Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002
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Sudnow, David. Ways of the hand – a rewritten account. London, England / Massachusetts, Cambridge; MIT Press, 2001 139pages HB ISBN 0-262-19467-8. $ 19.95
Reviewed by
This is a book written by a passionate piano player and philosopher that details, with intricate descriptions, the process of the author learning to play improvisational jazz piano. I have never read the original version and so I cannot judge as to the quality of the re-write that David Sudnow presents here in terms of the rewriting itself. What is clear from this book, however, is that Sudnow has managed a formidable feat of phenomenological description that is at times fascinating and at other times obscure. It gives very little ground to the reader and pursues the description of learning to play jazz into such a level of complexity and depth that the words, at times, seem to be on the edge of failure. Sudnow negotiates with great care the difficulties of describing a bodily activity which almost of necessity goes beyond words.
Two incidents may shed some light on this tension between the description and activity central to this book. The first concerns Sudnows Jazz piano teacher who is clearly someone he wants to learn from because of the respect he has for the teachers ability to actually play jazz. At points this teacher demonstrates particular gestures and excerpts of playing that Sudnow describes as pathways. Sudnow builds up a repertoire of such pathways and their possibilities but comes up against a problem of decision, of which pathways to take and when to take them. He can make rules but they then need further rules for their implementation and a proliferation occurs which indicates there is something more to what the teacher is doing than merely a following of pathways.
Sudnows’ teacher cannot, no matter how Sudnow questions him, form a description capable of passing on not just the pathways through the piano keyboard but the ways his hands take them. Sudnow cannot quite ‘get it’ from the teacher, cannot quite make the step from playing pre-formed moves of chords and scales into a free flowing improvisation. His teacher can sit there and show him but no matter how hard he looks, no matter what analysis he tries to bring to bear, Sudnow cannot find the rules that enable this free improvised jazz he hears coming from the fingers of his teacher to be replicated. He is looking for the pathways the teacher takes through the keyboard and yet cannot find a way to see anything other than fragments of the way. The bulk of his description rests on an attempt to deal with this problem through his hands – the ways of the hand, of the title, are capable of being found, it would seem, only though the hands themselves. The description is not simply about an inability to find something but also details the fragments of the ways taken en route, with descriptions that bring alive the skill-learning process Sudnow is going through.
This first incident occurs early in the book and is one of the opening moves in the narrative. The second incident occurs much later in the text and forms a revelatory moment that offers Sudnow a way into the ways of the hand. “More than any other single experience” he says “it was listening to Jimmy Rowles that marked the crucial turning point in my fourth year of study, when very significant changes began to occur in my path to improvisation” (p.73). What is fascinating about this incident soon comes to the fore as Sudnow describes this process of listening to Rowles. In fact what Sudnow does is watch Rowles. He doesn’t listen to recordings but instead watches the performer at work regularly for a period of months. “For months, night after night…” (p.74) Sudnow watches this performer with the eye of a serious student, attentive and already containing enough knowledge to look with sense. What he finds is a ‘body idiom’ that is more than simply the style of playing and which seems to be intimately connected to the improvised jazz sounds produced.
These two incidents form counter-point to each other. In many ways the core of the experiences seem to be remarkably similar, consisting of Sudnow watching another player in an attempt to learn how to improvise. Of course, there is far more interaction with the teacher than with Rowles but by the time Sudnow begins to watch Jimmy Rowles there may be less interaction but far more bodily experience to draw on in his observations – he has, after all, been practising his playing for some four years by this time. It appears, moreover, that it is the predominance of the body as a whole that shifts between the two experiences. No longer is Sudnow concerned with pathways to be followed and rules to choose which to take but instead he steps back to see the way in which the body itself in front of him takes those pathways with its hands. The notion of a ‘body idiom’ is the moment when the hands re-attach themselves to the brain through the body rather than through an abstracted relationship of mind, where a whole begins to form that suggests the birth or coming to be of the ‘player’.
To return to the problem of the description of the activity it is crucial to remember, as Hubert Dreyfuss does in the Foreword, that this is a skilful activity. Over and above the simple description of the activity there is the skill necessary to carry out the activity, a skill that cannot be given by the description no matter how complex. As if to point explicitly to this tension, Sudnow attempts a ‘detailed’ description towards the end of the book of a simple melody (p.123-124). This paragraph that describes every movement of the hands during a melody and does so in musical terms shows in itself the redundancy of description at a particular point in the acquisition of a skill. To describe what is done is not to describe how it is done. Sudnow himself says that if he had been faced with such descriptions it would have been impossible to practise on their basis. In effect some other route was needed for the hands to find their way through the keyboards and produce improvised jazz.
The strengths of Sudnows work are in the details. He writes what he calls a ‘production account’ and begins from the assumption that such a production account might fulfil the scientific accuracy that phenomenology first sought for itself in its return to the things themselves, without any of the metaphysical pretensions such phenomenology had in its over-rapid generalisations. It is almost as though someone took the odd paragraph or page of description within phenomenology and decided to use this as the learning tool par excellence. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, for example, is clearly an inspiration for Sudnow as well as being a philosophical background. The difficulty is that the tension within phenomenology between description and conceptualisation becomes pushed to an extreme within Sudnow, albeit a very interesting and quite possibly profitable, extreme.
To put this another way, the work by Sudnow falls across disciplines but does so not because it is inter-disciplinary but because it forms or attempts to form a body of data. This body of data, however, is qualitative, narrative, subjective, always prone to the charge of irrelevance, reduced to little more than anecdotal accounts, which of course it is. Faced with a hard-nosed scientific scepticism it would be hard to defend the status of Sudnow’s text as data. If it looks like a story and reads like a story then it probably is a story. The fascinating aspect to Sudnow’s book is that it doesn’t feel like a story, but reads like a report. It accounts for a specific activity and the reader learns very little about Sudnow himself. What it cannot do, however, is argue for a conclusion or establish any theories or hypotheses.
There is, of course, a peculiarly difficult issue in terms of the particular skill that Sudnow is learning, improvisational jazz piano, which suggests that there is more to Sudnows’ work than data relevant to questions surrounding skills. If we were to commission a report on the model of Sudnows production account in order to help our inquiries into skills it would be a peculiar choice to pick piano playing from the whole realm of possibilities and an even more peculiar choice to pick improvisational jazz piano from within the particular skill itself. What adds the edge to Sudnows’ account is the nature of expression that is so central to the sort of skill he is learning. It is not any old skill but a particular skill that Sudnow writes his production account of. This skill is one of expression within a medium and in that sense is akin to language and speaking well, the skill of expression within a medium. Sudnows’ account plainly aims to suggest ideas that are of much wider philosophical interest and application than might be thought if we simply saw the book as a book about skill learning. Towards the end of the book this aspect becomes increasingly clear. We find, for example, a direct analogy being drawn within the writing between aspects of language skills and jazz piano skills (p.126-130). As another example I would point to the fcat that throughout the work there are comparisons between using the piano keyboard and the typewriters keyboard on which the work is being written.
I will briefly look at just one of the suggestions Sudnows makes with regard to language. Contained within footnote 15 is a short suggestion that we must allow music to talk about itself (p.138). Sudnow is suggesting that, at least in part, his production account shows that music somehow has a meta- level, a level equivalent to exactly the conceptualisation that seems on the surface to be missing from the production account itself. If music can talk about itself, what sense can Sudnow be giving this statement? This is attempted through re-working our idea of what it is for one thing to be about another thing, with Sudnow putting forward the possibility that it is simply a ‘course of movements I do’. This of course appears to throw out any reference capacity within language in order to allow music to be understood in the way we understand language, which would be in this situation as a skilful practice. The danger with Sudnow’s suggestion is that it equates too little language with too much music. It is always worth worrying when we begin to lose distinctions between practices such as language and music and it is therefore all the more interesting that his account leaves Sudnow with a strong sense of language and music needing to come together in our understanding in order to prevent precisely what he calls “rampant confusions …in any distinctions between fundamental features of music and language”.
It is a fact, I would argue, that Sudnows text works as a philosophically interesting description, however oddly. This success flows from the fact that it is a description that is in the margins of both speaking and playing. The fact that this text is already a rewritten description may also suggests the internal difficulties in the very possibility of a work such as this, written in the margins of a particular expressive practice. It is the sort of text that would be useful in teaching philosophy because of the immediacy and intricacy of the problems it raises, because of the fact that it is written in the margins of thought, practice and expression and is both about such things as well as showing, very clearly, many of the problems it is about. For this reason we may well learn from this short text as much about philosophy as we do about piano playing.