The Polyglot Method and John Ogdon

8/11/2019 The Polyglot Method and John Ogdon

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The Polyglot Method and John Ogdon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZHOzPJEMGY

"Ich fhle Luft von anderem Planeten"

Stefan Georg

Central to the Polyglot Methodbut, much more excitingly, to any

performance skill such as Public Speaking or Classical Musicis

the notion of the delegation of the effort to Autopilot as being the

ideal condition to be sought out and arrived at.

The studentin this case myselfworks off two sets of stimuli,

as he guides himself from the symbols he has traced in the

course of conjuring up languageto the realization of a fluent

reading

(This is the second of the two phases which we should begin to

define in the Polyglot Method: first the creative phase; then the

summation)

One stimulus is the voice of the teacher giving the correct sound

of the word or phrase. The other is the word as written: which

implies the graphic element lying beneath, subtending, a correct

pronunciation.

If you were Barthes you could make quite a thing of that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZHOzPJEMGYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZHOzPJEMGY


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Fig 1 : Georgian and Russian versions of teachers simple biography paragraph

Strangely, this is far more problematic in Russian than inGeorgian. The difference between reading Russian off the board

and reading Georgian is akin to the gulf between trying to sight-

read Scriabin or Rachmaninov and looking at a reasonably

playable piece (say a Prelude) by Chopin

It is important to spot what exactly isthe mental functioning

which kicks in

Northern Lights from International Space Station

The student finds that for certain words, he can just plunge in

and it comes out perfectly: there is no reading as such; he just

glances at a word and pronounces it faultlessly.


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The sea flowing gently onto a beach in Crete

Here is a graphic breakdown of the mechanisms involved:

The process is entirely akin to that of the concert pianist.

John Ogdon was said to be able to fluently read and

publically playat an interpreted high-powered


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performance leveland simply after a few read-throughs

on the trainthe score of a new and entirely unknown

concerto just recently written for him. He seemed to have

no need for rehearsal.

If one thinks about this, its clear that he must have

possessed a special gift for allying any of all possible

musical shapes on the page preciselyto its corresponding

sonic image; being able to dip into this vast lexicon at will.

I imagine that in such circumstances, elements are not so

much carried in memory over long periods of time as

downloaded. Ogdon could instantaneously retrieve the

correct musical, artistic and sonic gesture in all its

wholeness and freshness; as is apparent from his playing

of Mozart; and it is possible to watch other excellent and

note-perfect musicians and see what is lacking in

comparison. Its just this sense of an inevitable, perfectand organic whole which they do not even come close

to

*

If individual elements are conjured on demand, the

sacrosanct idea of a memory bank for words in a foreign

language developing as you go along mayjust be a

convenient mental construct shrouding the real

downloading process, which seems primal; and also a

more satisfactory explanation; because the student may


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find himself surprised, even astonished, by the finished

quality of fragments arising from his imaginative efforts.

*

There exists the same paradox in the related field of musical

composition.

In this context, these paragraphs, from a few years back, by The

Guardians music critic Christopher Fox, are extremely pertinent:

In retrospect, the most striking feature of the postwar period was the way in which Schoenbergian

modernism hardened into the dominant orthodoxy of new music.The result has been a peculiar

form of quasi-modern music that still survives today. It has the superficial characteristics ofSchoenberg's version of modernism angular melodies, uneasy harmonies, abrupt shifts of tone -

but, lacking the expressive necessity that propelled Schoenberg towards his new musical language,

it has none of the fervent urgency of the second string quartet.

This paradoxical music, conservative modernism or modernist conservatism, has its merits. It is

often very skilfully made and, for those who acquire the taste, it can seem very tasteful. It sounds

like modern music and is assiduously promoted as modern music by much of the classical music

industry. Its disadvantage is that, when heard alongside the modernist masterpieces of the first

decades of the 20th century, it just sounds vapid and dull.

As a composer myself, I have never gone along with any of that

because I have approached the problem from a completely

different angle.

Although that I agree that music needs to be well constructed, I

hold that an act of construction can only take place meaningfully

once the fires of creativity are smouldering. That is, of courseif

we areaiming for an inspired, new-minted work, discovered at

the Vulcanic interface of creativity and by that definition wemean a new work of music; which we will judge, naturally, by the

tokens of this familiar (and yet unfamiliar) source...


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Sureits good to be well-prepared; and there are tens of

thousands of composers far better equipped in advancein this

respectthan I.

But I have never accepted the premise that musical compositionis a sub-species of architecture. Im puzzled when, in a public

lecture about Sur Inciseshis wonderful piece for three pianos,

three tuned percussion instruments and three harps, the

composerPierre Boulezcites a (very well-made) phrase at

the start of the piece, and says of it that he asked himself, What

can I do with that?when he would extend and re-work the piece

into a larger artefact.

To me this is too cold, too detached: hes a master architect, but

he seems too much in control of the project, like certain grammar

books, maybe

A comparison between finding an elegant aorist in Liddell and

Scotts Greek Lexiconand hearing Albert Finney quoting

Aeschylus in the original to a rapt classroom in The BrowningVersionmight be an apt parallel...

Entirely to the credit of the freer and more spontaneous way of

going about things, it goes without saying. . .

*

But it struck me lately with some force that ones increasing

confidence ones increasing sense that the metaphoricalmemory bank for words was getting larger and more elastic and

with a finer mesh (like the New Testaments great dragnet)

might indeed have another explanation : that the neural

pathways were getting shorter because the brain is finding


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increasingly efficient ways of processing the data received in the

classes and at the whiteboard.

If this were so, it would be a matter of designing memory places

antecedent to (or as a structured preliminary within) the Polyglotclasses; to further structure and restrict the unfocussed growth of

rewarding pathways, as a fruitful and stronger way of enhancing

the linguistic action at the interface as I say; and as Glenn

Gouldhas said of recordingat a distance. . .

But it would be a moot point as to whether this really worked; and

magically enhanced the learning process at a later stage: in the

middle game, so to speak

No-one has tried this yet, I guess: mainly because I am the first, I

think, to apply the intelligent thinking about the rles of corporato

the dynamic field of language learning...

If one discounts straightforward derivative work stemming from

the new General Service List, that is. Useful though that may be

in another context

On these lines, I am designing what we might call the

Matryoshka Methodof envisioning familiar places, scenarios and

settings in familiar language; and the chart looks initially like this:


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There are about nine top-level concepts: Countryside, Town, City;

School/Office; Nature/Geography/Travel; Technology; Feelings,

Ideas, Miscellaneous.

Each of these nine levels has ninelower levels; thus

Countryside>path; gate; sky; farm; tree; river; cloud; lake; forest;

and within these nine levels we locate ninemore, thus:

path>

direction>north>south>east>west>wide>narrow>overgrown>spaci

ous

This should give a global chart of about 800 basic nouns and

associated adjectives, adverbs or short phrases, all decided upon

quite loosely, and in an arbitrary and a purely intuitive way; andwith due deference to that in between worldof alluring danger

and the unknown on the one hand; and the familiar, stable,

trusted and known on the otherwhich defines the psychological

territory of adolescence.


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The world of Le Grand Meaulnes, Swallows and Amazons, Big

andThe Riddle of The Sands(among many more!) in a word

which I am working on in another part of the island

I felt this familiar, half-lit, youthful world a meaningful parameter towork withinsince languages are typically learned during the

years of adolescence: when concepts are forming in general in

the gradually-awakening mind; and everything is up for grabs.

Genius is often starkly present at or before 17. Think of Rimbaud.

So I naturally felt that (clutching to my chest the Proust and the

Alain-Fournier !) that we should go down the same path too, as

adults! To know the place for the first time.

*

First indications are that such lists are very sympatheticto being

viewed and then expounded in two other languages. There is not

that oppressive sense of aridity which comes from conventional

textbooks: with their dull and predictable vocabulary, always

expressed in banalities and the language of clichs.

The more we can mimic the psychological world most apt for

ingesting new wordsin other words, the area of fairy stories,

romance and adventure which defines the growing-up stagethe

more likely it may be that we can enact a new growing up in our

minds of the primitive thought-worlds of other languageswhich

are, of course, such a pleasure to penetrate within

I would call this the The Darkened Valley psychological area of

adolescence, which John Ireland evokes so splendidly in his little

piano tone-poem of that name, here expertly played by a

wonderful eleven-year-old girl called Alice


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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDlU79MJgA

*

And at the interfaceas I like to call it (in other words in the ideal

supportive, non-invasive, balanced, settled, not overcrowded nor

disrupted nor trivializedclassroom situation) I think that the

student has a very clear sense of trying to conjure up something

wonderful from afar.

If he succeeds, he proceeds; if he cannot proceed, the teacher

very carefully prompts him, coaxing an intelligent response. We

might say that the student proceeds by blind intuition; becausethere is an element of needing to trust the passive memory, too;

and until one engages it and examines its contents for a clue, one

remains unsure as to what, in general, will occur.

If the student loses the thread, however, and defaults to reading

the whiteboard word bit by bit (the scenario generally considered

adequate in language classrooms all over the world!) in

which Ipsychological terms he proceeds in a quite different waywill analyze in momentbut, it must be said, with far less fluent

and convincing results.

*

A musical score may be considered a chart which represents on a

specialized grid the musical elements to be performed in their

when-ness and how-ness.

A musical chart is like a mariners chart of the seas: it shows what

is supposed to be there, antecedent to navigating into the real-life

experience of it all, to find out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDlU79MJgAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDlU79MJgAhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaDlU79MJgA


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There is a Platonic parallelism here: west on the chart means a

westerly direction for the ship; and the representation of a reef

means that there is indeed something to avoid in the sea just

aheadBut if the seagulls were to make a chart of their own, they would

use the elements of time and place to show when this or that ship

arrived in, and left, their immediate area. They would not be

concerned to possess a global view. Their chart would be rather

different.

So, I ask you to envisage a chart of a piece of music as imagined

were it a sentient being The piano has eighty-eightby the piano, .

notes; so each note could be depressed or not depressed at a

given moment. I would liken it to an octopus squared (8x8) and

thatadded to octopus triplets (24)making eighty-eight in all

Imagine, then, representing, on a laboriously-devised chart

consisting of 88 cells, the presence or non-presence of a sound

from a given note at a given momentsay every tenth of asecond. It would be a very complex chart (and not unlike the top

half of the audio graphics you get when you record something

audible using the computer) but the same information as that in

the scorea recipe rather than a recordwould be there

Simplifying this example, imagine the transcription onto such a

chart of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star at a rate of one note per

second, and notated in seconds.

The result might look something like the following:

NOTE

A x x

G x x x x (tie)


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F

ED

C x xSecond: 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th

Is NoteHit ?A

0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0

Second: 1st 2nd 3rd 4th 5th 6th 7th 8th

12

Is NoteHit ?G

0 0 0 0 1 1 0 0


12

Is NoteHit ?F,E,D

0 0 1 1 0 0 1 1


51

Is NoteHit ?C

1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0


192

And the results might even be susceptible to a binary

representation, as above - (with decimal equivalent below each in

green; the decimal values to show that it is possible to compose a

piece of music using just figures; which is exactly what a MIDI


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interface does) (I have made them decimal to create a more

suggestive analogy)

The point is, though, that a numerical value is easily thought of as

aplace,in physics; and in digital analogies of all phenomena; andas such can be manipulated in many interesting ways

For Im homing in on the idea that a similar convention could also be usedover

there in our Polyglot System Language Classroomfor establishing the

presence or absence of certain quite subtle and invisible mental behaviours

which we can only infer; and that these may be given a unique value, just as the

first two Note Cs in Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star have a unique valueOnly

thing is, whats being described is a lot more subtle than that, and at first sight,

although not really, hard to pin down

*

Lets reprint the SmartDraw chart from Page 3 and look more closely


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CASE A shows the decoding or primitive level of reading a

whiteboard text back to the teacher.

CASE B interprets the fluent level: which arises not because of

any acquired fluency in the learnerthat hoary and untenableshibboleth in the perception of language learning, worldwidebut

because there has been contact, and meaningful contact, with the

linguistic interface : entirely as a result of adopting eliciting,

suggestive, non-threatening, non-judgmental, non-assessment-

based, non-progress-oriented, andtout court , non-Aristotelian

methodsin the pedagogic process at hand

Those are the merits of the Polyglot Method of Language

Learning

*

(Aristotle, by the way, was a worthy Greek; and a great man: but

he deserves a break)


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(TO BE CONTINUED)

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The Polyglot Method and John Ogdon