“Aesthetics is to me as an artist must be what ornithology is like to a bird.”
– Barnett Newman, an artist
Someone broached the subject of aesthetics, specifically the Japanese idea of Ma, meaning negative space, or silence, used as a direct poetic instrument in music and art, and do we ever think about it playing the drums.
Since nobody normal knows what that is, here is an explanation from NewMusicUSA:
Perhaps the most ubiquitous and well-known concept in Japanese aesthetics is that known as Ma. Translated as nothingness or emptiness, Ma emphasizes the space, in time or dimension, which is prevalent in all Japanese art forms including theater, architecture, gardening, and—of course—music. It is the space between objects, the silence between sounds, and the stillness between movements. Much more than the absence of something, it is a palpable entity. In music, Ma typically manifests as the silence we “hear” between phrases. It is that nothingness that separates sound and removes it from a position of prominence. After the first phrase of a shakuhachi solo is played and the player takes a breath, that silence, or Ma, can create a tension that brings a small relief when the next phrase eventually begins. Or if that silence separates the sounds completely, and allows each phrase to be independent, then the silence becomes its own world upon which to meditate.
The short answer is, no, I don’t really think about that, but here are some thoughts on the topic:
As drummers I think we’re closer to an African conception, which is about continuity— one eternal pulse, or conglomeration of pulses. It’s a doing instrument, we’re not calculating silences. And as an accompanying instrument, we don’t have a whole lot of control over actual silence, unless we’re talking about the busyness of our accompaniment, which is not really the same thing. We have a choice of accompanying a musical event or not— catching a figure and/or setting it up— either way the event is still there. The most control we have over the overall texture comes when soloing, or with arranged solo fills.
That’s clearly an effect, a piece of show, it’s not some kind of core tenet of his playing.
Japanese art is— speaking somewhat broadly?— deeply formal, traditionally, and these aesthetic concepts like Ma and Wabi-Sabi, and the rest, are expressions of that, and are the tools of it. They’re also tools of criticism, and so are also enforcers of that formalism. With that as a thing we’re getting closer to genre, or to academicism, depending on your orientation.
It’s a little bit alien from modern ways of making art, which is more about process. We’d be more interested in tactics for working than in the aesthetics of finished results. Ideas like this would be more in the category of worthwhile suggestions— nailing it down and making it a formal part of the process institutionalizes it, turns it into an approval-getting device. It’s like checking with a parent.
Space as a statement in itself is a little bit alien to Americans— in some media it’s called dead air, to be avoided at all costs. We’re more about filling up time/space with the pure goods. Show me everything. You don’t go to a Brad Pitt movie to wait for him to do something, you go to see him do a lot. Use your voice; time spent not using your voice is just waiting around. For an actor, use of silence would fall under the category of timing, which is still not what we’re talking about.
Maybe it’s an American thing to be suspicious of defining high artistry too precisely (hell, suspicious of artistry itself). Partly that’s American anti-intellectualism— the degenerate phase of which we are experiencing as a society right now— and partly from general democratic, anti-authority attitudes. In the past. Today a not-insignificant segment of American society today is very pro-authority indeed, the more unreasoning the better.
Possibly the more American attitude would be commercial, to pay attention to the negative space, for the purpose of defining your subject better for impact, making a stronger overall design, creating a lock. That’s part of what pop craft is about. For an extreme nitwit example of this, in sound design, see the trailer for any action movie, battering your senses with 90 seconds of explosions and car crashes before a sudden silence, someone whispering something ominous, followed by the biggest explosion of all.
Maybe there are some clues in the way we follow things to their natural conclusion. In Japan, that takes us to Zen, on the one hand— emptying out all desire and direction to the point of having no reason to live or die— and to genre on the other— pure mechanical formula, rendered unendingly. See: all anime. The American way is the too much coffee way— boneheadedly adding more of whatever element we thought was good. More hops in beer, more lethally hot hot sauce, faster Death Metal, more blades on a disposable razor, more coffee, all taken far beyond any reasoned logic, to the point of defeating it’s own purpose, leaving us feeling really, really bad.
The lesson is: Americans should not follow things to their natural conclusion as it appears to us. We’d be better off seeking a British type of balance— as described by William S. Burroughs: never go too far in any one direction.
A lot of us have a kind of builder’s mentality, of artlessly assembling things from component parts. The kind of people who have wood shops, who rebuild carburetors. A Hank Hill mentality. We see that in traditional rudimental drumming— which is largely just collections of rudiments, plugged into a couple of set forms— and also in Metal drumming, and in genre playing generally.
With aesthetics more broadly, if we define what’s so great about the way Tony Williams plays a ride cymbal, as an aesthetic principle, what have we gained there? We’ve invented a rule for the way it should be done, for musicians to feel bound by, so when they play that way, it’s not because of any great personal insight, it’s not a personal statement, it’s because they were good at following a rule. Which is not supposed to be the point of any of this; the goal is not to be a monoculture of everyone sounding good the same way. We’re individual citizen artists, part of what we’re interested in in art is what you figured out, what you decided is good music to present to us.
It was really enough for some trusted person to say listen to Tony Williams, that’s how you should play a cymbal, which sets you on a path of listening and figuring it out, in whatever way you’re going to figure it out, and figure out what you want to do with it.
The modern history of looking to Japanese and broader Asian art and philosphy for inspiration and direction goes back roughly to the time of the post-Impressionist painters, and has been a more or less strong thing ever since. We never quite get there with it. When Van Gogh copies a Japanese wood print, the effect is an outward thing of having a more bold design— he never has anything like that original quiet hand. In jazz we’ll try copping some Zen attitudes towards creation, with the goal of playing better, and feeling better about it, which is diametrically anti-Zen. There’s a whole religious, philosophical, and cultural thing happening beyond the surface results we’re attracted to, that is really different from what we do— it’s extremely difficult to be anything more than tourists with these ideas.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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