Thinking Together: An E-Mail Exchange and All That Jazz

by Howard S. Becker, Robert R. Faulkner, Dianne Hagaman (Editor)

Faulkner and Becker, sociologists and experienced musicians, wrote a book about their musical experiences—Do You Know? The Jazz Repertoire in Action—describing how musicians who didn’t know each other could perform competently and interestingly without rehearsing, or playing from written music. When they wrote it, they lived at opposite ends of the country: Faulkner in Massachusetts, Becker in San Francisco. Instead of sitting around talking about their ideas, they wrote e-mails. So every step of their thinking, false steps as well as ideas that worked, existed in written form.

When conceptual artist and poet Franck Leibovici asked them to contribute something that showed the “form of life” that supported their work, they collaborated with Dianne Hagaman to put the correspondence in order, which Liebovici exhibited and now appears as an e-book (which allows linking to available performances of the tunes they discussed).

It’s one of the most revealing records of a scientific collaboration ever made public, and an intimate picture of the creative process.

Collective creativity—making sparks of originality produce something more than a glint in someone’s eye—intrigues sociologists, people who study communication and theorists of business organization. The collective part of that process, turning an idea into a finished product, is even more complicated, and Thinking Together readers can watch the authors go through all the complications of working together to make the final result happen.

Becker played piano in Chicago and Kansas City and taught sociology at Northwestern University. Among his books are Art Worlds and Writing for Social Scientists.

Faulkner played trumpet in Los Angeles, got a PhD in sociology from UCLA, then taught at the University of Rochester and the University of Massachusetts (playing professionally in those places too). He is author of two books about the movie business, Hollywood Studio Musicians and Music on Demand: Composers and Careers in the Hollywood Film Industry.

490 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2013

About the author

Howard Saul Becker was an American sociologist who taught at Northwestern University.

Reviews

[Yisu Z. · Rating 3 out of 5]

昨天读的Do you know?的「背景材料」，事实上是Becker 和Faulkner两位互通的邮件，记录了他们构思那本书的过程。评且有点评各种音乐际遇的小故事（我觉得故事更有趣）。这本书提醒了我们，正典在爵士乐（以及广义上的社会科学）内的重要性：正典是乐手们互相交流的基础。即兴演出往往从互相熟识的曲目开始；正典也构成了人际互动的象征符号（「啥，你连这首调子都没听过？你行不行？」）。只不过和社会学的三巨头不同，爵士正典包含大约几百首曲子，而且随着整个音乐行业组织结构（比方说听音乐的方式，比方说流行的肇因）变化，这个曲库也在不断发生变化。这本没有实体书，只有电子版。有意思的是还特地整理了二人所讨论的各首曲目（都有油管链接）。学术性不太强，喜欢听音乐故事或者对艺术进行些抽象思考的推荐读一下。