Normal & Natural


In the July 23, 2007 New Yorker there are a few pages taken from \"A Neurologist\'s Notebook\" entitled \"A Bolt From the Blue\" and subtitled with a question: \"Where do sudden intense passions come from?\" The article is by Oliver Sacks, author of many fascinating books which, over the years, I have gradually learned to read in reverse (going back to basics) or from a BornToGroove (BTG) point-of-hear. Point-of-hear rather than point-of-view because it is from a visualy biased, literal, seeing-is-believing or dismal science point of view that Sacks is writing his essay about people who were struck by lightning, or had a gran mal epileptic seizure, or had a large brain tumor removed, and who then developed an intense passion for music which seems, compared to their previous lives, sudden, abnormal, unnatural, strange and very, very mysterious.Before the lightning, the seizure, the operation, these people didn\'t live-for-music or live-in-music and now they do.


What happened? I\'ll answer this question in the clear, parsimonious BTG way in a minute, but first we have to look closely at the picture and caption that open the article. With some digital manipulating a person, probably a man, his back to us and sporting a pointy, conehead duncehat or hairdo, is standing on top of a thin and tall stump, like a postmodern-day Simon Stylitis, bowing a strange violin-like instrument toward the sky. All the trees around him are dead in the water, one of those die-offs caused by a beaver dam in nature, but here the scene seems post-apocalyptic, post-fire and post-flood. This character has the courage to send a message or a prayer up to God anyway. This picture is so Western, so Biblical, so full of bourgeois individualist ideology, so drenched with tragic humanism, so full of dead nature and unstopable human questing, so easily deconstructed with pomo theory, that you have to love it. The caption reads, \"After the accident, he was inspired, even possessed, by music.\" For Oliver the idealist, music is out there somewhere and will come and get you if you have a lucky accident or the exactly right tumor operation; for Charlie the materialist and for Jon-Roar Bjorkvold, the muse is within, much musicking is immanent in each of us. The good BornToGroove news is that you don\'t have to have a huge tumor removed from your temporal lobe to become musical. If you\'re a tot, you just have to turn off the cathode tubes and not go to school. If you\'re a sot, a pothead or an addict of any kind (and many of us are obsessing or in recovery these days) you can show up at @@ and let your Deeper Power remove the bondage of self. If you\'re a commited and successful professional you may, indeed, have to be struck by lightning or a market crash. Sorry to be cute, but I think these pages are from A NEROlogist\'s Notebook: Sacks is fiddling with the old Western or Platonic worldview while the planet burns.


Let\'s further compare a few worldview assumptions with a few worldhear assumptions, and then I\'ll tell you what happened to the people who suddenly became one with the music.

worldhear vs. worldview

participation in vs. alienation from body, Nature, labor, society

joyous science vs. dismal science

materialist vs. idealist

muse within vs. muse somewhere else? (diaphonous gowned gals in glades?)

the Dogs vs. Plato & Aristotle

in-body-experiences vs. out of body experience

concrete & different for each of us vs. abstract and the same for everyone

one tone vs. a thousand tomes


It is a usefull exercise to run these dichotomies and polarities out for a page or two -- live vs. mediated, now vs. before & after, time-feel vs. formula, process vs. syntax, etc. etc. etc. -- and if you are a student, a seeker of academic truths, I would recommend entering the lists and adding to the lists of opposites, thinking about each polarity and its relationship to the other polarities. It will help you to read Sacks in reverse or from a BTG vantage point. But remember, this polarizing is just the kind of thing \"worldviewers\" do indoors or inside the boxes while worldhearers are out wandering in Nature or throwing themselves into musicking and dancing.


So what happened? A few people were shocked and awed back into their original, Normal & Natural, mind-body unity and joyfully discovered the profound truth that a wonderful neuronal musicking capacity was there all along; they were born to groove! They were zapped out of alienation and into participation. To put it in slightly more technical, neurological terms, post-trauma they were able to vertically reintegrate their triune brains (MacLane) reconnecting the motional-lizzard brain to the emotional-paleomammalian brain to the overated cognitive or associative cortex of Homo ludens collaboratus. We understand from the old gospel song that \"da knee bone connected to da, thigh bone, da thigh bone connected to, da hip bone\" but many people are shocked to learn that our muscles have memories, our hearts think, our gut anxieties reshape the colony of 300 plus bacterial species in our large intestine as they urge flight or fight or dance upon us.


What happened? In the medical model, instead of accepting a post-lightning, post-op, or post-seizure diagnosis of \"post traumatic stress disorder\" or some other diagnostic label for one of our many contemporary miseries, these \"lucky\" few got happy musicking and didn\'t need to be medicated, therapized, manipulated by the professionals into a calm, passive, consumerist, mode of being that would pass for sanity in this deeply alienating society. Sacks, in this article at least, seems to be unaware of alienations (from body, Nature, labor, society) as forces capable of dulling, shutting down or deadening the central nervous system. Similarly, participation felt as dancing the emotions into meaning, only pops up by implication at the very end of this article when his patient, the fellow Doctor struck by lightening, decides not to \"invesitgate this further.\"


\"Could we now, a dozen years later, define the neurological basis of his musicophilia? Many new and far subtler tests of brain function have been developed since Cicoria had his injury, and he agreed that it would be interesting to invesitgate this further. But after a moment he reconsidered, and said that perhaps it was best to let things be. His was a lucky strike, and the music, however it had come, was a blessing, a grace --- not to be questioned.\" (pg. 42, New Yorker, July 23, 2007)


Since Sacks ends his piece this way, on a BTG note, I don\'t think I should walk you through the whole thing pointing out that \"hypermusia\" and \"musicophilia\" are not new words for new medical conditions but just how we were partially hard-wired at birth, \"very musical\" and \"loving music,\" needing only the daily imprinting of singing, dancing, drumming, whistling, humming, miming, peekabooing, dandling, riffing, joyfully rhythmic adults to complete the miracle of a precious human birth.

I bought a djembe over spring break from Djembe Direct in Salt Lake City. They sell exclusively on-line, but I was able to visit the store and pick out a professional djembe that I really liked. When I say that I liked it, I mean that it \"spoke to me\" -- basically I liked how it looked and have yet to learn to play it. All that I know is how to get two different high sounds and a low sound. I will go through the book I bought as well to learn some more stuff. My goal is to be able to teach music education majors how to use djembe in their elementary and middle school teaching. If anyone has suggestions, I\'d be happy to hear them. Otherwise, I\'ll keep you all posted on how it goes....

Today at the rehab center we had 14 of us drumming, and over a dozen last week too. The number of people playing a pattern in common makes it easier for everyone. They are less self-conscious individually. They are not as burdened by my looking around the circle to see who has the pattern in hand correctly and who doesn\'t. When we all chant a dumbek version of \"bomba\" (duum ka katek, duum ka katek) or funga (duum ka katek dum dum teka, duum ka katek dum dum teka) no one is embarrassed because your voice gets blended with a crowd. There are probably many more specific plusses I could list about \"more\" in the room, but it may just boil down to \"more the merrier.\"

We reviewed samba, starting with the surdu part and the importance of muffling the big boom, at exactly the point where the pickup beat \"ah\" of \"ah hock key stick\" on the shakers coincides. Muffling or cutting off the low surdu boom coincides with the loudest shake on the 4 shakes of the shaker to build momentum, shuffle, groove. Missed the woman who knew how to dance samba a few classes ago, but we drilled three bell part variations and my attendance at a samba lesson up in Housatonic, Mass. on Tuesday revived sense of all the different ways there are to link parts together. There must be an old source of \"samba\" as done on conga drums, with other \"Cuban\" equipment like sekere, and with a long estabished choreography (Pearl Primus? Martha Graham?) that is more proscenium arch contexted folklorico than actual Brasilian. We had this \"samba\" going strong in Buffalo over 30 years ago, and it was present in Housatonic, Mass on Tuesday.

I\'ll try to drop a diary in here whenever I\'ve doing some musicking and/or teaching outside my own home.


This morning I played for about an hour with Miami Mo out in front of a Salisbury restaurant. Very few passersby and not much reaction to our renditions of standards. Mo does the \"one man band\" with a versatile keyboard that supplies bass lines derived from the lowest note of whatever chord he is hitting and some drum machine effects according to the kind of groove he has punched in. I chug along on congas and pick up my cornet once in a while if the song is familiar and key is charlie-friendly. High point for me was \"Manyana, manyana, manyana is good enough for me\" from a time when Mo and I were both about 9 or 10 years old -- a big post WW II hit that I\'ll try to revive. We\'ll do so more of this kind of oldies but goodies at his house Sat p.m. Mo is going south with his keyboard and sopranino sax and won\'t be back until spring.


Went to a rehab center for workshop 2:15 to 3 and a few people were there who were introduced to basic samba, bomba, funga, and salsa rhythms last week. I teach these core or foundation rhythms each time (been going there for about a year now), but the turnover of people is so fast and so constant that we rarely get an ensemble of interlocked parts going from one week to the next. This past summer I started going every other week, still hoping to pick up one or two more regular staff members so that there will always be a minimum of 2 or 3 interlocked parts for each groove. As it is, \"my host\", the one regular center staff member, is getting better and better at core parts, and can keep the basic beats going when I\'m not there, or put together an ensemble of a few musicians that can grow and continue over time IF there is a steady flow of musically skilled \"campers\" coming to the center over time. Basically it is touch and go, people at all different stages of rehabilitation and getting with the AA program, and all different stages of willingness to try learning new skills and playing together.


Today we had 6 or 7 people ready, willing, and able to learn samba, bomba and funga parts, and a few people just barely with it. Turns out one woman was Brazilian and could show us the dance moves as only those born-to-a-beat can do it. \"It\'s all in the hips\" she said, and I could immediately see the connection between her samba and the most basic Cuban rumba moves, feet moving side to side in 4 and a lot of hip action that says \"carnival\" \"street fest\" time in a lot of cultures south of the border. But the group reaction was not really, \"WOW, the real thing, a chance to put dance-drum-song together\" but some said, \"hey I thought this was a drumming class!\" Clearly, the idea that music and dance are made for each other or all one process in \"people\'s music\" was NOT common knowledge. And you don\'t build confidence in this assumption with a one minute pep talk.


Maybe it\'s a mistake to keep teaching cultures/grooves holistically with constant encouragements to \"make it your own\" or \"add any song you know to this groove\" or \"learn this beat and it opens up songs & dances ad infinitum\" because people don\'t want it all, at least at first, they just want to really get one thing to practice, and maybe in just one tradition.


It helps me to type this little report out. Forces me to think about why I keep failing to get traditions started anywhere. I think I\'ll focus on samba, more parts, breaks, try to get just one groove going well at this center, and just do a quick 4 minute review of the other beats each time so that people will know there are other places to go. Eventually. We don\'t have to learn everything! Right away! Maybe more staff will come if they can hear it as just one set of parts to establish. Finite. Doable.

Still don\'t know what \"tags\" are, or \"pingbacks\" or most of the lingo, even tho I\'ve been blogging, plogging (poetry), cclogging (conserving consensus essay) & open lettering over at the clean the House of Reps and save the world site (conservingconsensus.us) for about 16 months by now, and I hope to keep at it through the November 2006 elections in the USA because so much is at stake. But what will it matter if we \"clean House\", take a better direction toward sanity and serenity at the political level, if just about everyone in the global village has forgotten how to groove in the process? Had a nice talk with drummer Vinnie Amico on the telephone a few days ago and we got to wondering why it is that if everyone is indeed Born to Groove, so many feel they never even had a choice or a chance to groove consistently in daily life, and still others decided at one point in life to groove in earnest but then couldn\'t seem to find the handle? What keeps kids from being caught by the \"jes grew\" bug -- jazz, funk, reggae, country, punk, some kind of DIY musicking addiction? What keeps a motivated person from getting satisfaction from grooving-in-practice all alone at home? What keeps an experienced groover from getting better and better at it in groups with others? Today at the peace demo two horn players showed up and we got some tunes for a \"peace medley\" going -- \"I got peace like a river. . . (melody a gift to me from Molly couple of years ago), \"All we are saying, is give peace a chance\" (like many anthems this will slip into 12/8 rhythms nicely someday), and then \"Down by the Riverside\" for the \'ain\'t gonna study war no more\' section. But before the horns got there I could only get a little percussion help for my cornet playing because the two older people were shy about picking up a tamborine, and the youngster who showed up toward the middle hadn\'t played with me in quite a while, so he didn\'t want to be noticed or coaxed. Got me back on the topic: I\'ve led a lot of horses to water over and over again thru the years but I have to admit that most of them didn\'t wind up dedicated to drumming, dancing, singing, trying to keep some live musicking in their lives during some part of the day. More on people \"dropping out\" of the musicking flow next time I get into this BTG box.

I\'m in the process of converting the chapters into true HTML format.  For you non-technical folks that will mean that you won\'t have to endure the Adobe Acrobat \"Splash Screen\" or wait that extra time for the contents of the chapters.  The site should also be more searchable and navigable now.  Let me know if you experience any problems with the new HTML chapters.  The HTML chapters will be sporting this
icon.


Enjoy. 

Check out the great new videos in the open discussion at the top of the book and in section one. (Thank you Dick Blau for having your students do these.) You can reply to the forum postings of the videos to let us and the videographers know what you think. Check out the new audio files from Charlie as well.
They\'re in section four of the book.

Please report any login, posting or upload problems, or send questions or comments about the site to me, at carl at snarlnet.com. Or, use the forums for comments or criticisms if you think a public discussion would be helpful.


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