A Guitar Parable of Muay Thai

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Imagine there is a guitar school, where boys come to live at a pre-teen age, that has something of a feel of a family. None of them know how to play a guitar. 

They are given guitars and given very basic drills to practice each day. They may be taught how to basically hold the guitar, or hold strings, but there isn't much technical instruction. They can see from older boys who have been at the school how it is done, and there is a lot of imitation. 

The drilling is fatiguing. Everyone drills together, playing scales or basic chord series over and over, and everyone is doing it together. They can see each other, and even the most experienced players in the school are sitting with the most inexperienced. Some may struggle, they push through. There is a strong sense of obligation, and the dynamics of the group hold everything together. 

Sometimes this drilling is grueling. 

Experienced student players are so adept at the drills they can do them in a very lazy fashion, or they can do them with flair and personal small variation. Sometimes they can find themselves "competing" with others in the group, just in a sort of expressiveness, because the drills are so boring. The fatigue units everyone. Younger boys watch the older boys add small qualities to their drills.

Aside from drilling like this, there battling. This is almost always quite playful...though there is always a dimension of dominance, of agonism. In pairs students "battle each other" in back and forth exchanges of aspects of music, much of it drawn from the skills in the drills, but the battles are musical, and expressive. Communally there develops an aesthetic where one knows if they are losing a battle at any point, mostly from watching the playful battles of older guitar students. The younger students battle in a rather simplistic way. There is a kind of metronome of music as everyone is battling at the same time.

There is almost no "instruction" given in these battles, no correction. In the drills there may be some correction, but the correction is toward the intensity and focus given. Most of the correction comes organically from the group, and the lead examples of developed players. 

Because fatigue is involved in these sessions, playful guitar battles, which last in rounds everyone follows, may by quite lowkey. Students that know each other well may just used them to rest, in only a gentle back and forth, together "mock" battling. And then other playful battles may really escalate, because social hierarchy in the school, where everyone lives together, is always contested. Winning at any one time feels substantive.

So, in these sessions of fatiguing drilling together (drills which develop personally expressiveness, and extraordinary endurance) and playful battles (which vary in intensity from sleepwalking imitative back and forth, to outright contests of superiority, and sometimes passing between the two intensities in alternation), make up the conditions for skill development, not only at the technical level, but also the level of styles. 

At a fairly young age the students of the school also participate in public guitar battles versus other guitar students of their own approximate skill...as do the more experienced students. Everyone attends these, and guitarists in these battles win money, some of it for themselves, some for the families they don't live with, some for the school.

Gambling abounds in these public battles, so guitarists on stage can always tell if the battle is close, who is winning, from audience bets and their shouts and energies. The battles have a strong aesthetic shape, composed of 5 rounds. In the aesthetics of music, as the battle builds the most intense back and forths occur in rounds 3 and 4, when the music is really building. 

Wins and losses in these public battles raise or lower the social standing of the students when they go back to the home school. And the display of creative skills in play is fed back into their play battles and drilling back in school. Sometimes they are corrected, often they are urged to be more of a certain way, a way they would have won, but there is a cycling dynamic between the public battles, and the playful battles back in the school. 

Everyone in the school is watching everyone. Student learn from imitating the better, older, more developed students, but also from others that are their own peers. Because everyone of a certain age and experience is sharing the fatigue, and the struggle, how others your age are doing things affects and inspires you. The environment is incredibly mimetic. Identities and skills are developed in the context of others. 

The host of schools in a region, and their 100s of local public battles, collectively create the styles of the music of that region. Certain techniques or tempos fall out of favor, others rise, according to the gambling values. Much of this is shaped by the underlying culture, and the cumulative history of the music, generations of public battles, and even famous musicians that grew out of these battles. It is an agonistic aesthetics of music, full of styles and localized techniques that have developed in diversity, but it holds together as a single "music". If you hear this music being played, you recognize it right away. 

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

The above a first sketch run-through of a descriptive idea, surely to be improved. Event-triggered from this video by my friend Timothy: 

https://bsky.app/profile/tnwjackson.bsky.social/post/3lqbthtbs2k2o

[Kevin von Duuglas-Ittu]

Here is some of the Philosophical discussion background behind the Guitar Parable: