Writing new rules, writing new songs: emergence on Jorge Drexler’s music
Posted on October 25, 2021
Jorge Drexler is one of the musicians who has expanded the frontier of musical practice in Latin America. His work, based in many cases on the design and integration of deliberate limits and rules as part of his creative process, may perhaps inspire our practice as transdisciplinary designers and offer us a way to envision emerging futures.
Drexler is an acclaimed Uruguayan songwriter and musician, born in Montevideo in 1964. A doctor by profession, at the age of 30 he undertook a journey of radical transformation to Spain, led by his mentor Joaquín Sabina, to dedicate himself entirely to composing music. As a solo artist he has recorded more than 13 albums and has been awarded 5 Latin Grammy Awards, and the only Oscar that has been given to a song written in Spanish, for the Best Original Song category.
His music is an experimental amalgamation of poetry, european and latinamerican folk rhythms (milonga, bossa-nova, candombe, samba) as well as contemporary sounds. In his songs he reflects on migrations and borders, on the passing of time and the ephemeral, on the indomitable laws of nature, on the human relationship with technology, and on the very act of giving birth to a song.
But in addition to writing revealing songs, which connect us deeply with our human existence, Drexler’s journey has also been marked by an insatiable exploration and expansion of the boundaries that demarcate how music is supposed to be created, performed, or experienced by an audience.
The structure that has emerged and the features of some of Drexler’s creative experiments may also illuminate our own practice as transdisciplinary designers and our way of intervening in fields and systems other than music.
Creative freedom depends on creating new rules, not on breaking them.
Many of Jorge Drexler’s most successful songs use a complex verse form, the Décima, which originated almost five hundred years ago and migrated to Latin America 200 or 300 years ago, leading to the emergence of different traditional musical genres across different countries. Drexler explains the fascinating history and structure of the Décima in his TED Talk:
“The Décima is ten lines long; each line has eight syllables. The first line rhymes with the fourth and the fifth; the second line, with the third; the sixth line, with the seventh and the tenth; and the eighth line rhymes with the ninth”.
Even if this may sound like a contradiction, the Décima is an example of how designing a framework of rules can lead sometimes to a path of creative exploration, even greater than breaking or ignoring such rules.
Indeed many of Drexler’s experiments and musical proposals seem to be inspired by that same philosophical line; the creation of deliberate conditions and new limits as a liberatory creative mechanism. For example, the recording of an album where musicians could only use guitars as the unique source for all the sounds on the record. Or the invention of a new unique type of rhyme that would accommodate the former 140-character restriction on Twitter.
No hay #Espinela que quepa,
Que yo sepa, en esta esquela.
La #Semiespinela ostenta
Su cuenta de caracteres
Que muere en ciento cuarenta.— Jorge Drexler (@drexlerjorge) August 31, 2011
“You have the same creative freedom in a hectare, as in a tile… you can always find an infinite degree of freedom in any framing that you determine” – Jorge Drexler
One of the best examples in Drexler’s work is his proyecto N, an interactive album, made of three songs that follow a new rule: songs designed to work specifically on a mobile device.
Normally, the way we normally interact with a song on our smartphones is usually similar to the way we listen to it on any other device; we would use basic interactions to play, pause, or fast-forward the song.
However, in Proyecto N, Drexler explored other possibilities. In N1, the listeners of the song use their smartphone to directly intervene in how the verses they are listening might be combined. The possible combinations are infinite, and therefore it is practically impossible for two people to hear the same verses. Hence, there is no “official” edition of the song, but infinite editions.
Similaryly, in N2, the listeners must use the geolocation function of their device, and walk in different directions in order to activate and listen to certain instruments of the orchestra.
“It was not the technological experimentation that I liked, but the fact that I discovered things about the act of writing songs that I did not know. Having to write with verses that work like Lego pieces, which have to be replaced, allows us to project into the future not a specific application but infinite applications that it may have. ” – Jorge Drexler
Here, the learning for our work as transdisciplinary designers is that the process of imagining new rules, establishing deliberate conditions in our own practice, is a liberating act, which can lead us to propose unexplored approaches, and to reveal unique opportunities to transform the operation of a system – be it music, or the design of a future model for care or urban transportation.
This idea is closely related to the concept of Leverage Points, described by Donella Meadows in Thinking in Systems: “Leverage points are places within a system where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything ”. Among the list of twelve possible (and very complex) leverage points that Meadows suggests might serve to intervene in a system, one of the most intriguing that Meadows proposes is precisely the intervention in the Rules of the System:
“The rules of the system define its scope, its boundaries, its degrees of freedom. Rules are high leverage points. Power over the rules is real power.” – Donella Meadows
Ultimately, the rules by themselves are not good or bad. It depends on what we manage to create with them.
Recommended: Behind the scenes of Jorge Drexler’s Proyecto N
Loving the plot more than the ending.
In addition to creating new rules, as a powerful leverage point, Drexler’s genius also hints at other relationships, perhaps deeper ones, that we can adopt within the practice and philosophy of transdisciplinary design: giving up on our obsession of controlling and mastering the variables of a system; and the recognition, instead, of the value that emergence has in our practice. In Drexler’s words: loving the plot more than the ending.
Emergence, as Margaret J. Wheatley has described it, is the result of tens, hundreds or thousands of interactions and individual exchanges that shape macro-behaviors within a system.
“It is how life changes, never from just a single cause, but from a complexity of many causes and parts interacting.” – Margaret J. Wheatley
Since it is virtually impossible for us to control all these interactions, we can’t design emergence; but we can design with emergence.
Drexler suggests his own notion of emergence in the writing of some of his songs.
In Abracadabras:
In La Edad del Cielo (The Age of Heaven)
However, emergence seems to be not only a theme for his songs, but also a principle in his way of designing musical experiences.
We can find the best sample is his album Cara B. This record is based on one of his tours across different cities in Spain. In this case, both the concerts of the tour, as well as the final album, were produced using random recordings of individual sounds from the tour route: the streets, the theaters, the transport stations, the hotels, the airplanes, the trains and the live reactions of the public in each city become part of the result as the tour evolves.
In one city, while traveling from the airport to the theater, Drexler stumble upon a musical band playing on a local street. After listening to them, he ends up deciding to record and later invite them to play one of his songs on the stage.
In this way, the end result is unpredictable, emergent. It is not the result of a rehearsal repeated many times, but of the organic interaction between the spaces and the people who occupy them. It is a collage of the interactions that emerged from the tour experience.
The learning, in this case, is that, although we have the illusion of having control over the results that our design will produce, we need to learn to give up control to emergence. We need to create with it, recognize it, channel its flow, and let it act and guide our practice.
“We need to continue to persevere in our radical work, experimenting with how we can work and live together to evoke human creativity and caring”. Margaret J. Wheatley
SRM
References:
Meadows, Donella H. Thinking in Systems. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2015.
Wheatley, Margaret J. So Far From Home: Lost and Found in Our Brave New World. Berret-Koehler Publishers, 2012
Drexler, Jorge. Poesía, Música e Identidad. TED Talk. April, 2017.
Songs by Jorge Drexler: Abracabras, La Edad del Cielo.