A Self-Taught "Big Moussa?"

Take a look at this clip, and especially, at the information that the poster (xylophonist, Mamadou Diabate) has prepared.

Diabate describes that for the Sambla, practicing means “playing, making music and having fun together.” He explains that: “a goal of this exercise is that Small Moussa Diabate (here 5 years old) learns different ostinati so firmly that he, in spite of the rhythmically free-flying solo and the capricious beat-changes of Big Moussa Diabate [...], can't be thrown out of the beat any more.”

Well, a fundamental component to a more traditional apprenticeship is the presence of someone who would play the role of a “Big Moussa”—i.e. someone who already knows the accompaniment patterns quite well and who has a ready stock of embellishment possibilities in the hands, mind, and body. Without a Big Moussa accentuating and highlighting the various feels of given ostinati, and especially without the social interaction that makes the exercises “fun,” (see all the other children just hanging out, dancing, and clowning around?), practising becomes much more like work, and much less like play—or at the very least, like communication. Now granted, Little Moussa does have his fair share of work to do. He does have the accompaniment patterns to learn before he can even play the game with Big Moussa. And whenever one is learning new “vocabulary,” there’s a certain amount of struggle to undergo before appropriate application of that vocabulary becomes second nature.* But even still, when there is a Big Moussa involved, the rewards of the struggle are immediate. Patterns learned are applied directly to musical, communicative situations and learning becomes much more intrinsically rewarding. (My guess is that, unless the game were fun for both of the Moussas, they just wouldn't bother doing it. Does anyone you know play video games because they've been told that "practice makes perfect?")

Unfortunately, apart from my month in New York, I’ve never really had a “Big Moussa” to accompany, with whom to simply “play music,” nor from whom to learn about how to generate variation in the patterns acquired. The fact is, save for my month with Famoro, I’ve simply never been in the same city as a teacher for more than a few days at a time, and so, have had to video-mediate nearly all of my bala lessons. Even in New York (much to my dismay), I rarely played together with Famoro. (I alluded to this in an earlier post.) Instead of playing with me (letting me accompany him), Famoro would spend most of our lesson time just showing me some new accompaniment pattern or variation. Then he would leave me alone to figure out (usually via transcription of the video I had taken) the patterns shown and to practice them by myself.

Well . . . a new semester has begun at school and I find myself taking on the role of bala teacher. (Several people have expressed interest and I’ve finally decided to accept, and indeed, am excited to have a few students.) Naturally, I want the students to enjoy their studies. I’d rather that they had the opportunity to learn like Little Moussa, which is to say, communicatively, and high surrender. But I’ve had very little opportunity to learn with a Big Moussa myself, and so, it is difficult for me to “draw different feels out of the time” in just that way that would expand the students’ understanding of how they can learn the instrument without having to simply memorize a lot of lengthy phrases and then cut and paste them together—which, again unfortunately is how I’ve had to learn to play.

Now the purpose of this post is not to complain, but rather to try to articulate the dilemma (and perhaps even consider a solution.) I feel that if I had gone through (or could go through at some point during the course of my PhD program) a traditional-type apprenticeship, learning with a Big Moussa, then assuming the role of Big Moussa myself when I have students of my own would not only be easier for me, but would, I bet, also make learning more enjoyable for them.

*One hallmark of a good teacher is, of course, the ability to make the acquisition of new material as quick and as painless as possible, given the particular characteristics of the individual learner. With a good teacher, and perhaps a certain amount of focus, Little Moussa could no doubt learn the parts very quickly, but would still need at least some amount of time to memorize and allow patterns to sink in.

Hanging Out at the Magic Room

Consider the following list of activities:

The performing of a Haydn piano Sonata
The execution of a cup-stacking sequence
The performing of a Maori haka
A Cirque de Soleil-style five ball juggling performance
The execution of a country line-dance
The public recitation of a memorized speech
The performing of an Indonesian gamelan piece
A freestyle skateboard jam on a half-pipe
A one-on-one basketball game
An improvisatory jazz performance
A b-boy jam to unfamiliar music
A bala performance at a wedding or a child-naming ceremony
A conversation in a second or acquired language
A capoeira jogo

How do the people who perform these activities learn to do them? And (assuming they all have criteria for distinguishing the quality of one performance over another), how do they each “improve” their performances? What things do they have to practise in order to improve?

When Jay Rahn (a York faculty member) and I were discussing some of the differences between Mande music and some other of the world’s musics, we made frequent use of the term “scored.” For the purposes of that conversation, if something was “scored” (regardless of whether it was written down or otherwise visually represented) it was, by and large, conceived of and performed the same way every time from beginning to end with little or no improvisation. Given this definition, it seems to me that the first seven activities in the list above are scored activities, whereas the latter seven, are non-scored. And my sense is that the way one learns to perform in the context of a scored activity is rather different from the way one learns to perform in the context of a non-scored activity—or at least, learning non-scored performance seems to involve an extra step.

With half-pipe skate boarding, capoeira jogos, or bala performance, you never really know what will come next at any given moment. Performance involves the creation of a context (the back and forth traversing of the tube, the jenga, an ostinato groove or chord structure) and then, at any time, the performer can decide to generate or react to changes in that context (usually within particular style parameters). The learning process thus consists of the acquisition of “riffs” or “tricks” that open up possibilities for the performer, without necessarily binding them to a strict recreation of a memorized sequence (as might be the case in a country line dance, for example.) In practising non-scored activities, individuals must develop not only the ability to execute the discrete pattern “chunks” but also to reorder those chunks in reaction to various (often new and sometimes unexpected) stimuli in the environment.

Now, maybe the differences are of degree, rather than kind. As Casey Sokol (also a faculty member at York) was describing yesterday, there is after all a certain amount of improvisation (moment to moment decision-making undertaken by the performer) in all of the above activities. What’s more, the extent to which high-level bala players are actually undertaking random, never before sequenced orderings of the chunks that they piece together (instead of simply returning to sequences that they’d previously mapped out at some point) is not totally clear. Indeed, although above I described that half-pipe skaters, capoeiristas, and balafolaw “never really know what will come next at any given moment” this is true only up to a point. (They don’t likely have to be prepared to jump out of the way of falling safes or defend themselves against wolf attacks.) As well, to be sure, bala playing, as with other improvised music performance involves (or may involve) rather a lot more than simply reordering memorized chunks.*

Nonetheless, my impression is that when the skateboarders I knew in high-school used to hang out at the Magic Room learning and sharing and performing tricks for one another, or when my drum kit buddies would express their excitement at having learned a new rudiment and being in the process of teaching themselves how to articulate it across the toms and snare drum, the practising that they were doing is somehow different from the kind one would have to undertake in order to learn to perform (and then perfect performance of) a Hayden sonata or a cup-stacking sequence. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

*Remind me to write about this some time, citing some of what both Casey and Rob have discussed with me . . .