Thinking Together

Faulkner and Becker, sociologists and experienced musicians, wrote a book about their musical experiences¿Do You Know? The Jazz Repertoire in Action¿describing how musicians who didn't know each other could perform competently and interestingly without rehearsing, or playing from written music. When they wrote it, they lived at opposite ends of the country: Faulkner in Massachusetts, Becker in San Francisco. Instead of sitting around talking about their ideas, they wrote e-mails. So every step of their thinking, false steps as well as ideas that worked, existed in written form.

When conceptual artist and poet Franck Leibovici asked them to contribute something that showed the "form of life" that supported their work, they collaborated with Dianne Hagaman to put the correspondence in order, which Liebovici exhibited and now appears as an e-book (which allows linking to available performances of the tunes they discussed).

It's one of the most revealing records of...