english 100 intro

hello ya'll

Boyles Boil

You gotta love anyone who can site B.F. Skinner without a hint of irony or disgust. Posing the conversation as a spontaneous and perhaps (debated) inherent quality of human nature, Boyle goes on to examine the improvisational nature of such which then in turn becomes a conversation in music, between musicians with word, gesture, attitude, intent made action. Conversation is the specific location of our dialectic, the red dress with which we affix our speech communities. (see above) It is a process by which as Burke might say we come into identification with one another and leaving room for " the potential of dissent" we experience something-- communication, understanding, knowledge, play? All of the above?
Music is the tableau upon which Boyle quite aptly places the "harmonic changes" which integrate into our thoughts-made-genre-made-conversation. lovely.

Ramage Chapter 5-- uncertainty reigns

Ramage's extensive interpretation and critical response to the events of 9/11 find us considering all angles of the issue, from our own personal responses and the emotional, cultural, economic ones to the attempt at sympathy when he touches the tender wound of wondering "how could the terrorists justify such an act?" Where was their agency or motive?
We all try and schematize or adjust to a simulacra of an event that was bigger than anything we could really comprehend. Whether is is through his own response "It's like a bad movie" or Stockhausen's "the greatest work of art" response we find ourselves at the door of uncertainty, grasping with our individual and collective terministic screens to interpret the indescribable.
Uncertainty is a scary beast to encounter, especially as beings who must "overcome our powerful resistance to this acknwoledgement" and by accepting this uncertainty we must accept that our "interpretive model cannot be set in motion." After all, what is language for if it cannot in some way begin to interpret things, from the very mundane to the utterly catastrophic?
Ramage asserts that the cost of refusing to at least try to interpret things with our limited schema is too high. So in the face of not knowing, we must at least try to know, in order to not destroy ourselves with our ignorance or as the Buddhists would have it, we cannot succumb to our greed fear and delusion merely because our frame no longer fits. Because we are so enmeshed in our terminology, we have a difficult time rising above it, or perhaps we even have an impossible time with this but Ramage argues that it is an "ethical imperative" to at least attempt to do so. We do this with language by allowing it to "create a synthesis that reconnects the terms and establishes a new common ground between them."

In response to Blakesely chapter 4

As Blakesley interprets Freud through the lens of Burke...



Blakesely-says-Burke-says that Freud was "adept at tracking down the implications of his own terminology." He posited his own interpretation of symbols, as the analyst, over those of his "clients" or his "patients."
I find it interesting that apparently for Freud, one symbolic means of interpretation is just as valid as another even if it comes to the dreams of another person. In the realm of the subconscious Blakesley notes that Freud cared less about what happened in the dreams of his patients and more about what language they used, and what symbol system they identified with in order to describe their subconscious. Freud laid his own framework of the Oedipal anecdote over the thing and called it good, defining integral principals of the feminine in terms of the negative, in terms of being the opposite of male or the absence of the phallus. Yes, I think this is what we would call a terministic screen.
In a sense, Freud's terministic screen was then imposed on a series of successive generations of people looking to understand the meaning of their own lives and those making an efffort to track down the underlying source of their own terms. Of course, his discoveries, aimed at a deeper understanding of human nature then in turn became oppressive.
If we are all making efforts towards the personal entelechy of own impulses and associations with our own "entelechial dog" are we at all being accurate in our discoveries if we have another person's symbology laid out over our own? Or is it possible as genre theory supposes, and that Blakesely asserts as well that invention comes not from a discovery of something new rather than it comes from it's own antecedent genre.
I come again to the conclusion that there are no absolutes, that all we do, say, think, suppose, happens deeply situated in our own experience and in the experience that we create in our own lives and culture.
I appreciate in this sense that Blakesely is advocating a "systematic tracking down of [its] originating terms" as crucial to a critical look at the forces which form us as the "symbol making" and "symbol using" animal that we seem to be.

Improvisational Popcorn: A Comparison of Bruffee and Sawyer

Keith Sawyer's ideas on collaboration/improvisation overlap nicely with Kenneth Bruffee's ideas on collaborative learning. Sawyers basic premise is that teaching is performance and that it should not be focused on a crystallized pedagogical model but instead should arise collaboratively and in the vein of improvisation. Sawyer returns the teacher to the conversation, like butter on popcorn. Bruffees premise is that although collaborative learning may be fraught with some logistical concerns, it is an extremely effective way of creating fresh and original knowledge in a classroom. His work is a response to the idea that students are failing where they should succeed and that the collaborative model answers some of these important questions.

He returns to the idea of conversation being a substantial element of learning.
Bruffee begins with an historical example of the beginnings of collaborative learning which started in the medical field with the studies of Abercrombie and asserts that "successful (medical) practice is better learned in small groups of students arriving at diagnoses collaboratively than it is learned by students working individually."

This is well mirrored by Sawyer in most of his ideas though he also grounds his framework in improvisation. He posits the idea that "scripting" in teaching is something that stifles creativity and that it leads to the teaching of and emphasis on "lower order skills" while teachers who advocate what he calls "creative teaching argue that it results in deeper understanding among learners" He says that experienced teachers rely on improvisation as well as scripting adapting themselves to what he calls "disciplined improvisation" and that they adapt their skills and perfomances to the individual classroom environment.

This might be one possible solution to some of the problems that Bruffee mentions with collaborative learning: "many teachers are are unsure about how to use collaborative learning and about when and where, appropriately, it should be used." He goes on to say that sometimes it "works beyond my highest epectations. Sometimes it doesn't work at all."
If we take Sawyers concept of "disciplined improvisation" which must necessarily be a part of collaborative learning we might find that "teachers locally improvise within an overall global structure."

Because anything that happens in collaboration can only be scaffolded and facilitated, there will always be an unpredictable, organic and improvisational character to the learning that goes on in this type of teaching. Benefits of collaboration take off on the idea that comes from Vygotsky and others, that human beings learn best in groups and learn through conversation. Collaborative learning harnesses this potential. Or should I say that it potentially harnesses this potential...

Not to trope on this again but, this little loop then leads back again to the advantages of improvisation which has a gentle structure behind it, it creates a "scene" and perhaps the teacher then creates the "attitude" of the improvisation. But the other elements of the Pentad reveal themselves creatively, taking the emphasis off of the lone teacher at the top of the room, spouting discourse on the vertical axis and instead expandings the discourse horizontally and creatively in potentially dynamic ways. Collaborative learning has the potential to strike a nice balance between teacher centered and student centered classrooms. There also exists an idealism in it which expresses the possibility of new meaning making, new discourses being birthed and group thinking which could in then inform the individual thinking in a class.

I could go on.. There are problems associated with it as well, a danger on it dumbing down the student population, a danger in the lack on content, a danger in an overarching group think not allowing for individual ideas to flourish. I think the hope here, or at least for Sawyer, is that a teacher would be on hand to help the conversation to flow smoothly and in a meaningful way.

Satura Magrhibi

Jarrets' Satura is likened to the food metaphor. The song I listened to was from the Maleem Mahmoud Ghania and Pharoah Sanders. Structurally it is Saturnine in its deliberate mixing of seemingly disparate genres of music. Each ingredient retaining, as Jarrett describes it, a unique flavor which mixes. It is a powerful metaphor, though a well used one. And it is distinctly American, or is it?
Moroccan music and culture is a mixing. The Arabs and the Berbers. The mountain and desert peoples. The music that comes from Gnawa (Mahmoud's genre) is a delicious mixing in it's own right. Though I am not sure if the average Moroccan knows what the mixing is, it is infectious. Just as Jazz was a music that enlivened the American people, though perhaps middle America didn't know its underpinnings in racial expression, liberation and commodification.
The music evokes something ancient and it replies to and against itself. Gnawa music is music played in the streets and provides the roux, the base, around which many ingredients gather. In this case, it is jazz.
Moroccan Arabic culture is filled with proverbs. Proverbs are one of the primary ways in which philospohical meaning in conveyed. So perhaps the music has a base, a theoretical form, a framwork from around which improvisation can happen. Gnawa revolves on a repeated sound, the instruments and then the uud. The voices become the variance, singing call and response in a soft spoken answer form.
It is a music which in enlivened by participation. Here the Sanders horn plays with the form and weaves in and out.
So I would point out that if you look from a traditional form to a contemporary one, you might actually be troping, creating variations, which in turn then recreate themselves as new. A new dish from which we eat together, a dish that is shared by many hands.
In this sense, the parts come together to make a whole. Two cultures across the world that can talk to each other in the simple and complex language of music.

Things on the West End

Like any technocrat of modern proportions, I sit in my office, listening to West End Blues on the computer, while chatting with my best friend from thousands of miles away. The first thing she says is "ah, you're listening to West End Blues" and she goes on to say "that is the best trumpet solo ever written." I agree with her, it is pretty spectacular. Also I wonder how much of our appreciation for Jazz comes from a romance for the fathers who never loved us the way we wanted them to.

Our Fathers come from Jazz era times, (but don't we all?) both dropped out of mainstream culture and because they pursued a mixed lifestyle, or to lift from Jarret, a "saturna" or gumbo of sorts, they often hung onto certain things while letting go of others.
I suspect that Jazz was the thing that connected my fathers generation to the voice of what came before and the improvisation that their lives were to soon become.

But to return to the subject of the West End, this song is all about the trumpet. It has a voice. The two pieces evoke specific and distinct uses of that voice. Armstrong uses his voice in what we call now "old timey" rhythm. But that does it little justice. It evokes his own voice. It evokes him. It is both metonym and whole. There is meaning in the silent spaces in between his phrases, and his humming provides a thread for us to follow. So much is said without words here. His trumpet is poetic. It is neither overstated nor diminishing.

The Payton piece is swing time, it is rhythm and it is big band. It is more modern, more playful and less plaintive. It is full. The trumpet swings from branches of sound and bounces off walls. It is louder and more pronounced. It is also homage like. It takes a standard, a jazz icon and turns it up a notch. It is in honor of Armstrong's sadness. It enters into conversation with Armstrong. (and of course all of this could be wrong if Payton came first, but I suspect that I am right in my chronology). But the significant difference is the trumpet here, Payton's is loud and mouthy and sharp, it knows how handsome it is. It is having fun playing. Armstrong's plays him through it's body.

As I get off the phone, I can't help but think of my father again, and myself. How now all my fathers records are Jazz. How he no longer listens to folk music, though he remembers it well. It is both a return and a divergence, and it contains some of that lonesome trumpet, signaling both an end and a beginning, the West End perhaps.