Agustín Lozano (b. 1970) is a jazz musician, educator, and the author of Juego de Tonos,
https://www.juegodetonos.com/
Can you tell a bit about your background that is relevant to your practice? Is past education important for what you do now?
The truth is that I have a very diverse background. I am a jazz musician (electric bassist, double bassist, singer, composer, and Big Band conductor), but I also hold two engineering degrees, and I teach as a Professor of Music at the Castilla–La Mancha Higher Conservatory of Music, in subjects as varied as Improvisation, English Applied to Music, or Big Band. I believe that all of my education has been relevant to what I have done in my professional life, even if at certain moments it didn’t seem so.
Many teachers at higher levels (like Jeffrey Agrell) consider improvisation to be the most demanding subject to teach. How do you see the situation in Spain on this front? Do new students come to the university with some improvisation skill?
The problem with teaching improvisation is that in classical conservatories it is not practised on in instrument lessons. Improvising is nothing more than “speaking music,” and in the conservatory students are only taught to read music, which seems absurd to me. I don’t even think improvisation should be a separate subject, but rather a skill that should be developed before learning to read music, just as children learn to read after they have already begun to speak.
In my case, I teach the subject of Improvisation in the final year of the Higher Degree in Music, when students have already been studying music for 14 years. Many of them throw up their hands in disbelief and cannot understand why they were not given even a few simple guidelines for improvising earlier.
As for the situation in Spain, I think it is similar to that in other countries in the field of classical music. In fact, the Erasmus students I have received also have a significant gap in this area. I believe it depends more on whether the training is “classical” or jazz-oriented, since jazz education places much greater emphasis on improvisation.
How do you approach the relation between theory and practice in art? Any book or article recommendations?
I am a real “harmony freak”: I enjoy musical harmony enormously and I think it is extremely important, above all, to be able to recognize all kinds of harmonies aurally. In my improvisation classes I always tell my students that, in order to start improvising, you don’t need to know anything — but to do it well, you have to incorporate musical theory and let that knowledge emerge naturally in your improvisation. If I may recommend my own work, in an article (in Spanish) that I wrote a few years ago for a specialized magazine, “Ten False Myths and a Reflection on Improvisation”, I explain my point of view on this subject.
https://csmclm.com/wp-content/uploads/Revista-Consonancias-CSMCLM-1_compressed.pdf
How would you describe your field and artistic context? Do you accept labels like ‘experimental’ or ‘avant-garde’?
Most of my musical work is related to jazz, but not all of it, nor exclusively. I am the leader of the band Juego de Tonos (yes, the same name as my game. It’s a long story related to registering the name with the Intellectual Property Office), which blends influences from jazz, blues, Latin funk, and pop. At the same time, I am involved in other mainstream or avant-garde jazz projects, and I even had a period as a pop singer-songwriter whose music was played on commercial radio with my band Hermano Lobo.
Do you have a favourite game? Or a game genre/mechanic?
It could also be said that I am a “freak” of modern board games. I own more than 300. Some of my favorite games are The Castles of Burgundy, Nemesis, War of the Ring, Lorenzo il Magnifico, Dawn of the Zeds, Hanabi, and Paleo.
There are promising trends in modern board games — among the winners of InnoSpiel 2022 was an audio game, Echoes, and a rhythm game, Hey Yo. Did you have a chance to try some new titles that reach out towards music to any extent? Maybe Tempo or Clap? ("party-style" titles from Spain)
To my knowledge, there really aren’t many games available related to music. The one I liked the most among those I’ve tried is a game that’s already a few years old called IV–V–I, by Rafael Hernández. In this game you have to follow certain rules to create classical cadences.
There is also another game, called in Spanish Ritmo y bola, which I find quite fun, in which you play following the characteristic rhythm of the song “We Will Rock You.”
What music do you enjoy? Is there a difference between what you perform and what you listen to? Any guilty pleasures?
I listen to almost all kinds of music, and in most genres there is outstanding music to be found. However, my favorite styles are undoubtedly jazz, funk, and progressive rock. I love musicians and bands such as Vulfpeck, Flying Colors, Jacob Collier, Robe (a Spanish songwriter who passed away recently and who was a great poet as well as a musician), Michel Camilo, or Yes. To be honest, very little of today’s mainstream music really interests me. Of course, I will always love metal, which was the reason why I started playing electric bass in the first place. And most of the music I make tends to be close to these genres, although I have done many other things as well, such as composing music for numerous theater productions, even writing the score for a musical, or playing with my city’s symphonic band.
Please, tell us a few words about your most recent project. How long did it take, and how many people were involved?
My most recent project, which I am very proud of, is the recording of a live Big Band album with my band Juego de Tonos. I wrote all the arrangements, with entirely original material of my own authorship, both vocal and instrumental. It involved a total of 18 musicians, and the reception of both the live performances and the album has been very positive among everyone who has listened to it. Here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRqxMFtcZ4ggfQWH9GDyN3EeDm72ic7Ch
What do you value most in collaboration? Do you work with amateur artists, or do you prefer professionals?
Chemistry on stage, especially in jazz, where it is absolutely essential. You never know where an improvisation is going to take you, and for me that is the most beautiful thing about music. I usually play most of the time with professional or semi-professional musicians.
Thanks for sharing your preferences as a performer. Could you touch also on collaboration in design? Was it rather easy or hard for you to find playtesters when developing Juego de Tonos, with it diverging so far from mainstream games?
Finding playtesters has been very easy, since I have a large number of students in different subjects: Music Theory, Modern Harmony, Electric Bass, Improvisation, and English Applied to Music. Therefore, I have had no shortage of enthusiastic volunteers for the playtesting process.
What the process looked like in general?
Achieving a “mathematical” or mechanical balance is crucial in game design. In summary, the design methodology followed these steps:
- Selection of the musical material the game will work with (notes, scales, chords, etc.). Research into mechanics and dynamics that could be used, providing an initial germinal idea for the specific game. A brief outline of the basic rules is then written.
- Solo playtesting of each new game. The author simulates a game, usually taking the role of several players at once, using a prototype of the materials. In this way, dozens of games were played for each design and many changes were introduced aimed at improving the mechanics, dynamics, length, and perceived enjoyment of the games. Scores obtained in the games, their duration, and possible changes are also recorded.
- Possible rejection of the game. Many prototypes are discarded at this stage for not being sufficiently interactive, musically relevant, or simply not entertaining enough. At this point, boards are also redesigned when necessary.
- Next comes the detailed writing of the first draft of the rules, which until then had not been fully described because they were subject to constant changes. This task is one of the most complex in the entire project. Writing the rules of a board game in a clear and unambiguous way is a titanic task. From the creator’s perspective, it is very easy to assume many details that new players have no reason to know or infer.
- Once the rules are written, test games begin. At this stage, the rules are explained by the author, and none of the participants need to read them in order to play. These sessions allow observation of which mechanics and dynamics work best, whether there are moments of inactivity, the real duration of games with different numbers of players, and which games are best received by the students.
The main criterion for selecting the games is to cover the greatest possible variety in every sense:
a) Level of difficulty, both in terms of the rules and the musical knowledge required.
b) Concepts covered: notes, tones and semitones, intervals, scales, and chords.
c) Player groupings: priority is given to games suitable for a large number of players, though some are designed for two players and even one solitaire game.
d) Duration: all games should ideally be playable in under 30–40 minutes, with an average of around 15 minutes, though it is also important to include games that can be played in about 2 minutes.
e) Victory conditions: in some games the winner is the player who obtains the most cards or victory points; in others the goal is to discard all the cards in hand, complete a task, or achieve a specific scoring objective.
f) Competitive vs. cooperative play: in addition to competitive games, some are designed for team play or cooperative gameplay.
g) Card games and board games: some games with boards and pawns were also created to increase variety and broaden the range of mechanics.
After this stage, the rules of all games were reviewed again, incorporating suggestions from players as well as variants that arose during test sessions. These variants are desirable in order to adapt the games both to the players’ maturity level (related to the mechanics) and to their musical knowledge (variants related to the “musical level”).
The next step was to conduct further playtesting with new groups of players. In this case, however, the games were not explained by the author. Instead, players had to learn the games solely by reading the rules and playing without misinterpreting them. Even at this stage, small adjustments to the mechanics were still made, and new variations were implemented.
Finally, the definitive version of the rules for each game was written, and the final prototype was refined and produced before manufacturing.
Do you have an open call (e.g. on your webpage) for people to come up with new playable activities for the JdT system? Did any rulesets by other authors catch your attention?
There is no specific place for alternative rules for the games (my website is very modest), but I have received a lot of feedback from teachers who use the Game of Tones system in alternative ways. I think the elegance of the system lies precisely there: it is basically a deck of cards with notes and rhythmic durations, and countless games can be invented using this system.
In fact, at an early stage I developed up to 27 different games, before reducing the number to the 12 that I considered the most interesting and varied. In reality, the most complex games I designed — the ones with the greatest amount of strategy or that were more “game-like” — were the ones I decided not to include in the rulebook, in order to focus on the faster and more musical ones.
Many people have told me that they implement the games in such a way that players must play the notes on their instrument when they lay down the cards containing those notes. I have also done this in my improvisation classes. I have even given concerts in which I used the deck so that someone from the audience could generate a random progression for me to improvise over.
Do you see something missing from the current landscape of music/game intersection? Or something you'd like to see more of?
In 2018, after creating my game system Juego de Tonos, I carried out research on gamification and the use of games for musical learning (as my Master’s thesis in Musical Research), and I came to the conclusion that there really weren’t many games focused on this area. It is possible that in recent years new proposals have appeared that I am not yet aware of. As a hardcore eurogamer, I miss a eurogame that uses music not only as a theme, but also as a core mechanic.
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