Mind Training ~ Musical Training

A lot of non-Buddhist spiritual practitioners, perhaps Thomas Merton most famously, have felt that the tools of mind training can be used effectively in their own endeavors. Based on the very general framework laid out in the previous post, I think they can be helpful in the practice of music making as well.

One of the basic tools of mind training is simply practicing being more aware of your thoughts and actions in real time. As we go through life, a lot of our ways of thinking about things and behaving is habitual and reflexive. By learning to watch our thoughts and behavior we can get a better sense of what's working and what isn't, which is the first step towards making improvements.

What's really interesting about this, and what correlates so well with music making, is that we're bringing into the conscious realm things that usually reside at a deeper level that we're normally much less aware of. It's like shining a flashlight of attention around a dark factory and seeing the individual components and finding the ones that need work. Then, once we've fixed something up, moving on to another, while that one slips back out of the immediate consciousness.

What the neuroscience is telling us is that in this procedure we're slowly but surely rewiring our brains in various places. If we go about this in the right way, we'll end up with more of our music making flowing in a natural and nearly automatic way.

Another mind training tool that goes hand in hand with this is being clear about your motivation. The lamas often make the point that doing things to simply satisfy the "self-cherishing ego" can lead to suffering. Working towards being more of a benefit to others can lead to more happiness and contentment.

I think the analog to this in music making might be that if your motivation is simply to build technique as an end in itself, you're setting yourself up to be a creature of your "self-cherishing ego". That is, a lot of, "Hey, look at me and how great a player I am", can creep into your mind. If this is the case, one result is going to be being pretty upset when you make mistakes, and that kind of disequilibrium can cascade into some unhappy states of mind.

More importantly, though, if your motivation somehow includes being of benefit to your audience, that's going to color all of the instances of your brain rewiring work. Besides thinking about how to more efficiently make music, you're also going to be thinking about how your music is going to affect an audience. To my mind, that broader awareness of what you're up to has a lot to do with what frequent commenter Jonathan West calls "musicality".

photo - day lily 

Military Mind Training

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think the Buddhist techniques of mind training can be helpful to music makers. This story on mindfulness techniques used by the U. S. Marines has some concise quotes on the general benefits of mind training.

Designed by former U.S. Army captain and current Georgetown University professor Elizabeth Stanley, M-Fit draws on a growing body of scientific research indicating that regular meditation alleviates depression, boosts memory and the immune system, shrinks the part of the brain that controls fear and grows the areas of the brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation.

Four years ago, a small group of Marine reservists training at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., for deployment to Iraq participated in the M-Fit pilot program, taking an eight-week mindfulness course and meditating for an average of 12 minutes a day.

A study of those Marines subsequently published in the research journal Emotions found that they slept better, had improved athletic performance and scored higher on emotional and cognitive evaluations than Marines who did not participate in the program, which centers on training the mind to focus on the current moment and to be aware of one’s physical state. . . .

. . . . “It’s like working out in the gym,” said Ms. Jha, the director of contemplative neuroscience for the University of Miami’s Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. “Right now, the military has daily physical training. Every day, they get together and exercise. But the equivalent is not given to the mind. The more [these troops] practiced, the more they benefited.” . . . 

. . . Why the cognitive boost? The answer lies in neuroscience. Previous studies have shown that habitual meditation:

• Changes the way blood and oxygen flow through the brain;

• Strengthens the neural circuits responsible for concentration and empathy;

• Shrinks the amygdala, an area of the brain that controls the fear response;

• Enlarges the hippocampus, an area of the brain that controls memory

One thing I'd like to emphasize is that 12 minutes a day was enough to show a significant result. My friend Lama Tashi once said to me that a short meditation practice every day was far superior to great long sessions some days and none on others. I think that most music makers would agree that the same goes for practicing music. 

Generally speaking, though, I think all music makers could benefit from something that, "alleviates depression, boosts memory and the immune system, shrinks the part of the brain that controls fear and grows the areas of the brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation".

Mind Training

Jeffey Agrell left a comment down in the persona post that bookmark these two posts of his, and my response says that every time I reread them all sorts of new ways of looking at things pop up in my mind. This post is a try at framing one of the very deep issues of music making they raise.

As evidenced by the work put in to create the CD over on the right, I think Tibetan Buddhists are on to something. For one thing, in teachings where lamas present their ideas, they much prefer the term "mind training" to "religion". Bound up in that notion is the idea that one's progress depends on one's practice, which involves analyzing what you're doing and then trying to make a better job of it, as is the case in music making.

A lot of the new brain research talks about how spending ten thousand hours doing something effectively rewires your brain. In music practice, a lot of that rewiring involves getting the physical body to become more responsive to your musical intentions. What Jeffrey's posts make clear is that effective music making in front of an audience requires more. He also makes clear that this other (non-technique specific) part of music making, without which the exercise can lose most or all of its value, is not much talked about by music educators.

The primal point of Buddhism is motivation. Why you're doing something is more important than what you do. Every teaching I've ever attended has begun with a discussion of the importance of your motivation.

One of the great insights of Buddhism is that neither wisdom nor compassion alone does the trick. If either outruns the other, obstacles will arise.

In music making, technique is analogous to wisdom. And for now I'm going to say that the motivation to positively connect with and to be of benefit to an audience is the analog to compassion.

The lamas often say wisdom and compassion are like the wings of a bird, as both are needed to take flight. The point of mind training is to pay attention to and to cultivate each. 

photo - calla lily

Music/Mind Training

Many thanks to Pliable for sending along this link to a story on what the neuroscientists have discovered about the brains of some Tibetan Buddhist monks, each of whom had spent anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 hours in meditation before the testing.

. . . first, the monks exhibited a higher ratio of high frequency gamma brainwaves to slower alpha and beta waves during their resting baseline before the experiment began; and when the monks engaged in meditation, this ratio skyrocketed—up to 30 times stronger than that of the non-meditators. In fact, the gamma activity measured in some of the practitioners was the highest ever reported in a non-pathological context. Not only did this suggest that long-term mental training could alter brain activity, it also suggested that compassion might be something that could be cultivated. . . .

. . . In the brains of the meditators, they found larger volumes of gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex and the right hippocampus, areas thought to be implicated in emotion and response control. "It is likely that the observed larger hippocampal volumes may account for meditators' singular abilities and habits to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability, and engage in mindful behavior," Luders writes.

These data points get at what I was trying to say in this post where I talked about some of the similarities between music training and mind training. If you're going to try to connect with and have an effect (that you want to have, not an unintended one) on audiences with your music making, you need to work on more than simple (no matter how advanced) technique. 

The complication for music makers is that you're not practicing feeling an emotion, but how to project it, which is not the same thing.

Who's In Charge?

The elephant in the room, as far as all the new neuroscience is concerned, is that our conscious mind is not fully in charge of our behavior. Here's a paragraph from an article looking at how this new information might change our thinking about legal issues. 

The first lesson we learn from studying our own circuitry is shocking: most of what we do and think and feel is not under our conscious control. The vast jungles of neurons operate their own programs. The conscious you – the I that flickers to life when you wake up in the morning – is the smallest bit of what’s transpiring in your brain. Although we are dependent on the functioning of the brain for our inner lives, it runs its own show. Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.

Freud and Jung may have gotten various details wrong, but they were on the right track with their basic notion that the conscious mind is just one of many players creating our personalities and driving our behavior.

The Buddhist idea of "mind training" is also built in part on the idea that getting our conscious mind more in control of the situation is a tough thing to do, and that having a concept of what you're trying to do and how to go about it can be very helpful.

The previous post on the potentiating nature of dopamine, which can be released during music making, suggests it can be helpful in reinforcing positive aspects of the mind outside direct consciousness while quelling some of the negative stuff rattling around up there.

On a much more specific level, it seems to me that when we're helping someone make music, being open to non-verbal ways of transmitting information is the way to go, because we're probably already doing that whether we're aware of it or not.

Nadia Boulanger and the Unconscious

This woman's name pops up all the time as having been a composition teacher for numerous modern composers, but until this brief article, I had never seen anything about how she taught.

Bearer is also a composer who studied with the French composer and teacher Nadia Boulanger. “She was very, very focused on the musician’s mind,” Bearer says. “To study with Boulanger meant that you learned to use those unconscious parts of your mind that respond to music, that dream of music, and you learn to bring them to the conscious state where you could take a pencil and write them down.”

Going through the training with Boulanger, Bearer says, “I can say through personal experience that music does not live in the same part of my brain as my science."

I came across this just after leaving a comment on this post on Julia's Horn Page. She's talking about Jeff Smiley's work (which I most recently posted on here) and says:

As your lips learn to do new things, the things that work better are gradually and unconsciously incorporated into your current embouchure.

Maybe it's my background in the psych field, but I find the astonishing vituperation Jeff's work can bring forth from music educators about as fascinating as the work itself. It's my intuition that it's this opening up to and working with the non-conscious aspects of the mind that's so upsetting. If you're dedicated to reducing the activity of music making to a set of rules and concepts, it seems to me you're setting yourself up to paying more attention to the conscious mind than all the rest of it.

What's the practice about?

Phil Ford's post that's linked in the post below is full of stuff to think about, but what really jumped out at me was the following:

>>At a certain point when I was getting really serious about piano playing I realized that I was getting stuck, not because I couldn't physically move my fingers in certain ways, but because I didn't know how to focus my mind the right way to train my hands to make those movements. I learned one of my great enduring truths of piano playing: learning to play means learning to practice. You have to figure out what you're paying attention to, how you pay attention to it, how your consciousness is organized when you're concentrating (are you self-conscious? what does that feel like? what does it feel like to let go of self-consciousness?), how long you can concentrate, what it feels like to lose focus, and so on. And this is something that is actually very good for one's general happiness and health. When you get good at this meta kind of self-monitoring in your chosen practice, you get better at it all around. You notice things. The world becomes a more beautiful and mysterious place. <<

The overall point of how spending time working with music making can benefit your life in general is the cornerstone of what music therapy should be all about. Whether or not, and to what degree, that can happen depends upon how you practice music.

The word "practice" goes back to the Greek word meaning "concerned with action". It's not just the action of running through scales and pieces, but being concerned with those actions. Phil's point that it's as much or more a matter of consciousness as physical movement goes to the very heart of music making. 

You could argue that there's a Buddhist subtext to Phil's post, (and I think in previous posts he may have mentioned familiarity with Zen Buddhism). For one thing, Tibetan lamas usually prefer to call what they're up to "mind training". If you're going to get full benefit from your music making, being aware of the parallels between having a "spiritual practice" and "practicing music" will probably help.

Another resonance with Buddhism is that "karma" simply means "action". It's your motivation that makes the karma positive, neutral or negative.

Another point to make ties in to the Jonathan West post on musicality I keep going back to. He concludes it by talking about how he encountered a particular piece as a student and only thirty years later did he begin to understand how to play it. If you approach music making with open ended awareness, it will change you. It's not just a question of increased skill, but a deeper and deeper appreciation of how meaningful music making can be. 

Towards the end of the last of the Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot writes:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Afflictive Emotions

One of the objects of Buddhist mind training is to identify and work to ameliorate afflictive emotions and their effects. For example, anger can be an intoxicant leading you to behavior you'll later regret. 

The first step is to recognize in retrospect that it was the negative emotion which had a hand in creating the behavior. Then in real time you can sort of see it happening but not really be able to immediately alter the behavior. Over time that very recognition reduces the power of the emotion and its effects in that and similar situations. The final stage is realizing in real time you've exchanged the negative emotion with a neutral or positive one, one side effect being you can now clearly see when someone else is falling into the same trap you've worked your way out of.

Music educators work with those for whom music comes easily and have usually passed some sort of audition. Music therapists tend to work with those for whom making music does not come particularly easily, usually due to some non-musical as well as purely musical issues.

Public speaking is a great example of what I'm trying to get at. We can all talk, it's what humans do. But the prospect of speaking in public can bring on such strong afflictive emotions, some people are unable to do so, or do so in ways they never would in a friendly one to one conversation.

There's the specific parallel, in that until the advent of recorded music, being part of music making was a natural human response. Now though, it's thought of more as something only trained people can do. 

There's also the larger and more general parallel of recognizing that helping people learn to make music can be a broader endeavor than simply addressing technique issues, and that this is more apt to be the case in those unable to navigate an entry into the educational system.

Motivation

Along with cultivating mindfulness and working to ameliorate afflictive emotions, a third tool of Buddhist mind training that can offer a helpful way of thinking about how to go about approaching music making is a consideration of your motivation. Why you're doing what you're doing greatly affects the outcome.

I live in central Virginia where horses are one of the major industries and lots of people have them for a variety of reasons. At one extreme there are folks who simply enjoy riding along trails and through woods and fields just for the simple pleasure of riding and being out in nature. At the other extreme there are the horse show people who spend hours and hours and hours teaching their horses how to negotiate a series of jumps and obstacles in a closed ring observed by judges and spectators.

As a music therapist I tend to work more with people wanting to simply make music for the enjoyment of doing so. Music educators tend to work with people who enjoy making music as well, but who also have the motivation to push their skill level higher and higher in a competitive environment.

Establishing early on why it is you want to make music, and then using that insight in how you go about doing it can prevent a lot of needless frustration.

Motivation is also very important in very detailed and specific ways as well. Music is more than just notes on a page. Having a clear idea of what it is you want to express with them will greatly facilitate learning how to play them. The same goes for improvisation - the better idea you have of what you want to express will help you find the music that you'll enjoy making.

The Habits of Life

I've read this post by Phil Ford over at Dial M several times now, and still haven't taken it all on board. It's a further exploration of issues in the post I linked to and talked about here. 

Here's one quote:

>>...if you're not doing something about those little scripts you run in your brain—if you're not intervening at the level of the "operating system" rather than on the level of content—you will almost certainly end up taking a lot more time and energy getting the results you want, the end product won't satisfy you, and you won't be very happy about the experience. <<

I'm not sure it's an either/or duality, but understanding that working to improve your music making should include some "operating system" growth and adjustment will be very helpful. This is all at the core of what music therapy can be about, and there's a great deal of overlap with Buddhist "mind training". Will be returning to the subject, but for now just want to make the link.

Music, Fiction & Apprehension

A recent post of Kyle Gann's, Literature as a Mirror, along with the extensive comments, is  wonderful conceptual exploration of music and fiction and group think. I've reread it a number of times and have yet to keep all the thoughts it triggers in any kind of tidy bundle. For now just want to bookmark it and paste in my comment.

This is an amazing post and discussion, full of idea boxes to unpack. I am as in agreement with your basic argument as my general unfamiliarity with new music and fiction allow. I’ve been happy to leave *most* of it outside my sphere of interest ever since majoring in English back in ’71 and getting a whiff of what was coming down the line. What you’re calling sophistication has always come across to me more as pretentiousness, and in-crowd validation, once I left academia.

But what’s driving this comment is your phrase, “try to expand my means of apprehension to appreciate what was there”. That’s what your language on this blog, and your music, particularly The Planets, has done for me. It’s a very handy phrase for talking about a dimension of art/music/literature that’s not neccessarily present in entertainment.

It also seems a good phrase for talking about the purpose of Buddhist mind training (and a lot of other spiritual endeavors), which is not meant to be mere routine, but a catalyst.

Really glad you’ve kept on blogging for a while!

Memory vs Sight Reading

Here's a short post on memorizing music. The takeaway quote: 

“Memorization is not a trick. It internalizes the music for you; it makes the music, somehow, a part of your own physical being,” Oliver says. “And you can express so much more like that. If you don’t see a singer’s face and you don’t see the posture of a singer, the address of a singer to the audience, you’re really not getting what a singer can deliver in music and what composers expected the singers to deliver.”

Insert “musician” every time he says “singer”.

Sight reading is a wonderful activity, but it's not an unalloyed good, at least to my mind. Music on the page is strictly two dimensional and people who do a lot of sight reading are training themselves to miss a lot of depth. When I play music I've memorized it's much easier to feel it in three dimensions and it's easier (for me) to get to that place where you're inhabiting the music and it's inhabiting you. The gestural content of the music becomes much more apparent and the whole endeavor becomes less abstract, which for me is a plus, but may seem messy to someone with "theory mind", especially if they don't agree with the interpretation.

The Music Instinct

Here's a review of a new book out called The Music Instinct by Philip Ball. From what I can tell by the various reviews I've seen, it doesn't contain anything particularly new, but does a good job of presenting an overview of what all the new research is finding. Here are a few snips for the review:

. . . Listening to any kind of music, however, appears to be good for us in the neurological, if not the aesthetic, sense. Studies have found that music lights up not just particular parts of the brain, as in the case of language and other cultural activities, but all of the brain. . .

. . . “When you think about it, it isn’t surprising,” says Ball. “In fact, it’s probably why we listen to music. It engages the emotions, the intellect, language processing centres, and obviously some music engages the body as well. It’s a gymnasium for the mind.” . . .

. . .  “One of the interesting things is that musical training produces an enhancement in the corpus callosum – that’s the bit of the brain that communicates between hemispheres,” says Ball. “I get a bit tired of the popular idea we have of ‘left brain and right brain’ – and I like the fact that music subverts that, because it‘s using both integrated together. It seems that in musicians the two are, literally, more firmly welded together.” . . . 

. . . It has to do with the instantaneous nature of certain musical effects on our brains. . .  “If you look at what’s going on in the brain at that point,” says Ball, “the sensory inputs take a short cut to our emotional centres. And there are good evolutionary reasons that should be so. There have been times in the past where we’ve had to respond at a gut level – straight away, before we have time to really think about what it is that we’re hearing.” . . . 

. . . “But the main thing I wanted to stress is how important music is in the education of the brain, and in education generally. It’s so important for the development of the brain itself, and for the development of sociality, and because it gives us this rich neurological experience. What’s clear from these studies is that music has so many benefits that it needs to be a core part of the educational curriculum – and not an optional extra.” . . .