Exaptation Of The Guitar

In this essay, republished from my old visionary music blog at Zaadz.com, I explain how my study of evolutionary biology has influenced the way I play guitar, and how I understand the creative process in general. Share it with anyone interested in guitar, or evolution...it might be too much to hope that you know someone else who has a passion for both, but if you do, would you please introduce us?

Exaptation Of The Guitar

Pablo Picasso - The Guitar Player

In all the years I studied evolutionary biology in school, there was one word I can hardly believe I didn't learn. It figures so prominently into my understanding of the evolutionary process and creativity in general that I am amazed it isn't in the lexicon of every biology student (much less the whole human race, for we all are students - if not outright disciples - of biology, in one way or another). It so neatly rebuts some of the flawed interpretations of evolution that so fetter our culture's full appreciation of its beauty. And it also has a growing personal significance for me and the way I understand the whole kosmic creative affair - not just as it operates on the unfurling and ever-editing of genetic material.

I understand my own role as a musician and songwriter as it appears within the context of a unified and harmonic universe, as a gesture of the same omnipotent principles that express everything. As a spark of the bonfire of the Big Bang, I burn as the same flame that sings at every scale. So whenever I can get my head around a new biological concept, it shivers my entire grasp of what it means to be and do life and art. The word I wish I'd learned in college continues to yield to my contemplation, rewarding me with an ever-subtler appreciation of living as a human artist.

And like all really good words, it's the quickest way short of telepathy to communicate something truly tremendous, something that fought through the haze of the barely imaginable for years before it landed in our world with a faerie footstep. To me, a word is the faint reduction, the tiniest tip of a flaming angelic archetype, the tendrilous extension of its infinite body reaching into the limit of our low-resolution physical world. I love words for this reason: because each is one voice in the hill of voices on which we live our lives. Each word is the toeprint of something much larger and more foliate than we can even know from the perspective of a human brain.

For this reason, and because I do insist on my brain's perspective (most of the time), I am bemused and indignant for not having been given this word sooner; and so part of my motivation for writing about all of this is my desire to set things straight and spread the utility of an excellent construct. But it is also a concession to my idealism, to indulge for a moment in scandalous idolatry of this one facet of the divine. I am giving my proper respects, kissing the toes of whatever hermaphroditic gleaming angel squid, whatever slumber-stirred postmodern ishtadeva explodes fully-formed from the forehead of the word "exaptation."

In ths world, anyway, we owe the legendary paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elizabeth Vrba for "exaptation," which premiered in their 1982 paper, "Exaptation - A Missing Term In The Science of Form." Before I can explore the impact of this beautiful and lucid term on my music, I have to savor its Latin etymology (or "the truth of the word"): "ex" as in "out of;" "apt" as in "fitted" (past participle of "apere," "to fasten"); and "ation" as an action or its consequences.

Exaptation is function following form, making do with the tools at hand, loving the one you're with. On one end of the spectrum, exaptation is defending yourself with that rock just within reach. On the other end, it is taking the infinite abundance of every superimposed possibility at the root of manifestation, and using it to forget yourself in a world of frustration and constraint. In both cases, the creative medium (the rock, or the pleroma) contains no set of instructions, no essential purpose. It is "good for" whatever it happens to be good for, determined by the tumbling lock of relationship we call natural selection.

Gould took serious issue (in a paper with Richard Lewontin, available here, and in the follow up here) with the rampant fondness of some other biologists for assigning purpose to the various characteristics of organisms. Even today, decades after Gould wrote so eloquently against it, we read textbooks making dubious claims that a giraffe's long neck is "for" reaching the high branches of trees and the enormous eye of a giant squid is "for" seeing in the ocean's darkest depths.

We do this in anthropology, too: any mysterious artifact is immediately declared a religious icon. (It's become kind of a joke among scholars.) And we can see this at work in our daily lives: we succeed or fail to "make the most" of our convoluted existences, according to what interpretations we inject into them after the fact. It's little wonder that we immediately assume the religious import of archeological anomalies, when we ourselves are total slaves to the religious impulse, filling every unexplored nook and cranny with the mortar of some stable answer.

Not that I condemn this. In fact, quite the opposite. I cherish this half of the dialectic, the post facto deciding of things, the naming and the poetry, the revelation of how to feed ourselves with our own hands and that moment of "Yes! This is what they do!" But I, like Gould, don't lightly suffer the persistent mistake of confusing this construction of meaning with the discovery of some fundamental, intrinsic, and specific use. A rock might make a great weapon, but if we were to be good statisticians, we would admit that on average it is mostly "for" just sitting there. That's what it does best. Same with the multiverse: how presumptuous is it of us to assume that making universes is the quantum vacuum's métier? Maybe it's only moonlighting.

Although I'm relieved to see that Berkeley's Integrative Biology Department is includes exaptation in their introductory tutorials, their website's definition still paints what seems to me to be a contorted distinction (apparently hailing all the way back to Gould and Vrba's coinage) between exaptation and adaptation. According to its (hardly) common use, an adaptation was "produced by natural selection for its current function," whereas an exaptation was "produced by natural selection for a function other than the one it currently performs and was then co-opted for its current function."

But, uh, doesn't this fall into the same pit trap the authors were trying to avoid? Beyond merely differentiating between the first and subsequent uses of a single form, this kind of wording still suggests that natural selection produced the trait (when in fact natural selection only operates on the creative input of variation), and that there are adaptations that are not exaptations.

Why does it seem so easy for us to understand exaptation in one context, but so difficult in another? If traits persist due to their successful functioning, and function is determined by the form's fit to its environment, then every adaptation is the marriage of two moments of creativity: making it, and then figuring out what to do with it.

Just because we have displaced the whole "x exists for f(x)" thinking back a step doesn't mean we have gotten rid of it. To say that the feather first evolved "for" insulation, only later to be exapted "for" flight, is just as much nonsense as claiming that we apply our brains and thumbs to ends that "God did not intend." Right...like He had any more idea what He was doing the first time! Whether it evolved in this generation or the millionth generation before it, every single novelty is born again in every moment without ultimate reason or utility. Even if the feather appears to be used for the same thing in fledge after fledge of birds, each bird rediscovers what to do with its body uniquely, originally, for the first time. Every adapation is a hypothesis, the projection of meaning onto whatever we're given. And so, mathematically speaking, exaptation and adaptation are sets that contain each other.

So how do I exapt exaptation to inform my creative process? What does this boon from biology mean for music?

Pat Metheny playing the "Pikasso Guitar"

It means that every creative act includes a moment of decision, a deliberate projection of function and meaning onto the artist's environment. And this is what blows my mind the most about exaptation: When I pick up my guitar and play, I'm agreeing that this is an instrument, that this is a guitar, that I play the guitar, and that I play the guitar in some specific way. That this is what it's "for."

But there are an infinite number of ways for the universe to express itself through the functional relationship between a human being and a guitar. It was a definite act of creation when my friend dipped his hand into the soundhole of my friend Kate's guitar and rolled his eyes back in his head to communicate his attraction to her. Jimi Hendrix - with the help of LSD, that unparalleled sire of iconoclasts - communicated something by burning his guitar that could never have been said by strumming it. And that's just with the same old guitar that you and I know - luthiers have done some incredible things with the design of the instrument itself, like Manzer's "as many strings as possible" Pikasso Guitar, commissioned for Pat Metheny (pictured above).

And so it is for this feisty young man, privileged or burdened as I am with unceasing progressive inclinations, that many of my favorite musicians prefer to consider themselves as practitioners of music in general rather than the tradition of their specific instruments. As I love to remind people, the great bassist Victor Wooten insists that his medium just happens to be the bass, and that he is not a "bassist," any more than a self-consistent practitioner of the Buddha's teachings would actually declare himself to worship "Buddhism" ("or," in the words of Ferris Bueller, "any other ism for that matter.") Likewise, Kaki King grew up on the drums before translating those sensibilities to the acoustic guitar. In her early interviews made it plain that her whole agenda was to "fuck with" people's ideas of what the acoustic guitar even is. Never mind that she wasn't the first to play it like a percussion ensemble; there's no such thing as being completely original, anyway, unless you're willing to grant all phenomena the same courtesy. On even the most newly-poured volcanic island of thought, there are as many exaptations as there are participants. There is something utterly unique in even the most mundane copycat playing. There is something wild and new about every instant's spontaneous perspective on the fact of the previous moment.

If I can stay wide open enough to hold every creative moment in the light of an ever-present and ever-renewing genesis, each instant is an equally wild idea. It is absolutely creative because it happened at all. If we take the past as a given and define it according to the standard of the present, we deny it as a moment creative in itself, and rig the game in favor of our current interpretation. "My, how we've grown." "What were we thinking?" "Behold primitive man, living as a savage...the poor heathen."

And so to cherish the unique exaptation of every moment in this way is not half-blind futurist zealotry, disrespectful of tradition - it's more like telling a girl that you like her eyes, when you know that everyone else compliments her on her breasts. It's an attempt to appreciate the whole package, past, present, and future, inside and out.

But that's a hell of a lot to appreciate, and I can rarely do it for long. Like everyone else with limited energy and attention, I deserve to be convicted by a jury of myself for identifying with a particular set of preferences and positions, relative to a single observation platform floating one way across time. I still often make the mistake of declaring the so-called "progressive" art forms to be more creative and therefore more interesting than their predecessors - perpetuating the false distinction between exaptation and adaptation, as if to play the guitar fretboard like a piano is a more fabulous idea than playing it like a normal freaking human being. (Kaki King: "Are we to have another century of guitar when the best instrument in the world is still the piano?")

Consequently, maybe nine out of my ten favorite guitarists are doing things on the guitar that were unimaginable fifty years ago. These people have carved out their homesteads on the freshly exposed terrain of that new island. They have my respect for being its first inhabitants, collectively discerning (and deciding) the rules of this new land that is just now peeking over the splashy boundary of unconsciousness.

As a male mammal, I will always have a special place in my heart for the journeyers, the rogues and rovers, the wanderers and frontier families. My love for the music coopted from its original context is just one incidence of a broader pattern in my being: a love of reclamation, the same reconstructive postmodern desire that fuels the creation of urban gardens and beautiful graffiti murals, all manner of tattoos and piercings, circuit-bent instruments, remixes, redefinitions, and reimaginations of literature (such as Julie Taymor's film production of Shakespeare's Titus and stage production of The Lion King, and chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound's performances of Aphex Twin's often-aggressive electronic music). I can hardly call this "ownership," because we have inherited all of it and we will all sooner or later pass it on to someone else. But it is beautiful and affirmative, restorative and inspiring to know that we are capable of exapting our world to the meaning and purpose we see for it now.

In this spirit, I encourage you to look upon the world with fresh eyes, to see it and feel it, not as some rigid predestined machine, but as a gift of creative jubilance inviting us to assist in the unfurlng form and function of everything we know and are. Don't assume that you know what that guitar is when you pick it up, or that pen, or that hand. Don't assume you know what you've got riding in your chromosomes, or that their full potential has been explored.

Every instant is a new world, with new opportunities. It falls upon us to learn how to avoid the hamster wheel of endless adaptation to external fortune by exapting the world and playing with the flux instead. This is a profound change of perspective. If you have found your purpose, don't refuse opportunities for amendment. If you still haven't found your voice or calling, relish in the flexibility of an undetermined existence.

Find a new meaning for your guitar, and maybe - just maybe - you'll find a new meaning for your self.

...
For more info on exaptation, you can find numerous related papers here and here.

An Ode To The Chapman Stick

Unlike with previous instruments in this column, I have a long-standing and personal relationship with the invention I'll be discussing this week. It's called the Chapman Stick, and it was one of the most radical developments in music from the second half of the Twentieth Century (the first half goes to the electric guitar). Created by Emmett Chapman in 1969, the Stick is a wild redesign of the guitar that opened a new realm of musical expression - one that has only begun to be explored.

Forty years ago, Chapman was struggling to fill the anemic sound of solo jazz guitar with a richer bass end and started adding lower strings to his instruments. It wasn't long before six strings became nine. Soon after, he realized that his magnetic pickups were sensitive enough to register even the slightest tapping of strings to frets. He had found a way to make sounds in a much more direct and percussive fashion than by plucking and strumming, liberating his right hand from having to sound the efforts of his left.

Thus, the Stick was born. Chapman had discovered a musical space similar to the one occupied by pianists, in which interweaving voices, multiple melodic lines, and free-winging improvisation with chordal accompaniment is standard fare. Each hand can be playing in a different meter, or - thanks to its split pickups and a stereo output - through a different effects chain.

Here's an example - a gorgeous pastoral piece by Rob Martino:

By the 1980s, he was installing MIDI pickups on them, and suddenly each string could trigger a separate synthesizer. The Stick effortlessly spread its wings into the burgeoning fantasia of electronic music. There are now Stickists performing in bands all over the world in the stead of guitar, bass, keyboards, and even drums (thanks, again, to MIDI).

Glenn Poorman has taken fantastic advantage of this, using MIDI and live looping to create a one-man live electronic act:

I first heard the Stick played by Greg Howard on "The Dreaming Tree," the deep sylvan sojourn holding up the back end of Dave Matthews Band's 1998 album Before These Crowded Streets. (So yeah, I got acquainted with the Stick through a song about a tree. How appropriate! The further I go with this instrument, the more cosmically symmetrical everything about it becomes. More on that in a minute.)

Greg Howard is a virtuoso, very much the heir apparent to Emmett Chapman. He covers Charles Mingus' "Goodbye Porkpie Hat" in this video:

After years of hopeless dreaming, I finally got my own Stick last spring - and laying eyes on it for the first time, I reeled at the incredible potential this thing contains. This bizarre instrument with its five octave range sat sleeping in its open case like the only visible body part of a transparent orchestra. It occupies a terrain somewhere between the guitar, piano, bass, drums, and synthesizer - a giant fretboard, played as a part of the body, with the nuance of acoustic and the teeth of electric. It's operated - if one can even use such a vulgar word - with the amplifier turned up loud, so that the player can use as little force as possible. It's the paradoxical junction of grace and grit - at once the stupidly obvious logical conclusion of stringed instruments, and yet exotic enough to appear as an artifact of the unimaginably distant future, in the David Lynch's adaptation of Dune.

Here's the clip of Patrick Stewart faking it on an embellished Stick:

The Stick is a magical object, glowing with alchemical significance. Literally: Chapman, who invented not just the Stick and its method of parallel tapping, but also a powerful ambidextrous tennis technique and a significant breakthrough in brewing coffee, also happens to be a master astrologist in his few remaining hobby hours. He sees the grand and deeper patterns of the universe. He is a Libra - you know, "The Scales" - and the fact that this beautiful thing found its way into the world through Libra - a sign reknowned for its symmetry, balance, and sense of order - has not been lost on me. It has ten strings - for ten fingers - and is tuned reciprocally, so that the same fingering produces a chord in the treble strings and the inversion of that chord in the bass. Chapman even created a new modal system for it based on his personal birth chart. Seriously.

The geometric perfection of it all is too much for my limited cognition. Several people claim that playing this instrument has actually alleviated their carpal tunnel or other serious chronic hand issues and allowed them to make music again. (It's because of the Stick's ergonomics, how it's held upright and how you reach across the fretboard to play, thus opening your hand - rather than the cramped positions that most instruments require of their players.)

My own Stick is one of the later models, woven from graphite fiber like other futuristic things - including that space elevator we'll be getting any day now. It was never a living wood - no sentient beings were harmed in the making of this musical revolution. I bought it on the 8th of April, a day that is celebrated in Japan as the birthday of Shakyamuni Buddha, with a festival of countless fluttering blossoms. There's something about its crystalline construction, the ludicrous abundance of Japanese festival culture, and the Buddha's "do no harm" injunction that requires me to use this as an instrument of peace.

It arrived in the mail on Good Friday, which is appropriate because I cannot think about it without being swept up in angelic metaphor. I am not alone among Stick players in my conviction that this is a sacred instrument. Even as a die-hard guitarist, one of the minority who have taken up the Stick without abandoning my mother tongue, I cannot imagine the guitar evoking exactly the same intensity of nerd-monk reverence. There's something about it that inspires an otherworldly devotion and wonderment that is rare with other instruments, an elegance that puts it in the same category as relativity theory and the Cartesian plane. I mean this in the strictest sense: Einstein attested relativity theory to a spontaneous peak experience he had while riding a train, and Descartes said that his mathematical revolution was delivered at night by angelic vision.

In this video, Trevor (the only Stickist in Kansas?) peppers footage of his excellent playing with a bit of discourse on his spiritual relationship with his instrument:

The Stick is a rare physical object in the pantheon with these luminous abstractions; it stands unpretentiously as a gift from on high. It's a burning bush, the impossible clue that we give ourselves to wake into a lucid dream: by all reason, it should only be a fantasy, and yet I can feel it underneath my fingers. I don't claim to understand.

Many of my favorite musicians have communicated the importance of favoring the message over the medium. To whatever degree you can, forget the instrument that you play and focus on the music you are trying to express. Victor Wooten - probably the most influential bassist alive - is fond of saying that he is a musician, not a bassist. That paying attention to your instrument while you play can trip you up in the same way that paying attention to your tongue makes it more difficult to speak.

Try as I might, though, it's hard to make the Stick totally transparent to the music (although earlier, literally transparent lucite models do exist as a kind of joke attempt). If there's one thing I've learned from postmodernism, it's that the message is never really separate from its medium. Although the Stick can liberate a solo artist to perform stupendously rich compositions, it simultaneously transforms the same artist into a Swiss Army knife in band contexts. Agency and communion. The drum and the harp. Masculine and feminine. I open the case and suddenly I am voyeur to the spectacular orgy of every archetype as they make love in the space of an overhead compartment.

Nor can I, no matter how poetic I wax, truly describe the weird beauty of the Chapman Stick with words alone. Here are some other good videos of this masterpiece in action.

A cover of the cantina band theme from Star wars:

The Stick with a proper European lightshow:

A truly excellent Stick and african percussion jam:

Additional audio/video, and more information than you could ever fully digest, is available online at www.stick.com. Enjoy!

(Written for iggli.com)