Geoffrey Thomas

Wind and string players spend endless hours maintaining and improving their tone. The great Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma once told me that a string teacher can forgive a student who has better technique, but will hate a student who has better sound.

Very few keyboard players pay such close attention to their tone. After all, the glorious sound of a French horn or the haunting tone of an English horn are completely unattainable on any keyboard instrument. But, careful focus on tonal quality brings unexpected benefits on the keyboard. Clearly, having good tone will make your playing more pleasing to the listener, but it will also improve the quality of your practice. You can solve many technical problems more effectively by paying attention to tonal quality. Getting the correct notes is a fairly low order problem for the perception. Playing the notes with the idea timbre and color is a far more intriguing problem for the perception. As a bonus, the right notes will come.

Just Concentrate! How many times have you said that to yourself? Has it actually ever worked?

Just Concentrate! is the sort of thing the inner coach is always yelling at you. The inner coach is a notion developed by Marianne Ploger. If, like me, you have a constant inner dialogue, you are sure to have some version of the inner coach. The inner coach wants to get in the pool with the swimmer and try to help her swim. That’s not where the inner coach should be. The inner coach needs to be outside the pool to teach and give helpful feedback after the performance.

Just Concentrate! is not a very helpful visual metaphor. It suggests contraction, furrowed brows, intense stares and physical rigidity. It does not suggest poised awareness of the present. It does not suggest the spiritual flexibility that enables the performer to respond to the moment, to create something afresh.

A fundamental reason my inner coach has yelled out Just Concentrate! so often is that my mind wanders. What Buddhists call the monkey mind has taken me on a largely irrelevant mental journey instead of attending to the business at hand, which is playing music. Perhaps the greatest joy you can have as a performer is at the moment when you are riding the crest of time, when you are in a state of flow, when you are not divided.

How to enter this state is the critical question. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, a book recommended to me by Marianne, is providing direction. The first question that truly shook me was this: can you turn your mind off? My personal answer is, regrettably, no. A second observation that struck me was the simple fact that we can only be in the present moment; the mind can of course race across the universe of time and space, but we live, willy-nilly, in the eternal now.

I now understand, for the first time, why archery could be a Zen practice. What one would consider to be a physical activity – archery – is in fact a highly mental and spiritual exercise. The practice of being present is the key underlying skill.