Musicians and systems thinking
March 29, 2008 | 1:30 pmGerald Weinberg posted a comment about musicians and systems thinking recently. Here are my thoughts about this subject:
Music can be played and created in solitude, but an extra dimension is added when musicians meet and play together. You don’t have to improvise; even playing a familiar song is a greater experience when played together with other musicians. Add an audience and you have yet another dimension. An enthusiastic crowd can inspire you and make you play like you never before. There is more to listening than just consuming. Listening can be participation and interaction. That makes such a difference. Of course each musician has to take his responsibility, but the whole is surely greater than the sum of the parts.
Music has much to do with relationships. It is said that international sports promotes understanding and fellowship, but think about it, competition is a main ingredient in sports. Imagine a musical movement where people from different countries meet and play together without competition and create music together. There you have some promotion of fellowship. Especially Jazz music is an universal concept that crosses all cultural boundaries. In fact, I believe all creative Arts promote connectedness.
Some of today’s music is produced like on assembly line, barren and without lasting impact. It is commercialized fast-food.
I had worked in the computer industry for some 15 years when I started playing myself. I had a rather analytical and left-brain approach to my work and life in general. Along this path I eagerly developed the technical and solitude side of playing bass. I soon discovered the other side; the need to play with awareness, to be connected with myself and with others. Music is to be played together with other people, whether they play or just listen. Being the person I am, I began to reflect over this new perspective and started to hunt for more information along this path. I found a way of thinking that felt natural. This is the way the world operates. If you let loose your artistic right-brain side, it will teach you connectedness.
You may live by these principles more or less, but perhaps you are not aware of the system or how things fit together. I have found that the better I understand the system, the better I can direct my steps, and maximize my musical learning and experiences. There are always problems along the way that needs to be solved and if you can see the principles, you have a better chance of finding a solution. Thankfully, often intuition comes to our help.
We, as citizens of this earth, should strive for wholeness. Only then can we break the downward spiral of destruction. We cannot afford to live in our own egoistic, disconnected world. I believe musicians and artists have an important role to play for us and for the future.
Interesting post Anders, I fully agree upon the argument that music is a way of connectedness. I also agree upon that musicians, that you and Gerald pinpointed out, probably do think differently than the rest of us, if it’s close to system thinking – perhaps. If it’s about a left- or right-side brain issue I really don’t know, but it’s a both side brain training for sure.
The thing I focus at is that musicians playing together do a lot of things simultaneous which makes, more or less, fully usage of their brain. Playing the instrument, listen to the other musicians’ instruments so that the song/track sounds “as it shouldâ€, following the notes and lyrics either from paper or from a good memory, feeling the rhythm and getting emotional. There is, as you are talking about, several dimensions that you could lay upon the factors above. But then again, we talking about live music. Because, like you said, there is plenty of assembly line, studiomixed, blond-singer, mainstream crap, that cant be counted in when talking about music and system thinking.
I don’t think it’s possible to talk about Art in general as a connectedness. You never see painters come together and paint a canvas at the same time, never do writers. That would probably be kind of a chaotic situation. You close to never see painters do stuff in front of an enthusiastic crowd. That’s why I think of music as a “higher†level of connectedness and probably closer to system thinking then other Art, or art-alike, expressions.
Even more interesting, and Ill be quoting you:
“Thankfully, often intuition comes to our help.â€
Now and then this “intuition†rescues us from different kinds of situations. Could this be a system thinking mechanism? If we would understand the logic behind our intuition we could find a way of find the wholeness? Or is intuition just a mechanism that saves us in difficult times?
Just my 5 cents!
Daniel,
Thanks for your comment! I believe that getting together and creating something together is powerful, whether it is a live performance like a concert or something to be experienced over a period of time, like a book or painting. Perhaps has the power of togetherness been more explored in music than in visual arts. But on the other hand we have many other forms of creative arts that create and perform live together. We might have areas to discover here! I am much more familiar with music than with visual arts, but I know that at least the content and the ideas behind writings could be stronger if created in collaboration.
Diversification is important when coming together, but there has to be some kind of common ground and connectedness at first, or else there will be competition or chaos.
“I believe musicians and artists have an important role to play for us and for the future.”
Well, they certainly have in the past, so it’s quite a solid prediction. Minstrels seem always to have had a special protected place in many societies, and between and among societies that otherwise were often in conflict.
Of course, there’s nothing automatic about it. Musicians have also been used often to lead soldiers into battle, stirred by the strong emotions of martial music (which I often use to motivate my writing).
In other words, music may have charms to soothe a savage breast, but that’s only within the right context. Music alone won’t do much to save us from ourselves, much as it helps each of us individually to be calmer and more likely to think in systemic terms, right, left, and middle brain.
So, one of the tasks for non-musicians like me is to protect and serve music and music-makers. And not to waste energy thinking about the “assembly line, studiomixed, blond-singer, mainstream crap.” There has always been inferior music, and lots of it. (I read somewhere that there are over 50,000 published operas.)
Sometimes we fall easily into a systems fallacy, the selection fallacy. Our “classical” music is not a valid sample of the music of the past. It’s a very few survivors from a long, long selection process. Just take the long view and concentrate encouraging the best stuff. Let natural selection take care of deciding what’s mainstream crap.
Gerald and Anders, I’m sitting here 2 days before my 29th birthday. Watching a soccer game between Arsenal and Liverpool. Meanwhile I’m writing a few e-mails and trying to create a blog-alike site – Anders motivated me a few days ago to start writing on-line. I’m trying as well figure out how Scribus is working, since I need to visualize a PR-paper tomorrow at a big meeting.
I would call it a real life multitasking but others, including my girlfriend, would probably identify the working method as madness. However, during the hours since dinner I also trying to understand the system thinking and it’s important contribution to a more sustainable world. During my university studies, MA in International Relations, we talked a lot about system thinking with focus at international politics, relations, humanitarian interventions, human rights and so forth but then again, its still a fragmentation of the reality. Its, and I’ll quote Weinberg:
“Sometimes we fall easily into a systems fallacy, the selection fallacy.â€
Are we, as Humans, ever able to grasp – more or less – wholeness? Or is this the human limitation, that we do select? Or do system thinking even have a contextual framework, beside not focusing on fragments?
This blog, thanks Anders, and your replies Mr Weinberg is really motivating me to deepening my knowledge about system thinking.
I’ll continuing with my fearless multitasking…