And not just any jazz standard, but an especially ubiquitous one: "Autumn Leaves."
His point, during this panel called "Music and the Spark of Spontaneity," was to illustrate what some of the scientists sharing the stage had been talking about, that our brains have a kind of two-track approach to deciding what we like in the world.
On the one hand, we are wired to respond to things that are familiar, to predictability and patterns that help us make sense of what is around us. But at the same time, too much familiarity breeds, if not contempt, at least ennui or complacency. Our brains like newness too, things that surprise and deviate from an expected pattern. ?
"I love the idea of this question of novelty versus familiarity," Mr. Metheny said. "'Autumn Leaves,' everybody knows that." And, he added, "for the first few choruses, I'm going to use one finger on one string. I'm not going to do anything that's more complicated than anyone who could play simply would do."
Easy for him to say. Even the stripped-down version he started out with was exceptionally musical, bending the familiar melody around Mr. Grenadier's exuberantly rhythmic bass. But as their performance became more intricate and adventurous, it underscored the science: They ?could travel miles from the melody, they could do calisthenics with the chords, but the audience still understood it as "Autumn Leaves," something they knew spiced with something entirely different.
Our preference for combining what we expect with what surprises us was demonstrated in recent studies on what makes music expressive by Daniel J. Levitin at McGill University, and also in brain imaging research by Edward Large at Florida Atlantic University. Both scientists used classical music: Chopin piano nocturnes or etudes in which the length and volume of notes were adjusted to varying degrees. They found that musicians and nonmusicians alike responded most to versions of the Chopin that included a lot of variety but not too much, and not variety that was just thrown into the mix in a random, out-of-context way.
The World Science Festival panel in the Great Hall at Cooper Union focused mostly on improvised music, especially the intuitive art of jazz, trying to address the question of what is actually happening when a musician spontaneously creates melodies, harmonies and rhythms that have never been played before.
After "Autumn Leaves," the moderator, John Schaefer, the host of the "Soundcheck" show on WNYC, gestured to the four scientists on the panel, and said to Mr. Metheny, "Before I ask these guys what was going on in your brain, let me ask you."
Mr. Metheny gave a thoughtful recitation of the elements in a jazz musician's toolkit. "The harmony, the basic flow of the rhythms, the way the chords are divided from key to key," he said, adding that "there's a whole set of options" from which an improviser can choose, including playing different musical scales or modes over a chord – “It could be Dorian, it could be Mixolydian."
But then he Cheshire Catted it, saying, "but the real answer is I wasn't thinking about any of them." Consider that "you just asked me a question in perfect English," he said to Mr. Schaefer. "Did you think, 'O.K., I need a verb?'" or "about how to hold your tongue?"
Mr. Metheny's answer pointed up another duality in the way our brains work,?that we have both conscious and unconscious brain processes, said one panelist, Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and the incoming president of Cooper Union, who is also a violinist. "The vast majority of stuff that goes on in our brain we do not have conscious access to," he said. "It's automatic."
But music requires?"years and years of practice in order to make what is conscious unconscious," he said.?Plus, improvisation is not just free-form playing – there has to be a mastery of structure and discipline. "If you want to fly off the edge of a cliff, you have to know where the cliff is," he said.
没有评论:
发表评论