For those interested, a very interesting essay by the Irish flute player Elizabeth Petcu (http://www.elizabethpetcu.com/) has just been published on the dub-dub-dub. The full title of the essay is ‘A Phenomenological Study into the Experiences of a Flute Maker/Player Dyad’ and it has been published on Martin Doyle’s website in six parts as ‘A Flute Maker/Player Dyad’ - here: (http://www.martindoyleflutes.com/a-flute-maker-player-dyad1.html). Elizabeth Petcu’s study involved Martin Doyle (flute maker) and Desi Wilkinson (http://homepage.eircom.net/~shadywoods/) (flute player).
This from Elizabeth Petcu’s introduction:
This study is an attempt to shed some light on the experiences of a flute maker/player dyad. The flute maker and the player were interviewed separately before the instrument was completed. A phenomenological approach was used to distil the essences from the interview transcriptions. The opportunity for feedback from the participants was included in the design. Themes which emerged from both interviews are presented and discussed, and summarised in the final section.
I do hope visitors enjoy and find something inspiring and useful in Elizabeth’s work.
Thank you for this. Please don’t take it amiss if I observe that Petcu’s study
somewhat recapitulates my own work, especially J. Stone, 2002. ‘The Critique of Pure Drool,’
Mugwump University Press (Hong Kong). The only significant difference, in fact, is that, where Petcu’s
concern is the phenomenological triad between maker, player, and flute, my work’s
focus is the kazoo.
You may also find of interest my piece in Nose Flute Quarterly, May, 1998,
‘Booger or Boogers: Should we pluralize what we can’t count?’ (75-88).
I agree that Edmund Husserl was one hell of a guy.
I’ll read her article again when less bleary eyed (its very early here and Daylight Savings Time and the full moon are messing with my sleep cycles).
My immediate reaction is that this is a much too narrow sample of the relationship between maker and player - and that a wider sample would provide more useful information. Instead it seems more of a love fest with one particular maker, presented in impressive sounding yet obfuscatory language. There are also other relationships and factors not explored such as the relationships between players, between makers, the realities of flute making as a business, competition between makers, how information is gathered, how skills are learned etc.
Early in my career I made tools for violin makers which gave me entry into everyones’ workshops. It was in one workshop that I met an oboe maker who eventually mentored me into flute making. Some of my observations: even if the makers came out of the same apprenticeship program, they all approached their making differently. Everyone was seeking a niche different from everyone else. Some aimed for the high end as some aimed for mass production. One guitar maker started whittling wooden Slugs (of the molluscan variety) and did better at that. One business grew out of a garage workshop into a highly successful factory producing excellent harps and hammer dulcimers with global distribution.
It is unfortunate how Doyle picks on Mopane as unsuitable, and then promotes Cocus. I feel just the opposite! For one thing, Cocus is notorious for poison oak type skin reactions - one reason why I avoid it. Properly finished, Mopane looks lovely. Its also relatively hypoallergenic (these days I’m finding myself becoming sensitive to even blackwood unfortunately! As long as I don’t breath the dust I am fine). Tonally this wood is superb. I suspect I’ll hear about how unsuitable Mopane is for flutes from now on, as a result of this article. Its the Wood vs. Plastic debate all over again.
My problem is that its past midnight here. I wanted to print that out to read it as I dozed off. BUt it prints out badly. The print is too faint to be legible in some of the formatted sections. The balance is also a bit faint.
Can someone raise this with Mr Doyle’s webmaster?
So now I can’t read it before I go to sleep. Grand-daughter will be waking me early demanding her morning constitutional for to watch the “birdies” by the sea …
EDIT NOTE ON 13 MARCH 2009
OOh its different with Wren’s colour printer! Very legible.
I can thoroughly recommend that A Flute Maker/Player Dyad be read with the goal of perceiving some of the deeper aspects of the study - even though it is cloaked to some extent in scholarly and intellectual attire. The arid, insecure mind will only ever weigh and judge the shallow, whereas the rich and fertile vision of the heart will always perceive beauty and truth. Therefore, I recommend using the heart (spiritual, not emotional - there is a very big difference) when reading such things and leave the critical mind out of the picture. Personally, I am very proud of Elizabeth’s efforts with this essay because it exposes the sublime and the subtle - and this should be encouraged.
interesting that the objective, if you will, of phenomenology is to accept a phenomenon for what it is and not to interpret… and after saying so, the writer spends the rest of the paper doing exactly what is not the objective… interpreting.
the writer acknowledges that this “methodology” is, by definition, subjective… and the writer does not disappoint in that regard. the writing, interpretation, presentation and summation are all very subjective, too much so, i believe. a “study” of three subjects … with the observer as one of the three subjects is less a study, more of a catharsis perhaps… or at the least, the projection of one’s own subjectivity upon the subject and outcome of the study. while it does reveal some about the maker, the player and the process… it reveals much more about the writer/observer.
also interesting… imbuing the flute/timber with personality and life… uhhmm… it’s wood. it has certain characteristics, but make no mistake… it’s dead. if you water and feed it, it will not sprout. this imbuing also seems to fly in the face of phenomenology.
it was interesting to read, good writing, good form, good citations and citation usage to purpose … but… overly subjective, lacking in solid science (understandably,) more to the psyche of maker, player and (especially) listener/observer than to the therapeutic qualities of the process (and the writer was in pursuit of a MA in Music Therapy, i think) … and nothing upon which to base the earning of a master’s degree.
i would nominate it for a place on the shelf next to jim’s above noted studies… or maybe a couple books down the shelf…
Gee… I liked it. Scholarly, yes, dryly academic, yes. But I learned something about a great flute-maker and that is always interesting. Great flute-makers are always worth reading and talking about. And, yes, writing scholarly articles about.
I’ll refrain from commenting on the epistemological implications of the presentation as regards phenomenology. For one thing, I don’t understand it. For another, as Shardul points out, that is not the heart of the article.
This stuff always reminds me of the “do it on the radio” scene in Educating Rita (‘…its a game, with rules…’)
Scholarly and intellectual satire from jim s ?
I was reading Sartre’s Nausea. In a central part a fellow is sitting on a park bench, looking at a tree.
It stops being a ‘tree.’ The concept ‘tree’ falls away and he is confronted with a thick sinuous
thing snaking through space. This rang a bell in my head.
I asked Hazel Barnes, a leading Sartre scholar: ‘Is he tripping?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Mescaline.’
Sartre had a friend at the Sorbonne who was giving people mescaline. The subjects were ‘tripping’
through fields of wild flowers. He encouraged Sartre to try it. Sartre had the first bad trip,
he was being chased by lobsters and other crustacea. For years afterwards,
walking through this or that city at night, Sartre was haunted by the
conviction that he was being followed by lobsters.
Striking
how much art and philosophy turn out to be drug induced.
Drugs really
do get to the phenomena without the mind imposing its categories. Phenomenologists seem to have
got to the experiental place hippies got, then, disastrously, decided to write like Kant.
I’m pretty much with jiminos and Jim Stone on this one. I take Shardul’s point about “heart” or whatever and I did, like Julia Delaney, get some interesting observational insights from it, but it seems to me that is just about all of it. For the rest, it seems like pseudo-academic, vaguely “New Agey”, rather self-indulgent waffle, certainly not worthy of serious academic consideration. “Dryly academic” it is not - not really: it masquerades as such in language and format, is all, but ultimately doesn’t go anywhere beyond the groundwork recording/observation and the attempted going is slushy to say the least! I’ve no problem with self-indulgence in choosing a topic of special personal interest and engagement for academic investigation, but I wonder why settle for/try to make so much of such a limited data resource/field of investigation? Even allowing that this was just an essay, not a full scale research paper, such a narrow investigation really offers very little to move forward from. It works OK on the level of a journalistic story (would work better presented as such), but not pretending to be serious research, however prettily (!) presented, even allowing that presumably part of the point was for the essayist to demonstrate her command of a “technique” applied to particular material, the actual material not necessarily being particularly relevant to the task or the assessment of its performance.
I’ve come across this tendency in the “Social Sciences” before - to use an admittedly consciously subjective theoretical starting point, a theory or an “-ism”, to work on a woefully small sample and draw “conclusions” from it which then get used in ways comparable to “proper” research as a Scientist’s or Historian’s might (even as the basis for public policy decisions!), the lack of a decently representative (and duly selected and controlled) sample being justified by the chosen subjectivist approach.
I’m not saying it has no insight or usefulness as either an approach or an end-product, but such pseudo-academic presentation is IMO dangerous in giving such un-thorough approaches undue credence. Talk about “feet of clay”!
A bigger sample and a more objective approach would produce a much more interesting result. OK, I know “objectivity” is an unattainable goal, but at least one can demonstrate one’s efforts to attain it and one’s awareness of one’s shortcomings in striving for it, rather than using an ideological excuse for not doing so.
oh oh! If so, I apologize for my first post,
because I didn’t intend to mock Petcu’s work.
Thought I was playing a long with a joke.
I’ve read this twice and would have to read it yet again
to consider it on its merits. Rather play tunes. Have enough
of this sort of thing on my plate.
Later, maybe.
Thanks for posting, Shardul.
If I must be consumed by something, it might as well
be by a flute.
“As the condensation which forms on the inside of a flute after playing could be considered the distilled essence of the flute player…”
Looking on it more positively. If that was in a poem, or a song lyric, or some other literary work then it would be a whimsical, maybe thought provoking and probably original concept worth playing with for a few lines. As part of a formal study leading to conclusions it seems out of place. Fine if that’s what the author wants to spend her time writing. But if I come across a qualified music therapist, rather than simply thinking “thats a worthy way to apply skills and experience” I’ll be thinking that it may also involve study that is “a game, with rules”. But then maybe its what you have to do to get where you want to be.
If Casey’s interest as a maker drives him to work through it in detail maybe he can give a summary that elucidates what it is in an essay that obfuscates.
Of course you have come acroos this sort of thing in the Social Sciences. Phenomenological study is pretty much in vogue. Its interesting that you call it “pseudo-academic”. Most of the major academic institutions I know have a faculty that include or is a Social Science faculty by that name or similar.
Most of the comments in your post are about an academic trend and present your sour views about it.
