Collaboration

I want to draw your attention to this book since it speaks so incredibly directly to insights about the importance of collaboration.

http://www.amazon.com/Collaboration-Present-European-Cultural-Transition/dp/0754655121

It goes further. What would Orson Wells have done without John Houseman and the Mercury Theater? This is a very old story. The Italian Renaissance can be understood best in the light of collaborative thinking. Hell, let's just skip back to the ancient Greeks and Plato bouncing off Socrates, or bounce to the explosion of standup comedy in Boston in the late eighties. The story is always the same. Insights and growths in knowledge never occur in a vacuum. There is always a culture that thought grows within and one has to understand that culture to understand the profound thoughts that emerge from that culture.

Einstein worked as a patent clerk, but the world was fascinated with time back then because rail travel had made the synchronization of clocks a cutting edge issue. Prior to fast railroad travel, any town could just declare noon to be any time it wanted to. Once railroad connections had to be made the importance of time synchronization became one of practical importance. Time zones were adopted in 1884. Time zones are essentially an admission as to the relativity of time itself. It is much easier to understand Einstein's theories of general and special relativity in light of this historical context.

There would have been no Western Classical music without the work the Italian monks did on the idea of musical notation from the 14th century to the 17th century. What we call classical music only emerged AFTER we had musical notation. Prior to that we had folk music or chants or whatever simple songs that could be taught by rote and passed down through the generations. After musical notation, we had Vivaldi, Bach and all the rest. The explosion of Western Classical music was a direct result of this idea that something new could be written down, and musicians who knew nothing of the traditions of where those notes came from, could produce new sounds based simply on notes on a page. This was a profound change in musical behavior. 

I could bore you with stories about the shifting of popular attention from the performer to the composer to the conductor throughout the 1800's but what remains is that all that music was written down.

So let's skip ahead to the birth of recording technology and the birth of jazz. Without recordings, jazz would not be. None of this stuff happens in a vacuum. I am a classic case in point. I was raised in poverty but I got to read Bach written in notes on a page but I also got to listen to Ellington played on old 78's. I am a product of both technologies and it is right and fitting that I have played both acoustic and electronic instruments in my public career.

I think The Way Up is a kind of love letter to history and collaboration.

- LYLE