The Care and Feeding of Filk Circles

[billroper]

I've been kicking this idea around for a while and I think I've gotten my thoughts together enough to produce a draft. As with most things, Your Mileage May Vary.

A filk circle is an organism. It is born, it lives, and it dies, usually in the space of a single evening. No two filk circles are ever going to be quite the same, being made up of the individuals who are participating along with the particular set of expectations that they're bringing with them for the occasion.

On any given evening, the most important thing is that the filk circle be healthy. I'm going to adopt a relatively low bar for the health of the circle:

A filk circle is healthy if the majority (preferably a super-majority) of the people participating are enjoying themselves.

This seems self-evident to me. We do this for fun, after all. If we're not enjoying ourselves, there's no reason to be doing it. This leads to an interesting corrolary:

If I'm not enjoying myself, I may improve the health of a filk circle by leaving it.

See, the problem is that if I'm not enjoying myself, I may try to drag the circle into directions that it really doesn't want to go. This ends up making me frustrated (not good), but it also is going to frustrate the people who are perfectly happy with the current state of the circle. The filk circle at WindyCon this year went aggressively folky one evening. The majority of the people and performers there seemed happy with that; I wasn't. I didn't really feel like listening to folky material, nor did I really want to play it myself.

So I left. There was absolutely no point in spoiling everyone else's good time, but there was also no point in me hanging around and not having a good time. I'm sure you can invent your own, similar examples.

There are a lot of prescriptions out there floating around to try to produce a healthy filk circle. We have names for them like "bardic circle" or "chaos", just to pick two diametrically opposed prescriptions, each of which has many variants. And our personal choice of prescription is going to vary, depending on what we value the most.

The bardic circle (which I'm going to use here to refer to a performers' circle, where the rotation moves between performers and excludes non-performers) values an egalitarian ethic: everyone should have the chance to play, equally often.

Interestingly, it's a still more egalitarian version of the bardic circle, "Pick, Pass, or Play", that includes the non-performers actively in the circle and -- in my experience -- can produce the least egalitarian results. Take, for example, a circle that contains an infrequent visitor to the region who we will, for the purposes of this example, call "Leslie Fish". The PPP circle frequently will have non-performer A ask Leslie to play a song, as will non-performer B, and non-performer C, and...

What you end up with is an impromptu Leslie Fish by request concert with an occasional song by someone else. Here's one of those circles where -- with no disrespect intended to Leslie -- the best thing I can do for the health of the circle is to go somewhere else. The circle is fine and healthy, save for me. I should go.

But let's go back and look at the performers' circle. The good thing about it is that everyone gets a turn (modulo occasional exceptions, see below). You'll sometimes get to hear something good that you didn't expect to hear, because someone who wouldn't manage to get a song in edgewise in other formats will screw up his courage and sing, as did the young woman I saw at Marcon two weekends ago.

The problem is that a performers' circle can get to be too large. The circle at Marcon on Saturday night took 90 minutes to go around. And I'm going to assert that any circle that takes more than an hour to go around is inherently unhealthy, because singing a particular song is now going to become more important to the performer than singing the song that is best for the health of the circle.

Let's think about this. Ego-driven monster that you are (aren't we all? :) ), you've got a new song that you'd like to sing sometime tonight, or something that you've worked up for your repertoire, or just a song that you really like to sing. It's your turn now. The song that you really want to sing doesn't follow worth a damn. You could sing something else that would make the sing "better", maintaining or gently changing the mood. (Or maybe completely disrupting the current mood, if that's what's called for.) Or you could sing the thing that you really want to sing.

What're you going to do? I submit that you're probably going to sing the song that you want to sing, because you just don't know if you're still going to be awake when the circle gets back around to you again.

And the circle is less good because of it.

Would you make a different decision if the mean time between songs dropped to 30 minutes? I would -- and I suspect that most of the rest of you out there would too, because then you feel like you're going to get another shot at singing that song that you want to sing at a better time.

So if you figure that the average song is about 4 to 5 minutes long, that suggests that a "good" number of performers in a bardic circle would be 6 or 7, if you want folks to be able to sing every half hour or so.

By not-so-odd coincidence, that's the number of performers that I usually say is the maximum that a good chaos sing can support. But that's because I'm all about the flow -- and any sing that is too large is a flow killer.

A chaos sing can support more than 6 or 7 performers, but generally not more than that number who want to sing each turn around the circle. Yes, contrary to what it may appear, a good chaos sing actually does move around in a circle, it's just in non-Euclidean space and points are not always touched in the same order.

A good chaos sing is based on shared knowledge and observation. I may know someone else's repertoire well enough to surmise that if I sing X, they'll follow it with Y. People are looking to see who has hands on the necks of their guitars, or who is standing up with songbook in hand, to get an idea of who wants to sing next. And they'll frequently communicate non-verbally across the room to determine who's going to sing that follower. Sometimes the previous song will end and one person will say to the other, "I've got a really good follower. Do you want to follow me?"

Most times, this works, as long as there are few enough performers in the circle, the sight lines are good, and everyone's paying attention. Some times, not so much. I've seen people who have things queued up and are patiently waiting their turn get trampled.

I try to avoid that myself. I don't always. But I never claimed to be perfect.

I find that I'm not quite done, but I think that's enough for now.

Comments

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

I've heard back from Trace, at Marcon. He tells me that Marcon does, in fact, have an alternate filk room, which was listed in the pocket program and announced at the beginning of the open filk. Good for them. (I've suggested adding prominent signage in the filk room.)

And that leads me to my own comments. Chaos, bardic, poker chip, moderated chaos, and whatever other shapes of circle that filkers form all have their advantages and disadvantages. The common factor I see is that all of them have their faults magnified when they become Too Damn Big. Right now, I think both OVFF and FKO are doing a good job of making alternate rooms available, so things mostly flow into reasonable sizes and configurations. Certainly there are circles that become Too Damn Big, but the people there do have the opportunity to find or form another circle if they want to.

I'm performing less these days - personal preference, and the fact that I'm not writing much lately - and I'm enjoying open filks more as a result. Friday at Marcon was the most I've done in a while, and I only did one or two beyond the Dorsai theme filk, I think. Saturday I only performed once, and that was because I'd just written something new. (And I admit I pushed in after waiting a while, because the people I wanted to sing it for were about to leave.) At FKO, I only soloed twice all weekend, and once was my contest entry.

But at FKO, I had a wonderful time in the first alternate room one of the two nights, just listening and harmonizing. The musicianship was outstanding, the energy and flow were spot on, and there were enough songs that either had a chorus, or were songs I knew, that I had lots of opportunities to harmonize.

I'm not an instrumentalist at all, but over time, I've learned to love listening to jams. My favorite musical moment of Friday at Marcon was when I asked Amy to do something, she announced the key, and we ended up with an ensemble of two fiddles, several guitars, and (I think) a couple of drummers. Magical.

I guess what I'm leading towards is the question of expectations. So much of a person's enjoyment of an open filk depends on what he or she wants out of it. If the goal is "I want to hear a bunch of great music", then enjoyment is easy to find. If the goal is "I want to sing, and it doesn't matter if it's lead or harmony", then it depends on the ratio of solo performance to songs you can sing along to. If the goal is "I want to sing lead", then it's a question of finding a venue where that's possible. (Which can be a big problem if the con only has one room for open filk.) If the goal is either "I want to sing lead in front of a big audience", "I want to sing lead in front of particular people", or "I want to sing some leads *and* I want to hear my favorite performers", the it may be necessary to either be pushy (in chaos) or wait a long time (in bardic).

I don't yet know how I'm going to approach my first Contata. Since I'll be in the presence of a lot of people who don't already know all my stuff, I may try to step forward and do more, possibly in an alternate room. Or I may decide to stick with the largest sing, to hear more people that I haven't heard before. I've found that it's best to just flow with whatever I most feel like doing at that particular moment.

[billroper]

Yeah, I swapped e-mails with Trace too (who is planning to take some time off from running filk at Marcon, at least next year). I wasn't aware that a second room was available on Friday, but I know that the one that opened up on Saturday wasn't available until 11:30 PM due to another panel, which is really later than I'd like to see, especially when there's a theme circle running in the main room. And I do understand the difficulty involved in negotiating space with the rest of the folks running Programming.

As you observe, what you feel like doing at any particular moment varies. I'm sure that's true for most everyone. For me, it's usually some combination of "I want to sing some lead", "I want to hear some particular people", and "I want to hear something I enjoy listening to" (the latter two categories overlapping, but not being identical, especially since you can never know when something new and interesting is going to pop up). These are also modified by "I don't want to be a filkhog" and "I don't want to have to actively fight to get a song in edgewise".

On average, I'd rather be in a smaller circle with people that I like (both for listening to and as friends) than in a larger circle of any kind. (This doesn't mean that I don't want to be in a circle that includes people that I don't know well, just to be clear -- if that's possible given the number of negatives that I just piled on there. :) ) That can be a tricky thing to arrange, especially in a situation when space is limited.

[markbernstein.livejournal.com]

For me, it's usually some combination of "I want to sing some lead", "I want to hear some particular people", and "I want to hear something I enjoy listening to" (the latter two categories overlapping, but not being identical, especially since you can never know when something new and interesting is going to pop up). These are also modified by "I don't want to be a filkhog" and "I don't want to have to actively fight to get a song in edgewise".

Precisely! I mean absolutely no offense or judgment here. But you've illustrated my point perfectly. That's a fairly long list of goals, and in some large-crowd situations, perhaps including this last Marcon, it's not necessarily a realistic set of goals. Which can lead to unrealistic expectations, which can lead to disappointment. (That sounded almost Buddhist. :) )

On a different point, I have to confess that my knowledge may be out of date, as these days when I'm at a general sf con, I'm more inclined toward parties and conversation than the open filk. When, in your experience, do the open filks at such cons really get rolling? In past years, my perception was that they often didn't reach anything approaching critical mass until after 11. As such, I've tended to think of theme filks (at least, those starting at 10 as they did at Marcon) as neutral-to-positive, as they gave people a reason to gather and could act as a jump start for the open filk.

(Yes, I do realize that both of us fall into the category of those no longer inclined or able to stay up all night, making an earlier start more desirable. Much more so for you, now that you have small children. But when do people actually start showing up?)

[billroper]

Oh, I concede that my goals may not be realistic in any given situation. But if one doesn't have goals, one never achieves them. :)

When the filk starts really depends on what else is going on around the con. If, for instance, I have a Wild Mercy concert scheduled in a room at 9 PM with the filk scheduled afterwards, you can pretty much count on the filk starting at 10 PM. OTOH, at other cons, folks may come straggling in.

But 10 PM is the most common start time and there's usually activity around that time unless the filking population at the con is pretty thin.

[ms-dblk.livejournal.com]

Why does the filk start so late? (Yes, I'm old, and turn into a pumpkin *grin*). I'm speaking about a general con as opposed to a filk con (which is all I've been to).

[billroper]

Historically, filk used space that the con didn't want for other purposes. (This was after it moved out of sleeping rooms and into function space.) By 10 PM or so, programming and events were generally over and the non-filkers were off to room parties.

[tollermom]

Mark, I think you'll love Contata! If I wasn't in the middle of moving, I'd definitely be going back, because I had a _blast_ at Conterpoint last summer. It's small, and friendly, and very laid-back... it's kinda the relaxacon of filk cons and I loved it!