H vis du har sans for humor, så ved du, hvor godt det er for dit humør og dermed for din afslapning og din musikalsk kunstfærdighed.”M y violin teacher, Chiyao "Jackie" Lee, put his fingers on my jaw while I was playing in my lesson with him on Monday night. Immediately that revealed that the muscles contracting there were creating needless, unproductive tension that interfered with the music by imparting that tension to other parts of my body.
[If you have a sense of humor, then you must know how good it is for your mood and [therefore, or secondarily—] for your relaxedness and musicianship.]
— Thomas Raab, Dansk Selskab for Medicinsk Humor.
T he revelation was so surprising that it made me laugh out loud... a spontaneous giggle from me at this little discovery, hitting me like a lightning-bolt. It’s like a “paroxysm”—instantaneous and uncontrollable: laughing as a kind of a “nano-seizure”.
L ater on in the lesson Jackie puts his hand on my bowtip as I am bowing. Instantly this reveals another fault in the balance of my bow… a fault that’s so delightful to figure out—and so shatteringly obvious in the way that he has revealed it—that this event caused yet another hearty laugh to bubble up inside me!
Y ears ago, Susanne Langer wrote that when it comes to learning instrumental technique, children have a great advantage. Children read “vague and multiple sorts of meaning into pure visual and auditory forms... a fertile openness that enhances intuition, since a child’s mind grasps analogies that a riper experience [of an adult] would reject as absurd.” (p. 110) What I am finding, learning violin as an adult, is a frequent kind of surprise—surprises full of humor that’s directed at my own body, at my own persona.
I n other words, each instrument, including the violin, has a ‘user interface’ (UI). It has a Heideggerian ‘toolness’ or ‘Verstehen’ that has evolved over the centuries to become what it is today—including K-bows and all sorts of other things.
B ut not only the instruments (in my current situation, a ‘composite’ of “violin box + strings + bowstick + bowhair”, or “keyboard + strings + soundboard + pedals”, or “flute body + headjoint”, or “trumpet + mouthpiece”) have UIs. I myself have a UI. My body—has a UI of its own! And sometimes it’s uncooperative. Or let’s just say it is “irregularly irregular” in its cooperativeness. And the learning process precipitates lots of instances where the instrument UI and the body UI collide. One of them balks at what the other is expecting/demanding.
T hen my teacher identifies this “instrument-student corporeal interface conflict” and, by the “mere” act of doing so, makes the UI gremlins vanish (at least temporarily…). That vanishing is so surprising that it is, to me, funny as hell. Makes me laugh, launches these tiny seizures of chuckling.
S ituationally-evoked ‘petit mal status gelasticus’, 50-cent physician phrase.
A nd then, “post-ictally”, when I recover from the chuckling I can continue playing and learning. Jackie is very patient with me. He is extremely perceptive, a wonderful teacher who is capable I think of helping (and surprising) any student at any level—a natural-born educator and one who clearly loves what he is doing.
I wonder whether his incisive teaching causes ‘status gelasticus’ in other of his adult students…
I t is possible to formulate some features common to all types of humor, including ones involving the experience of something that is paroxysmally surprising, a “peek-a-boo” surprise like what Jackie causes when I have a lesson with him. And, although an overall theory of humor is still lacking, several recent cognitive theories have hinted that humor should be understood as a general biological process of navigating and acting in an ever-changing cognitive environment—which in turn involves discovering and recognizing repeated patterns in novel experiences, internalizing/learning them, and predicting them in the future. The humor comes when some other human being basically “re-wires” or “re-codes” your own body’s UI. You think you “own” your body and “understand” your body. Hogwash. You do not own your body. Your teacher has just re-wired you! That is immensely funny and surprising, to anyone who thinks like an adult. There is the giddiness of a child who has just learned to walk, or to tie her shoes. There is the giddiness of a stroke patient who in rehab is able now to move a limb that he never dreamed he would be able to move again. And there is my giddiness at music lessons.
T homas Raab and colleagues in Copenhagen have recently published papers on the theory of humor—the cognitive and physiological science of humor. You may like to have a look at their website (link below).
L aughter induces the release of beta-endorphins which bind µ3 opiate receptors in the endothelial lining of our blood vessels. Laughter also induces a direct release of nitric oxide (NO) in the circulation. Researchers actually publish scholarly papers on this!
B oth of these—the endorphins and the NO suddenly entering the bloodstream in generous amounts—cause the blood vessels to relax and dilate, and blood pressure promptly goes down (see Miller & Fry 2009). All of that is good for the musicality of whatever sounds we produce.
W hat else? Well, in 1987 Terry Winograd’s and Fernando Flores’s book (link below) was new. It has been my ‘10 Commandments’ reference as I have worked in my professional employment as a software developer over the past 23 years. They prominently feature analysis of computer UIs’ toolness in terms of Heidegger’s philosophical theories. My violin lesson with Jackie on Monday night caused me to pull Winograd & Flores off my bookshelf and re-read it, this time with an eye toward UIs of musical instruments.
M artin Heidegger in the 1930s wrote the bible, so to say, on ontology of toolness. He used the example of hammers, as archtypical of tools with good UIs. You don’t have to learn an abstraction to use it. Little kids when first encountering a hammer and without any parental teaching pick up hammer and begin using it, mostly in the intended hammerlike use-case. Heideggerian ‘toolness’, ‘immanence’—‘usability’, if you like—or the ordinary German word ‘verstehen’.
V erstehen basically means ‘thereness’, ‘openness to experience’, or ‘primordial comprehendability’. Those are the most adequate expressions to convey what it really means. The usual English dictionary translation of verstehen is wimpy, though. Usually some lame, card-boardy thing like ‘understanding’, way too cerebral. That’s not what it means. Not primeval enough. Verstehen is seeing a hook-like object and reflexively and instantaneously imagining that you could use it to catch fish, or seeing a sharp-edged object and imagining without any internal discourse or deliberation that “I could kill and eat food with that”. Or seeing a Google search UI or a good videogame UI and knowing immediately how to interact with it to get a good, valuable, winning result.
O r, for me, feeling the big muscles of my body, plus and arm and right hand, propelling bow with a tension-free, childlike, immanent bowhold—to produce an aesthetically commendable note. Preferrably lots of them, strung together into an aesthetically commendable performance.
B elow are links to my favorite books on the topic of UIs and ‘toolness’, mirthful and otherwise. The value and relevance of Heidegger’s and La Tour’s writings on ‘verstehen’ and the ontology of instruments as being-in-the-world are, I think, underappreciated by musicians…
T aiwanese violist Jackie Lee (my teacher) is a recipient of top prize awards in the ICO Concerto Competition, the Cleveland Institute Concerto Competition, the Ekstrand Competition, the National Viola Competition of Taiwan, and the Taipei City Viola Competition. As an active chamber musician, Lee was a member of the Satori Quartet. Lee has appeared in concerts at the Alice Tully Hall, Harris Hall, Vilar Center, and Severance Hall. He has performed at many summer music festivals, including the Music Academy of the West, Audubon Quartet Seminar and the Takacs Quartet Seminar. Besides serving as a faculty member at the UMKC Academy of Music and Dance (a component of the UMKC Conservatory), Lee’s other teaching activities include the Youth Programs of the Aspen Festival, the Bravo Music Festival, the Kneisel Hall Music Festival and the Taiwan National Institute of Art Summer Chamber Music Academy. Lee received his Master degree in Viola Performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music. While studying there, he also received a degree in Audio Recording Engineering. He is currently a DMA candidate at the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance.
- Dansk Selskab for Medicinsk Humor (Thomas Raab, et al.)
- Foundation for the Advancement of String Education (FASE)
- American String Teachers' Association (ASTA)
- Bogost I. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism. MIT, 2006.
- Giuliani N, McRae K, Gross J. The up- and down-regulation of amusement: experiential, behavioral, and autonomic consequences. The up- and down-regulation of amusement: experiential, behavioral, and autonomic consequences. Emotion 2008; 8:714-9.
- Green B, Gallwey W. The Inner Game of Music. Doubleday, 1986.
- Harman G. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. OpenCourt, 2002.
- Harman G. Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (Anamnesis; Immanence; Toolness; Ontology of ready-to-handness). Re, 2009.
- Kaptelinin V, Czerwinski M, eds. Beyond the Desktop Metaphor. MIT, 2007.
- Langer S. Philosophy in a New Key. Harvard Univ, 1951.
- Miller M, Fry W. The effect of laughter on the human cardiovascular system. Med Hypotheses. 26-MAY-2009.
- Werner K. Effortless Mastery: Liberating the Master Musician Within. Aebersold, 1996.
- Will W. Perfect Wrong Note: Learning to Trust Your Musical Self. Amadeus, 2006.
- Winograd T, Flores F. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Morgan-Kaufmann, 1987.
Carnegie Mellon Univ tutorial on Heidegger
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