Have you ever written a limerick? It’s fun. It has a particular pattern of syllables and stressors along with a strict AABBA rhyme scheme. The cadence of a limerick makes everything a little more fun, even when people stretch a foot or tweak the rhyme, so it lends itself to lighthearted jokes more than deep emotions. Still, you can do a lot with the format, and playing around with the best way to say the lines is as fun when writing a limerick as it is when reading one.
I recently read a memoir titled Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges. It discussed various aspects of her relationship with her violin and her family, including her difficulties with improvisation and working with improvisers. She discussed Gabriela Montero as part of this, a famous classical pianist famous for her incredible improvisations. Montero’s performances involve asking her audience members for ideas - musical themes, words, whatever - and then expanding on those ideas on the fly.
Some of her performances are available on YouTube, and they are a lot of fun to watch. She interacts with her audience in a fun way, and the music reflects that interaction. On top of that, she is simply a very skilled musician; her renditions of composers like Brahms are fantastic to listen to, even if she is most known for her improvisations.
I don’t think these are unrelated concepts, though. Her improvised works are built on a strong foundation of theory, and her classical works are built with an understanding of how to communicate through music. The playful nature of her performances is most obvious in her improvisations but is omnipresent in everything she does.
Artistic skills are most often developed with rigour. You have assignments to use a particular technique, to record some aspect of reality, to copy some famous work, and you are evaluated based on how well you match the requirements given to you. This reflects how work is assigned to artists later in life - you are given a subject to draw, a topic to write an article about, and you are evaluated based on your submission. The act of creation is irrelevant to the contractor, only the result.
Improvisations are different. There may be a similar starting point, a subject to work with, but the act of creation is part of the work. The audience is present and involved in the creation process through their reactions, and they are witness to how the work develops over time. Rather than an act strictly of composition, it is a work of communication where the artist has the opportunity to change their art based on the audience, and the audience is privy - just a little bit - to the mind of the artist.
This also opens up the idea of play in art. In Montero’s performances you can see her play with a motif handed to her to see how she’d like to use it, to get the proper sense of what the audience is looking for. When an audience member sings the Harry Potter main theme, she plays it a half dozen times in slightly different ways as she tries to remember how it goes. And from there she takes off with something that, while it still has that main theme at its heart, is different and more her own.
Limericks (yes, that was actually relevant!) have a fun back-and-forth between writer and reader that mimics this. The words on the page are what the reader is reading, but neither really knows immediately what the other is doing. The writer puts the stress on an odd part of a word; will the reader pick up on that? The reader says lines 3 and 4 with different syllable counts; is that what the writer intended? The writer is communicating their idea in a way they think the reader expects, and the reader is piecing together which bits are intentional and which aren’t.
Art in general works on this concept that the artist is communicating something that the audience will interpret. The limerick is a microcosm of this broken down to its most basic form, where the audience has an expectation that the artist is fulfilling and a dialogue forms in figuring out whether and how this was done.
The “whether” portion of that is important. The Wikipedia article on limericks has an example in the variants section that flouts the rhyme scheme. You can read it in the cadence of a limerick, it was written as a parody, but does it feel like a limerick as you read it? That’s a personal question; to me, I think it highlights how important the rhyme scheme is to the “vibe” of a limerick. It doesn’t matter how many times I read it, it still doesn’t satisfy my desire for a goofy anecdote. The others on the page do, no matter how much they stray from the formula, but that one doesn’t do it for me.
These variations are examples of “play” in writing, in the same way that Montero will play around with her motifs before hopping into an improvisation. It’s getting a feel for what you want to present and how your audience will react to it. Before you ask them to engage in a serious work you can play around a bit and engage in a brief conversation. Do you like this? Do I like this? Is this what I’m trying to do, and is it what you expect? Do I really understand what I’m trying to do here, and do you understand well enough what I’m trying to do to justify doing more of it, and will either of us get enough value out of this work for me to justify doing more?
Play allows an unserious presentation of art that peeks into the artist’s thoughts. It takes the skills an artist has developed in their career and, rather than applying them to a carefully considered masterpiece, applies them to something small enough to consider throwing away. A thought that, in the end, is considered wrong; a motif that, in the end, carries no meaning; a theme that, in the end, is disconnected from the work.
It is not that these small, playful works are meaningless. Rather, the meaning is in the peek behind the scenes, seeing how the art is constructed piece by piece. Improvisation sometimes leads to a beautiful work, and sometimes it falls flat, but in either case you see the musician putting together the pieces on the fly, so fast that you can see what habits they fall back on and what works they are most familiar with riffing on.
This concept of play in art bears value for both writer and reader, in that the writer can develop ideas and skills in a smaller format and the reader can get a peek into the psyche of the writer, granting better understanding of their larger works. All of this is packaged into formats that, like the limerick, can simply be fun to create.
Not all art needs to be work. Sometimes it’s better to goof around a bit.