joined in, for the fun of it. In this context, every once in awhile—and, over time, more and more frequently—magic could happen. People would have fun and, perhaps, anxiety would be dissipated as well.

Forget about whether or not that’s a convincing just-so story. I like it, but that’s beside the point.

The point is: What’s required that people synchronize their motions and vocalization in cyclic activity? What are the parameters? The physicists tell us there are two: period and phase angle. Period is the length of time required by one complete cycle while phase angle has to do with the alignment between adjacent cycles.

Imagine a pair of people walking side-by-side. Imagine that they are walking at the same tempo. If their left feet hit the ground at the same time then their right feet will do so as well, but half a cycle later. We can say, by definition, that they are walking in phase. If, however, one person’s left foot hits the ground at the same time as the other person’s right foot hits the ground, we would say that they are 180 degrees out of phase. If they are 90 degrees out of phase then their footfalls will not be simultaneous. That’s phase angle. The point is that walking at the same pace doesn’t imply that they are performing the same actions at the same time.

Period and phase angle are thus coupling parameters. They constrain movement so that people move together. To the extent that specific values for those parameters recur in session after session, those values would be memes.

More expansively, we can think of the conventions of the blues, for example, as a set of coupling parameters. They specify cycle length (12 bars), certain melodic elements (the so-called blue notes), and the harmonic trajectory through the cycle (in one notation: I IV I V I). The harmonic trajectory is in fact a set of target parameters which have been given a specific temporal order. Rhythm Changes, as we’ve discussed before in this series, is a still more complex set of coupling parameters and associated targets.

Specific values for these parameters would then be memes. When one plays a blues in the key of Bb, the arguments for the harmonic parameters are specified: Bb F Bb G Bb. A skilled musician joining a jam session in progress has only to hear the music in order to identify it as, say, a blues. Once you’ve played a note or two you can identify the specific key as well and it’s off to the races.

We Got Rhythm...and We're Synched! The magic of the bell, swing in a racing shell, a cornerstone of Athenian democracy

This is about and experience that is very important in human society, but that has only recently come been the object of exploration and investigation. I am talking about closely synchronized physical interaction in making music, but also in dance and athletics. I have devoted considerable attention to this in my book on music, Beethoven’s Anvil, and have many posts on the subject under the labels coupling and synchrony.

This post is about two particular instances of such coupling. First I recount the story that opens the second chapter of Beethoven’s Anvil. Then I offer an anecdote from an athlete at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a rower. I conclude with an argument that William H. McNeil made about how rowing in triremes was a cornerstone of democracy in ancient Athens.

Swing: The magic of the bell

My friend Eddie Ade Knowles attended Lincoln University with Gil-Scott Heron in the late 1960s and then toured with him in the Magic Band for seven years. That was enough; the life of a touring musician conflicted with the demands of family life. He went into academic administration, first in New York City (I forget where), and then moved upstate to the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He was, I believe, Assistant Dean for Minority Affairs when I met him in 1978 or 79. He eventually rose to become Vice-President for Student Life and then retired from that post to teach Afro-Cuban percussion in the Arts Department.

When he teaches the introductory course in Afro-Cuban percussion he has his students read the second chapter Beethoven’s Anvil. That chapter, “Music and Coupling”, begins with a story about an incident that happened while we were rehearsing with a group we’d formed, the New African Music Collective. There were four of us, Ade, me, Druis, and Fonda, and we were rehearsing a bell rhythm (pp. 23-24):

... each of us had a bell with two or three heads on it—the bells were of Ghanian manufacture. Ade assigned three of us simple interlocking rhythms to play and then improvised over the interlocking parts. Once the music got going, melodies would emerge which no one was playing. The successive tones one heard as a melody came first from one bell then another and another. No person was playing that melody; it arose from cohesions in the shifting pattern of tones played by the ensemble. Depending on the patterns he played, Ade could direct the tonal stream perceived as 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.

Occasionally, something quite remarkable would happen. When we were really locked together in animated playing we could hear relatively high-pitched tones that no one was playing. That is, while each bell had a pitch tendency (these bells were not precisely tuned), these particular high tones did not match the pitch tendency of any bell. The tones were distinct, but not ones that any of us appeared to be playing.

Let me repeat that last point. We heard distinct tones that none of us was playing. They somehow arose from the interaction of the tones we played together – constructive interference among upper partials? who knows? – and only when we had relaxed into a particularly deep groove.

Over the rest of that chapter and the next, “Fireflies: Dynamics and Brain States”, I argued that, when a group of people are making music together, their physical interactions are so tightly coupled that we may think of their (thus coupled) nervous systems as a single physical system. In this system some signals paths are inside a single individual’s nervous system while other signal paths are external to individuals, in the air between them. Those signals are shared by all individuals in the group and bind them into a single system. Note that they can do so only because, when the music began, each individual gave up many degrees of freedom so they could synchronize with the others in the group. Later on I argued that it was through such music-mediated interaction that groups of clever apes became proto-human beings. But that’s neither here nor there.

By way of transition I note that, when we had finished that bit of playing, Ade remarked that what we had experienced was “the magic of the bell”. That is to say, among certain circles of musicians it was a known phenomenon designated by a specific phrase. I should also note that of the many hours we rehearsed and performed together over several years, that was the only time the New African Music Collective experienced that magic. We’d experienced many rocking good times, many deep grooves, but none so deep and high as we’d achieved in those few moments.

Swing: Rhythm and rowing

One of Ade’s students in his Afro-Cuban music course in the current semester is a rower named Lucas Vanslette. Here is a passage from his term paper (used with permission):

Rowing five days a week for five months each year, I had the privilege to experience a famous rowing phenomenon called “the swing” only once in the past five seasons of my crew career. As Jon Buse, University of Washington Rowing class of 1972 puts it: “You know when you are able to accomplish what they call ‘the swing’ because the boat is just like one person. There’s no formula for them or how you obtain that; all the different aspects of the stroke have to be in perfect unison… and the boat just takes off.” (Taylor Hawkins). When the swing happens in a boat, every single person rowing in the boat is in sync with one another. Instead of each person taking a stroke, the boat as a whole takes a stroke. When the swing is achieved, there is a noticeable change in the boat’s speed, but also in how hard it is to take a stroke. I found that when the swing was achieved, if only for a split second, taking a stroke was much easier than before, because everyone was in time with each other. I have made the connection that “the swing” and “the magic tone” phenomena are created in the same way. Both are produced from a result of multiple people performing in perfect unison to produce something more than what any of group members could individually hope to accomplish. This synchronization may be due to the possibility that “coupled nervous systems in some sense function as a single system” (Benzon 25). Like when the swing occurs in rowing, the magic tone has no individuality; it is a team effort with no one orchestrating or enforcing the tempo.

Here is the video Vanslette refers to. The passage he references runs from roughly 4:03 to 4:20:

I was of course delighted when Ade sent me Vanslette’s paper, but I wasn’t particularly surprised by what Vanslette reported. That's just how we are.