Customer Reviews

Ways of the Hand

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

It speaks volumes that David Sudnow found it necessary to completely rewrite his treatise on his experience learning jazz improvisation at the piano. According to Sudnow's introduction, upon reading it again not even he, the author, could penetrate the cloudy, turgid prose that cluttered his first edition to get any meaning out of it (although the author did not quite admit as much). However, Mr. Sudnow has blown away the first edition's clouds only to replace them with a thick fog in a tome just as impenetrable as the original.

Occasional moments of clarity notwithstanding, Sudnow's book reads like a manual of how to convolute language beyond its capacity to render meaning. That this occurs in a book about music--arguably the most emotionally expressive of the arts--makes Sudnow's literary idiosyncrasies unforgivable. Expecting enlightenment, the hapless reader instead encounters turbid gems like this: "A rapidly paced entry into a way thus known could take it with a sure availability for a numerical articulational commitment, and with no prefigured digit counting. Its paceable availability, here and now, afforded securely paced entries whose soundfully targeted particular places would now be found in course, doing improvisation." It's English--well, most of it; he invents a word here and there--but totally meaningless, and far from insightful.

Examples like the one above paint every page, and only morbid curiosity can keep the pages turning. Let me save you some money: One piece of decent advice is mentioned in the book twice, and it does not originate with Mr. Sudnow. Namely, sing while you improvise. It will increase your sensitivity to what you are playing, and will connect you more intimately with the piano. Sing while you play, and listen to your idols. Have faith in yourself to find your own insights, and let Mr. Sudnow wander in the fog.

This is a fascinating book. It is fascinating because it may actually be saying something interesting. Then again, it may not.

The primary problem with this book is that Mr. Sudnow may play the piano well, but he cannot write. I have actually used parts of this book to demonstrate why writing in the passive voice often obscures one's meaning and is hell on readers. Choose almost any page from the book, and you will find most of the sentences have a passive construction. Adding to the constantly convoluted sentence structure is a goofy vocabulary that obscures rather than elucidates.

This may be the most poorly written book I have ever read. I frequently read old books about wretchedly parched things and suffer reams of rotten student and doctoral prose, but I have never encountered anything as difficult to read as this book. What is sad is that a high school level writer could immediately identify Sudnow's flaws and describe how to correct them -- they are obvious, easily fixed, and unforgivable in a published volume.

On the plus side, Sudnow appears to be saying some things that may be interesting about improvisation and coordination. And he is definitely thinking about them, which in itself is interesting.

Would that he had had even a mediocre writing class at some point is his life or an editor.

Several of the reviewers here have expressed the opinion that Sudnow's prose is indecipherable. However, it is not true that it is meaningless. I was a former student of Sudnow's who worked closely with him on the book as a junior collaborator, and can tell of the struggle he engaged in to find a form of expression adequate to its subject. Sudnow attempted to create a language that would faithfully describe the real way in which improvised action takes place, and improvised knowledge exists as something that occurs in course rather than in stasis, a type of active understanding that had never been adequately described. Sudnow's work takes place in a tradition of phenomenological sociology known as Ethnomethodology, a fairly arcane academic discipline that attempts to describe the details of how interaction takes place from a descriptive and subjective standpoint, rather than an objective report from outside. The truth is that this book was not designed for a general audience, and probably couldn't be. Sudnow is a genuine philosopher, one who had spent years immersed in his meditations on the nature of reality from a philosophical and sociological perspective, and there is no way that he would have been able to return to ordinary language to engage with his subject. Those who want to go to the trouble of acquiring the necessary background to receive a vision of reality and the nature of action that is unique and piercing will find their efforts well rewarded. For the rest, it is like reading Finnegan's Wake. You can enjoy some of the music and poetry, meditate on the meaning of a sentence and find out what it involves through your own investigation, or leave it alone. But to declare it meaningless or pretentiously dense is only to declare one's own unfamiliarity with the genuine traditions it occurs within, and perhaps impatience with those who dare to present original thought and language to an unschooled public. For those desiring a background to really understand this work, I recommend Sudnow's own inspiration in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception," Harold Garfinkel's "Ethnomethodology" and Erving Goffman's books on social psychology. Reading those works, followed by Ways of the Hand, will give you an altered perspective on action and interaction that will be well worth your time.

I rated this a 5 because I think that the average reader may find the text impenetrable at best, and a "put-on" at worst. On the other hand, if you have met David Sudnow as I have, you may just smile and think--"That's Sudnow all right!" This book is really one inspection into human learning processes--something into which Sudnow has excellent insights. The author was a late blooming wannabe jazz pianist who thought that some mental alchemy could create jazz "artistry". Well, he comes about as close as one can using all his formidable intellectual resources. But as in every endeavor, one cannot become a "natural" through analysis or study. You either got or you don't! Nonetheless, Sudnow creates an excitement in the discovery of why and how the hand can be the agent that delivers the creativity of any artist. Sudnow's pedantry may be a sly put on. Even so, he is a true believer and even today hunts the grail.

It speaks volumes that David Sudnow found it necessary to completely rewrite his treatise on his experience learning jazz improvisation at the piano. According to Sudnow's introduction, upon reading it again not even he, the author, could penetrate the murky, turgid prose that cluttered his first edition to get any meaning out of it. However, Mr. Sudnow has blown away the first edition's clouds only to replace them with a thick fog in a tome just as impenetrable as the original. Occasional moments of clarity notwithstanding, Sudnow's book reads like a manual of how to convolute language beyond its capacity to render meaning. That this occurs in a book about music-arguably the most emotionally expressive of the arts-makes Sudnow's literary idiosyncrasies unforgivable. Other reviewers on this site have pulled out but a few confusing gems from Sudnow's book, but I won't bother to provide more. I will simply state that such examples are sadly the rule, and not the exception, in Sudnow's book. It is a sad example of a fascinating idea, buried in meaningless language.

David Sudnow's phenomenological study, as Hubert Dreyfus states in his introduction to The Rewritten Account, is an altogether unique piece of work. As a (former) piano player, it inspired me to learn a piece of Bach again just so I could rediscover, for myself, some of the phenomena Sudnow describes with such depth. As a casual reader of some of the major existential and phenemonological writers, it strikes me that Sudnow, more than anyone, shows us the phenomenological perspective at work. I haven't read the earlier Harvard edition, which I've been told is very difficult, but this version certainly isn't. It's a flowing account, told beautifully, and I am sure that it will become a classic. I hope Sudnow comes through on his promise and offers us a description of learning a second language. If he makes a contribution to language studies anything like Ways of the Hand makes to the study of handicraft, that would be extraordinary.

Having just finished rereading David Sudnow's "Ways of the Hand" I am reminded of just how much I love this book. I think it is one of the most original books and is quite possibly the finest and most detailed record of skill acquisition ever written. I doubt that there is anyone who describes the details of things that we do the way Sudnow does. Although this is a difficult book, requiring careful examination, the rewards are well worth the effort. The uniquely descriptive language he has created is fascinating to follow as it unfolds in the course of his story. It is truly a combination of poetry and narrative. Sudnow creates an excitement in the discovery of why and how the hand can be the agent that delivers the inventions of any artist. Anyone interested in creativity and seeing how an artist comes to let his body take over and do its art should read this book. I loved it- one of the best books I've ever read.

But, being an academic AND a jazz pianist, I am going to distill the book's wisdoms for you all, right here, in three sentences.
1. Jazz piano has its own repertoire of gestures that you can observe in other jazz pianists.
2. If you start out wanting to do fast improvisation, you will learn to slow down and hear and feel your way ahead.
3. The keyboard has patterns that you can absorb and utilize for mindful, tuneful improvisation, with a kinesthetic and aural awareness.
Its main flaw is that the rhythmic aspects of melodic jazz improvisation are almost totally ignored. Thus the writer describes his struggles without the essential fact of jazz to help him out of his dilemma. In basic melodic improvisation, the chordtones go on the strong beats, and the non-chord tones are placed on the weak, or off-beats. For more detail on this essential topic, see Hal Galper's book "From Bach to Bebop", Sher Publications.
There, now NO ONE has to read this Lewis Carroll-style pseudo-intellectual tome. (Small apologies to graduate students in ethnomethodology)
Avoid either edtion at ALL costs. Then buy a good video ( from AMAZON, of course, lol) of Keith Jarrett, Bill Evans, Oscar Peterson, or any other jazz pianist of renown and see the masters in action.
MBB

It's a dense, frustrating, poorly written book. It's also a fascinating study, with words popping off the page as if in a Charlie Parker solo. It's a book not meant to be read, but heard - preferably in Suds own voice. It's a jazz study masquerading as beat poetry masquerading as sociology masquerading as a jazz study.

I picked it up in a book store in the early 80's, tried several times to read it. Eventually I got through it, reading it like Shakespeare -- just going for the gist. I couldn't get it. I couldn't forget it.

Twenty years later wandering the stacks in a library, I found it again. Once again I picked it up. Once again, I thought Suds was on to something, or else just on something. Well, that led me to google his name and find his piano method.

I purchased the second re-written edition -- where he often substitutes clarity for poetry. He described "Ways of the Hand" as a book on how NOT to learn jazz -- focusing on particular scales and tone collections, breaking the discourse into particular jazz phonemes, into which one can build words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and books. His frustration with this helped create his method, in which he takes a top down approach, breaking a sophisticated sound into something the "rest of us" can get our hands on.

In one of his website posts, I believe he said that if he had to do it all over again, he would have just take a solo, a piece, an improvisation, and take each step phrase by phrase, until he got it into his hands.

What I loved about Suds was his rebellious spirit: Iconoclast, academic, humanist, populist, comedian. He was all of that. He even rebelled against his own rules, breaking them with the first chord of Misty. And he encouraged the same in his students. After defining his voicing rules, he provided 18 pages of material (at least) on how to violate them.

As for myself, I had little use for the dot diagrams in his method. But his fractional notation really spoke to my condition. I felt like an old tin pan alley arranger, experimenting with different ways to get out the sound. (Steven Sondheim uses similar notation) It's a great deal of fun. And it will always be with me.

He never believed in playing by ear. He felt it to be a misnomer. He played by hand. He spoke of developing piano player hands. He titled his book "Ways of the Hand." not "Ways of the Ear." He just regarded the ear as the final arbiter, the judge of what stays and what goes.

It's amazing. He denied that his method was a jazz course. I showed his voicing rules to my teacher, a jazz pro. He stated simply, "It's Jazz."

Robert Epstein's review expresses my sentiments about Ways of the Hand. I would add that the book is not about the making of improvised music per se, but really about the bodily production of language. David Sudnow used to say to me that he was more interested in talk like his colleague Harvey Sacks, but since he couldn't see the vocal cords like he could see his fingers on the keyboard, he had to content himself instead with the music-making body as a means of peering into the bodily process of speaking a language, whether it was street-corner French or jazz. There is nothing convoluted in Sudnow's language if one approaches it from the perspective of Merleau-Ponty. David asked basic questions like: How is the music (read language) being made? Who or what is directing the next place to be going? What is limiting the places you can go in meaningful sound? What does the brain have to do with it? Is 'thinking' in the shaping of fingers (read vocal cords) and to what extent do the limitations of the hands determine the next possible notes (read words). Think shapes that make sound, think of gestalts, think of the mystery of intentionality. These are the issues addressed by Sudnow. This is a highly original work that has been largely misunderstood. David's observations and questions are as fresh today as when originally written in 1978.