Guitar Zero

The New Musician and the Science of Learning

Gary Marcus

 Penguin Press, 2012  

This thoroughly interesting and rather amusing book doesn't properly have anything to do with free improvisation. Actually, the "New Musician" in the subtitle doesn't have anything to do with "New Music" either, in the sense of the sonic avant-garde.  However, "Guitar Zero" does concern the beginning musician, which at least philosophically certainly has much to do with improvising.  

Here's the deal: a well-known cognitive  psychologist and music afficianado/consumer who possesses what he considers to be absolutely no musical talent decides at age 39 to become a guitar player.   

  In fact, based on the informal diagnosis of a professional colleague  (who actually is a music player) he flatly declares himself at the beginning of his story to  suffer from "congenital arrhythmia;" or in layman's terms: he possesses "no sense of rhythm whatsoever."  

We're talking less than no chops here.  Pretty much complete lack of musical understanding or awareness of how music is put together, or any notion of listening inside the music to discern its components beyond the lyrics (which is how most people identify their favorite music anyway).  This is also combined with the classic butter-fingered absence of strength and digital dexterity of the non-player.  

No 'audiation,' which he defines as "Edwin Gordon's term for imaging and comprehending music."  (Incidentally, this definition is from his 'Glossary' of musical and neurological terms at the end of the book, in which you will find "rhythm" immediately preceding "right prefrontal cortex.")

His first effort at making music begins as he starts "playing" music on video games (the book's title is a reference to the "Guitar Hero" game).  Soon enough he realizes that pushing buttons on an ersatz guitar is not a true music-making endeavor.  Then he goes on sabbatical from his teaching gig, when he undertakes an extended "crash-course" in playing an actual guitar, although he quickly realizes that this crash course has immediately become a life-long endeavor. 

The book's main narrative lies in chronicling his first year or so of actually attempting to play guitar; and moreover in using his immense knowledge of cognition in experiential learning to address some key questions around the nature of becoming a musician, and of the origins of music as a language form in humans.

So, what does happen when the adult with 'no musical ability' takes  up playing?   Furthermore (and this is most germaine to the book): what's going on inside  our brains with music perception and production in the first place?

It's important to recall in this context that Gary Marcus is a cognitive psychologist, which means that his first area of expertise is the study of how we learn, or more pertinantly here, how the areas of our brains involved in musical comprehension and production interact and change as a result of playing music.   

As he explains, there is no single area of the brain responsible for music; in fact our musical abilities are a conglomerate from numerous areas, none of which is  exclusively devoted to music making per se.  "Instead, virtually everything that plays a role in music has a separate "day job." When the brain listens to music, it moonlights in a second career for which it did not originally evolve."

OK then, here's someone whose profession is understanding (even at the neurological level) how the brain works, and especially how it acquires skills. What  then does he observe about the process of starting with pretty much zip relationship  with the instrument?  

It's at this point that things get a bit complicated in the mechanics of the learning process; and this brings up numerous issues.  

For example, take "talent."  Are we somehow just born with musical  inclination as hereditary (genetic) traits?  Or is it simply a matter of practice and/or instruction?  Is it environmental, as in coming from a musical family?  Or is talent a matter of a single-source element at all?  

Underlying this start-up musician's tale is Marcus' highly-regarded work in his primary field, which is defined as "the study of how people perceive, remember, think, speak and solve problems."  (This definition, by the way, is not from this book's 'Glossary'; it's from Wikipedia, which also states that cognitive psychology generally "rejects introspection as a valid method of investigation.")  

Especially with regard to actual "New Music," and certainly vis-a-vis free improvisation, his music preferences in general seems most apparent by his orientation towards populist trends as the most reliable barometer of achievement in musical development.  

When he declares that "nothing sounds good if it is not fluid and regular,"  this is part of an overarching notion that "good" music consists of two crucial elements: "familiarity and novelty."  Confidentially though, this whole "good music" notion  suggests a questionable rigidity of music appreciation, especially in light of the sonic languages of modern composing, let alone free improvising. 

There is an underlying sense here of music as requiring consonance; so he declines to seriously address in any way  "out" music; i.e. musics that are deliberately or incidentally insurgent by nature, occurring outside of complete conscious design, which are dissonant, atonal, indeterminate or which otherwise do not behave or occur in a context along the lines of a couple of his other requisites, "fluid and regular."

It makes little difference that he passingly references dissonance via Edgard Varese, John Cage or Arnold Schoenberg ("...whose experiments were noble but unsuccessful..."). It seems clear that his approach to playing is decidedly "left-brain dominant," as the old saying used to go. At any rate he does not seem interested in what might anecdotally be called 'holistic' listening, at least not as an area of great focus.  

The closest he gets to improvising is describing "a wondrous state" which the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced 'chick-SENT-me-high-ee) has called 'flow.'....a merging of action and awareness...characterized by a sense of concentration on the task at hand and a sense of control, a loss of self-consiousness, and an altered sense of time."

I can't speak for Chick-sent-me-high-ee, but that sounds like improvisation to me.  Except that in his own practice, Mr. Marcus is talking about a fairly restricted sound pallet, and an underlying limitation in the method of music making which he is examining.

In fact, although this detail remains irrelevant to the essential characteristic of "flow," he finds this "state of joyful immersion, wherein one loses all sense of time passing" while he's jamming with a group of 12 year old rockers at a hilariously-described "Day Jam" summer rock band camp.   

Musical tastes aside, it is true that on the neurological levels any sort of practiced music making works with many related parts of the brain.  As he explains, there is no single area of our noggin solely responsible for music; in fact our musical abilities occur in widespread conglomerate of numerous areas, none of which are exclusively devoted to music making per se.  "Instead, virtually everything that plays a role in music has a separate "day job." When the brain listens to music, it moonlights in a second career for which it did not originally evolve."

This makes one wonder, though, if there may be certain other circuits that light up when the player is using "automatic" methods, whereby 'the music' as an aesthetic object appears as a by-product of a process not necessarily intended to produce a given product at all.  

This is why it would be all the more interesting if he were to look into the synaptic action when "familiarity" is beside the point, and "novelty" becomes an huge understatement. 

Having said that, "Guitar Zero" is an thoroughly encompassing, intriguing and enlightening read.  Aesthetic and philosophical issues aside, there is much crucial insight to be gleaned from these pages about how the musician's mind evolved and works in the course of playing music as a unique type of learning experience.

Even if he's working with a somewhat superficial aesthetic,  Marcus is reaching deep here.  This book presents a concise and possibly unprecedented take on the beginner's mind, and is quite charmingly written with fine storyteller's chops; and therefore "Guitar Zero" definitely qualifies as recommended reading.  

                                                                   -DJW