Mask/Persona

Terry Teachout's almanac entry for today reads as follows:

"We are talking about an artist; and for the enjoyment of the artist the mask must be to some extent moulded on the face. What he makes outside him must correspond to something inside him; he can only make his effects out of some of the materials of his soul."

G.K. Chesterton, "The Dagger With Wings"

I'd say a vital aspect of music therapy is that the music you make must correspond to something inside you, and that the more you feel that connection, the more therapeutic your music making.

The quote also reminded me of the etymology of "persona" that I posted on a while back.

Another of TT's almanac entries from a while back gets at the professional (non-therapeutic) aspect of acting (and I would say music making as well).

"I very much disapprove of the adage that you have to feel the performance completely every night on the stage. This is technically an impossibility, and really is the negation of the art of acting. The art of acting, after all, is not actual feeling but simulation of feeling, and it is impossible to feel a strong emotional part eight performances a week, including two matinées."

Noël Coward, "The Art of Acting" (The Listener, Oct. 12, 1961)

Play

This article from Psychology Today is a great discussion of what "play" is. Here's a brief quote from early in the article:

(1) Play is self-chosen and self-directed; (2) Play is activity in which means are more valued than ends; (3) Play has structure, or rules, which are not dictated by physical necessity but emanate from the minds of the players; (4) Play is imaginative, non-literal, mentally removed in some way from “real” or “serious” life; and (5) Play involves an active, alert, but non-stressed frame of mind. 

Those points, and others made in the article, read like a good definition of music therapy if you substitute "playing music" for "play". 

One reason I choose the name "Kenwood Players" as a performance name for the Friday group is that I wanted to make explicit that "play" aspect of our music making. As I've noted from time to time, it seems to me that our visibly having fun playing engages audiences at least as much as the music itself.

One of the antecedents of "play" is the Old Dutch word "pleien - leap for joy, dance" according to the Oxford American Dictionary.

For me, the most striking correlation between music therapy and play was the author's elaboration of that first point. 1) Play is self-chosen and self-directed - players are always free to quit. 

Back when I did music therapy in closed classrooms for emotionally disturbed children, the cardinal rule was it was not mandatory. I always said something like "I'm sure there's other stuff your teacher can find for you to do if you don't want to participate in music." Right off the bat that eliminated the "power struggle" of trying to "make" the children behave. And the corollary to that was that I told them it was my job to find a way for them to participate that they could easily handle. 

I never had child choose to not participate, and the teachers were always impressed by the fact I had no real discipline problems. 

The Oxford Companion to Music

I've had a copy of the tenth edition of The Oxford Companion to Music close at hand for thirty some years. It's the best single resource for information and insight into "classical" music I've ever come across, and is delightfully entertaining as well, due to the wonderful writing of Percy A. Scholes.

This opening paragraph of the entry on tempo is a great example of what is, to me, some of the best writing on music there is.

Tempo usually means 'speed'. Upon the choice of the best speed the effect of music greatly depends. Every composition may be said to have its correct tempo, but this is not capable of being minutely fixed without scope or variation, as to some extent circumstantial factors enter, such as the character of the instrument used (e.g. organs may greatly differ in their effect), and the size and reverberation of the room (a very reverberant room requiring a slower tempo if the music is to 'tell'). Moreover, the general character of the interpretation decided upon may affect the tempo: one performer may consider that a particular piece will be most effective if every detail be made clear (calling for a slower tempo) and another that it will be most effective if treated in a 'broad' style calling for a quicker tempo; and both these interpretations may be good ones. Further, a highly rhythmic performance at a slower tempo may give the impression of being quicker than a really quicker one with less rhythmic life. In fact, what matters is not the tempo the performer actually adopts but the tempo that the listener is led to imagine he is hearing, for whilst in science things are what they are, in art things are what they seem.

Music(al) Stretches

Sound and time are the two primal ingredients of music, and a word we use for each is rooted in the act of physically stretching something. 

Tone comes from Middle English: from Old French ton, from Latin tonus, from Greek tonos 'tension, tone, from teinein 'to stretch" -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Pace comes from Middle English: from Old French pas, from Latin passus "stretch (of the leg)', from pandere "to stretch'. -  Oxford American Dictionary.

Stretching is something the human body does all the time, from waking in the morning to standing on tiptoes reaching for a top shelf, so we all have a built in somatic sense of some stretches being easy and others being extreme and everything in between. 

The most deep seated stretching we do is extending and relaxing the diaphragm with every breath. We do it one way when we're relaxed, and another when we're anxious. 

Since it's my contention that a lot of music's power to move us is due it its encoding physical gestures (and associated feelings), I feel the ways in which music can mimic physical stretches (and associated feelings) has a lot to do with the feelings a piece of music might evoke. It's so easy to get caught up in the surface issues of music making, we can sometimes forget there's this deeper gestural substrate that's communicating to an audience in a mostly non-conscious way.

A key component of physical stretches is that they always have an arc from not being stretched to being fully stretched and back again. You can't make yourself stop breathing and you can't hold a body stretch forever. So besides the degree of a stretch at it's fullest, from barely stretched to full or over extension, there's the way each stretch builds to a peak and then relaxes.

"Tension and release" is a phrase often used in talking about music, and for me, understanding that in the context just laid out gives it a richer meaning. 

"Balance" is another word often used in talking about music making, but I've never really liked it because I always get the extremely two dimensional image of scales tipping one way or another, whereas stretching is complex and our sense of it springs directly from our proprioception.

I often ask students if they've ever been around someone who has lots of interesting things to say, but whose voice is so off putting it's hard to pay full attention, -  that's the substrate I'm talking about. If their voice tone suggests either a string stretched to the breaking point or barely tuned up to pitch, and if the pacing is either to fast or too slow, the words they say will may not register as well as they might. 

On the other hand, if the gestural substrate of your music making matches up well with what you're trying to express, there's a much better chance of connecting with an audience.

Music Making: Experience & Language

Part of the process of learning how to make music is that the effectiveness of language describing what you're trying to do is so dependent on your level of experience. I've noticed this especially with the horn. Not only is instrumental music a non-verbal art form in itself, trying to put into words exactly what's going on with the embouchure is extremely difficult.

Since taking voice lessons at conservatory back in the 70's I've been hearing variations on "breathe from the diaphragm", and from the beginning I understood what that meant. What is so interesting is that over the years, that phrase has gained meaning for me via experience, and it means much, much more to me now than it did then. It's not just language, but language that connects up with a much more tactile, proprioceptive understanding of music making that years of experience have given me.

It's another virtuous circle like the one I talked about here between proprioception and hearing. I'm not sure there's any way as a teacher to help people make these kinds of cognitive/experiential advances any faster, but I have caught myself from time to time expecting words to convey to a student something they're not experientially ready to take on board. 

One of the reasons I've been so struck by the work of Jeff Smiley and his Balanced Embouchure method for trumpet and horn is that his exercises are a mother lode of experiential learning that taught me a world of things about embouchure that are beyond words. It's the one time for me in learning how to make music the experiential side got so far ahead of the verbal side. 


(If any Blogger users can explain why sometimes it double spaces between paragraphs and sometimes doesn't and there's a way to stop it without messing with HTML - I'd love to hear about it. It's been happening sporadically since they "upgraded".)

Your Tone Is You

It's my feeling that tone is the most primal of the elements of music making, just as one's tone of voice is the most primal element of speech. 

During my 20's I worked as an attendant and group therapist on locked psychiatric units. My primary responsibility was to insure the physical safety of the patients, which meant closely monitoring the emotional state of patients who might become violent with themselves or others. Over time I learned to pay close attention to tone of voice as an indicator of mood, more so than the verbal content of speech. Listening closely to tone of voice was also very important in understanding what was going on under the surface in group therapy sessions.

The flip side of all that attention paid to the voice tone of others was trying to always insure my own tone of voice was not accelerating a volatile situation, but rather helping to keep things relatively calm.

Those experiences led me to be more conscious of something I think we all do on a mostly unconscious level, i.e. make judgments about the personality and state of mind of others based in part on their tone of voice, and that we use our own tone of voice as an underpinning to expressing ourselves through speech.

It's my idea that when the neuroscience gets sophisticated enough, we'll see that the tone quality of your music springs from, and affects the listener in, deeper and more primal parts of the brain than the rhythm, melody and harmony. When you make music, your tone sets the stage for whatever else you do. 

(As a side bar to this discussion, there's the question of the tone of piano players. It would seem that, more than wind and string instruments, the tone of a piano resides more in the piano than the player. That's largely true, but the hammer action means that strings can be hit with different amounts of force and at different rates of acceleration (see correction below), exciting the strings in subtlely different ways. Along with that, high level players can control the dynamics and the temporal sequence of every single note to such a high degree that individual styles can be developed and appreciated.)

UPDATE - Jonathan West corrects me in the comments:

By the way, you're wrong about the piano. By the time the hammer hits the string, it is no longer attached to the key and so it is in free movement and has no acceleration due to the key. Being in free movement, the the sound made by the hammer's action on the string varies from one note to the next solely on the speed with which the hammer hits.

What pianists and others think of as tone on a piano is derived from timing and use of pedals, and also from different degrees of force (and hence loudness) applied to different notes of the same chord. To a great extent, the idea of varied tone on the piano is a cognitive illusion fostered by the player - one which the player himself may be unaware of and honestly believe in.

All of what Jonathan says is very well put, especially that last sentence. During my time as a keyboard major in the late 70's I convinced myself that there was something more than simply the speed of the hammer affecting the tone of the note, and had come up with my faulty explanation involving acceleration. There is the acceleration created by gravity as it works to pull the hammer back to its resting position, but that's a constant rate involving the number 32. So maybe what I'm feeling is how that interplay between gravity and the force of the keystroke allows for super fine tuning of the hammer speed. 

Jonathan is also absolutely right to mention pedaling, which I'd not included and which has immense effect on a player's tone. Oftentimes a hammer is hitting a string still vibrating anywhere from a little to a lot from a previous hammer stroke, and pedaling controls the amount of that vibration. 

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.

Mindfulness in Music Making

This article from Wired talks about how your mental attitude affects your behavior. 

. . .“Our results indicate that beliefs about free will can change brain processes related to a very basic motor level,”. . .

. . . To lose confidence in free will seemingly introduced a lag between conscious choice and action. . . 

My sense is that studies such as these are so very preliminary that drawing hard conclusions on the specifics can lead you astray, especially on topics as controversial as free will. But I do think that they empirically reinforce the common sense idea that your attitude and general mental state as you go about something like making music is going to affect the outcome.

The neuroscience is telling us that it's the simultaneous coordination of many areas of the brain in music making that makes it such a unique behavior. Maintaining continuous awareness of all that can be tough sledding, and I think the concept of mindfulness as put forward by Tibetan Buddhism can be one very useful way of talking about how to go about it. 

A big part of mindfulness is simply observing your thoughts, emotions and behaviors without feeling you're having to make immediate conscious decisions and judgments about everything all the time. In making music this involves being as good a listener as you can be to what you're doing, as well as to those around you if you're in an ensemble. Taking the time to have a better sense of the music as a whole can help you understand what adjustments you want to make on the smaller scale.

One thing about practicing mindfulness is that like anything you practice you can get better over time. One thing which sets high level players apart is their being able to hear and respond to the music they're making both as a whole and in its many parts in real time. For those of us not at that level, understanding that how we're thinking and feeling about making music has a lot to do with how successful we are. It's another way of framing the musicality vs. technique duality.

One thing that can happen as you work with being more mindful is that you become aware that there's more going on in your behavior than you're usually aware of, and that some of it is merely reactive and routinized. A classic example in music making is rushing when playing passages perceived as difficult. Usually it's anxiety kicking in and highjacking the tempo. Coming to realize it's an anxiety issue as much as a technique one is half the battle.

Another point to make about mindfulness in the Tibetan sense is that it has to do with feelings and emotions as well the more rational connotation it has in the West. A Tibetan saying someone has a good mind is like a Westerner saying someone has a good heart. So in music making this means being open to the feeling/emotion content in real time, as well as the technical issues. 

My Friday group has both professional level and amateur level players, and all the amateurs have approached me at various times to say they've had more fun and gotten deeper into making music in this group than any other they've ever been in. I think a lot of that has to do with arranging the music to suit their abilities, which allows them to be more mindful the musicality side of things. That means they can lay down a solid framework for the pros to use to take improvisational flight.

A Pauky Poem

Kyle Gann just posted this wonderful poem, which uses the word "pauky", which I'd never before encountered. It means shrewd or cunning, often in a humorous manner. The poem was written about this event. The poem and the brief introduction are in this post of Kyle's.

And speaking of poetry, a Boston poet friend of John Luther Adams, John Shreffler, wrote the following poem in response to JLA’s and my pilgrimage to Concord:

For John Luther Adams

The experience aspires to communion,
But the art is various, so many
Different ways to do it, sometimes you feel
It wrap its arm around you as its other
Hand reaches in and neatly lifts your wallet;
That would be Wagner, while Beethoven and Ives
Storm Heaven, locked in wars into which you’re drafted,
But sometimes, now and then, the artist nods,
Lost in his thought and fumbles with the keys
And turns the pauky lock and opens the door
And inside lie mansions, where the conversation
Is real and equal and, as well, ecstatic
And shimmers like the Northern Lights laid out
In a Heaven into which you’re invited.

Sometime back I posted another poem about poetry itself, wishing there were one as good for music and this poem by John Shreffler makes a good companion to it.

Flow and Something Else

In my most recent Horn Diary I mentioned how my playing in the Fauré Requiem on Palm Sunday induced an altered state during the performance which lasted for hours after the concert. In a comment, Jonathan West pointed out that that state of mind is described by "flow". In a subsequent comment he said that in the hundreds of times he's performed (and he's high level, not an amateur), he's experienced "flow" only a dozen or so times.

Judging one's own mental states is a dicey proposition at best, but my sense is that I've experienced "flow" hundreds of times - practicing, performing, composing, running group music sessions, etc. - so I'm pretty sure there's a semantic issue here.

I've been wandering down the foggy ruins of time trying to think of other times I might have had experiences like the one playing the horn in the Fauré on Palm Sunday, and the only one I can come up with is my having attended a teaching given by H. H. the Dalai Lama and having had the opportunity to shake his hand. 

I've also been trying to find words to describe both experiences and have come up with:

Exalted - in a state of extreme happiness, from the Latin exaltere from ex- 'outward, upward' + altus - 'high"

Exultation - show or feel elation or jubilation, esp. as a result of success, from the Latin exsultare, frequentive of exsilire 'leap up' from ex- 'out, upward '+ salire 'to leap'

Individuation -  a process of transformation whereby the personal and collective unconscious is brought into consciousness (by means of dreams, active imagination or free association to take some examples) to be assimilated into the whole personality.

I want to take this discussion further in a subsequent post and would welcome any further comments or emails on this subject, and I can't help thinking our Vermont readership might have something interesting to say on all of this.

Talent

As a music therapist, I often hear the word "talent" in a phrase such as "I don't have any musical talent". That can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but my position is that it needn't be. For one thing, my view is that there is no unitary "musical talent". Some people have a great feel for rhythm, others for intonation, others for harmony and feeling chord changes, others for performing for audiences, and on and on. Truly gifted people have an abundance of a lot of those talents, but regular folks often have some measure of some of them as well.

Also, a crucial component of success at music making is the motivation to work at it enough to fully engage in the process and to experience the positive benefits it can bring, creating a virtuous circle of progress. I have from time to time encountered people with wonderful technique, but who have given up music because it no longer interests them because they feel no reward in pursuing music. They have various musical talents, but not the talent of connecting music making to their personal enjoyment and sense of fulfillment.

This article from the BBC seems to lend some support to this view. It's a discussion of how the new research into genetics indicates nurture has a lot to do with nature, i.e. just because you have a particular genes doesn't automatically mean you have that trait.

. . . genes interact with their surroundings, getting turned on and off all the time. In effect, the same genes have different effects depending on who they are talking to. . . 

. . .[A trait] emerges only from the interaction of gene and environment." This means that everything about us - our personalities, our intelligence, our abilities - are actually determined by the lives we lead. The very notion of "innate" no longer holds together. . . 

. . ."Like a jukebox, the individual has the potential to play a number of different developmental tunes. The particular developmental tune it does play is selected by [the environment] in which the individual is growing up.". . . 

. . ."High academic achievers are not necessarily born 'smarter' than others," they write in their book Talented Teenagers, "but work harder and develop more self-discipline.". . . 

. . .Most profoundly, Carol Dweck from Stanford University in the US, has demonstrated that students who understand intelligence is malleable rather than fixed are much more intellectually ambitious and successful. . . 

. . . Bit by bit, they're gathering a better and better understanding of how different attitudes, teaching styles and precise types of practice and exercise push people along very different pathways. . . .

All of this has great bearing on the discussion of "natural" in this post and those posts on other blogs that are linked. It also bears on the feelings discussed in this post on educators' often brusque elimination from their programs of people wishing to make music. 

I've seen in other discussions of the new genetics, though, that environment (nurture) can only affect genetic predisposition (nature) at the margins. It will take a while for all this to get sorted out, but in the meantime I hope to give regular folks some good tools for developing their music making abilities so as to enjoy all the benefits that can flow from successfully making music.

Red Moon

One of the lines for "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" I picked up somewhere along the line over the years is, "Oh, when the moon shines red with blood". I didn't really know what it meant until I saw the phenomenon some years back during a lunar eclipse, when the moon took on a reddish hue. 

There's a lunar eclipse tonight, so depending on conditions this may be one of those times the "moon shines red with blood".

"Natural"

The first time I can remember associating the word "natural" with making music was back in the 80's when I heard a radio interview with Tony La Russa and he used the word responding to the question of why he thought he was such a successful baseball team manager. He said that he'd never been a natural player, so in order to improve enough to make it in the big leagues, he had to analyze all the facets of the game so that he could figure out how to do things like hit and run bases. That meant he was in a good position to help others play to the best of their ability. 

I immediately had the realization that I was in the same position making music. With the possible exception of rhythm guitar/banjo, I am in no way a "natural" musician. And all the work I've done to improve my skills helps me help others.

The next time I consciously thought about "natural" music makers was reading Jeff Smiley's The Balanced Embouchure. I can't remember if he expressly says so, but I came away with the feeling that his method for trumpet/horn players is a rigorous set of exercises embedded in a well thought out philosophy that helps students find their way to playing as if they were a "natural" player.

All of this has come to mind because of this post by Bruce Hembd, where he makes the point that there's nothing "natural" about playing the horn:

Until animals start buzzing their lips in the jungle, I don’t buy the ‘natural’ approach that some teachers tout as a selling point – along with its abstract, pop-psychology terminology. . . 

. . . Playing a brass instrument requires technical knowledge, and mental and physical skill. For some that requires breaking things down and analyzing it to see how it works and all fits together. 

This slightly different usage of "natural" tripped me up the first few times I read the post. I agree with the point being made, but also feel trying to figure out how to get the body to work in the most natural manner possible is the way to go. (Valerie Wells, the horn rep for Jeff's BE method comments approvingly to Bruce's post.)

All of these ideas about "natural" players and how to learn from them raises the issue of our consciousness when playing. Stan Musial didn't go to the plate turning over in his mind all the details needed to hit well, he just hit the ball. Once the rest of us learn from observing naturals, we need to work with what we've learned enough so that we don't need to think about it either - that's what practice is all about. What starts out as conscious thought should over time slip down into more automatic behavior. If we do all that well, an observer should have a difficult time picking out who was originally a "natural" and who wasn't.

Update: I was remiss in not mentioning this post by James Boldin, which I'd read and commented on before making my own post here. Dave Wilken also posted on the subject 

(and included links to some great posts of his touching on the subject), and Julia Rose has a very interesting post responding to Bruce here.

This discussion is one of the reasons I find blogging so beneficial - all these people who really know their subject spending time sharing their knowledge and insights.

Update 2: Want to paste in Julia Rose's response to a comment I left on her post:

I don’t think I’ve changed approaches, but rather I’ve gone back to an approach I used before. Every single success I’ve had in my career (making finals in auditions, competitions, etc.) I attribute to my thinking musically instead of technically when I played. However, when I started running into problems a couple years ago (as everyone eventually does, I think) I began to focus on what I thought was physically going wrong. But there is just too much going on physically for one to think about, at least while playing. I know now that when one runs into problems, one must continue to think musically in order to solve the problem.

Persona

The word persona comes from the Greek for mask, specifically the ones actors wore in dramas. Somewhere along the line I remember seeing that besides hiding the face, they somehow altered the voice of the actor as well.

 ~~~ Update - Just checked Wikipedia and found:

 

This is an Italian word that derives from the Latin for a kind of mask made to resonate with the voice of the actor (per sonare meaning "to sound through").

The latin word derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and its meaning in the latter Roman period changed to indicate a "character" of a theatrical performance.~~~

In psychology, and I think Jung in particular, persona is the term to describe the face we present to others and how they perceive us. It seems as well a handy term to describe how musicians present themselves to their audience.

Jeffrey Agrell has two great posts up talking about the non-musical aspects of performance here and here that I've read several times and been meaning to post links to. 

Then today came across another of those botox inhibiting emotional intelligence stories here.

"Our facial expressions reveal social context by mirroring expressions of those around us, giving us insight into their emotions, states of mind and future actions," he says. The Botox study, he says, suggests that our facial expressions also guide how we interpret language.

The new findings fit with the increasingly accepted theory that aspects of higher thought, such as language, judgment and memory, are shaped by our bodily sensations and movements, says Paula Niedenthal, a psychologist at Blaise Pascal University in Clermont-Ferrand, France, and a leading scholar on the role of the body in emotion. According to this "embodied" view of cognition, which has gained popularity over the last decade or so, the brain makes sense of the world at least partly by simulating action.

Connecting with an audience while making music means a lot more than simply getting the notes right, and Jeffrey's posts are a great survey of what's involved, and your persona as perceived by the audience is as important as the music itself. Part of what's going on has to do with mirror neurons.

One thing I've noticed recently in working with these ideas and trying to keep a more relaxed and personable face while performing (and practicing) is that my facial expression affects the tone and emotional content of my singing voice way more than I'd realized. It's obvious, really, but a lot about music making is obvious only when you give it some attention.

Horn Endurance

Jonathan West has in this post nicely summed up, amplified and put into larger context the extremely helpful and on point advice on horn endurance he's been giving me in the comments here. He's obviously spent a lot of time thoughtfully considering a wide range of issues relating to music making, especially in ensembles large and small.

More importantly, he's able to write clearly and concisely. My situation is somewhat unusual, and like they say, your mileage may vary, but I find his writing on music making some of the best I've come across, and a model for what I hope to do in my materials.

When I started blogging a year ago this month, I never guessed one of the benefits would be to get such wonderful help on learning the horn. Thanks, Jonathan!

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.

Poem

Working through the ideas in the previous post led me to remember the final lines of this poem which have stuck with me since high school. Sure wish there was a poem that does for music what this one does for poetry.

               Ars Poetica

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs

A poem should be equal to:
Not true

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -

A poem should not mean
But be

-- Archibald MacLeish

Turbulence

A few nights ago the weather here was affected by a hurricane far out in the Atlantic. There were eerie calms mixed with cells of turbulence that seemed to come and go like armies in the night. That line supposedly said by Henry II about Thomas à Becket came to mind, "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

There are lots of ways to talk about the details of music making, but fewer about its general nature. The notion of "gesture" can be helpful, but only goes so far. I keep coming back to "equilibrium", but that sounds so clam and flat. Until I can find a single word that includes the meanings of both "equilibrium" and "turbulence", talking about different pieces of music having different mixes of the two might work.

The Oxford Companion to Music has a graphic of Mozart playing with billiard balls, as he is said to have done while thinking about music. When you set a ball in motion you're introducing turbulence into a system than then seeks equilibrium. That language helps me more than the usual tension/release chestnut, which seems so one dimensional.