What I think about all the blah blah around the evolution of Storytelling

I see you have been busy 🙂 and from what I understand I’ll wait for your next move. Thanks for the tweets too.
Regards,

This is a very long answer, take your time.

I thank you for engaging in conversation and taking the time to research, read, think and process. Reaching core issues in storytelling requires being very specific, otherwise we use generalizations that take us away from understanding and I’ve seen enough of those, not only in storytelling. So thanks again.

Yes, storytelling lives and it’s beautiful. No one can actually stop its existence. We need it like air, warmth, shelter, contact, food. Even in the most oppressed societies, storytelling goes on in secrecy, a small flame but its there.

Thanks for presenting your points of reference, your background, it is important and I would not call it prejudices. Driving me nuts with questions? That’s usually my part according to my students. No, you’re not, on the contrary.

Answering your first question and I’m repeating my suggestion for the definition of storytelling:

“Mediate ideas articulated in words to or with other people. Storytellers work with thought and relationship. The same process happens in literature, poetry, and theater. It is the need to successfully mediate the verbal and kinesthetic narratives to other people orally, in time, while adapting to a specific telling, that demands the use of a third narrative. That is the vocal, the narrative of patterned movement.”

I perceive both music and storytelling as sculpturing in time. Music does not use words and after checking this out, words cannot be translated into a definition in music syntax. A single note does not frame an idea. So here we have discernment, although music, already with a single note, does create a sensory experience for the body (kinesthetic).

A line of notes – beginning with two, is already a relationship and a thought but that thought is not expressed in the music itself as an idea. If you engage rhythm, patterned movements joins in. We have a need for that patterned movement, its part of our wiring and even when it is absent from the actual sounds we create it.

I say music and storytelling are close because of the inner patterned movement created by our response to sound, whether the pattern is there or not. Why do we hear “tic tock” when the clock actually makes the same sound on all ticks? We search order and order is in patterns. We like to break them too but we need to know order exists so we can feel safe to fly high. Storytellers in a way master the use of time through patterns and they express this “sculpturing” with their use of the vocal narrative.

Literature and theatre created other safety nets. They materialize in a more concrete way. They too use patterns but not with such intensity as music and storytelling. You can leave a book in the middle; you can’t leave storytelling in the middle because when you come back the event will be already in another place. Theater is closer but still it is not as dependant on the ongoing relationship between story, teller and listener in its creation.

Reading poetry is very close according to the above understandings. Although the text is physically present (a book) the event is still very dependent on what is actually happening in real-time and patterned movement is one of its building blocks.

I don’t know if this is enough to answer your question and if it is not just tell me so.

Beginning to answer your second question I’m citing from a written document I’ve created some years ago so my ‘voice’ might sound more formal. This has to do mainly with the vocal and patterned movement. Verbal we will talk about later on, I feel this order is right:

Melody – musical line

Once there was a fiddler who played with a sweetness that got all his listeners dancing, and whoever heard the sound was drawn to dance. A deaf man came who knew nothing of playing, and what he saw seemed to him like a fit of madmen, with no source and intention.
The Ba’al-Shem-Tov

Melody has been called “The soul of Music”. If you catch your self whistling a song or any other composition, it would usually be the melody you are whistling. A good melody has its power to move us, although we cannot always tell why. It is the thread, the line or curve upon which hangs the work, whether music or tale. A performing musician can tell you that playing the melody to it’s right quality might be the most difficult thing to do. It is also an ability musicians “musicality” is tested by. Even non-musicians say, “I can’t carry a tune”.

A melody is a sequence of single tones we perceive as a unity. That means we get the impression there is some kind of conscious arrangement, a significant relationship among the separate tones. We get the sense of a beginning, middle, and an end. In telling a story, the audience perceives the meaning of each single word, they know the meaning, but when the words are arranged in a sentence, they perceive them in relation to the thought as a whole. In music, single notes create an impression, an experience, but if put into a succession, we don’t perceive them separately but in relation to each other within a pattern.

A melody works in two dimensions: It moves up and down, tones being higher or lower, and forward in time, tones claiming our attention one after another and for different durations. Melody has some more qualities: It can leap or move stepwise, it can have a narrow or wide range (range being the distance from its highest to lowest tone), it can be loud or soft, fast or slow, it can create different atmospheres. Summing up all the melody’s qualities I can say that its character is determined by its overall pattern of movement.

Let’s examine a well-known tune:
Bah-bah black sheep, have you any wool?
Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!

This melody is divided into two halves. Each half ends with a resting place, which is known as a cadence. Don’t let the word “resting” mislead you. It does not mean an energy shutdown. It is a punctuation of the music flow, and many interesting things can happen there. It is a place of momentary discharge, that lets you charge up for what is about to proceed, and when performed, should not give the feeling of cutting off the movement of the melody, even if it is the final tone. Inconclusive types of cadences give the feeling of a comma, while full cadences give the feeling of a full stop.

Both parts of the melody examined here are combined in a “question-and-answer” formation: the second part emerges from the first part and completes its meaning. The listener comprehends the full melodic phrase only after it has been performed. This quality of organic unity is necessary in time-based information delivery.

Repeating ideas in both parts of the melody unifies the structure. In this case – the same tone repeating its self. Interest is created trough contrast – moving in opposite directions and the little coil at the end of the first part. This combination of unity and variety is basic to music and story architecture. Without unity there is chaos, and boredom takes over where there is no variety.

I would like to illuminate three more characteristics of the melody: The central tone, melodic rhythm, and the melodic climax.

The central tone is that one tone in a melody all the others are pulling towards in different forms of relationship. A central tone is evident in all musical traditions, but its power is determined in different ways. What is important to emphasize here is the understanding that melodies don’t “take a walk” just like that. These orbits the different tones of the melody take in relation with the central tone, and the fulfillment of those relationships is what gives the feeling of reaching a goal.

Rhythmic pattern is what moves the melody forward in time. Its what keeps the melody alive. Try and sing a melody you know, but keep all the tones in equal duration. The melody looses life, and it does not give in to clear phrasing.

The melodic climax strikes the listener as the peak of intensity. It gives direction and intention. It creates the impression of crisis met and overcome. Above all, the melody has to be interesting.

Melody is the direct bearer of meaning from composer to listener. The music performer carries the essential task of delivering that meaning and creating the bridge between the composer’s intention to the listener’s perception. If the character of a melody is determined by its overall pattern of movement, movement is the main element a performing musician has to explore, in order to carry out his task well.

Rhythm – musical time

“In the beginning was rhythm.” Hans von Bülow

Rhythm is called “the heartbeat of Music”. In Greek, the word rhythm means “flow”, and refers to the controlled movement of music in time. The rhythm of a musical passage is determined by the duration of the different tones, their frequency of appearance, and the regularity or irregularity with which they are sounded.

Rhythm is the element of music most closely connected to body movement. It is what makes people fall in step when listening to a band play. It is what makes us nod, or tap, or dance in our chairs or on the table. Even if we can’t move a muscle, the rhythm of music can still make our inner parts move. It grabs us by the gut. Its simpler patterns, if repeated over and over again, cause a hypnotic effect. We feel in ourselves a kind of ideal motion. Rhythm makes us feel the pulse of life.

One of the most common remarks I’ve heard as response to good storytelling performances is “Oh, She’s got rhythm!”. I feel this is a description for that live and electrifying quality some performers have, and it doesn’t necessarily mean high speed. It’s more of what I interpret as the listener recognizing the ability of the performer to get all the different events happening during the performance into a relationship that flows as a live stream of water. This gives a feeling of vitality and order, of relating, and recharges all who are present. In it’s larger sense, rhythm controls all the relationships within a composition and in a whole performance. This quality is many times referred to as timing.

Where does rhythm come from?

Rhythm springs from the need for order inherited in our minds. We have the deep need to impose patterns. If we listen to the ticking of a clock, to the clacking of train wheels, to any mechanically produced sound, we automatically impose a pattern on those sounds. We hear them as a regular pulsation of strong and weak beats. We organize our perception of time by means of rhythm. Because if we didn’t, we would feel in the hands of a merciless caprice destiny, and that is too frightening. So we created our own ideal universe. That universe is Art, and rhythm is it’s controlling element. That makes us feel safer.

Time organizing in music

Musical time is usually organized in terms of a basic unit of length. This unit is called a beat. The beat is what we clap our hands or tap our feet to when we listen to music. If you attend a concert of music amateurs, notice many of them tap their feet while playing. That is something a professional musician will never do, for he already has the beat inside him, and tapping can interfere the free flow needed for playing melodies. It also cancels the conductor’s beat, or the pulsation of his fellow players in an ensemble.

In most of the music we hear some beats are more accented than others. These stronger beats usually occur at regular intervals – every other beat, every third beat, every forth, and so on. This causes us to perceive the beats in groups – two, three, four etc. Each group is called a measure. In general, the most accented beat in a measure is the first one, and it is called the strong beat.

This patterned arrangement of time is named meter. It gives a metrical framework to a musical event, whether a single measure or a whole work. Within this framework rhythm flows freely. I can demonstrate that by saying that all Marches have the same meter: ONE two, ONE two, but within that meter each March follows its own rhythmic pattern. The bass drum in the band will be beating a regular pattern – the meter, and the clarinets will be playing many notes of different duration – the rhythmic pattern. Together, they will be articulating the overall flow of the music.

As I mentioned earlier, unity carries order. But it also opens the door to boredom – unless variety is presented. Two pleasures participate in this game: satisfying expectations and surprise. One way of surprising within the metrical framework is syncopation. Syncopation is a deliberate upsetting of the normal accent. Instead of playing the accent on the strong beat of the measure, it is placed on a weak beat or between beats (offbeat). This causes conflict with the meter pattern we have already perceived, and our pleasure of meeting satisfaction through the fulfillment of our expectation meets surprise.

The meter tells us how many beats there are in a measure. The beat gives us the length of the basic time unit within a musical work. But none of these two tells us whether these beats occur slowly or rapidly. The element of music that provides us this important information is called tempo. Because of its fundamental relation to storytelling I will present this element separately.

Tempo – musical pace

Tempo means the rate of speed, the pace. The flow of music in time involves both meter and tempo.
Tempo and mood are interrelated. We hurry our speech when we are excited, waving our arms rapidly all over the place. If we are afraid, we might turn very slow, almost lifeless, trying not to be noticed by what is frightening us, or hysterical, moving erratically. If we feel lively, our body becomes jumpy like a bouncing ball.

Music is an art of movement, and the rate of movement is of prime importance. The music performer can derive pretty much of the composer’s intentions just from reading the tempo indication at the top of the score. If the tempo is set correctly while performing, the listener will feel physically and psychologically what the writer meant. Our entire being adjusts to the rate of movement, consciously and subconsciously.

Tempo markings indicate the character of the music as well as the pace. Notice the use of the word character, isn’t that interesting? The pace of time units defines a character! Tempo terms are usually indicated in Italian and there are many of them. Here are just a few of the most common tempo indications: grave (solemn, very very slow), largo (broad, very slow), andante (walking pace), moderato (moderate), allegro (cheerful, fast), vivace (lively), presto (very fast). There are many modifying adverbs added to these indications as well as terms signifying changes of tempo, thus creating a mini-dictionary for describing musical pace.

The simple version of the previous paragraph should be: The rate of a beat indicated by a verbal definition signifies the character of a musical work.

I’ve read through your response twice and I’m still standing. 🙂

I can see where some threads of your response relate to the musicality of storytelling but I can hardly wait for you to explain and tie this all together. People who might be ‘listening to your musical responses’ will likely be grateful as well, so, I’ll ask, what does this have to do with storytelling?

And, thank you so much for explaining all of this and being so patient with your responses and my questions.

I’m not at all sure what makes me ask this, but the question is there, so…

What came first, music or story?

I am coming to understand why you say storytelling is an event and clearly the same can be said for music as witnessed by the examples you have just pointed out. There is a triangle in the music event you describe and I suspect that same triangle exists for storytelling.

Storyteller –> Story –> Listener

No matter where we go, triangles seem to inform our past, present and future.

If I understand correctly, that storytelling triangle is an event. The success of that event can clearly be seen from the eyes of the teller and/or the eyes of the listener. The success of the ‘story’ though is dependent upon the ’emotional connection’ that forms between teller and listener? Would that be the right way to say that?

Further, just as with what you pointed out with music, the storyteller would need to be aware of narratives. If the narratives are neglected, as you said about music, “the outcome is shallow and does not create the same experience.” The story experience for the listener would not be as powerful, as memorable, in that set of circumstances.

Which brings me to your closing statements.

“We no longer (unless we tell only the stories of a very specific group we actually come from) have a direct physical connection to the narratives most of the stories we tell come from. In short, we don’t know how it “feels” and how that feeling translates into movement, expression, how it codes and decodes intentions in story, teller and listener that could be from anywhere on the globe. We are no longer sure about what is right or close enough to right. That’s why too often I hear the answer “well, that’s MY way of telling the story” from various storytellers indicating the work is “right” in their eyes, but if we check with the audience and the story – they are not as satisfied… which set me off on the road of research in the first place.”

If we lack that physical connection, which in turn directly affects our ability to “feel”, we would not be as effective in our storytelling as we could be since “feeling and movement” play an integral part in the storytelling triangle.

Am I even close?

I’m going to take that “oy vey”, coming from someone of Hebrew heritage, as high praise. 🙂

I’m thinking about all that you just said and will continue our conversation along this line. May I ask you two things?

First, what did you mean by “…watching two more *storytelling evolution* items yesterday I’d say you might be moving towards being labeled a heretic.”

What two items were you ‘watching’?

I’m thinking that being labeled a heretic here might be a good thing. 🙂

Second, are you certain that you don’t mind taking all of this time you are being so generous with and talking with me about all of this?

I was watching the DIY days yesterday as well! How wonderful that we might perhaps be able to talk about geolocation or location based and augmented reality storytelling.

I should have known better than to ask if you mind. 🙂

Answering your update, this conversation is the highlight of each day. (Okay, okay, so I lead a sheltered life. 🙂 )

I’m still wondering what possessed me to reply to your initial post. That was a lucky day for me.

I do like the sound of hula-bula too. “What can I get you to drink, sir?” “I’ll have a hula-bula martini please. Extra dry. Two olives please.”

Okay, back to the conversation at hand. Yes, I can answer that last question. In some ways I am close. But I have so many more questions. 🙂 They’ll get asked in due time I’m sure.

Going back to music and story for a moment, I would think that we “heard”, “listened” before we “spoke”. In many ways it’s too bad we don’t adhere to that in today’s world. But that’s neither here nor there for the moment. Maybe this is the more relevant question. Did we ‘sense’ (feel?) patterned movement and then express that through music, through storytelling?

The concept of real time (real time web anyone?) in relation to story (and music too, but how else is music experienced than in real time?) that seems to be what sets oral events apart from books, literature, etc. We can go back to reading a book ‘story’ but the dynamic (the flow of life?) between teller and listener/reader may have changed. I suspect that it’s likely to have changed from sitting to sitting. I read a lot so I’ll have to look at that through this lens.

I loved the Bob Bloom-Toscanini story. When you said “Memorizing the musical text is one thing, by heart is something else.” I think I understand what you are getting at. Storytellers can memorize myths and fables and tales and stories all they want. If they don’t ‘flow’ through them then the ‘heart’ part is missing.

As I look back on exactly what you said, you answered that for us. “By heart is Toscanini visiting Beethoven’s narrative requesting “show me again, tell me how it is this time” and in turn breathing life into Beethoven’s ability to code part of the spirit of humanity in a way relevant to Toscanini’s time, then transferring his new finding to his players in the orchestra, recharging the listeners who in their turn give a new reason for the piece to exist as it does for them. Another bit of meaning is conveyed then which is most probably so important for mankind that we can’t stop getting at it again and again.

So the story too is dependent on the emotional connection or the ongoing need to feel the flow of life. Toscanini knew it was his responsibility to visit the narrative again and see new connections to the narrative of his time. Same with storytellers, we don’t become ancient Chinese or Greek when we visit the narrative of a myth, we explore it to know it physically, emotionally, intellectually and find the connections by which we can bring those stories into today’s world through.”

That last part seems to me to be very critical to the core model. Bringing the stories (the mythology, the fables, etc.) to today’s world so that they can be shared and experienced by the teller and listener through the lens that is “today”.

In answer to your last question “The narrative was neglected no doubt. But hey, the audience was impressed so what’s the problem?”, the problem, it would seem to me, is that ‘impressed’ isn’t anywhere to be found in ‘conveying meaning’. We need ‘meaning’ to live. ‘Impressed’, uh, we don’t need that so much.

I think that you just brought us back around to your original question. “How did storytelling become a hype word?”

Shall we explore that?

Before we do, can you tell me where I can find more on this: “Why is so much money invested in developing what is called location-based storytelling?”

Always shaken by the way. Bond or no. I can imagine that you were a great bartender. I did a little of that as well…

I’m reading the KM PDF. I have thought about asking you this question before, but forget to do so as I’m busy soaking up what you say. Do you know the work of Heraclitus? Specifically as it relates to chaos and order?

An English writer, John Fowles, did a very good job with The Fragments in one of his works, The Aristos. He had spent time teaching in Greece after university.

Found it, there is a copy at Haifa University 20 min. from where I live. On my list.