Re: (TV) Tom Verlaine

[Maurice Rickard <maurice@mac.com>]

As an improvising musician and something of a sucker for thinking 
about the creative process, I can't resist giving this a shot.  There 
are an awful lot of questions here, so let's take 'em one at a time.

Warning: verbosity ahead.  (Feel free to skip it, or use it as an 
insomnia cure.  Except for you, Iguana--you asked the question, so 
you have to read the answer!)

At 2:55 AM -0400 7/6/04, RawIguana13@aol.com wrote:
> I have heard before, or perhaps read, that Verlaine was (out of the cbgb era)
> the most "musically developed."
>
> Can anyone elaborate on that statement?

I think the reason you're running into resistance is that we don't 
know what context that statement was in.  Who wrote it?  What else 
were they saying?  There was a lot of musical talent in the 
scene--Richard Lloyd, Robert Quine...  Wasn't Richard Sohl 
classically trained?  Tom might stand out here because his first name 
doesn't start with "R."  But remember that talent and musical 
development can result from self-study (RL) and/or a hell of a lot of 
playing.  (RL, RQ)  RQ in particular noted that while (tip of the hat 
and apologies to Robin, who brought this up a while ago) he took some 
classes at the Berklee School of Music, they didn't do him any good 
because he couldn't read music well and in fact came to hate dealing 
with music theory.

Making music is both a mental and physical activity.  There's a body 
of knowledge that's been accumulated for several centuries, cobbled 
together out of the work and thinking of many different people over 
time.  Remember the old line about a camel being a horse designed by 
a committee?  Music theory is like that.  (Read Harry Partch's 
_Genesis of a Music_ for a particularly iconoclastic take on this.) 
At the same time, there are real physical phenomena (vibrations of 
air) involved, so some aspects are constant, no matter what "theory" 
one's talking about.  (Read Helmholtz's _On the Sensations of Tone_; 
he was one of the first people in the "modern" era to sit down and 
try to quantify and qualify what's going on when sounds are produced 
and heard.)

> I am aware Verlaine was classically
> trained on the piano, ]

Dunno about that.  I think he might have taken piano lessons at one 
point, but that to me is not the same as being "classically trained," 
which implies a number of years in an actual music conservatory, as 
well as degrees and recitals under one's belt.

> (I read elsewhere that he couldn't read music, is that
> true?)

I don't think he much cares.  See http://www.marquee.demon.co.uk/musmag87.htm

In particular, this part:

Verlaine: "I never practice. I just sort of doodle around, like 
somebody with a sketchpad. Sometimes I run a cassette recorder and 
maybe listen to it, maybe never listen to it again....

"I don't work compulsively. I don't sit around and drum on a guitar 
for five hours and pull my hair out trying to get a song. My 
'influence' on guitar players really is a bit of a joke. I've never 
really learned guitar technique. I once tried to learn a better way 
to finger a scale and I never practice that either. It's much more 
hearing something and playing it, going for something much the way 
jazz musicians do, a very of-the-moment thing. It doesn't always 
work."

> What was Verlaine doing, even in the sense of composing, what was he
> exploring?

You'd have to ask him.  From the same interview:

"There really isn't any pattern for how these things work. Some songs 
are written in 10 minutes. Sometimes I'll build a whole song around a 
bass line. Often the melody is just two sentences and that becomes 
the germ of a song.

"Some days I'll wake up and have an idea for a song. It's not always 
on guitar. I might just hum into a tape, or play a little Casio 
keyboard and get that idea down. Then a week might go by that I don't 
play guitar much, but just work on lyrics or listen to tapes. There 
isn't any given procedure or schedule."

You really should read this interview.  He talks about a lot of this 
stuff you're asking.  Later on, he says this about songwriting:

"It usually has to do with one sentence, or a chorus, or a little 
thing that expands into a song. I think all composition or writing is 
like that: John Coltrane experiments with a rhythm, and this leads to 
another rhythm. Beethoven and Mozart are the same thing."

My reading of this is that his composition is an intuitive 
process--he plays around on guitar or keyboard, and when he comes up 
with a pattern, a riff, or something that seems like it might lead to 
something else, he listens to it and works out what would come next 
in response to that first part, or what kind of thing might precede 
it.  These decisions are informed by one's own sensibility, which 
itself is formed by what one has listened to and what one finds 
interesting; what one likes.  One tries a pattern or a phrase, 
listens to it, and if one likes it, it stays in.  Or if one doesn't 
like it, one can keep it in, too--hell, I'm not your boss; do 
whatever you want.

One can generate these "seeds" in any number of ways--by physically 
moving one's body on the instrument, or by coming up with some system 
that generates sounds.  Put some blank staff paper on the floor.  Put 
a brush in an inkwell.  Flick the ink onto the paper.  Now you have a 
lot of dots representing notes all over the place--there's your 
starting point; you have to fill in the gaps according to your 
sensibility.  Or you can be like John Cage, and come up with a 
completely impersonal system to generate this stuff.

Music is an arrangement of sounds (and silences) in time.  If you 
come up with your own arrangement of sounds in a time sequence, 
whether it be written down, put on tape, or performed, you're 
composing.  Whether it's any good or not is something that you and 
others decide on the basis of the sensibilities you and they have 
formed.  This seems obvious, but it's worth mentioning in relation to 
something I will say later.

> I have seen the word "spontaneous" used to describe his solos.  But, in fact,
> spontaneity doesn't happen out of the sky, it is a craft that develops from
> an extensive knowledge of the art one is spontaneously creating.

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=spontaneous

In particular, note definition 2.  A "spontaneous" solo would be one 
which the musician developed on the spot, in the moment, while 
playing it.  The opposite would be a solo one has worked out in 
advance, and which one plays (substantially) the same way every time. 
The fact that they are different from performance to performance has 
a lot to do with the trading of live Television/TV shows.  Each show 
is different--the solo in this song in this performance is longer 
than in that performance, and I happen to like this one better than 
that one, although this other one is nice, too.  Tom might have been 
really "on" on a certain night, coming up with musical ideas that 
excite and thrill us, connect with us emotionally or aesthetically or 
both.  Or he might not be "on," and abandon the solo in this or that 
tune after a few measures of volume swells.  Also, Tom's not the only 
improvisor in the band, btw.

So how does this happen?  How does one play "spontaneously"?  For 
what it's worth, I have heard of several cases in which very 
well-trained musicians don't know how to improvise--they have so 
cultivated their sight-reading skills that they don't know what to do 
when there isn't any written music in front of them.  So we have 
evidence that  at least certain kinds of extensive knowledge can be 
detrimental to spontaneity.

As an improvising musician myself, I can say that it ain't rocket 
science.  You don't have to go to improvisor's school for 12 years 
before you get your improvisor's license.  From a strict point of 
view, if you're making sounds in a time sequence and not following a 
score, you're improvising.  At any one moment, you can choose to play 
any note you can reach on the instrument, any sound the instrument 
can make, or choose not to play for that moment, as you react to 
what's happening around you.  This is the process of spontaneous 
composition.

Note that to do the above, you don't have to have *any* mastery of 
the instrument you're playing, or any knowledge of music.  If you're 
doing it, you're improvising.  The next issue, though, is whether or 
not what you're doing when you're improvising is worth listening to. 
Remember what I said about one's sensibility--your history of what 
you've listened to and liked/not liked?  You evaluate what you're 
doing in accordance with that.  And the listeners do the same.

As you're evaluating your own playing during this process, a number 
of things are going on.  You could just be operating on a mechanical 
level, placing your fingers somewhere on the instrument (assuming 
that it's not, say, a Theremin) and making a sound, any sound.  If 
it's not an instrument you're used to playing, this may have some 
interesting and surprising results.  You might be satisfied that 
you're able to get sounds out of the thing at all, and particularly 
delighted when a sound seems "right" to you.  I once did a 
performance with another player's guitar, which had broken under his 
assertive playing.  By conventional standards, it was "unplayable," 
yet it still made sounds, and I used those sounds in accordance with 
my aesthetic taste.  I couldn't use conventional technique (the 
strings were literally a half-inch to an inch off the frets, and 
there was no tuning this instrument anymore), but I could in the 
moment develop a technique that satisfied me with this instrument, 
and I could rely on my sensibility within the boundaries the 
instrument presented.  Think of Arto Lindsay with his untuned guitar, 
for example.

Similar would be performances I've done with effects boxes in a 
feedback loop.  I can affect this system by turning knobs, but I 
can't control it--I can't guarantee that a sound I hear in my head 
will in fact be the result when I turn a given knob.  But I take a 
guess and try, and respond to that result, whatever it is, when it 
comes.  My response is turning another knob or hitting a switch, and 
that has another effect, and so on--viola!  A wholly improvised, 
spontaneous performance, on an instrument that's impossible to 
master.  (The morbidly curious may wish to hear the Death Pig samples 
on onezeromusic.com.)

Let's envision a case in which an instrument is more familiar to the 
performer, more controllable.  Technique and mastery may matter more 
to the performer here--you as the performer are listening to what's 
going on around you, and based on your sensibility, you can hear in 
your head the kind of thing you'd like to play.  If you have enough 
technique, then you can play that note or chord which you have 
imagined hearing in this spot, and it's worked.  Yay you!  If your 
technique is less than reliable, then hitting the note or notes you 
envision might be more of a chancy thing--you try something and it's 
exactly what you thought, so yay again.  Or it's not what you 
envisioned, but it still works according to your sensibility, so 
that's still cool, and you can respond to that.  Or you hit a total 
wrong note or chord, and you can feel embarrassed, or you can repeat 
it a few times to make people think that it was something you 
intended.  (I'm serious--repeat a mistake enough times, and it sounds 
inevitable.)

That mastery, while not absolutely necessary, sounds like a pretty 
good thing to have.  One gets there by...playing the instrument. 
Playing it a lot, over time.  Even without knowing theory, one will 
then develop a knowledge of what happens when one puts one's fingers, 
say, here.  One develops decent relative pitch, which helps in 
knowing where to put one's fingers ("OK, the note I'm playing now is 
this one and it sounds like this; I'd like the next note to sound 
like *that*, which I know will happen if I put my finger over 
*there.*").  One may not even know this *consciously*--if you perform 
actions enough, you develop muscle memory and you slave these tasks 
off to your unconscious mind.  I don't think a whole lot about timing 
my left and right hands; when I want to play a note, I just *intend* 
to, and it happens.  Sort of like walking, or riding a bike--after 
you learn how to do it, you don't think about the individual motions 
involved; you just do it, and you can do it without getting a 
physiology degree, but you don't do it without practice.

In both the above cases (not-mastery and mastery), the performer's 
and the listener's sensibilities are the key to whether or not the 
performance "works."  As I've said in other threads on the list, I'm 
more interested in people's sensibilities than I am their degree of 
technique.  I'll gladly take a non-player with an original vision 
over a highly skilled player whose sensibility is uninteresting to me.

So where's Tom fit in all this?  He's a person with a good 
sensibility who has played a lot over the years, and relies on that 
accumulated experience.  He's interesting because of his spontaneous 
risk-taking.  He's started this solo--will it work?  Will it be 
interesting?  Will it be exciting?  Surprising?  Will it change the 
way I think about music, the same way his playing did on [the first 
record I heard]?  We only find out in the moment, as it's being done.

Sometimes he seems a bit bored, distracted, or unprepared 
onstage--signs that he at times has difficulty coming up with 
spontaneous playing that interests him.  Quite possibly, he's not 
practicing, and so his musculature isn't reliably responding to what 
he hears in his head, or possibly he doesn't feel like performing 
that evening.   (The emotional and physical factors are something all 
performers have to struggle with; it's not unique to Tom.)  Sometimes 
he brings his full concentration to the act of making music, and 
something astonishing happens in that fusion of experience, 
sensibility, and ability.  And that's why we pay our money at the 
door.

--

Maurice Rickard
http://mauricerickard.com/   |   http://onezeromusic.com/
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