The Work of Playing (Marching For the Mind)
I am always amazed at drummers that keep both good time and play melodically. This relies on everyone meshing rhythmically. Most audiences tend to focus on the singer and are hypersensitive to pitch accuracy, but in bands where there is a kit drummer and/or percussionist, it is the architecture for the music--yet those players are mostly invisible. (In the early days of rock 'n' roll, the drummer and bassist could even hide on stage). People aren't concerned with the cleverness of the construction engineering, but it has to support the decoration. From the perspective of an "invisible" player, I sometimes focus almost exclusively on the cleverness of the construction engineering. It has been known to be a "guy" thing as much as they guys did those invisible things.
Each instrument has its challenges. When you analyze it at the micro-level, the main challenge is the latency between interpreting time mentally and the responsiveness of the limbs to the instrument (or vice-versa). For drummers, it's the stick and the head of the drum. With string players (plucking) it is the timing of the strings being stopped on the fingerboard. When you think about it in this way, in a band of four players there are four simultaneous rhythmic latency challenges. Programmed electronic music such as EDM is a top-level solution because it quantizes everything. If you have a button to push perhaps once a bar, or even less, you could program that as well. This has been the case since the advent of drum machines and MIDI sequencers, and since that point, we have adapted to a baseline of convenience. Music has become more reliant on appliances, not instruments as we once knew them. But for most of music history, people assumed music wasn't about convenience at all. Music couldn't be lazy.
A pervasive feeling has emerged that doing the work of playing is not worth doing because of all of the frustrating rhythmic latency issues inherent in manually playing traditional instruments--although network latency has made it an issue again in a new way that is unrelated to music. I have embraced the idea that the studio (and now laptops and smartphones) are instruments in themselves, but technological advances away from analog to digital have commingled all tasks into those devices. Playing rhythms is a task (work) but the task has become more about latency settings in software and natural network latency. (In the 1980s "the network is down" was a daily announcement). These continuous digital interruptions are anathema to real work that has any rhythmic groove. Of course any system, whether it be analog, digital, or natural, has to deal with delays--but delays are more frustrating when they are hidden and silent inside complex digital webs.
But look at this video of the Pretenders' Thumbelina. The drummer is playing a simple galloping shuffle without dropping any beats in an almost machinic groove, and the whole band is supported by the work he's doing. I realized it's one of the reasons I have always gravitated towards writing--a different kind of work that requires "reps", but since I always do a demo of my own songs, I still have to navigate the latencies inherent in tools (and appliances) I'm using, and is in some ways a more mentally fatiguing form of work.
Manually playing traditional musical instruments is a form of temporary "marching for the mind" as it focuses on a rhythmic activity that involves both body and mind in focused areas of the brain. It frees the brain from too much rumination, even at the compositional level.
Hermann Rauschning, who at first thought this eternal marching a senseless waste of time and energy, recognized later its subtle effect. “Marching diverts men’s thoughts. Marching kills thought. Marching makes an end of individuality.” (Hermann Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism, 1939, p. 48).
Ironically, this marching can also be done mentally. I like Jaco Pastorius' comment circa 1985 on mental practicing and why we need to play actual instruments to keep the brain rhythmically mapped. "If you have bad time, forget it."
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