ABSTRACT
An auto-ethnography of bitz playing an instrument By means of an auto-ethnography of viola playing, I investigate how, even in solitary music-making, bitz experiences have sociocultural implications. During my sessions of practising and playing the viola, I began by detecting musical passages and works that I am particularly fond of playing, to the point of getting almost addicted to them, losing track of time and getting fully absorbed in the task, an important indicator of ‘flow’ (Csikszentmihályi 1996: 111-113). For me, these musical passages are significant as ‘relevant units of affect’ (DeNora 2000: 61-62) to which I feel especially ‘attached’ (Gomart and Hennion 1999; Hennion 2001, 2004) in my passion for music and affective relationship with my instrument. Mapping out this musical repertoire was a way of pre-selecting pieces whose performance was more prone to produce richer data: on the one hand, I would be more likely to experience bitz when playing them; on the other, due to their affective significance, those pieces would afford a deeper relationship with the instrument’s material and sonic properties. The selected works are pieces that I know well (the playing techniques and bodily actions upon the instrument necessary to play the notes from the score are automatized and the sonic image is clear in my mind), thus fulfilling one important criteria for ‘flow’ to take place: the
matching of my skills to the challenge posed by the task carried out with intense concentration (Csikszentmihályi 1990, 1996). After this pre-selection of repertoire, empirical observation was carried out. This chapter focuses on a short passage from Benda’s Grave, one of my selected music pieces. The aims of this study are double, both theory-led and practice-led. Viola playing is used as a case study to shed light on sociocultural implications of bitz in the emergence of musical instruments’, and music performance, aesthetics, by investigating what, in music materials and in an instrument, affords or ‘pushes’ me into the zone and, conversely, what things bitz states afford exploring in my viola and in musical performance. There is simultaneously a practice-led, applied aspect, as one of the objectives is to learn about the potential usefulness of bitz as a tool for the exploration of the affordances of the instrument and the music, while keeping in mind how it may facilitate the acquisition of skills and the development of musicality (O’Neill 1999); more generally, I wish to think how bitz may be empowering for musicians as a source of socio-aesthetic agency that contributes to the construction of musical performance, aesthetics and identities. These auto-ethnographic notes of viola playing contribute to make explicit the often unverbalized, embodied tacit knowledge involved in instrumental playing (Becker and Faulkner n.d.; Polanyi 1967). More than just observing naturally occurring, spontaneous bitz experiences, however, I intentionally attempted to get into the zone, analysing empirically what was going on while keeping in mind the usefulness of bitz as a tool for music performance and its role in the emergence and active construction of a musical instrument’s aesthetics. As such, this research intertwines practice and theory and develops a performative mode of research, resonating with current trends of performanceas-research, artistic research or practice-based research in music (e.g. DoğantanDack 2015; Harrison 2014). Understanding bitz as a necessarily subjective, phenomenological experience (Merleau-Ponty 1962; Schutz 1967), I used a diary to note down impressions and interpretations of my being in the zone experiences (see Sudnow’s phenomenology of jazz piano performance, 1978; Smith, Flower and Larkin 2009), considering the role of the materialities of body, instrument and music. I have written my feelings, thoughts, actions and events involving me, the music and instrument, both during performance events (taking brief pauses from playing to write) and soon afterwards, as a raw stream of consciousness, or as more structured proto-analysis. This was followed by a more detached, reflective and analytical phase and by writing, which – despite following closely the notes in my diary – necessarily added a narrative dimension to my experiences, as a way of making sense of what happened in a more organized and analytical way, able to be explained and communicated to others.
