Doctrine

Not a word we use a lot in music, doctrine has a lot of unsavory religious connotations, suggesting bureaucracy, rigidity of thought, and the opposite of creativity in general. Indoctrination, orienting someone to a way of thinking and operating, seems little better than brainwashing. But in the arts— teaching, writing, forming our own idea of an approach— there may be no great “objective” reason to do things one way or another, it’s a useful concept.

In the religious sense it’s sort of a bureaucratic statement of this is what is, which is useless to us. The military-form idea of it is better: this is what we’re going with, this is what we think will work.

The word caught my attention via a shameful little side interest, in the low topic of war— that stupidity. One of the questions my friends and I would wonder about when we were 14, is why the Americans kept making these rather crummy Sherman tanks to go against the individually superior German Panther and Tiger tanks. Kids think about that kind of crap, and a lot of people never give it up. It’s not cool to me, it’s embarrassing.

Anyway, the idea was, on balance, this is what we’re going with— factoring in a lot of strategic and logistical issues, and realities of the particular battlefield situations they were facing, beyond simply one Sherman and one Tiger fighting a duel in a parking lot. Similar thinking went into the situation early in the pacific war, when Americans were pitting the Wildcat fighter plane— a slow but sturdy, well armed pig of a plane— against Japan’s Zero, which was more agile, but flimsier and less well armed.

That latter imbalance wasn’t the result of a doctrinal decision, but doctrine was needed to deal with it, until the US could get better planes to work with. Think about how you make your own modest talents work for you, versus more spectacularly performing individuals— that’s how I think. To the extent that a musical life can be likened to aerial combat.

Obviously, our motives in music are different. We’re thinking about learning to play the drums, informed by what has been done in the past, and by what what we need to do professionally, and by what we want to do creatively, as individuals.

For me it became pretty clear by about the 10th grade what my job as a drummer was: to be able to sit down and play with no preparation and sound good, and professional. I had a couple of good real life examples that illustrated very plainly, that the drum set is primarily about playing, improvising— the pure state of it is to give a good performance playing music you don’t know, that you’ve never heard, mostly without reading, the first time you play it.

It was a non-repetitive way of playing, and it quickly became clear that the Syncopation-type methods were the best way to get to that. Those methods were also the most similar to the kind of reading I was seeing in the school big bands and musical theater productions I was doing. In the next ten years of learning to play I tangled with a lot of other stuff, too, which were all varying degrees of suspect to me, and my results with them varied. The further I’ve gone with the Syncopation based methods, the more plain it is that that is the way to do it.

That became the foundation of my basic doctrine— what I do, and how. There are other supporting elements; the idea that the drumset is a single instrument (from Elvin Jones), and that it is a distinct instrument from the snare drum alone, from the craft of being a snare drummer. Contrasted with the conventional view that there is a very distinct order to followed, becoming a proficient snare drummer first, starting with the list of 26 rudiments, with the drum set, as the less serious instrument, to be learned less formally later, in bits and pieces.

There are other elements, like, we should be able to do a lot of easy things really well (from Peter Erskine), and be fluent with easy concepts, that drumming is coordinated rather than independent (from Bob Moses), that we do not first seek improvement by strictly technical means. We want to have a good reason for our technical training. And the primacy of your musical ear over technique— and do not funnel that into a conventional internet-style “groove vs. chops” non-conversation, please.

Beneath it all is an assumption that professional methods are the good methods, and that making music is the one legitimate goal. Regardless of how much an individual, who may be a hobbyist, is involved in those things, we’re going to be guided by them.

Good reasons to do things include it was done by the drummers I admire, it is expected in the community of players we want to be a part of. Respecting that we need a personal motivation to get anything done, but also recognizing that there some things are important enough that we should manufacture a personal motivation, we didn’t already have. We want to be able to manufacture interest, to an extent— in music we normally don’t much care for.

Of course not everything needs to be rational. That doesn’t mean there’s no reason for it— I can have an attachment to an inherited method simply because I inherited it, and it connects me to other people in the rest of the community that inherited it too. I communicate to the student that that is why we do it, and don’t try to claim that it’s because it’s simply “what is done.”

As a painter, I had to form a very personal doctrine of how I was going to do it— I wanted to do it seriously, but I didn’t want it to replace music. And I didn’t want to do it the same way I do music. I was going to see what I could accomplish totally instinctively, and without technical training or discipline— or with very little. Approaching it like a rock musician. To enter that, I first needed to want to make art that was within my technical reach— a lot of modern art was non-technical, or seemingly so.

So it’s about forming an approach we can pursue, without getting too distracted by “competing” methods, or questions. We could go further detailing my own thing, but I’m experiencing a little deadline pressure to “go do something else”— this is in fact the second time I’ve attempted, at great length, to write about this topic— so we’ll get to that another time, as it pertains to individual topics. It’s something to think about.

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