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Date:         Sat, 26 Sep 1992 20:59:00 EST
              <AUTISM@SJUVM.BITNET>
From:         Speed Bump <DNWIEBE@OWUCOMCN.BITNET>
Subject:      Re: Poetry

Carolyn writes:
>After four weeks of handing in papers with answers like "How do I know
>what the poet was thinking of? I'm sure he wrote it for me to 'feel' not
>pull it apart to work out its meaning!"; "I like this poem it gave me
>good feelings."; or "I don't like this poem it depresses me.", the
>English Master finally gave up and told me that if I wasn't going to do
>the assignments properly then I shouldn't do them at all... so I didn't.

        I feel something like this about poetry (and art, and sculpture,
and dance, and literature, and so on).  None of it has ever made sense to
me, except in a technical or humorous sort of way.  For example, I enjoy
the poetry of Steven Sondheim because I'm impressed by the way he can
write pages and pages of perfectly rhythmic verse, with exactly the right
number of syllables in each line (it seems he's never forced to "cheat"),
and fix it so that it rhymes in a rigid pattern.  I also like Ogden Nash's
poetry, lots of it, because it's funny, and I understand that.  But poetry
that doesn't rhyme and has no rhythmic form is mostly lost on me.  As
Wendy seemed to say, it acts like it's trying to create an amorphous shell
of feeling with no definitive underpinnings, and that doesn't work for me.
(Wendy!  You work in a library at Syracuse--do you know Keith Gatling?)
I don't generally feel any way unless I know, or can determine, why I feel
that way.  I can appreciate factual articles, that give me information about
a particular subject and leave me to form my own opinions, or even articles
that present the opinions along with the reasons for them (even if I don't
agree with the opinions), but it doesn't work to try to make me feel a
certain way, or form in me a certain opinion, without giving me any reasons
for it.
        The rest of the fine arts are much the same way.  I can appreciate
an intricately carved statue, or difficult and well-executed ballet moves,
or a photorealistic painting, all for their technical excellence, but stuff
like impressionism and interpretive dance is completely lost on me.
        The one possible exception to this is music.  This may be because I'm
a musician, and not a dancer or a sculptor or a poet, but sometimes when I'm
playing a song I know well, and there's a clear channel of musical
communication between me and the rest of the group, I can sort of close my
eyes and let my fingers fly autonomously over the fretboard, and they come
up with some really interesting and appropriate stuff for me.  Also sometimes
as we're playing a kind of window sort of opens and then closes, and during
the time that it's open, I can see exactly what should go in it, although
I can't explain the reasoning behind the "should."  Sometimes I see what
should happen a few milliseconds before it arrives, so I can be ready for
it and stick it in as it goes by, but sometimes I see it only in real
time, or maybe a hair late, so I have to stop the group and back them up
and have another go at it.
        Sometimes when I'm arranging, especially a vocal harmony, I'll come
up with a harmonization that perfectly follows the Common Practice rules and
sounds great from a theoretical point of view, but at one point or another it
just doesn't sound like it "should," and I have to go in and reharmonize or
at least revoice that part, which frequently means also reharmonizing or
revoicing a considerable stretch before and after the part in question, to
make sure it's gotten into and out of in the right way.
        Musical communication--maybe I should explain that.  We don't play
from sheet music; we play from lead sheets, which generally have the lyrics
of the songs written out with chord names above them.  Usually they're
handwritten.  The words are well-defined, and the harmonic structure is
well-defined, and the rhythmic structure is well-defined once you know how
the song goes, but what happens within those structures is not at all well-
defined by the lead sheets, and tends to be slightly different each time we
play.  Musical communication requires, first of all, an understanding of
what I call musical "niches."  For example, if the music is approaching a
climax, and the clarinetist is doing a complicated rising malisma, the
guitarist is doing short, clipped-off, "chuk" strums in small machine-gun
groups, and the drummer is in the middle of a long tension-building tom
fill, then there's a niche for the bass to provide a strong, driving,
rhythmic but simple support at the bottom, so that when you finally hit
that climactic tonic chord, with an explosive cymbal crash from the drums,
an authoritative strum "package" from the guitar, a strong root from the
vocalist, a high wailing trill on the third of the chord from the clarinet,
and a solid bone-shaking statement from the bass, the people listening are
right with you, singing at the top of their lungs with their eyes bugged out
and sweat running down their faces.  Or, on the other end, if a song or
phrase is ending gently and quietly, with a drawn-out harmony between the
vocalist and the clarinetist, a softening cymbal roll from the drums, and a
gently picked chord from the guitar, there's room for a quick midrange
flourish from the bass with a slide at the end either up or down to the chord
root.
        Musical communication involves knowing exactly what each person in
the group is playing, being aware of the musical niche everybody's filling,
and knowing the people and how they're feeling at the moment well enough to
be able to predict which niche they're going to go to next (even if it's
not predictable exactly how they're going to fill those niches), so that you
can choose your own niche without colliding with anybody or leaving any
niches obtrusively empty.  (Obviously, with four instrumentalists you can't
fill every possible niche, but there are some niches that, when filled,
demand that another related niche or set of niches somewhere be filled also,
and if you know nobody's going to fill those niches, you pick another niche
that works either by itself or in concert with the niches others are filling.)
Also, sometimes a member or members of the group will see a way to fill the
upcoming musical situation with a new pattern of niches, one that's never
been used before, and if communication is good, that member or those members
can musically throw out a prediction to the others of where he or they are
going to go next, and thereby suggest places for the rest of the group.
        I know looking at things this way isn't an exclusively autistic
feature, because the other people in my group aren't autistic, and we all
look at it this way.  But I've never heard anybody else describe the situation
this way before, so I'm kind of curious about how other people involved in
the arts, artistic or not, see their involvement, particularly when partial
improvisation is appropriate--you have to do something original within a
specified framework, like we do with lead sheets.

Shalom,
Dan
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