I had dinner with my brother. He is a music teacher. I have been trying to get him interested in fencing, and he is, but his finances are tight right now and he is dragging his feet. Nonetheless, he is always interested in engaging in a discussion about fencing.
Over dinner, we were discussing the difficulty of teaching/learning tactics. I mentioned to him that Chuck had gone to the tactics clinic with me but he was expecting something more structured. We kicked around for a while and we ended up agreeing that teaching fencing (or any) tactics is about as feasible as teaching someone to play jazz.
A jazz musician is known for being able to play improvisational music. Take a simple song like "Row, Row, Row your Boat" and a jazz musician will add, embellish, twist, turn, and enhance the melody with musical phrases that you may have never heard before. This is the equivalent to tactics. The catch is that nobody taught the musician to play any one particular riff at any particular point in the song. Neither, however, is the musician really making it up as he goes along - it only looks that way because you have never heard it that way before.
In reality, the musician has practiced the riffs, can play them flawlessly, and has experimented with each and every one of them to figure out when they might be appropriate and when they might not. To the casual observer, the music is a random treatment of a known melody. To the performer, it is the execution of a plan that has been honed to perfection. I know this to be true. I used to play trumpet. I could read music perfectly well, but played mostly by ear. When practicing, I would noodle around with melodies and variations on them endlessly - trying things I had heard before and inventing some things of my own, but when I had an audience, I played only the combinations that worked.
Tactics is like that. You can't learn tactics by having someone say, "When they do this, do that." You have to learn first-hand.
04-02-2008 03:49 PM