Simon Zagorski-Thomas says:

Hi both – Matthew – can you email Jo and let her know I’ve put some comments and questions on the website as I’ve made you the contact author.

I’ve been watching the video again and thinking about some of the bigger picture ideas that emerged. When I first watched it I was very taken by the physical, gestural, in the moment aspects that you discussed – Jo wanting to “lose myself”…”so I don’t know what I’m doing” and Matt talking about the “happy accident” of accidentally placing a finger shape on the wrong strings. And I would say that the different ways that people have discussed that in different videos is evidence that it’s an important factor. So I’ve tried to think through some of the issues relating to the familiar / expected versus the unfamiliar / surprising and about the thinking / not thinking. I have four things that I’ll try to turn into questions rather than just comments:
1. “Limitation creates form” – Leah Kardos is one of the C21MP Research Fellows who is working on one of our Open Research Projects (ORP) called ‘Deliberate Unfamiliarity’ (link below) under the wider Limitation As A Creative Methodology ORP. So far she’s outlined the project and is currently working on it but in her Rationale publication she points to “Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the habitual body, the site of pre-reflective, ingrained bodily knowledge, and the actual body, which must negotiate unfamiliar conditions consciously” and I’ve written about that as the difference between inductive thinking (learned from repetition) and deductive thinking (making hypothetical connections between aspects of that learned knowledge). One thing that struck me was how clearly that was demonstrated in the ‘show and tell’ form of your video – the common language or music as conversation that Matthew talks about at the end of the video. But that probably wouldn’t have been as clear without some form of verbal explanation. I’m interested in the different, more visceral understanding of the issue we get from ‘show and tell’ rather than, for instance, Merlau-Ponty’s book. How do you think that kind of non-verbal understanding is different and, learning from this experience, how do you think it can / should be presented as research? I’m thinking of Matthew saying Jo was ‘brave’ for showing mistakes but I’m not sure how different (if at all) it felt to see Jo’s documentation versus Matthew’s re-enactment? What do you think in retrospect?
2. “Co-creating with your instrument” – Another Research Fellow working on an ORP is Mark Duby who is still preparing the initial ideas that he will present on our relationaship with our tools (primarily our instruments). In Actor Network Theory, a tool like a musical instrument is considered to be an ‘actor’ because it embodies the agency of all those whose thoughts and actions led to its design and making. This is like Alfred Gell’s idea of retentions and protentions in art: that an artwork is different at any point in its history because of what we know about what it has been, what it is in the moment, and how we might imagine it’s future. Making the guitar more like a ukelele through tuning changed your relationship with it as well as what it was. How do you think that might be explored through practice research?
3. Ingold and reverse reading – this will sort of blur into the last point as well but for the moment I want to relate it to another research Fellow’s ORP: Mine Doğantan-Dack’s Identifying Experiential Content in Artistic Research (see link below). Mine and I have been running another research challenge which will soon be complete, exploring how doctoral researchers and ECRs are exploring the ‘problem’ of mistaking “the understanding for the living” as you quoted from Bergson. How can we both experience and document performance without Ingold’s “abduction of agency”. The vast majority of ideas seem to be based around different versions of ‘stimulated recall’ – the Proustian idea of re-living by re-experiencing some small feature of the original moment: the musical equivalent of the taste of the madeleine cake. Did this process give you any ideas about that?
4. Going back to “Mistake the understanding for the living” – Henri Bergson – I’m not familiar with his writing but I did a little background reading I’m interested in the idea of intuition as the key method for metaphysics. I’m interested because it made me think about the fact that both of you were clearly using ‘go to’ conscious techniques as well as the jamming / live experimentation / happy accident techniques that would probably fall under the definition of intuition – conscious techniques like Jo’s Asyndeton, lyric translation technique, and word set, and Matthew’s left-handed upside-down ukelele, cross-model (academic to song-writing) cross-fertilisation etc. Maybe, I’m wrong, but I got the sense that you see these more as tricks to make the ‘real’ intuitive creativity happen rather than as being the focal point of the creativity. Is that fair? In any case, I wonder if you have a different personal relationship with these two different types of creative practice and whether you can explain it at all?

Deliberate Unfamiliarity – https://www.c21mp.org/front-page/research-projects/creative-strategies-for-musical-practice/limitation-as-a-creative-methodology/deliberate-unfamiliarity/
Identifying Experiential Content in Artistic Research – https://www.c21mp.org/front-page/research-projects/practice-based-phd-methods/identifying-experiential-content-in-artistic-research-in-music/