We all know, let’s say, Miss Mcleod’s reel or whatever but every single person plays it differently so what is it that is the tune if you have ten thousand musicians who all have their own version of it. So can we kind of layer all those versions on top of each other, like abstractly in our minds, imagine you’ve got this layer of ten thousand ways of playing the tune.
But then each time each of those musicians plays the tune, it’s slightly different so you’ve got many more multiples of it.
Then you’ve got like all the people who ever played that tune in the past and how they ever played it but also how they ever could have played it.
And all the people in the future who will learn it in the future and all the ways they will play it throughout their lifetimes.
And then, you know, all the ways it could be played.
And so you’ve got this very interesting kind of stack of possibilities. And imagine if you were a computer navigating how do I play this tune and how do I make my decisions in the moment, what note am I going to play next for how long, at what volume, at what precise pitch and all the other kind of choices that are open to us as musicians.
How do we, as musicians, collapse those possibilities into the reality of the tune in that particular instance? And it seemed to me that … quite similar to the idea of the Schrödinger’s cat that …, like the tune is actually an underlying logic. It’s the super-imposition of all this possible ways of playing it and yet, somehow they’re all coherent, there’s some king of logic running through the whole lot.
That’s fine as a theory but how do you use it then as a practical kind of … say, ok, I actually want to act on that realization. So you’ve learnt the tune, a tune you know well and you think I know the notes of that tune but actually if you go off and you find all the recordings anyone has ever made of that tune and you try and internalize those in your bones, every single one and … And can you play all those versions? If you can hold in your head, let’s say five different versions simultaneously, five options at every point of that tune, can you roll a dice in your own mind? I’m on the fifth note of the tune, I’m going to roll a dice and choose what happens next - and continue to do that and continue to feed in more richness into it? You get to a point then where you’ve got an embarrassment of riches in terms of choice at every point of a tune and I suppose that’s where it becomes interesting. I think you reach a very similar place with what we were talking about earlier, playing a tune over and over and over until you’ve done all the clever things you can think of and your brain starts kind of exploring the possibilities that you can’t think of. Which is kind of the interesting point.
Taken from an interview with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh on the Blarney Pilgrims podcast