The following post is an excerpt from the book All Kinds of Time: The Enduring Spirit of the Creative Music Studio (Arborville Publishing, 2016), copyright Robert E. Sweet. Please do not reproduce in whole or part without permission of the copyright holder.
Music is not something you can use words to describe. Music is either in the air, and you find it, or it is in the air and you don’t find it, but you just don’t try hard enough. You can be educated to play the piano, you can be educated about chords, you can be educated about scales, you can be educated about everything there is to do
Keith Jarrett
with music, and you’re still zero, until you let go of what holds you back. And all of us could, possibly, not be held back, but most of us don’t let it happen.
For years I have referred to the Creative Music Studio as the twentieth
century’s premier study center for creative music. Yet we find ourselves now well into the twenty-first century, and the Creative Music Studio is still uniting, exciting, and edifying musicians from around the world who are seeking opportunities for expression that themusic industry simply cannot provide.
It’s unfortunate, yet understandable, that journalists over the years have portrayed CMS as Karl Berger’s “jazz camp.” It’s not a jazz camp
or a jazz school. In fact it is so different from anyone’s conception of a jazz or music camp that some folks who were used to that kind of experience were actually turned off by the freedom of the place. It was, and is, an environment where players are encouraged to develop a personal relationship with sound, rhythm, and harmony—elements that exist in all music, regardless of styles—and to express that most intimate and uniquely personal relationship by means of what we typically call improvisation.
So, what is creative music? If you talk to enough people about the Creative Music Studio, it’s inevitable that you will hear someone ask this question. And as a follow-up question, you can generally expect to hear, “Isn’t all music creative?” No. it’s not. All music is created but not all music is creative.
When people ask what creative music is, they are asking from a frame of reference that tells them that whatever they hear must be categorizable. They want to be able to compare creative music with all other categories of music with which they are familiar. They wonder which bins in record stores they are most likely to find creative music—is it free jazz, is it prog rock, is it alt country, is it third stream? Creative music is not an outcome, it is not a result, it is not a product, and it is not a category. It is a process. “It’s not what you play, it’s how you play,” says Karl.
Music is the art medium that communicatesinteriority, being only perceived by the ears, and received by the mind. A strict approach to
Jason Martineau. The Elements of Music: Melody, Rhythm, and
understanding music will consequently always have something lacking, as music theory, in essence, is primarily descriptive and not
prescriptive. The tendencies and practices in music are only observed and cataloged upon analysis, after the fact. It is the hearts and minds of human beings that shape and weave melodies, harmonies, and rhythms together into meaningful tapestries, imbued with the interior landscapes of their immediate experiences.
Harmony. Wooden Books, Walker & Company; 1st edition (October
28, 2008). http://jasonmartineau.com/
Creative music is a sonic expression of an individual musician’s unique inner experience. It is a feeling made audible, an expressive process that moves from the inside out.
Our Western music traditions have been based, for the most part, on a technical reproduction of what a composer managed to capture of his or her own unique inner experience, written out in notated form.
When a composer composes, it is a creative process. When a musician or an ensemble plays a composed piece, that process of translating what Leo Smith calls frozen information into a listening experience for an audience might or might not be creative. But it is definitely an expression of something that is exterior to the performing musicians.
The jazz musician is probably the only person for whom the composer is not a very interesting individual, in the sense that he prefers to destroy what the composer writes or says.
“Philosopher Jacques Derrida Interviews Jazz Legend Ornette Coleman: Talk Improvisation, Language & Racism (1997).” Open Culture, September 26, 2014. http://bit.ly/1E9OqTU
Creative music is, therefore, a process. It is also a musical environment in which the process is allowed to unfold, making it possible for what’s inside an individual to be expressed through organized sound. Creative music is not a category.
Your music is actually an expression of your inner state. If you are feeling doubtful or afraid or angry or tentative, it will be evident in the music. If you are feeling compassionate, relaxed, or confident, that, too, will come across. That is why some music that is very unsophisticated from a technical point of view can be so moving, and why some music that employs a high level of technical wizardry can be so disappointing.
Observing and becoming fully aware of one’s inner state in the present moment and then choosing to alter it by means of mental and emotional discipline to serve the music is the sign of a highly developed player. Getting to that point is a very personal process, but when you get a group of people working on the process in community, magic can happen.
Although these skills can’t be taught—they must be discovered—it is possible to create an environment where the paramount purpose is the nurturance of the creative-music process. And that is what makes the Creative Music Studio unique. Regardless of who the guiding artists are at any particular workshop, or what those artists choose to develop, regardless of what practice methods are presented, regardless of how ensembles are assembled for exploration or for performances, the development of the personal sound and expression of each individual is valued above all else.
The most important questions are, how well do you relate to the interior aspects of yourself that make music soulful, warm, and authentic? How well do you relate to the various universal elements of music? Are you alert, attentive, and in the moment? Or are you distracted, or even worse, censoring that part of you, which, if freely expressed, will result in your highest and best music?
Music education’s preoccupation with technical brilliance in general is far too wrapped up in what I call musical engineering. It’s even happening in so-called jazz education. The language of jazz masters’ improvisations—the expression of what was uniquely their own feeling and inner experience—has been formulized and codified.
Students are led to believe that they have only to learn the formulas, develop the technical aspects, and they too can be fantastic players.
But the warmth is not there, the soul is not there. True individual expression emerges only when one’s sound is deeply connected to one’s unique interiority.
When Karl was teaching in Germany at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, Frankfurt am Main (Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts) he clearly saw this dichotomy between musical
engineering and music that constitutes one’s love.
As the vice president of the school I also had to go to exams of classical players. I created a few classical enemies because I wouldn’t agree with their judgments of players. I’d listen to a guy they called a fantastic pianist. I’d say, “He plays all the notes, but the timing is not right.”
Everything was so technically oriented and I was just listening for the music part. I was interested in the music part! There’s no difference whether somebody plays what’s written or he just sort of
Karl Berger
makes it up—it has to sound like his music; it has to make sense and be believable. They were just looking for the great technology or techniques that those guys have. Some of the teachers had a feel for that, but the majority of them were just into this technical brilliance. So I did get some flak.
The process of developing a relationship to one’s own music is primary, but how we relate to the interior aspects of the others in an ensemble is also vital to a group sound. Around 1980, a Senegalese talking drummer named Aiyb Dieng came to the Creative Music Studio. Karl soon discovered that he and Aiyb connected musically in an uncanny way. As they played together more and more, Karl came to realize that there is some indescribable quality that allows some individuals to form a unique musical kinship.
When we played together, it was like he was my other self, like we were soul brothers. We just played, no problem. Everything was wonderful—smooth. It just felt perfect. We had a thing going together,and he was from the other side of the world really. Then, when we got to Senegal, Aiyb introduced me to his brother, who he said was the better player. We got together to play and nothing happened. But it’s really a very personal thing. And you cannot put your finger on it in a scientific way.
Karl Berger
Just as a very personal relationship between musicians emerges in an organic, unpredictable, and unanalyzable way, an individual’s very personal relationship with sound, harmony, and rhythm will either develop or it won’t. It can’t be taught. It is certain, though, that if a musician finds this personal and intimate relationship with the music to be elusive, then he or she must develop mental disciplines that will shut out the ego and develop a deeper level of attention that allows him or her to really tune in to the sound. This aspect of what Karl calls music-mind training is what led him and Ingrid to connect with the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism while at the Naropa Institute in the 1970s.
Jon Kabat-Zinn says that the Buddha was able to encapsulate all of his teachings into one sentence: “Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine.” Herein lies the great paradox and the great gift for a creative musician that a practice of mindfulness leading to a release from the attachment to I, me, mine offers. The more one is able to approach music making free of the restrictions and cognitive burdens of who “I” am as a music maker, the more one is able to open up and allow a creative expression that is uniquely one’s own.
During the fortieth anniversary CMS workshop in May of 2013, I had the opportunity to play with Ken Filiano, who is not only a brilliant bassist but also an uncannily insightful and perceptive human being. He said to me, after we finished playing, “You don’t really know me”—we had just met that day—“but do you mind if I say something?” I think that he felt that it might be OK to say something that he might not otherwise have said because of our common connection with Tad Weed, the pianist with whom Ken has collaborated over many years, mostly in L.A., and with whom I have been studying in Ann Arbor.
“Sure go ahead.” I was eager to hear whatever he had to say.
“I can see that you’ve got things together technically, with your hands and all, but if you just get it from your head down into your heart, you’ll really start to make things happen.”
I knew instantly what he was talking about. I knew it on an intellectual level. Of course, if I knew it more deeply on a heart level, he wouldn’t have had to say anything. The question that sprang immediately into my mind “How do I do that?” But I didn’t ask, because I knew that I was just going to have to figure it out on my own.
In a later email exchange, I mentioned to him that getting out of one’s head is something I have known about on an intellectual level, but that getting there is another matter. I asserted that more and more playing was the best route to get there, when a creative-music process was the goal.
Knowing how to get there you don’t have to worry about. You’re already there. Right now you just have to allow this to come through. It’s an evolutionary process of sorts where you learn to trust and observe that the heart and mind work together rather than separately.
More and more playing is the best route only if you exercise this observational balance—more observation, less judgment of the qualitative kind. By this I mean that we do have to line up the ducks, technically speaking. But then the second step of the process is to see/observe what part of one’s human spirit is being served by the technique. This should take you to some interesting places.
Ken Filiano
As I’ve pointed out, the technical aspects of music, the “theory” and the formulas, are what music education concerns itself with primarily.
The teaching of the observational balance that Ken speaks of, along with what Karl describes as beat-for-beat attention, are not the domain of formal music education in the West. Music is a way of being in the world. The most valuable thing about a life in music is discovering what it is about ourselves that interferes with our observation and causes us to become mired in self-judgment. And that discovery process can be applied to all other aspects of our lives.
Bob Sweet 