Of course! I think it happens in different ways, depending on the group. I.e., the connection between members of a chorus are different that the connections between members of a marching band, which are different from the connections in a jazz ensemble.
I do a lot of thinking about this, because I have a good deal of experience with it. What I talk about below is my theory about what is going on. I am not telling you what is happening, even though I say “you” all the time. That’s just my way of thinking. It’s really my experience and my thinking about it and my theories about what is going on.
When you are all doing your part, and it meshes perfectly, something happens—like a door opening inside your spirit—and you become aware that you are not separate from everyone else. You feel everyone in the ensemble in, well, it’s hard to describe because it doesn’t happen in our linguistic brains.
It happens in a part of our brain that doesn’t “speak” words and doesn’t have words. It’s a part of our brain that experiences the world directly, without any mediation by symbols. We are no longer telling each other our experience, we are experiencing the communication of that experience directly. The music facilitates that, but it doesn’t have to be music. Dance can do the same thing.
So, when directly communicating our experience to others, we become like one. We become aware of everyone (although we aren’t aware that we are aware, exactly). This unaware awareness allows us to tune together and match each other, and then everything clicks into place and it feels like you are everywhere. And nowhere.
Very few people can maintain both this kind of experience and the symbolic experience at the same time. So we often don’t even remember very much about what happened. We know in a vague way that something important happened. We can say we experienced this connection, but we don’t know why or how; only that we want more of it.
I do improvisational music. There’s no score and no sheet music of any kind. No chordal structure that has been agreed on in advance. For this to work, everyone has to listen very carefully to everyone else. There’s a lot to pay attention to. It’s not just rhythm and chords and melody. It’s also a feel, an emotion, and a direction.
When it works well—when everyone is on exactly the same page; it’s as if there is a score, and we’re all reading it together and playing it and everything fits just right. At this moment, it feels like I’m no longer just me, but I’m everyone in the group. We are all thinking together. We all know what everyone else is going to do and it is so tight it’s like being safely buckled into your seat. You can’t move without all of you moving together.
I think that what enables this to happen is our experience with music and our skill with listening and our willingness to give ourselves up to the whole. If you’ve listened to a lot of music, it’s like reading a lot of books or seeing a lot of movies: there are only so many plots. So when we feel like we are moving together it is because we have recognized the plot we are playing and we are following it.
We also know each other. We know each other’s favorite riffs and favorite motifs, and so we give each other the space to shine when it is that time. We trust each other. This allows us to lose ourselves in the music. We no longer have to think and plan and we don’t worry about whether we fit in. We just do it.
I close my eyes and I enter into an interior visual space where I see lights moving, and I have the impression there are colors, although I don’t remember seeing them. Sometimes the different parts of the music appear like building blocks and I rearrange them to fit whatever needs fitting at the time. I can see impulses coming like a bullet train from far away and I can jump that train at the same time everyone else does.
I could go on and on about this. Each thought leads to another, but I’ve gone on a length already, and as @yankeetooter said, I should probably give others a chance to answer.
Composing members:
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Composing members:
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