The Matrix Revisited: Letter 2 Stuart Wood

Hi again,

This morning I had a fabulous idea. 

Revisiting page 13 of the Matrix book, I was surprised to find myself lolling, in both meanings. 

Yes, I had my fancy gaming chair on recline, so loll I did. I also found 2016 me quite funny. Oh the exuberance, I thought. Look at you dramatising Rumi and exploring theories of musicality in a comedic dialogue. LOL.

Then I thought, this is all fine, but your proposed syncretic view of innate musicality is somewhat utopian. You might have a point, sure. But is this the lived, conscious, experience of most people, whether in Music Work or not? Anyway, I get ahead of myself. What about that fabulous idea…

Well, one thing some Music Workers do in their practice is a technique many call “improvising out of…”. We might establish awareness and connection with others through listening to or playing a known song, a pre-recorded piece of music for example. But at a key moment, maybe a shift in ownership or agency in the other person, or to stop looping maybe, we try to keep the connection alive and new by making new music, flowing naturally out of what we recognise, into new territory. We improvise out of one known world, into whatever is coming next. Here’s where people often find an authentic version of themselves, a new skill, or development in the relationship you’re building with them. 

So. Here’s some known work. It’s a chunk from the Matrix book, pp13-14. If you’re sitting comfortably, you may see where I start improvising out of it, into a new world. Clue: it’s where I stop sounding so bossy. I don’t know what will come out of it, yet…

The way we meet the world is musical; the way the world offers itself up to be met is musical, too. We experience that meeting in countless different ways, most of which we wouldn’t normally call “music”. All the same, the world makes sense to us because of things we can only use musical understanding to describe. Over the last century, a polyphony that includes (amongst others) psychoanalysts, child development specialists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, sociologists, and philosophers has caught up with what poets and mystics have said for much longer: Music is how we know we are alive. When Rumi famously said, “We have fallen into the place where everything is music”, he wasn’t talking only about a mystical state of union. He was talking about just being human. 

Our starting point is that “everything is music”. Perhaps, I like to imagine, a young student stops Rumi right there and says, “Wait a second, Master. Everything? How is this cup I am holding, “music”? How is this circle we are sitting in, “music”?” Sensing a positivist, Rumi sighs, mentally filing the rest of his poem temporarily. Perhaps Rumi (here in the voice of a clumsy Englishman) replies,

“First, well done for sensing that pause in my poem and for jumping in so quickly yet somehow politely. Well done also, for so elegantly reaching out to exactly where that cup was and for coordinating your fingers so expertly around it, bringing it just so to your lips without cracking a tooth. And how naturally we all seemed to arrive and organise ourselves into this circle, silencing ourselves without being shushed, spaced as we are periodically and evenly, regularly almost. And do you feel the growing anticipation that I do, at wondering what will happen next?”

“Uh, yeah…”

“Well, now…”

He does not, although he might, quote Stern’s Vitality Affects (1985), or Malloch and Trevarthen’s Communicative Musicality (2009), or Pavlicevic’s Dynamic Form (1997). Nor does he feel the need to bring in his Quantum Physics or Deleuze on Creativity. But if he had, he would have only supported his observation on the musicality of human life. 

One question we could go on to vex ourselves with is, “What is music?” This is a fair question, and one that my imagined Rumi conveniently avoids answering except by saying, “everything is”. Another perhaps more pertinent question is, “How does music manifest?” How does music make itself known? This question points to the meeting between the world and us. This is where music is and how it manifests. Being, as we are, part of the world, music manifests in us as we make sense of everything. Musicality is our best way of explaining how we make meaning in the material and symbolic world. 

Oh but so little makes sense, really.

How does it make sense that 

those bereaved elderly men - 

those retired farm workers

truck drivers and military veterans

those husbands of wives who passed from dementia

those men still digesting their time as carers

hands tattooed, ringed with gold

placing vinyls so carefully, making coffee so kindly - 

find peace in the Blues?

those worried men who sing a worried song

who keep their uke soft until they know the chords

who keep the drum pad quiet until they are handed the dustbin lid snare drum

not naming the minor third, the comforting mantra, the predictable movement

not, from their salt-aired harbour town, worried how others worried before them

but worried and worried and worried anyway until the word itself stops making sense

How does it make sense that someone else’s song, from another place and time, hits us here, now? Later, I go looking. “Worried Man Blues” is an American song that is widely acknowledged to have originated from African American singers. It seems to have many sources and inspirations, harking to the unfair imprisonment and abusive treatment of people formerly enslaved, echoing across numerous songs of that period and culture in the USA with similar key phrases or tunes. 

Documented as early as 1915, it was first recorded by The Carter Family, a group of white musicians who reportedly learned the song from an unnamed informant who they - conveniently for them - then forgot. On through time, with recording on vinyl and then digital, more and more people asserted rights over it. At least these musicians are known to have performed or recorded the song: J.E. Mainer’s Mountaineers, New Lost City Ramblers, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Lonnie Donegan, Flatt and Scruggs, June and Johnny Cash, the Kingston Trio, Van Morrison, Burl Ives, and Devo.

And now here we are

back in our Vinyl Cafe: record player, skiffle band

improvising out of the single, into a multiplicity

out of the known song into the impossibly unknowable present

and as the playing ends, one - the drummer maybe - finds that he can say,

“I know we were singing something that came from slaves, and you wonder if it’s your place to sing it, but we’re worried too, aren’t we...” 

“Aye. The song helps. What kinds of things worry you?” another asks.

and somehow, out of all of it, through humility and honouring, here is some sense.

In an online chat about some of her teaching work, the Anti-racist Book Group was reflecting with music therapy scholar Michaela de Cruz about how we can sit inside cultural humility when, perhaps, music’s manifesting doesn’t completely make sense. The conversation led, as it so often can, to an acronym: the circular, looping process of Humility, Enquiry, Acknowledgement, Research, and Honour (H/HEAR).

We honour Michaela’s teaching work, and the group listening that manifested H/HEAR.

I honour the history of songlines and of recording that produced in that Vinyl Cafe, in that moment, a song we could be in, and then play our way out of.