Table Of ContentWays of the Hand
Ways of the Hand
The Organization of
Improvised Conduct
David Sudnow
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
1978
Copyright © 1978 by the President and Fellows of
Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Sudnow, David.
Ways of the hand.
Bibliography: p.
1. Improvisation (Music) 2. Hand. 3. Jazz music-
instruction and study. 4. Phenomenology. I. Title.
ML3822.S92 786.4'6 77-24057
ISBN 0-674-94833-5
For
Harvey Sacks
(1935-1975)
Acknowledgments
I would like to especially thank David Belknap,
Michael Butler, Emanuel Schegloff, and James
Schenkein for the hours of talk we had together.
Each in his own way contributed to the develop
ment of my thoughts about music making, and
each put up with my many false starts with much-
needed encouragement.
James March and Michael Cole were partic
ularly instrumental in my research, for they were
central in establishing a most extraordinary setting
for interdisciplinary work: the School of Social Sci
ences at the University of California, Irvine. Here
an anthropologist could teach a course by having
Mexican craftsmen build a boat with the students;
a mathematician could explore learning by estab
lishing a school on a farm near the campus; a
sociologist could conduct a course whose exclusive
focus would be on the opening several seconds of a
single conversation; and when they asked me what
I could use in my laboratory when a new building
was planned, I said that a piano would be nice, and
they got me one, to aid my teaching and research
in sociology. Without Irvine in the late 1960s, my
work would have been impossible. University life
everywhere would profit if there were more people
like March and Cole.
I owe to Dick Powell, a superb pianist, friend,
and critic, the wonderful joys of being able to
make music.
Three people participated in my intellectual
life with an order of influence to which I hope this
study in some measure does justice. Harold Gar-
viii | finkel provided the impetus for this investigation,
in his writings, lectures, and the conversations we
had over the years. He pushed me at every point to
go for the detailed looks of things; even the most
passing comments he made on many occasions re
vealed an expanding richness of implication as I
wrote; his encouragement enabled me to realize
the consequences of allowing the keyboard, and
not an academic discipline, to tell me where to go.
If my study helps to realize the vision of a rigorous
ethnomethodology, I would be most pleased.
Harvey Sacks, whose work is well known, was
a model for what close thinking, a love of detail,
and a commitment to caretaking could be all about
as a style of living and working. He was my mentor
and friend for fifteen years, and like all those who
were so very fortunate to have known him, life will
simply never again have the fullness that Harvey
made possible. His loss drains me each day.
Robert Epstein, first as an undergraduate stu
dent of mine and then as a friend and colleague,
discussed every aspect of this study with me in
detail, read and reread every page, made sugges
tions of fine intricacy at each turn, and taught me a
great deal about writing. I hope I can one day
repay the debt I owe him when it comes time for
him to do that masterful work we can surely expect
in the future from an extraordinary thinker.
Joyce Backman, of the Harvard University
Press, worked terribly hard to see this book through
the various stages necessary to reach publication.
Her encouragement, editorial help, and support
are deeply appreciated.
My children Jessica and Paul, my parents
Estelle and Irving—they suffered with me, because
of me, and brought special pleasures that sustained
me through years of hacking away at the piano and
typewriter. I hope I have brought some music into
their lives in return. And Patricia now brings new
meaning to whatever will become of the effort.
The hand reaches and extends, receives and
welcomes—and not just things: the hand extends
itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands
of others. The hand holds. The hand carries. The
hand designs and signs, presumably because man
is a sign . . . the hand's gestures run everywhere
through language, in their most perfect purity pre
cisely when man speaks by being silent. And only
when man speaks, does he think—not the other
way around, as metaphysics still believes. Every
motion of the hand in every one of its works carries
itself through the element of thinking, every bear
ing of the hand bears itself in that element.
Martin Heidegger
Preface
From an upright posture I have looked down at my
hands on the piano keyboard for some years as I
studied jazz music, and when I regard my hands
now, my looking is deeply informed by the history
of looking I have done.
If I watch my hands on a typewriter, I don't
recognize their movements. I am startled by the
looks of my hands while typing, just as I'm sur
prised by the sight of my profile when surrounded
by mirrors in a clothing store. It's like witnessing an
interior part of my body going through some busi
ness.
But the sight of my piano-playing hands is
familiar. I know their looks, not only in those inti
mate ways in which we all know our hands' looks,
but as my jazz-making hands. It is the ways of the
hand that I watch now. For a long time in learning
to play jazz piano, I was busy watching my hands
and the terrain of the keyboard to see that they
did not get into trouble; or I was looking at the
keyboard in order to find places to take my fingers,
so that instructional work was occurring as a form
of guidance in which my looking was very much
implicated. Then my look became preoccupied in
more subtle ways, party to a kind of imaginary
conceiving of various aspects of the territory in
which I was moving. Even when looking away from
the keyboard, I would conceive visual 'gestalts' of
pathways for use as I was playing. Many jazz stu
dents spend a good deal of time approaching the
task of improvisation by formulating and using
