Thank you for taking it seriously, Tommo, and taking the time to comment.

<Ploughing on, because there are interesting things here, not least ros's and tommo's contributions earlier today>

Another anecdote, which may help (me) clarify my own position:

As a graduate student, I took part in a 'performance' during a composition seminar which consisted of the following. About eight of us sat around a very small table and deposited all manner of things onto it: bunches of keys, coins, knick-knacks from around the room, pens, the odd acorn or two. Then, having decided in advance that what we were about to do would be 'music' we moved those objects around the table. We picked them up, shook them, replaced them elsewhere. The extraordinary thing was that questions of 'ensemble', 'dialogue', 'timing', 'pacing', 'gesture', 'dissonance/consonance', 'structure (of course)', 'rhythm', 'solo/accompaniment', 'improvisation' - and whatever else, became, over the course of 30 mins, extremely focussed, and what we did then was for me (since it involved sound and time), music. We then spent another 30 mins improvising on 'real' instruments in response.

It was a really important musical experience for me, because I learned more about interaction and the musical potentialities of time and its structuring than in almost any performative experience I'd had beforehand.

I love you too much to to it teither Anty.
 

I am devastated, devastated, look you. Buy a hat? I couldn`t buy a goldfish!

I like what you say here about 'the musical potentialities of time and its structuring' - an elegant way of saying what I was trying to say earlier re my car experience. What I find even more interesting though is how you used the experience later - ie in improvisation with 'real' instruments. I'm playing devil's advocate here - up to a point - but (without diminishing the importance of the original experience) you almost seem to be saying that it had something of the nature of an exercise (a mental/musical limbering up) before the later improvisation. Another important phrase is your 'since it involved sound and time', which, together with the fact that it was a shared experience, suggests something much less tenuously connected with music than six_events. I wonder how often though instrumentalists or singers are invited during the course of their training to think outside the confines of traditional ways of developing technically and instead are asked to find unexpected ways of developing musically (which I think is undoubtedly what your experience did). Reiner will be able to contribute more to this, but it seems not a million miles away from the sort of trust and improvisation games that actors use.

Ros,

It's strange you mention actors' improvisational games, because I was going to mention that, too. Peter Brook even used them with opera singers when he did his famous Carmen production in Paris. They can seem silly and embarrassing at times (especially when you're being told what they entail) but often they throw up really strange and useful nuggets which feed back into what what's being rehearsed. It very much depends on what the director sets up, and some are better than others at doing this, but learning the process of developing others through improvisation is an individual path that can't be taught. His games with the singers in this case were as much about teaching them to perform actions which needed concentration whilst also using their brains for unrelated mental gymnastics, so that in performance the many things that a singer has to think about simultaneously became that much easier, as well as building up a rapport of trust with each other.

(A famous Brook example came when he was rehearsing his much admired MND. The Pyramus and Thisbe play is usually done as a cod knockabout, but he was aware that there was another issue here: that the Mechanicals were being put into a very alien situation, playing as they were before Duke Theseus and his court. During the long rehearsal period, the nobles and the Mechanicals never met each other. On the first day that they were all to rehearse the scene together, the actors playing the Mechanicals were given a specific time to arrive at the rehearsal hall. They got there to find the door shut with a note saying something along the lines of "Rehearsal - Private - Do Not Enter" pinned to the door. They sat outside and waited. And waited. Eventually they decided amongst themselves to try the door at least, and gingerly pushed it open. They found the other actors already there, lounging around in smart clothes, drinking champagne and snacking on canapés: worse still, almost immediately a bright spotlight was shone on them, the rest of the place went dark, and someone barked out an order to get started. Their memory of the awkwardness and panic of that situation was what Brook wanted to explore, and it created an atmosphere in performance which was markedly different to any other version of that scene I've ever seen.)