"Alasdair Maloney" <alasdairmaloney@hotmail.com> wrote:

I have been listening to various versions of Cobra, and the other game pieces recently. And while I think I understand the basics of the game piece concept, I am not sure what the actual "rules" etc. of Cobra are.

Can anybody help me?

Count me among the folks who don't think it's really necessary to "know" the rules to actively hear what's going on in these pieces. Most listeners don't really "know" the grammatical rules that go by the name of music theory and they get along just fine listening to most music created with those structures in mind. Generally, in the game pieces Zorn created sets of rules for how the musicians can interact which allow for a lot of leeway in terms of what the musicians do, not unlike the rules of sports and games like poker or baseball. Someone may have a very good hand in poker, or be on a hitting streak in baseball, but the actual outcome of any particular game, or play within a game, is at least as dependent on how EVERYONE plays as it on the rules of the game. If all the other players fold early in a poker game, it doesn't matter how good your hand is, you're not going to win much. Zorn's game pieces are not about the particular notes that any musician or group of musicians play, but about how groups of musicians interact, how the rules of the game enable and limit interactions of various kinds. If you want to try to hear this level of structure in Zorn's game pieces without seeing it in performance, the best way may be to focus on the changes that occur when the music played by a particular subgroup of the ensemble is interrupted by another kind of music or at least by another group of players. Does the first group continue playing, stop, fade out, begin playing in the new style? If the kinds of music continue does the music/do the musicians interact, co-exist without interaction or actively disrupt each other? Is the first group interrupted by a single musician or a group of musicians? In what ways is the second type of music different from the first, in what ways is it similar? Do earlier groupings and/or styles of music recur? Do certain kinds of changes between musics recur, even if the specific groupings and/or styles do not? Another possible handle on how these pieces work in general might be to think of them as being analogous to some of the Naked City compositions that have a lot of stylistic shifts in them or the pieces that Zorn has composed for classical performers and ensembles, which may also involve lots of radical stylistic shifts. While these pieces rarely seem to involve much improvisation, paying attention to the how the changes of style, texture, personnel, etc work within these composed pieces may help you to consider the same kind of changes in the improvised game pieces. -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com