Critique Part 3 supplement — Engaging the artist's imagination

George Martin.  Image via soundofthehound.com.

Just as art can leave room for the insights of its audience, critiques of art in progress can leave room for the artist to decide how she wants to proceed.

Critique that takes the form of a long list of detailed responses, while helpful, might not engage the artist’s imagination and the learning already present in the work.  For example, consider a singer recording a vocal track.  She sings a take, and the producer, seated behind the control-room glass, responds. 

Compare this response . . .  

“You were flat on the first Mary and lamb and also the second Mary.  (The second lamb was okay.)  You were sharp on the final fleece, and you rushed snow.  Let’s try it again.”

with this one . . .

“Let’s try another, and this time, see if you can focus on telling the story.”

The second response has several advantages over the first: 

• It recognizes the deeper problem, which is that the performance got away from the singer.  She lost her concentration. 
   

• It offers a single meta-task around which the singer can focus her next take, rather than presenting a series of little fixes to which she must attend. 
   

• It sets free the singer’s imagination.  Rather than attending to a checklist of problems, she can now engage her imagination.
   

• It leaves room for unexpected solutions. 

A great example of deeper communication between artists: After the Beatles recorded the basic tracks for “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” John Lennon communicated his vision for the finished recording to producer George Martin.  The conversation is reported in Mark Lewisohn's book The Beatles Recording Sessions.  

"Beatles songs were quite simple in the early days," says George Martin.  "You couldn't play around with them too much.  But by 1967 we were building sound pictures and my role had changed — it was now to interpret those pictures and work out how best to get them down on tape.  Paul was fine — he could express what he wanted, the sounds he wanted to have.  But John was less musically articulate.  He'd make whooshing noises and try to describe what only he could hear in his head, saying he wanted a song 'to sound like an orange'.  When we first worked on 'Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite!' John had said that he wanted to 'smell the sawdust on the floor' . . . 

Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Recording Sessions, p. 99

Note that what Martin may have viewed as Lennon's liability, his lack of a proper musical vocabulary, may well have been a great advantage in his collaborations with Martin and McCartney.  See how the statement that he wanted to 'smell the sawdust on the floor' . . .

• Identifies a deeper problem, the mood of the recording.
   

• Sets forth a single meta-task, rather than a list of specifics. 
   

• Frees George Martin to engage his producer’s imagination. 
   

• Leaves room for unexpected solutions, in this case recording a sped up Hammond organ, chopping up the tape, and splicing it back together at random to produce something surreal that evokes a circus.

By way of this framing of his mission, Lennon engaged Martin’s artistic imagination, and the song came to life.

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Critique Part 3 — Helpful feedback begins with an honest “Yes.”

Above and left, Yoko Ono views her own work "Ceiling Painting" (aka the Yes Painting).  Viewers climbed a ladder and used a magnifying glass hung from the ceiling to glimpse her message: "yes"  Images via pixgood.com and tumblr.net.

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When responding to an artist’s work, it helps to on the side of the art.  This holds true for several reasons.

• “How is this working for me?” (as opposed to “How is this failing?”) allows a respondent access the learning the piece has offered her.  By first identifying the elements to which she responds with the biggest “yes,” she is primed for further insights that will guide her toward a more productive critique. 
   
• Likewise, feedback that starts an honest “Yes” reconnects the artist to the learning she has already undergone through creating the work.   By helping her keep track of the earlier learning, such feedback better positions her to consider her next steps.
   
• Artists are prone to await feedback with a certain amount of anxiety, which can occlude their ability to listen.   By starting with an honest “Yes,” a respondent can help defuse some of these anxieties and help the artist listen more attentively.
   

A good example of why this works: Imagine a recording session.  A vocalist stands at the microphone while the producer stares at her from behind the control-room glass.  The producer, who is mindful not only of the finished product she has in mind but also of the singer’s vocal endurance and, perhaps, anxiety, will want to lead her artist through the recording in the fewest possible takes (though she may be ready to take as many as needed to capture the desired performance).

With that in mind, consider the difference between this . . . 

“I thought you were rushing the choruses.”

and this . . .

“I like how laid back and pocketed the verses are.  You are really feeling the rhythm there and it’s bringing the words to life.  Can you work that same groovy magic on the choruses?”

The second response affirms what the singer has already learned about singing the verses and invites her to bring that learning to the choruses.  It turns her learning loose on the problem.  The first response, on the other hand, makes no such reference.  Indeed, the singer may think she is singing the verses wrong, too.  If she is like most of us creative types, the first comment will invite unnecessary self-criticism.  The second invites self-affirmation, which is what all artists need to access their deepest learning.

Begin with "yes."  It's a lesson from improv acting that has relevance to the art of critique, and life at large.

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Critique Part 2 supplement — Workshops Connect the Dots

Image via honside.com.

The relevance of critiquing to making art can be understood by considering the insights of Alexis Wiggins, a high-school teacher, who was asked to become a learning coach whose job was to improve learning.   Her principal suggested she be a student for two days.

I was to shadow and complete all the work of a 10th grade student on one day and to do the same for a 12th grade student on another day. My task was to do everything the student was supposed to do: if there was lecture or notes on the board, I copied them as fast I could into my notebook. If there was a Chemistry lab, I did it with my host student. If there was a test, I took it (I passed the Spanish one, but I am certain I failed the business one).

She was surprised by what this process uncovered.

Key Takeaway #1

Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.

I could not believe how tired I was after the first day. I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot – in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem…we move a lot. 

But students move almost never. And never is exhausting . . .

Key Takeaway #2

High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes.

. . . I was struck by this takeaway in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard . . .  

Key takeaway #3

You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.

I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. It’s really hard to do, and not something we ask adults to do day in and out. Think back to a multi-day conference or long PD day you had and remember that feeling by the end of the day – that need to just disconnect, break free, go for a run, chat with a friend, or surf the web and catch up on emails. That is how students often feel in our classes, not because we are boring per se but because they have been sitting and listening most of the day already. They have had enough.

— excerpted from “I Have Made a Terrible Mistake” by Alexis Wiggins.

Alexis Wiggins put herself out in the audience and made huge discoveries about how to teach.  Though she had taught for years, these insights were not available until she tapped into the experience of being a student.

Participants in art workshops are primed to make parallel discoveries.  Writing students, for instance, make discoveries as readers of work by others that had eluded them while writing pieces of their own.  The problems that hamper their own writing are invisible to them until they encounter them in work by others.

Stepping out into the audience as an artist—it can be enormously instructive. 

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Critique Part 2 supplement — What is on the page?

Pianist Marilyn Nonken.  Image via marilynnonken.com.

One of the hardest lessons for workshop students is to respond to only what is before them.  What is on the page?  On the screen?  On the stage?  On the canvas?

The lesson is important for both respondents and artists: let the work accomplish its goals under its own power, by its own means.  Lengthy notes of explanation from the artist, if they are not part of the work, encroach on a respondent's ability to evaluate the work’s success.  Likewise, responses to things outside of the work (the artist’s process, her level of effort, her other work) distract the artist from hearing how the work itself has been received and gauging how it might be received by those she may never meet. 

One tipoff that the response looks outside of the work is the presence of moral judgment.  

Compare this . . . 

            “I just don’t feel like you tried very hard.”

Or . . .

"I felt like the writer was trying to get me to feel sorry for her."

With this . . .  

“I couldn’t figure out what the piece was really about.  At first I thought it might have been the arson.  Then there were five paragraphs about the brother’s troubled past, but then it returned to the arson and the investigation.  So I found myself unable to grab hold of the story, because I couldn’t determine which storyline was the ultimate focus, the brother or the arson.” 

Note how the gratuitous moral language in the first two responses offers nothing about the art, only speculation about the artist.  The third response highlights the source of the respondent's confusion and stays within the bounds of the art.

Respondents do well to confine their attention to what the artist sets before them. And artists do well to learn to let their art speak for itself.  Well-conceived work can stand on its own.

Consider, for instance, how strange and yet perfectly articulate this piece of music is.  It's an excerpt from Morton Feldman’s Triadic Memories, performed by Marilyn Nonken.  Feldman's composition and Nonken's interpretation require no introduction, even though a listener may be unfamiliar with this kind of music.  The logic of the piece is sufficient unto itself.  And understanding it does not require us to reflect upon anything outside of the piece and its performance.  

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Critique Part 2 supplement— The Hazards of Prescription

Anoushka Shankar.  Image via worldmusiccentral.org.

Creating art requires an artist to channel the mysteries of her intuition into something others can behold.  It requires her tune out chatter from within and without.

In my writing workshops, I ask students to avoid prescribing solutions to their classmates.  I do this for several reasons:

• The main goal of the workshop is to get the students to listen to their experience as readers, and if they begin to offer prescriptions, they shift out of listening and into broadcasting.
   
• The artist is the person most in tune with what she is trying to make.  Attempts to interfere with her process are likely to disrupt the learning that is bringing forth the artwork.

This does not preclude the students from considering possibilities.  But note the difference between this . . .

“I think you should end it at the third paragraph from the end.”

and this . . .

“I was really captivated by the description of the parachute ride back to earth, but the closing paragraphs after the landing felt less compelling.  I wondered if you considered ending the piece at the third paragraph from the end, when the narrator is still in the air.”

The first response offers prescription without experience.  It leaves little room for the writer, who might know that the final paragraphs are crucial to some purpose not yet evident to her readers. 

The second reports on the reader’s experience, and rather than prescribing a particular solution, which might conflict with the writer’s ultimate purpose, merely invites the writer to consider one valid option.

In order to create work that will reach her audience, an artist must tune out the chatter of the audience members (real and imagined) and descend into her own intuition.  It requires the kind of focus and deep attention so evident in the following clip of sitar player Anoushka Shankar, tabla player Tanmoy Bose, and tampura player Kenji.

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Critique Part 2 — Reporting Experience

Image via technocrazed.com.

In my writing workshops, I invite students to skip the question “What do you think?” and answer a different question instead: “What did you notice?”

Consider some of the differences between these questions:

“What do you think?” invites opinion.  It invites grand pronouncements, verdicts, and thereby situates the conversation outside of the work instead of within it.

“What did you notice?” invites a report on a reader’s experience.  See how the verb notice makes room for even the smallest observations, ones that may seem trivial at the moment of being offered but which may turn out to contain important information.

“What do you think?” produces a conversation where respondents argue over their opinions, whereas it’s nonsensical to disagree with someone’s experience.   “I was confused as to who was talking during the stretch of dialogue on page seven.”  Though others might report having no such difficulty, they can hardly disagree with this report.

“What do you think?” invites the others in the workshop to become reviewers, a pursuit beyond the scope of a creative writing workshop, whereas “What did you notice?” keeps the participants rooted in the question of making art.

Because “What did you notice?” keeps the conversation rooted in the work, it invites the respondents into discovery.  The conversation, I have found, continues to uncover aspects of the work that escaped the first response.  “What do you think?” invests each respondent in a position.  Changing her mind comes at a moral price.  By contrast, “What did you notice?” allows the respondents to remain fluidly engaged and leaves room for backtracking, “Now that I think about it, what I actually noticed was . . .”

For all of these reasons, I have found that “What did you notice?” offers a more fruitful framing for discussing work by someone else and, of equal importance, for reading one’s own work. 

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Critique Part 1 supplement — What is the piece about?

Image via artic.edu.

One of the important lessons students take from an art workshop is that their work might miss the intended mark.   Thus, the first response fellow workshop members might make is to address the question, “What is this piece about?”

The question will be addressed differently according to art form. In my nonfiction writing workshops, I invite students to use the framework presented by Vivian Gornick in her book The Situation and the Story.

Every work of literature has both a situation and a story.  The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer: the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say.  

— Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story, p. 13

Thus, when my students comment on a piece by one of their classmates, they are asked to begin by identifying the situation and the story.  They have an easier time identifying the situation, which might be as simple as . . .  

“The narrator, a high-school senior, goes with her family to Thanksgiving at her grandparents’ house, and a big argument about politics and family history breaks out.”

They have a harder time identifying the story.   I ask them to describe the arc of the narrator’s insight.  Something like . . .  

“The narrator braces herself for a holiday with the family, especially given her tense relationship with her father.  He has always been critical of her, most recently about her plans for college.  Over the course of the weekend, she sees her father bracing himself for his encounter with his own parents.  Never before has she taken note of how much criticism they dish out to her father or of how much her attachment to her grandparents might reflect a sense of mutual alliance against her father.  By the end of the weekend, when she rides back home with her parents, she wonders whether these discoveries into her father’s psyche will inspire renewed connection or simply enlightened detachment.”

Or perhaps . . .

“I couldn’t find the story.  I wasn’t sure if what the narrator was describing was a series of revelations about her father or her evolving plans for life after high school.”

When students dig out and articulate the story (or report on the absence of a clear story), their critiques reflect a more organized understanding of the piece’s successes and problems.  More importantly, the process of asking and answering the question “What is this piece about?” drills into them the fact that their readers will be attempting to answer the same question. 

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Critique Part 1 supplement — The Distinction between the Artist and Her Voice

Vivian Gornick.  Image via sarahshatz.photoshelter.com.

As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the advantages of the workshop format is that it helps students become more critically aware of their own work. 

For my writing workshops, I’ve adopted the pedagogy that Vivian Gornick presents in her book The Situation and the Story.  One of Gornick’s emphases is the distinction between the writer and the narrator:

The writing we call personal narrative is written by people who, in essence, are imagining only themselves: in relation to the subject in hand.  The connection is an intimate one; in fact, it is critical.  Out of the raw material of a writer’s own undisguised being a narrator is fashioned whose existence on the page is integral to the tale being told.  This narrator becomes a persona.  Its tone of voice, its angle of vision, the rhythm of its sentences, what it selects to observe and what to ignore are chosen to serve the subject; yet at the same time the way the narrator—or the persona—sees things is, to the largest degree, the thing being seen.

To fashion a persona out of one’s own undisguised self is no easy thing.  . . . The persona in a nonfiction narrative is an unsurrogated one.  Here the writer must identify openly with those very same defenses and embarrassments that the novelist or poet is once removed from. . . .

Yet the creation of such a persona is vital in an essay or a memoir.  It is the instrument of illumination.  Without it there is neither subject nor story.  To achieve it, the writer of memoir or essay undergoes an apprenticeship as soul-searching as any undergone by novelist or poet: the twin struggle to know not only why one is speaking but who is speaking.

Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story, pp. 6-8

With this in mind, I ask my students to observe the distinction between the writer and the narrator.

Instead of this: “When you escaped the burning building . . .”

This: “When the narrator escaped the burning building . . .”

And instead of this: "When you told your boss you hated your job . . . "

This: "When your narrator told her boss that she hated her job . . . "

It takes the workshop participants a while to get used to this.   But as they develop this habit and cultivate awareness of the distance between the writer and the speaker, they bring a keener awareness of this distinction into their own work.  Their writing sharpens and sound more real, more vivid, because they are now aware that the speaker on the page does not exist until she has been created by the writer. 

The distinction holds across art forms.  Though their work speaks for them, it is worth considering the distinctions between . . . 

• A composer and the compositional voice in her music.
   
• A painter and the voice alive on her canvas.
   
• A dancer and the voice alive in her movement on stage.
   
• An architect and the voice alive in her design.

In each case, the artist creates a speaker, someone whose sole job is to express the art.  Her being does not perfectly overlay the being of the artist.  She might do or say what the artist would never think of.  The power and freedom she gives to the artist is available only upon recognition of her separate existence.

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Critique Part 1 — Critique as an element of artist training

Vivian Gornick.  Image via poetryfoundation.org.

A lesson I learned as a drummer: one show is worth ten or twenty rehearsals.  The presence of an audience raises my critical awareness to a place higher than where it had been in rehearsal.

I noticed this, too, as a songwriter.  Only at the moment of handing off a demo to a listener would I realize "Damn, I never figured out the bridge."   Handing over work and getting in front of an audience raises the stakes and our attention.

Artist workshops, where fellow artists exchange and comment upon each other's work, provide an opportunity to share one's work regularly and to learn from that sharing.  As a writing teacher who works in the workshop format, I can say that most of what the students learn doesn't come from the other students or their professor; it comes by way of their deepened connection to their artistic intuition.

In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, Vivian Gornick describes how she teaches her writing students:

". . . I have learned that you cannot teach people how to write—the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description,  all that is inborn, cannot be taught—but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others.  You can teach them how to puzzle out the experience buried in a mass of material and to see whether it is being shaped on the page; how to search out the link between a narrative line and the wisdom that compels it; how to ask, Who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two? . . ."

Vivian Gornick,  The Situation and the Story, pp. 159-160

I have adopted Gornick’s approach and found that it contains great wisdom.  When students become better readers, they learn to read their own writing and see its problems and potential. They begin to understand, for instance that . . .

Good writing is aware of the reader. 

It seems like an obvious fact, but many writers lose sight of it.  They become absorbed with getting their thoughts onto the page, which is hard enough.  Encountering work by others, especially work by fellow students who are still figuring things out, they become more attuned to the fact that a reader will have to pick up their writing and make sense of it.

Good writing trains the reader how to read it.

This question is invisible to many writing students.  A student may not yet have realized that her essay about her travels in Croatia could be read as a portrait of Croatia, but also as a story of the dissolution of a relationship with her travel companion, or a story of finding a sense of mission in life, or a story about realizing what she left behind at home.  She herself might have had clear intentions, but she hasn't yet learned that the writing didn't help her readers intuit those intentions.  By reading and critiquing work by her fellow students, where similar problems hover over the page, she is more likely to attend to the problems her readers might have.

Good writing knows the difference between a portrait of confusion and a confused portrait.

Many writers want to capture the sense of being muddled, unclear, lost, and so forth.   Only after reading successful (and unsuccessful) pieces by other writers do students come to realize how much clarity is needed to portray the lack of clarity they hope to capture. 

These are only a few examples of how the act of critically engaging work by others puts an artist in conversation with her intuition, a lifelong source of her learning.

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The Audience Learns Part 4 supplement — Removal

Hip-hop poets par excellence, the Digable Planets.

Removal is a particularly effective form of surprise.  When an element has been removed, an audience suddenly learns about its importance and its interaction with everything around it.

Hip-hop thrives on removal.  “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” by the Digable Planets removes the bass and drum groove at strategic points to achieve several ends:

• Removal punctuates the ends of the first two verses.  (1:25-1:27 and 2:14-2:16).  The vocals are briefly exposed against a backdrop of silence.  This creates the sense that the ground has disappeared and that we are suspended in mid-air with the rappers.  We are somehow more acutely aware of the song's forward motion.   Note how this calls attention to the absent parts.  Our ears suddenly miss what we might have taken for granted.  The returning elements give extra emphasis to the downbeats of the choruses.
   
• These removals set up our expectation that the removal at 2:53-2:55 will also be followed by a chorus, but the verse keeps going until the removal at 3:13-3:15.
   
• The extended removal at 3:43-3:54 (“We out, we out, we out . . . ”) gives emphasis to the end of the rapping and helps us hear that the track is now in its outro.
   

In all cases, the removals surprise us and also illuminate our understanding of what is happening in the track.

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The Audience Learns Part 4 supplement — Enjambment

Enjambment is a poetic technique where a line extends beyond the point of the line break and wraps around to the next line.  For example, these excerpts from Cole Porter lyrics.

In olden days a glimpse of stocking
Was looked on as something shocking,
But now, God knows, Anything Goes.

Good authors too who once knew better words,
Now only use four letter words
Writing prose, Anything Goes.

 . . .

And though I'm not a great romancer
I know that I'm bound to answer
When you propose, Anything goes

 Cole Porter — "Anything Goes

Enjambment charges a moment with energy by breaking the frame and violating expectations.

 In Design

The moment of enjambment is the shelf's continuation past the frame of the door. Rakatansky's design employed the use of color (the white wood) to emphasize this breaking of the design's rhythmic frame.

These bookshelves by Brooklyn architect Mark Rakatansky can be viewed as a case of enjambment in design.  The bookshelf appears to extend past its frame and onto the adjacent French door by way of a matching box cleverly mounted in one of the door’s panes (or lights, as designers refer to them).  The door can open and close freely.

In Drumming 

Drummer Mick Fleetwood makes extensive use of enjambment throughout the song “Dreams.”  Crash cymbals are regularly used by drummers to demark a new section or line.  Here, however, the song's first cymbal crash comes a beat later than expected.  So do many of the downbeats of the choruses, where we expect the crashes to align with the downbeat of the chorus— “Thun-der . . .” The crashes come instead on the second syllable—“Thun-der . . .” 

I once had the chance to talk to Mick Fleetwood for a few seconds and I mentioned my love for those fills.  “You mean all my dyslexic fills?” he quipped.  Yes, the fills disorient, and wonderfully so in a song titled “Dreams.”  His enjambments on the drums lend it a surreal quality.

In James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” studio-drumming legend Russ Kunkel employs enjambment at various spots.  The most mind-blowing instance of it comes in the out-chorus around the 2:50 mark. 

 If you count along with the song leading up to this point — one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, etc. — you’ll notice how he begins to break the four-count frame with his crash cymbals.  He turns the measures around, disrupts, and shatters the container, all of which brings home the idea of a world shattered, the song’s theme.

Russ Kunkel, via drummerworld.com

All of this serves as yet another reminder of the centrality of poetry in the arts and its importance as a source of insight for creators in all other fields.

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The Audience Learns Part 4 supplement — Denial and Reward

A fascinating book that you can read in an hour (and then may find yourself revisiting over and over): Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School. 

The 101 things in question are short observations accompanied by illustrations.  Many of Frederick’s insights about architecture have relevance to other fields.  Here is one.

Use “denial and reward” to enrich passage through the built environment. 

As we move through buildings, towns, and cities, we mentally connect visual cues from our surroundings to our needs and expectations.  The satisfaction and richness of our experiences are largely the result of the ways in which these connections are made.

Denial and reward can encourage the formulation of a rich experience.  In designing paths of travel, try presenting users a view of their target—a staircase, building entrance, monument, or other element—then momentarily screen it from view as they continue their approach.  Reveal the target a second time from a different angle or with an interesting new detail.  Divert users onto an unexpected path to create additional intrigue or even momentary lostness; then reward them with other interesting experiences or other views of their target.  This additional “work” will make the journey more interesting, the arrival more rewarding.

 #11 of Matthew Frederick’s 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School
 

Creators in a variety of mediums make use of this technique. 

In Fiction

Consider, for example, the tantalizing withholding of the title character’s entrance into F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.

• We see Gatsby’s name in the title, and in the introduction we hear of his impact on the narrator, Nick.
   
• Nick moves in nextdoor to Gatsby’s mansion.
   
• At Daisy and Tom’s, Nick notices Daisy’s reaction to mention of his name. “Gastby?  What Gatsby?”
   
• Later that night, Nick sees Gatsby’s silhouetted profile, looking at the stars.  As Nick tries to determine what far off light Gatsby might have been looking at, Gatsby disappears.
   
• From next door, Nick witnesses the spectacle of Gatsby’s lavish parties, the deliveries of liquor, oranges, food, tables, the orchestra musicians, and so forth.
   
• One day, a chauffeur walks over an invitation referencing a “little party.”
   
• As Nick weaves his way into the scene, the other party guests are evasive as to Gatsby’s whereabouts.
   
• Nick overhears rumors from others in the crowd: Gatsby murdered someone?  He was a German spy?
   
• Nick wanders into the house, peruses the library, talking with a stranger, and then during a lull in the action, another stranger sees Nick in the hall.  “Your face is familiar.  Weren’t you in the Third Division in the war?”  Yes he was.  The two of them talk. Nick’s sort-of girlfriend, Jordan, comes up to the two of them.
  
  “Having a gay time now?” she asks.
  
  Nick explains to the stranger, “This is an unusual party for me because I haven’t even met the host.  I live over there and this man Gatsby had his chauffeur walk over the invitation."
  
  And the stranger replies, “I’m Gatsby.”
   

At this point, we are almost one-third of the way into the novel.  Our denied access to Gatsby and then the sudden reward of encountering him helps to convey a sense of expectation that echoes the long wait Gatsby himself has endured as he plans to win back Daisy.  The book revolves around his hope that his denial will end with reward.

In Music

Musical examples abound,   One form of denial and reward is dissonance resolving into consonance  Bach's Prelude #1 in C Major thrives on this principle.  (This video begins with 15 seconds of silence.)

Notice how the dialogue between dissonance and consonance is roughly the length of one breath cycle; we inhale one and exhale the other.  It suggests that this tension between denial and reward is necessary to sustain the music.

Another musical instance of denial and reward would be a song with an introduction that delays the entrance of the band.

The rollercoaster metaphor, present in the melodic oscillation of the guitar riff,  also applies to the long, suspenseful ascent to the band's entrance. The denial and reward is created by the extended, tiered instrumental introduction.  The guitar starts, then enter the hi-hat and bass drum (playing only on the weak beats to add suspense), then agogo bell . . . 

. . . and  finally, with a whiplash drum fill . . . 
 

the song plunges down into the verse. 
 

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The Audience Learns Part 4 — Surprise

Jo Ann Beard.  Image via literarymothers.tumblr.com.

Jo Ann Beard, one of the great non-fiction writers of our time, advises her non-fiction writing students to ask four questions of each sentence they write:

1.  Is it grammatical?
2.  Is it true?
3.  Does it contain new information?
4.  Does it include a surprise?

Note the important difference between questions 3 and 4.  A surprise is more than new information; it asks us to make a mental leap.  Those mental leaps are what characterize the insights of the work.

Listen to the opening phrases of “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” performed here by Ella Fitzgerald and the Buddy Bregman Orchestra.

Note how each line considers Jo Ann Beard’s questions.

1.  Each line is grammatical (in that we are able to make musical sense of it).

2.  Each line is true (in the sense that the melody feels plainly stated, without deception).

3.  Each line contains new information (in that our understanding continues to deepen).

4.  Each line contains a surprise. 

After one whole quart of brandy

The surprises include the downward leap on the second syllable of after and the up and down leaps on “of brandy.”

Like a daisy, I’m awake.

The second syllable of awake adds a delicious and surprising tweak.

With no Bromo Seltzer handy

The span of the upward leap on the second syllable of Seltzer is a big surprise. 

I don’t even shake. 

Another surprising leap between the first two syllables.  Also, that last pitch provides surprise and intrigue.

My guess is that what sticks in the ears of most listeners are those surprises, especially the big leap in the third line.  The surprises are sticky.

Another example . . .

Joni Mitchell's songs are full of surprises.  As you listen to the first verse of "Help Me," hear how each phrase comes in for a landing on a surprising chord.

Help me
I think I'm falling
In love again ⬅︎

When I get that crazy feeling
I know I'm in trouble again ⬅︎

I'm in trouble
'Cause you're a rambler and a gambler
And a sweet talking ladies man
And you love your lovin' ⬅︎

But not like you love your freedom ⬅︎

The constant changing of key creates the sensation of riding along a hilly road where each hill crests with a surprising vista.  Those surprises are what make the song’s sense of discovery so palpable, so that the listeners can hang onto and learn from them.

"Does it include a surprise?"  Thank you, Jo Ann Beard.

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The Audience Learns Part 3 supplement — Three-person Jokes

Stand-up comic and author Katie Schreiber doesn't tell three-person jokes.  All the more reason to catch one of her sets in New York City.  Image via ktschreib.com.

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“A _____, a ______, and a _______ walk into a bar . . .”

We know this joke format.  Three characters face some common circumstance and deal with it differently.

The first two characters—let’s call them A and B—will establish some pattern that sets up an expectation of what happens to the third character, C. 

• A does something.
   
• B does something like it but a little different.
   
• C does something even more different.  The success of the punch line rests on whether or not what happens to C feels surprising.   

A and B are basically two versions of the same thing, which highlights the contrast of C, the character whose story ignites the laugh.

It's interesting to note the importance of B, squished in the middle and therefore likely to be the hardest to remember.  B’s storyline varies from A’s but in a way that suggests a similarity between A and B and establishes a trajectory that sets our expectations for C.  The trajectory is the crucial bit of misdirection on which the punch line relies.

After A and B, we wonder about C.

  So we find a progression from A to B and then imagine a trajectory leads to an expectation of C. 

And then C violates our expectations.

Images via wikipedia.org, downtownmcminnville.com, organicfacts.net, and outsidethebeltway.com.

This is yet another illustration of how variation, in this case B, draws us away from what came before it but in a way that serves to deepen our understanding of the original, A.

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The Audience Learns Part 3 supplement — Nina Simone teaching as she sings

Nina Simone.  Image via ebony.com.

Nina Simone’s gifts as an interpreter rely heavily on her care for the learning of her audience, and we can hear that care in how she attends to repetition and variation. 

Note here how the first iteration of the verse melody (0:23-0:40) is the simplest.  You can hear her teaching us how to listen, and like all great teachers she starts with something simple—something very much like an iconic melody. 

The second iteration (0:41-0:59) is nearly the same, with only one heartbreaking twist on the phrase “your own kin did.”  Even that one twist tells us some things about the simple melody, including the harmonic structure that is its context.

These first two, simpler melodies have prepared us for the breaking apart of that melody that we hear in the third iteration (1:43-2:01).  This breaking away from the original melody helps create the sense of deepening emotions, the sense that the song is driving at some deeper truth.  And the fourth time through the melody (2:01-2:22) is the freest and emotionally crushing of all.  Again, part of why it hits so hard is because we hear it as a bending and twisting of the earlier, simpler melody.  Were we not able to hear the earlier melody in these later iterations, the sense of heartbreak and loss would vanish.

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The Audience Learns Part 3 — Variation

Variation might be thought of as a form of repetition; by restating an idea with slight alteration, it brings us to a deeper knowledge of the original version.

French pianist and teacher Yvonne Lefébure.  Image via youtube.com. 

Think of how useful variation is as a teaching tool.  Homework problem sets, for instance, typically focus on one concept by way of a variation.  The individual problems change the surface elements and by doing so invite the students to employ the principle under consideration.  The variance between the surface elements serves to deepen the students’ grasp of that principle.  The greater the variance between problems, the deeper the student’s grasp.  The variation heightens our awareness of what has not changed.

Mozart’s 12 Variations on “Ah, vous dirai-je Maman,” performed here by French pianist and teacher Yvonne Lefébure, bears out the idea.

By virtue of its ornamentation of the initial theme, the first variation (which begins at the 0:30 mark) seems to ask, “What does this variation have to do with the theme?”  The answer comes by way of our deepened grasp of the theme’s shape and harmonic structure.

Additional variations shift the ornamentation from one hand to the other, change meter, key signature (from major to minor) and make other shifts that illuminate the essential nature of the theme.

Variations therefore add interest, not by drawing our attention away from the original idea but by deepening our understanding of it.

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The Audience Learns Part 2 supplement — The transition states of repetition

When engaged in repetition, singing a short melody over and over for example, it’s interesting to note how our attention engages and releases at certain points. 

The first few repetitions may hold our attention, the next few may lose it, but then we might be surprised to find ourselves reengaging and going deeper. 

I once saw Sun Ra and his band play a concert of songs from Walt Disney films.  They ended the first set with “Forest of No Return” from the 1961 musical Babes In Toyland.

A few minutes into the song, the band stopped playing and the musicians all stood up and sang the refrain over and over:

Can’t you read, can’t you see
This is private property,
Aren’t the sign plain and clear,
No one is allowed in here,
But since you’re here you should know,
We will never let you go,
You can cry you can shout,
But you can’t get out.

This is the forest of no return
This is the forest
Those who stumble in,
Those who fumble in,
Never can get out.

They paraded around the stage for a few laps as they sang, and then continued to sing as they marched out into the audience.  My attention went from focused to bored (after ten repetitions) and then to rapt (after twenty), at which point the many possible interpretations of the lyrics (references to a literal forest, comments on the modern world, the interactions between performers and audience in a club) began to resonate.  The repetitions had taken me through the crucial transition state necessary to achieve this resonance of ideas.

An application of this principle is found in rituals where a song or recitation of words is repeated over and over.  Liturgical planners, in my experience, are often too wary of repetition, fearing the first point of disengagement.  They often fail to recognize that the next transition into deeper attention comes a few repetitions later.  They could learn something from Sun Ra (and from traditions such as Sufi whirling).  A repeated action, if given time, takes on a resonant quality.

The incomparable Sun Ra.  Image via nybooks.com.

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The Audience Learns Part 2 supplement — Cumulative songs and tales

We have seen how repetition draws an audience member’s attention inward, to a place where she can begin to manipulate what she has been given and begin her own creative work.  We’ve also seen how repetition helps an audience absorb work that is full of challenging twists and turns.

Another, related use of repetition is accumulation, wherein the audience memorizes one phrase and then adds on to it.  A famous example of this is the nursery rhyme “This Is the House That Jack Built.”

This is the house that Jack built.

This is the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

This is the cat that chased the rat
That ate the cheese that lay in the house that Jack built.

The verses get longer and longer, starting at greater distance from Jack’s house. 

This is the horse and the hound and the horn
That belonged to the farmer sowing his corn
That kept the rooster that crowed in the morn
That woke the judge all shaven and shorn
That married the man all tattered and torn
That kissed the maiden all forlorn
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn
That tossed the dog that worried the cat
That chased the rat that ate the cheese
That lay in the house that Jack built.

"The House That Jack Built" is what’s known as a cumulative tale.  (Another example might be Green Eggs and Ham.)  There are also cumulative songs, one of the best known being "The Twelve Days of Christmas."  Cumulative tales and songs keep returning to a simple root image by repeating a lengthening set of details.  Part of the thrill for the audience is discovering the surprising capacity of the human memory.  Also, each recitation of the ever-lengthening refrain allows them to observe what happens to their attention.

Danish poet Inger Christensen.  Image via telegraph.com.uk.

You can see these same principles at work in alphabet, a book-length poem by Danish poet Inger Christensen.  The book proceeds through the letters of the alphabet, and the length of each section follows a pattern know as a Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the previous two numbers—0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so forth).

Thus it begins . . .

1

apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

2

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;
bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

3

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,
citrus trees; cicadas exist;
cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

4

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;
killers exist, and doves, and doves;
haze, dioxin, and days; days
exist, days and death; and poems
exist; poems, days, death

and a little later . . . 

7

given limits exist, streets, oblivion

and grass and gourds and goats and gorse,
eagerness exists, given limits

branches exist, wind lifting them exists,
and the lone drawing made by the branches

of the tree called an oak tree exists,
of the tree called an ash tree, a birch tree,
a cedar tree, the drawing repeated

in the gravel garden path; weeping
exists as well, fireweed and mugwort,
hostages, greylag geese, greylags and their young;

and guns exist, an enigmatic back yard;
overgrown, sere, gemmed just with red currants,
guns exist; in the midst of the lit-up
chemical ghetto guns exist
with their old-fashioned, peaceable precision

guns and wailing women, full as
greedy owls exist; the scene of the crime exists;
the scene of the crime, drowsy, normal, abstract,
bathed in a whitewashed, godforsaken light,
this poisonous, white, crumbling poem

alphabet by Inger Christensen.  Translated by Susanna Nied.

Note here the cumulative feel of the lengthening sections and role played by repetition.  As we encounter the poem’s recursions, we feel we are learning something about the workings of our minds, much as we do when presented with a cumulative tale or song.  Though each section is different, the repeating language, tropes, and sense that the line-length of the sections point back to their predecessors yields a particular form of insight that would be lost without the repetition.  Through the repetition, we discover connections and resonances between disparate elements and enter into the deeper learning of the poem.

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The Audience Learns Part 2 supplement — John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps”

Jazz legend John Coltrane.  Image via theguardian.com.

Imagine sitting in a classroom as the teacher explains a complicated mathematical proof.  She walks you through it, but the proof contains mind-blowing twists and turns at each step.  Knowing this, the teacher repeats the process several times, pausing to explain what is happening at each step so that her students gain a deep grasp of the material.

So it is with John Coltrane’s “Giant Steps,” one of the landmark compositions of modern jazz. 

One might identify the eponymous giant steps as residing in the melody (0:00-0:27), but the chord changes make giant steps, too. Though the song form is a repeating structure (16 bars long), the melody leaps from one tonal plane to another, so that it might take several times through the pattern before someone hearing it for the first time can begin to identify even the basic lay of the musical landscape. 

So new were the ideas in the chord changes that you can hear jazz legend Tommy Flanagan try to navigate their crazy twists and turns during his piano solo (starting at 2:55).  He may have had scant minutes to digest the changes before the recording was made.  Coltrane, by contrast, had spent significant time with the changes to get inside and explore them.  Much like the imagined math teacher above, his soloing teaches us how to hear the workings of the chord changes, revealing them from this angle and then that one.

Consider how challenging a B-section might be in a song whose structure challenges our hearing as much as “Giant Steps.”  It might prove overwhelming, and by omitting such a section, the repetition of the sixteen-bar song-form reduces the cognitive load on listeners, which is already considerable.  The repetition allows us to take these strange chord changes inside of us, unfold and examine them, and arrive at some deeper understanding. 

The recording is a great reminder of how, within the context of their art, great artists are great teachers.  And when they are teaching us about something as radically different as the harmonic landscape of "Giant Steps," repetition is one of their most important tools.

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The Audience Learns Part 2 — Repetition

Jazz harpist and pianist Alice Coltrane.  Image via foundmichigan.org.

Repetition is often associated with boredom (“He kept repeating himself”), but note how some of our best insights arrive when we are engaged in some repetitive activity—walking, listening to the repeating rhythm of waves on the beach, and so forth.  Those insights are less available to us when we are crossing the street against heavy traffic or greeting strangers in a crowded room, situations in which things keep changing.  Repetition has the power to clear mental space, which we need in order to process things and enter more deeply into a work of art.

The short chord progression in Alice Coltrane’s “Journey in Satchidananda” repeats for the full length of the track.  Notice how easily one can get a grip on what is happening and begin to think about it.  Notice how repetition of the chord changes and of Cecil McBee’s bass line and Rashid Ali’s drum groove invite us to enter a trance-like listening, where our thoughts are given freedom to begin forming ideas.  This repetition provides a backdrop to Alice Coltrane’s harp arpeggios.  We are quickly able to put a framework around Pharoah Sanders’s solo; even his fastest runs feel easily understood as a result of the repetition behind it.  The longer the track goes, the deeper our insights.

As you listen, consider this observation about repetition from producer and composer Brian Eno: 

"Repetition doesn’t really exist.  As far as your mind is concerned, nothing happens the same twice, even if in every technical sense, the thing is identical. Your perception is constantly shifting. It doesn’t stay in one place."

This is the magic of repetition, which can be the opposite of boring.  Indeed, it can free us into reflection and insight.

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