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.
Recently I taught a master class at Colorado University School of Music and worked with pianists and a harpsichordist. They all played well and so we were able to discuss musical issues. When I asked each player what he or she thought the piece was about the answers tended to be vague. This is no indictment of a group of talented students. There responses were like those you would hear at any good music school
It is curious that musicians can spend enormous amounts of time preparing a piece and never consider the meaning or extra-musical content. I must include myself in the indictment, because I have frequently failed to put meaning into the forefront. We musicians got so caught up with technical aspects that we generally neglect meaning. An actor would, of course, immediately dive into the problem of meaning and would continually wrestle with it throughout the study, rehearsal and performance process. If you are playing the role of Hamlet you will immediately consider what Hamlet is thinking and feeling, what motivates him, why he says these words and not some other, why he takes these actions and not some others.
Musicians need to engage in this process of discovering meaning. The answers are of a different nature and the clues are not as clear as in a literary text, but the exploration is just as essential. It is simply not enough to be satisfied with a ‘correct’ execution of the musical text. The question of why is central. Why did the composer write these particular notes? What was his reason for the notation he chose? What should we communicate? How can we do this? The composer intends meaning. What is that meaning? To discover this is our central task.
While teaching a master class at the University of Denver I frequently asked the audience their reactions to the way a musician had just performed. This feedback was enormously valuable to the performing musician and to me. It was gratifying to note that the audience was generally supportive of what I was doing. They often wanted more of a process I had started; playing with more flexibility and more organic gestures, for example. I don’t know yet how it could be done, but building up a performance with direct audience feedback, as we had during the master class, would be a very powerful way to discover how best to communicate.
New solutions to problems often come in reframing or even inverting the original question. I have been wrestling with the question of establishing the affect for a piece of music. By affect, I mean the external expression of a mood, a state of mind, or a situation. Ideally, the affect or range of affects should quickly become apparent. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to find clear answers. The notion of restating the question came to me in reading Cracking Creativity by Michael Michalko. Instead of deriving the meaning from the musical text, I am now trying on affects, like so many hats. This removes the problem of finding the right answer and substitutes a more playful, experimental approach. This approach can be improved with a sensitive listener who reacts to your experiments. Because you are attempting something new, you may not have sufficient awareness to judge the quality of what you are doing.
Authenticity was the holy grail of the early music movement for many, many years. As musicians and scholars began to dig more deeply into the problem they discovered, both on a practical and on an epistemological level, that the goal though worth chasing, is not attainable. Like truth, authenticity eludes all attempts at strict definition.
Yesterday, while performing at the Boulder Bach Festival I realized that an important aspect of authenticity has been left out of the equation: flies, flies that buzz around your head, alight on your hands as you play and make you imagine that the coattail brushing against your leg is in fact a pesky fly.
Perhaps lice that crawl down from underneath your wig to search for dinner in other locations would be a further bit of authenticity.
