Floating (Uni)verses
Fragments and Practical Tips for Musical Conviviality
It’s a strange question: what is a song?
Scene: A jam session with new musicians. Someone suggests a song. You try it out. It works. Ok. You pick another, someone needs the words and pulls out their phone. Someone else asks for the chords and pulls out their phone. Everyone looking at their phones.
Another Scene: The Levant, around 100 A.D.: “Before Islam, music was little more than unpretentious chanting, varied and embroidered by the singer, according to the taste emotion or affect desired. These variations were prolonged interminably on a syllable, word or hemistich in such a way that the singing of a cantinalena of two or three verses might be prolonged for hours.” (Alfred Sendrey, See the Music of the Jews in the Diaspora, see also his chapter on Nature of Oriental Song in Music In Ancient Israel)
The two scenes present an interesting contrast. Alfred Sendrey’s observations are dated to be sure, but if we can look past some of the superficially problematic terms, we do find ideas that are still useful. Here he is describing the differences between “Western and Oriental” concepts of music:
According to our Western conception of music, the main thing is the art product, that is the musical texture worked out in the most minute details and put down in written form, which is considered as final and immutable… In Oriental music, however, it's interpretation is the primary factor, the principal thing, almost more important than the original musical idea. The latter constitutes no more than a kernel, out of which the skilled performer creates the art work by his inspired rendition.
Alan Lomax noticed a similar pattern when contrasting white traditions (left) with black traditions (right) in America:
Again, this is overly simplified- Lomax is obscuring many white and black players who cross these lines and whose cultures are thereby rendered invisible. But I argue that the distinctions he raises point to a real difference in how music can be understood and this has had tremendous impact on how we “do” music.
What does this mean exactly? If the song is tied to a strict musical text, then we’re looking at our phones. But if the song is a loose interpretation of an idea, then we’re in a very different sort of space. This space might house all sorts of musical and convivial possibilities, but for many of us raised otherwise, it’s a very confusing space.
After all, how does one actually play music this way? History provides answers. In one of these (what he calls “Oriental”) cultures around the Levant, complex rules (maqam) were developed to form a musical grammar. Blues and flamenco present other approaches,
It is worth noting here that there’s no such thing as a flamenco song. Every performer has their cante, how the perform a palo or “post”…1
Other “musical technologies” like ornaments and timbres emerge when the hyper-focus on melody is relaxed. Complex dialects of these form over the span of centuries.
But, if we’re honest, the maqams and ornaments of the “East” feel phony to us, not to mention hopelessly complex. What can we do?
Try this. One chord, just a riff perhaps or a fragment of a melody from a larger tune. Repeat. Play it in a polyrhythm. Once the groove is set up, let your mind drift until a lyric emerges. You don't have to remember all of it, any fragment will do. Sing what you got. Repeat it. Let yourself get a little drunk and hypnotized on the rhythms and the fragmentary nature of it all. Groove a bit. Flâneur. Dérive. Wander amongst the ruins.
If more lines emerge, sing them. If not, suck the marrow out of the fragment you have. Repeat. Adapt the melody to the one or two chord riff. It's easier than you think. As your mind loosens its grip, ramble further afield. Pick a different lyric, a different song, or some fragment from a poem or thought. Blues singers of old used so-called "floating verses" which would “float” between songs and could be used interchangeably. “Blues is like a kielbasa, those long Polish sausages: you don't sing a whole blues, you just cut off a section.” said Dave Van Ronk. They don't need to fit or form a narrative. Pick up whatever is lying around and glue, staple or just mash it into the situation at hand, like an auditory African American "junk" garden or your grand-dad's shed.
Using this method, you should be able to play for about an hour easily without ever needing to consult a text or Youtube or a songbook or figure out a key or… etc etc. By using your memory and getting off the page, you are putting yourself in an entirely different space, one of orality and not literacy. One of performance, not product.
You are also changing your relationship to authority, as the previous versions of the song are no longer the locus of control. Instead you have to find in yourself the solution to aesthetic problems that arise. You are even changing your relationship to space/time. This song is not an inferior copy of something that existed in a purer and better form somewhere else. It is what it is right here, right now.
It’s easy and it is also very hard. For many it is near impossible to overcome the idea of music as being a recreation of a text. Humor helps. Don’t take it all too seriously. Your goal is to hang out.
But, at the same time, it can be a great relief to overcome the "individualism" trap. This approach to music greatly enlarges the way people can participate with music. It can be funny, serious, and anything in between, but you are not a singer-songwriter creating a witty copyright-able product suitable for capitalist consumption. Often, if you are just using fragments, it will be absolutely 100% unoriginal, and yet, it all comes from you! Like a dream.
Although the implications of this technique exposes the very foundations of what we in the West consider a song, this technique need not be not esoteric or obscure. I saw Funkadelic do essentially this; hitting a one chord groove/beat and then inserting lyrics from their tunes in a medley type format. Much of current hip hop doesn't feature chord changes or melody, but is rhythmic songspeech over a groove. A lot of Bob Dylan's output from the last 20 years is cobbled together lyrics and riffs (that he then adds just enough form to in order to claim ownership over, oh Bobby.) In a large stretch of territory ranging from Morocco to India, people have figured out ways to recite/sing poetry over modes (or scales) in an improvisatory or semi-improvisatory fashion. (Note: I’m told this practice is currently being taken up by some contemporary Jewish practioners up in Boston, who, in lieu of reciting a whole prayer, will groove on one line or word of a prayer and repeat at length as part of their service. See my friend Dan for more info. )
As might be expected, it's rarely as free-form as I suggested, after all, these cultures have been refining this technique for centuries. In some Sufi cultures, for example, there is a general arc to the performance, and people know when the rhythm is totally free form and when it starts to coalesce into a beat, when the melody can wander and when it is more stable, how to end it, etc.
Between the “East and the West”, there is a spectrum of inbetween musical forms that are constantly drifting back and forth between the poles, constantly changing from liquid to solid and back again. When taking their solid “song” form, they still have the memory or trace of this other way of doing things, and this gives them a bit of mojo. Blues can be seen this way. One of it’s groundbreaking innovations was to use these fragments and riffs and mush them into a European colonial harmonic structure. The tension between the two is endlessly compelling.
Speaking of which- something I learned on the stage- you can get away with all manner of nonsense in the middle of a song as long as you end it tightly. An easy way to do this is to stop the instruments abruptly and have the voice(s) remain for a line or two more in rhythm but a capella. It gives everyone a satisfying, peaceful feeling of closure.
Variations: The technique described above is just the beginning. Some other tools: (1) call and response, (2) simultaneous singing of different fragments, (3) vocal palimpsests consisting of spoken word, song and raw vocal whoops, (4) continually returning to one line but riffing away from it, (5) stealing one line from a trad song and then coming up with your own. There are others I’m sure. I've even used one line from a song and then delivered spontaneous sermons before returning to it. You can incorporate more harmonic structure but this is more of an advanced skill and can kill the vibe if done wrong. The big difference is between two chords and three. This way of approaching music can be just as complex as the European model, it just develops in an entirely different direction.
There’s no end to the sorts of innovation we can come up with as long as we identify the goal of music not in terms of imitating older texts (records are included in this) but increasing conviviality (with living folks as well as ancestors).
This technique has the unique ability to syncretize rather well. I've often used klezmer riffs and blues polyrhythms with European ballad lyrics and, to my ears at least, its not a hokey forced fusion, but a genuine new thing, since no one tradition is dominant. You could arrange sessions like this with people from entirely different musical backgrounds and make it work.
Finally, this doesn't need to be the way to play music. Even traditions with well developed improvisatory forms also have what we identify as good old "songs," the kind that can be written down and learned from records and played the same time over and over. Nothing wrong with that and they have their place too. But if you get tired of that, or that's not working, try this!
Postscript: This is a stretch, but I think this might be one clue to the old mystery: why do klezmer songs not have names? Perhaps the culture still had a distant memory of the old, old way where songs weren’t really concrete things in the Western sense, and therefore naming them was inappropriate. This would be consistent with Joel Rubin’s hunch that klezmer songs are really complex modules that are fit together (Sendrey says pre-Islamic music contains “melodicles” which are used similarly.) Likewise, many blues songs had titles only as afterthoughts and often the title was provided not by the performer, but by the record company, who needed to identify their “product” and fix its form with copyright.
Boyd, Joe. And the Roots of Rhythm Remain