Learning to Play
Reflecting on my conversation with Michael Dodds, The Eddy Network Podcast Episode 159
Music is the crowning art of the seven liberal arts … and reflects the other liberal arts.
Michael Dodds
Headstone - Henry Augustus Belo (1845-1864) - Salem, N.C.
My conversation with Michael Dodds, Professor of Music History at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts on The Eddy Network Podcast scratched the surface of our normal interaction. He is deeply gifted and I am deeply appreciative. As I have begun to experience being a member of his choir, I am finding that many things that I have thought and read over the years are returning to me. In effect, music is having a unifying effect upon me. Or, shall I say, the many particulars of my life find their coincidence in singing.
In particular, music brings together so many seemingly contradictory facets of human experience within the context of the reality of time and space. Certainly there is music that creates a mystical departure from reality. However the experience of the transcendent takes place within the context of the immanent nature of reality. Even if headphones and an image on the screen is the technological context, at some soon future moment, we put down the headphones, turn off the screen, and go into the kitchen to make some popcorn and get something to drink. The experience remains with us. This multiplicity of experience is human experience. It is not singular or contained, but diverse and free.
Share Your Voice
In my recent Substack essay, The Scope of Impact, I began with this reflection .
The scope of impact is the experience of change over time that transcends thought to become the expression of our best selves.
What is original to us is not what we think
but rather what we observe and then embody as living knowledge.
Another way of describing what I see is …
I am not what I think but what I voice.
My voice connects me to reality. It is the reality that is shared with others. When I speak (or write), I articulate who I am in the moment of expression. This is why our conversations with one another matter. When we speak together, our words resonate with reality over time.
For this reason, we must take care of our relationships. When we speak with malice or deceit, we deny the reality that makes peace possible between people. When we speak with respect, we affirm our shared humanity with one another. We do not have to be the same people. We only have to decide in our own hearts that we will treat one another like we wish to be treated.
I believe this is what Iain McGilchrist presents to us in his book, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World.
In the physics that makes the world possible, chaos and rigidity must be very finely balanced. We need forces for stasis and conservation, and forces for flow and change; but they must work together. We can see this being played out in the task of balancing inherently contradictory to paradoxical elements such as being both united and distinct in spatial terms as well as both stable and changeable in temporal terms. However, as elsewhere, there is an asymmetry between the forces of division and the forces of union: ultimately they have to be united, not remain divided.
Learning to Play
During our conversation, Michael Dodds refers to an essay by Hans-Georg Gadamer in his book Truth and Method where he writes about “play.”
“We can certainly distinguish between play and the behavior of the player, which, as such, belongs with the other kinds of subjective behavior. Thus it can be said that for the player play is not serious: that is why he plays. We can try to define the concept of play from this point of view. Which merely play is not serious. Play has a special relation to what is serious. It is not only that the latter gives its “purpose”: we play “for the sake of recreation,” as Aristotle says. More important, play itself contains its own, even sacred, seriousness. Yet, in playing, all those purposive relations that determine active and caring existence have not simply disappeared, but are curiously suspended. The player himself knows that play is only play and that it exists in a world determined by the seriousness of purposes. But he does not know this in such a way that, as player, he actually intends this relation to seriousness. Play fulfills its purpose only if the player loses himself in play. Seriousness is not something that calls us away from from play; rather, seriousness in playing is necessary to make the play wholly play. Someone who doesn’t take the game seriously is a spoilsport. The mode of being of play does not allow the player to behave toward play as if toward an object. The player knows very well what play is, and that what he is doing is only a game; he does not know what exactly he “knows” in knowing that.”
Gadamer, writing almost a century ago, describes what we today call “flow.” There is a certain forgetting of oneself in play. This is what I see in jazz improvisation. There is an embodied character playing. When we immerse ourselves in a purposeful activity that becomes play, the analytical attention to purpose fades into the shadows as we become bodily immersed in the moment of play. I have found in just a very short time of being in Michael’s choir that we’ll sing through a song with attention given to the notes and pacing, etc. Then we sing through it again, and all that fades into the background, and the spirit of the song invades my body as I tear up at its meaning. Learning to play or achieve flow is the discipline of letting go of our conscious intent to focus on a deeper, wider, greater reality that is always present. To play and flow is not inattention, but fully embodied attentiveness. I believe music provides a unique expereince in this way.
The experience of play really involves first, the difference between analytical or technical knowledge and embodied or intuitive knowledge, and second, how they join together to create a deep level of knowledge beyond our conscious awareness.
Knowing More Than We Can Tell
Michael Polanyi writes about knowing things that we don’t know how we know them. He calls this “tacit” knowledge.
“I shall consider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell. This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. …
Our body is the ultimate instrument of all our external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical. In all our waking moment we are relying on our awareness of contacts of our body with things outside for attending to these things. Our own body is the only thing in the world which we normally never experience as an object, but experience always in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body. It is by making this intelligent use of our body that we feel it to be our body, and not a thing outside.”
Tacit knowledge is that which allows us to “play” or “flow” without consciously thinking about the thing we are doing. We can get lost in the experience. It is like time spent on a long road trip. I have had many. Music is playing. We are singing some of our favorite songs, and then all of sudden we realize twenty miles have passed without our conscious awareness. We look down at the speedometer, the fuel gauge and the mileage passed. Were we safe? Were we ever unsafe? We don’t really know. Yet, we are where we are having experienced a sort of detachment that is at the same time a fullness of experience.
If we are giving attention to our driving while also experiencing the joy of the road, then we’ll be aware of the truck ahead that is slowing down or the exit we need to take to refuel. Still time passes with enjoyment as our conversation with our fellow travelers takes us into another frame of mind while still being attentive to the road.
This experience is parallel to the experience of music as Michael and I discussed.
The arena we are in with this discussion is known as the “phenomenological” perspective.
The problem isn’t the actual words “play” and “flow” or their meanings. The problem, instead, is recognizing the context in which we play and realize flow.
We live in a time where the metaphor of the machine dominates how we view the reality. Organizations are machines. Society is a collection of machines. People are utilities within the machine. Reality functions like a machine. We perceive reality as a utilitarian process that unfolds like a production line. Or, at least should perform in a predictable, efficient manner. It is easy to see how difficult it is to understand how play and flow become embodied in our experience of the mechanical structure of the world.
Machines Can’t Play
In 1936, Walter Benjamin, a member of the Frankfurt School, wrote an essay called The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. There he says,
“Even with the most perfect reproduction, one thing stands out: the here and now of the work of art - its unique existence in the place wither it is at this moment. But is on that unique existence and on nothing else that the history has been played out to which during the course of its being it has been subject. That includes not only the changes it has undergone in its physical structure over the course of time; it also includes the fluctuating conditions of ownership through which it may have passed. The trace of the former will be brought to light only chemical or physical analyses that carried out on a reproduction; that of the later forms the object of tradition, pursuit of which has to begin from the location of the original. …
The whole province of genuineness is beyond technological … reproducibility. But while in relation to manual reproduction (the product of which was usually branded a forgery of the original) the genuine article keeps its full authority, in relation to reproduction by technological means that is not the case. The reason is twofold. In the first place, a technological reproduciton is more autonomous, relative to the original, than one made by hand. … Secondly, it can also place the copy of the original in situations beyond the reach of the original itself. Above all, it makes it possible for the original to come closer to the person taking it in, whether in the form of a photograph or in that of a gramophone record. …
Reproductive technology, we might say in general terms, removes the thing reproduced from the realm of tradition. In making many copies of the reproduction, it substitutes for its unique incidence a multiplicity of incidences. And in allowing the reproduciton to come closer to whatever situation the person apprehending it is in, it actualizes what is reproduced.”
It is in the realm of music that I think we find the most explicit separation of forms. There is the music score, the live performance, the recorded performance, the record (both analog and digital), the live performance experienced, and the sampling of works for other works of music.
Albert Borgmann, Professor of Philsophy at the University of Montana, in his book, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium writes.
“How then do we explain that people manage to talk about the same piece of music no matter how different their symbols or circumstances? As Donald Davidson has often pointed out, it is one and the same reality that asserts itself in various languages and makes sentences true or false. Formal structures, musical ones in particular, must be part of that reality. It is both one reality and a manifold reality. The how of things unites them into one world, the what of things gives them their particular face and voice. …
To perform a piece of music is to comprehend a musical structure that has emerged from the rich and definite circumstances of the composer’s world and has assumed an austere and abstract reality; and it is to embody that structure again in the thick and particular setting of today. …
To some extent, every musical score is a reflection of its cultural environment. But kinds of music differ in the number of strands that they have gathered from their culture and entrusted to our care. Not that this is trivally obvious which of the cultural threads visible in a piece of music are intrinsic to its fabric. …
Records, however, submerge the full structure of information more resolutely even than writing and occlude the place, the time, the ardor, and the grandeur that provide the setting for the musical realization of structure. For a score to become real, it requires not only its proper place and time but also a communal tradition of extraordinary discipline and training. Human beings need to struggle with the recalcitrance of things and the awkwardness of their bodies before the ease and grace of music make descend upon them. The physical reality of a flute enforces stringent demands on the posture, the breathing, and the embrochure of the student. The violin requires that players place their fingertips on the uncharted territory of the finger board with a precision of fractions of a millimeter. Ordinary mortals need forceful teachers and many years of practice to learn these skills.
Once they are trained, however, musicians give voice to the grandeur of reality. They bring out the common and concealed kinship of movement in things and raise the resonance of reality to singing. When you see swallows circle and dive to the strain’s of Mozart’s clarinet concerto, you notice a coincidence of power and grace, a consonance of gliding and turning, a serene suspension of wings and sounds above the troubled world. But music need not be so ethereal. It has many ties to reality. It can move like a dancer, rise like a fortress, and cry like a baby.
Both the ardor and the grandeur of music give structure to time. Practicing and performing require regularity and engender focal practices. At its most eminent, however, music rises from its practices to an event that constitutes a landmark in time.”
Playing with Reality
I know many people who are lost in their thoughts. Some are bright, others use their intellect to avoid play. It is a common discussion now about the relation of abstract thought (left brain) and embodied intuitive thought (right brain.) Iain McGilchrist has done the most to help us understand the asymmetrical relationship of the two hemispheres of the brain.
The trap though is to think that if I read his books and watch his videos on Channel McGilchrist that I am now playing. I understand this very well because I used to live in my head. I valued being erudite. I always had an answer. But, I knew something was missing. One way to describe it was that to always have the answer is to live in a world of finely tuned abstractions. My mind (my thinking) changed when I encountered people who were not learned, yet had wisdom that made a difference in my life.
Forty years ago, I came across Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge, and the intuitive nature of tacit knowledge took hold of me. I began to appreciate experience. Not pure experience, but average experience.
Forty five years ago, I was driving between North Carolina and Boston. I was in the northern suburbs of New York City when my old Honda Civic began to fail. I pulled on to the shoulder of the Interstate highway. Looked under the hood, and from somewhere I reasoned that the problem was the rotor and points of the distributor. How did I know that? I have no idea. I pulled my bike off the back of the car and road down the highway to the next exit, found a car parts store, got the parts and rode back, fixed my car, and drove on. Still a remarkable memory for me.
The point of all this is the importance to having experiences where we can learn to play. For when we are playing, we are fully immersed in an embodied experience. If you are not sure what to do, join a club that engages with nature. If I had time, I’d like to go birding. Singing in the choir at church has already paid dividends in getting me out of my head, and letting my voice be heard.
Above, when I say, ”I am not what I think but what I voice” I am “saying” that we engage with the world outside our minds by forming words to articulate what our minds are constructing. Of course, we can speak into a recorder, and post it online, and we lose the more important reality that exercising our voice can bring.
Juhanni Pallasmaa in his wonderful book, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses writes,
“I wish to express the significance of the tactile sense for our experience and understanding of the world, but I also intended to create a conceptual short circuit between the dominant sense of vision and the suppressed sense modality of touch. …
Touch is the sensory mode which integrates our experiences of the world and of ourselves. Even visual perceptions are fused and integrated into the haptic continuum of the self; my body remembers who I am and how I am located in the world. My body is truly the navel of the world, not in the sense of the viewing point of the central perspective, but as the very locus of reference, memory, imagination, and integration. All the senses, including vision, are, in a way,extensions of the tactile sense; the senses are specializations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching, and thus related to tactility. Our contact with the world takes place at the boundary line of the self through specialized parts of our enveloping membrane. We humans, just as all animals, are extending ourselves into the world through our actions as well as material and mental constructions. As representatives of Homo sappience, our image of self does not stop at the skin, as we relate and extend ourselves in countless ways by means of mobility, technology, materials, culture and beliefs, both scientific and religious.”
Let me finish by saying this.
As modern humans, we find it very easy to talk about ideas. We don’t do well at giving voice to our unique and authentic selves. Because we don’t give voice to that which is deeply meaningful and defining of who we are, we remain detached from reality. To know what is real is to know how I impact the world.
If in the work and the life you lead, you do not experience play as described here, then you will have difficulty knowing full well that unique and valued contribution that you can make to the world.
It may require doing something new, that you have little or no background in, like joining a church choir, to discover the full extent of who you are as a person.
So, let each of us sing a new song,
a song of hope and of play,
so that together we may discover not only what it means to live an embodied life,
but to do so as a community of embodied souls.
Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1975/1989.
Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 1966/2009.
Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a PostCritical Philosophy, 2015.
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936.
Albert Borgmann, Holding On to Reality: The Nature of Information at the Turn of the Millenium
Juhanni Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses, Fourth Edition, 2024.
I really hope that more people sing! I took choir seriously and it has helped me many times in life. A dear friend showed me As It Is In Heaven...a great film that speaks to your post here. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0382330/