Music and Football (II) - Representation
To people who aren’t interested in football, the way the initiates talk about it can seem completely full of meaningless jargon. How can it possibly be this complicated, all for the sake of putting a ball in a net at either end of a field? I love it, but it does undoubtedly seem pretty hilarious when people say things like “United will never get anywhere playing 5-3-2 without a genuine box-to-box engine in the midfield, and wing-backs who cut inside far too often. They keep getting too narrow so there’s no service to the lads up top.” I’ve made it up, obviously, but it makes sense - that is, unless it doesn’t.
Today I thought I’d dig into one of the particularly strange things about football-talk, which is the way people who ‘know’ seem to find it extremely intuitive to talk about ‘formations’ and ‘setups’ among 22 quite freely-moving agents as though they were static configurations. What I mean is the way a football fan can probably identify whether a team is playing 4-4-2 within a few seconds of watching a game kick off, despite the fact that the players are in constant motion. There is no real sense in which these configurations are defined concretely in space; they are relative positionings, simplified into a lower-resolution conceptual framework. It doesn’t really map onto what watching a game looks like - it’s a bit more like drawing constellations onto an array of stars in the night sky. It structures our experience, and helps us to make sense of it by generating patterns at various levels. When we use simplifications like 4-4-2 or 5-3-2 to explain average (or imagined) positionings, it’s not that we think that’s a true representation, but it provides a basic framework that allows us to conceive of more complicated interactions further down the chain. I can’t claim this for everyone, but this is a big part of my enjoyment of (or frustration with) the beautiful game. Without those codes, we’d have no way of communicating about these potential behaviours, because it’s impossible to get past the initial complexity. People who don’t like football often experience bafflement followed by boredom, and I think this is partly because of the information overload experienced when you don’t have a mechanism to prioritize one’s attention, see patterns, and thus reduce complexity.
The idea of taking a complicated set of things - in this case, the independent behaviour of 11 individual players - and reducing them to a functionally useful but literally inaccurate representation, is obviously incredibly powerful. It’s quite a high level example of the human mind’s ability to use abstraction, widely regarded as one of the biggest reasons for our species’ success. (Philosopher Daniel Dennett has argued that such ‘thinking tools’ or ‘cranes’ played a role in the evolution of conscious agents in the first place). It’s not a small thing, then, and it’s everywhere - including music.
When we listen to or perform music, we are doing many of the same things as our United fan: we simplify, generalise, create low-resolution symbolic representations, build shared languages (including regional conventions and preferences within them), and generally build impressively integrated frameworks that leave a lot of wiggle room in their specific implementation. Is it going too far to say that musicians and football teams both have their own ‘styles’? If it’s true - and I think it is - that assertion can be understood in both cases as a pretty high-level, culturally layered representation of complex behaviour, behaviour that requires initiation fully to understand both the content and the consequences of. Another fun analogy is to think of musical notation as being like a football coach’s whiteboard. (You know the ones, where there are 22 little magnetic markers that each represent a player, and that you move around to show tactics). Everyone knows it’s not the game itself, because it gets nowhere near the complexity of the interactions, whether real or potential. The contingencies are not picked up well by the whiteboard, but they don’t all have to be. What it does is provide a structure that approximates a particular situation, specifying only the most important aspects of the positional relationships at that moment, while at the same time leaving considerable space for divergence in the actual details of execution. (For instance, body position, momentum, footedness, build etc.) It targets its priorities at a certain level of abstraction, usually tending towards the strategic or tactical, which play out over relatively large spans of time. For other things, you use different representations.
One of the main functions of the football coach’s whiteboard, then, is to train the imagination to look for the most effective possibilities, in response to certain structural configurations, and to distribute those common responses among a group of individuals in the same way. Sound familiar? (As I said, we humans are really good at this stuff). Similarly, musical scores are pitched at quite variable levels of abstraction and specificity, according to how they’re going to be used, and according to the conventions of known users. As England manager, if you try to play a hyper-intense, pedal-to-the-metal, Premier League style of football in an international match against Spain, it’s likely not to go very well. I know that not only because I’ve got an idea of some basic horizons, tactical expectations and cultural tendencies, but because I have a low-resolution conceptual model of the trade-offs. For the same reasons, insisting on complete textual literalism in the performance of under-notated Renaissance polyphony - e.g. “lose the dynamic inflection, it’s not stipulated in the score” - is almost certainly a terrible idea. While you might not technically be able to ‘lose’ at music, insisting on this model means it’s obviously not going to be as effective or as imaginative an experience as it could be. That’s because of some serious misalignments between the kind of abstraction/representation, its purpose, and the local & cultural knowledge that you need to make sense of it.
