Summary: Collaborations: creative partnerships in music | Stuart Grant <strong>Feeling The Flow</strong> In funk, it’s called being in the groove, in jazz it’s in the pocket. When musicians play together, listen together in attentive grace, particularly in improvisation, they are moved by an invisible flow of mutually experienced shaped silence; an intercorporeal contoured time-flow to which they belong, and to which they must submit in order to make a meaningful contribution to the music. The individual audible musical events struck by the musicians emerge as markers or symptoms pointing to and communicating the existence of the flow, making it available to the listener to experience in their own body, but those specific events are by no means necessary to the flow for its existence. The singular musical events: the notes, the phrases, the beats, the tones, the keys, the melodies, are all arbitrary attestations bearing witness to and shaping the flow, but an infinite number of other events might be played to reinforce, vary, state and shape the flow in an infinite number of ways without disturbing the musicians’ and the listeners’ attentive bodily submission to the flow. The flow is the essence of music: the relational structure which gives the individual notes of a melody its coherence as a melody, the propulsion which moves bodies, the elaborate contour of the deep dramatic and expressive structure of the symphony. And the flow is silent. The silent essence at the core of music. Music is shaped silence. In its sharedness, through the flow, it bears witness to the birth of shared time. The mutual embodied experience of pure diachrony. The flow.
