Music participation should be healthy, both mentally and physically, because only then can we reap its precious harvest. What are the most important fruits of that harvest?
LIBERATION—from the distorting grip of ego, from shame and fear, from the futility of trying to control every outcome
SERENITY—benevolent acceptance of how things are, and trust in the possibility of transformation
VITALITY—energized body and mind, spontaneous emotions, a tangible sense of connection with others, bold risk-taking
HONESTY—participation in a process that exposes self-deception
HUMILITY—letting go of false pride; learning equally from every result, successful or not
AWARENESS—of small details, large gestalts, and how reality shifts from moment to moment
BEAUTY—of being open to the penetrating power of music, of discovering new meaning through giving something away (sharing that beauty with others in performance).
As you look over this list, try removing all specific references to music. What’s left? Human values of substance and depth: liberation, serenity, vitality, honesty, humility, awareness, and beauty. If a person making music receives only a portion of such gifts, the adventure has been undoubtedly worthwhile.
This brings us to another way of thinking about the quest of mastering music performance, a way to view it from the other end of the telescope, so to speak. Not only should we ask how we can serve music well, but also how our musical strivings serve us. My answer is this: qualities to which we aspire in our lives in general, but sometimes find rather abstract and elusive, are made concrete by musical processes. Music study presents a natural, here-and-now route to self-knowledge and self-integration; in this light, some might even call it a spiritual practice, and a handy, effortless one too, since we’re usually not thinking about profound issues while practicing; we’re just trying to get the music right. The key is that we’re going about it with an awakened sense of awareness, free of irrelevant fantasies or fears.
Having a job to do can cleanse and open the mind; when Zen masters are asked about the path to enlightenment, they usually answer “sweep the floor” or “wash the dishes,” the idea being to perform these down-to-earth tasks with total, selfless, appreciative mindfulness. Musical work at its most practical level can be effective in just that way.
For example, a student tells me that he struggles daily with a tendency to be too “prideful,” but for the hour he’s practicing music he knows that all pridefulness has vanished, solely because of how the practice process works, and without any special effort on his part. That hour brings out his best self, and he senses it. Similarly, while many of us may find philosophical phrases like “be present in the moment” or “let go of your attachments” maddeningly elusive at times, musical experiences capture their meaning clearly. Paradoxes suddenly make sense when we’re practicing music; ancient philosophies such as “If you would become strong, first be weak” or “In order to gain control, relinquish control” find a living model in the hands-on arena of musical technique.
The dissolving of ego-consciousness in general, so crucial in practicing and performing, is indeed a universal value; according to Aldous Huxley, for most people “the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and always has been a principal appetite of the soul.”1 We do seem to have that appetite, and we find countless ways to forget ourselves for a time—entertainment, mind-altering substances, sports and games, sensual pleasures, food, hard work, nature walks, meditation, prayer, the absorption of listening to or making music. But there are some uniquely rich nuances to the musical experience.
Writer and literary critic Eva Hoffman was a trained pianist of talent who at one time considered a musical career. Thanks to a wise and special piano teacher in her native Poland, Hoffman as a teenager became aware through music of “the motions and conduct of my inner life” and sensed that she was receiving a kind of “moral education.” She awoke to the fact that music was more than pretty sounds but an eloquent “language of emotions,” especially regarding something quite specific: the tone quality one produces at the piano.
Tone, I discover, is something about which I cannot lie. If I do not feel the kindling of a fire as I play, my tone betrays me by its coldness; if I do not feel the capricious lightheartedness of a scherzo, my tone turns wooden in spite of my best attempts to feign playfulness. By some inexplicable process, the precise nuance of what I feel is conveyed through my arm to my fingertips, and then, through those fingertips, to the piano keys.2
This connection with the piano, or any instrument, is in fact a two-way communication, in which the player receives information too. In Hoffman’s words, “If the spirit is to flow into the keys through the conduit of my arm and hand, it has to move in the other direction as well—from the keys into my arm and soul.” Her teacher keeps reminding her to “let the music be itself.” “It is to this end that one has to relax, relax as much as possible—relax one’s arm and one’s self, so that one can become the medium through which the music flows as naturally as melting snow in the spring.” But relaxation isn’t everything, Hoffman rightly adds, since we also need strong, reliable technique to free us from distracting worries about whether we’ll be able to manage the next tricky passage or risky jump. Technique is worth building because, as Hoffman puts it, “Music may express the deepest truths, but it expresses them through a material medium,” and this happens best when the physical materials are mastered.
The ancient, mystical art of alchemy, the occult science of transforming lead into gold, was something we scoffed at in our high-school chemistry class. How ignorant they were in the old days, we thought. But the idea behind alchemy is timeless and relevant.
The medieval images associated with alchemy are symbolic and bizarre: a green lion eating the sun, a snake swallowing its own tail, a black sun, and so on. Ordinary objects became surreal, existing in a dream-world or parallel reality. But are such images really so strange? Everyday consciousness can change momentarily into a more transcendent mental state, a flash of insight during which everything looks different. This is something we all glimpse briefly in life. The power of alchemy is as a metaphor for such transformation. As Morris Berman has written, “The gold of which [the alchemists] spoke was thus not really gold, but a ‘golden’ state of mind, the altered state of consciousness which overwhelms the person in an experience such as the Zen satori or the God-experience recorded by Western mystics.”3
What’s useful here is not only what alchemy was, but how it worked. It seems to have involved a radical breaking down, a dissolving, of the “normal” substance at hand. The Latin formula most often used by alchemists was solve et coagula, which simply means that the original substance must first dissolve in order to coagulate later into the new “gold.”
It is not so easy to let the familiar world dissolve. But this is how we can open the door to transformation. At a particular juncture in my own work, several thought-provoking encounters with others jarred my complacency and seriously rattled my basic understandings of teaching and playing. All my ground rules seemed to have gone out the window. But to my surprise this felt energizing, not scary; apparently the jarring came at the right moment. I sensed that I wasn’t discarding prior beliefs wholesale or endorsing some rigid duality that ordained new ideas to be right and older ones wrong. I simply was no longer clinging to the familiar. All bets were off, and I trusted that the best ideas would emerge naturally from the transformation process, because I was letting my attachment to certain beliefs dissolve.
In general terms, conventional patterns must dissolve into chaos—or what appears to be chaos—in order to find the gold of alchemy: truer knowledge. Music gives us opportunity after opportunity to discover this. Performers must let the persona, the individual social shell, dissolve into the expressive stream of the music itself in order to deliver a convincing, vital performance. And in the practice-room, the clever right notes—achieved by willpower and the self-conscious efforts of muscles and nerves—must dissolve into the “chaos” of physical freedom (and momentary wrong notes) in order to recoagulate as integrated, “golden” technical control. When such a release happens, a musician can experience transformation—from a student into a virtuoso.
The procedures of alchemy were not rigidly prescribed and were thus not taught in detail. Tradition held that each student had to figure them out for himself. Each situation was unique. But the basic philosophy was definitely taught: that solve et coagula could lead to transformation.4 Alchemy thus provides us with a model, a helpful way to think about music lessons, art lessons, acting lessons—perhaps lessons in anything.
Albert Einstein made the oft-quoted statement that in an age of nuclear bombs everything had changed except the way we thought, and humankind would need a “new manner of thinking” in order to survive in the years to come. He didn’t explain exactly what this meant, which has certainly been a frustration to those who looked to him for answers, As intensely as Einstein agonized about the implications of the bomb’s existence, it seems unlikely to me that he would have withheld an explanation on purpose; but I believe that his insight was probably something that words couldn’t capture. We know from his violin playing that Einstein himself solved difficult problems using physical findings (about patterns and relationships, perhaps) that could never be explained in words.
Other scientists have also looked to music as a special problem-solving medium and as a means of understanding and representing abstract concepts. Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) was a world-renowned chemist who turned to philosophy in later life and achieved great prominence as a thinker. Polanyi went beyond the objective scientific method in which he was trained when he said that humans “know more than we can tell”: there are important truths which are personal and irreducible and which can never be analyzed or described. This view acknowledges that the scientific method will not always be adequate, since science takes a reductionist approach—one that reduces a big question to smaller, more manageable ones without necessarily ever answering the big question.
To illustrate the shortcomings of reductionist analysis, Polanyi turned to piano technique as an example. In fact, this passage reveals far more insight into piano playing than many books by musicians do! Polanyi understood that since the body will always be more sophisticated than the mind, its workings at a certain level can never be explained by one person to another.
The analysis of a skillful feat in terms of its constituent motions remains always incomplete. There are notorious cases, like the distinctive “touch” of a pianist, in which the analysis of a skill has long been debated inconclusively; and common experience shows that no skill can be acquired by learning its constituent motions separately. Moreover, here too isolation modifies the particulars: their dynamic quality is lost. Indeed, the identification of the constituent motions of a skill tends to paralyse its performance. Only by turning our attention away from the particulars and towards their joint purpose, can we restore to the isolated motions the qualities required for achieving their purpose . . . . This act of integration is itself unspecifiable. Imitation offers guidance to it, but in the last resort we must rely on discovering for ourselves the right feel of a skillful feat. We alone can catch the knack of it; no teacher can do this for us.5
Polanyi has captured the essence of making music: good, purposeful practice results in a dynamic and irreducible “act of integration.” Integration of a person through music can take many forms; sometimes these manifestations can be quite uncanny. In neurologist Oliver Sacks’s book of “clinical tales” called The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, music is a recurring theme. Many of Sacks’s true stories concern people with damaged brains and neurological deficits whose only intact mental functioning pertained to music, such as the woman with drastic memory loss who had no trouble remembering every word to a popular song she used to sing decades before. Sacks observed that the expressive element of “music, narrative and drama” seemed to organize the minds and functioning of the patients he worked with; for example, a man with a severe stutter loved to perform in musicals, since whenever he was performing a song in character his stutter disappeared completely. People whose mental challenges made it difficult to retain a simple sequence of four or five tasks to perform, could succeed “perfectly if they work to music—the sequence of movements they cannot hold as schemes being perfectly holdable as music, i.e. imbedded in music.”6 Sacks’s book celebrates “the power of music to organise—and to do this efficaciously (as well as joyfully!), when abstract or schematic forms of organization fail.”7
Integration of a person
through music can
take many forms.
Another contemporary research scientist of prominence—and of adventurous integrative thought—is Candace Pert. By meticulously tracking and measuring what she calls “biochemicals of emotion,” Pert is providing new evidence of our mind-body-spirit interrelatedness. In views such as hers, the human being is a sophisticated open-system complex of information exchange—physical, chemical, electrical—that operates through constant feedback. The more attuned we are to such feedback within us, the healthier we are. As we saw in chapter 3, music practice is an ideal opportunity for subtle internal feedback loops, for heightening that honest self-awareness. And in good practicing, we approach inner feedback with the same interested impartiality that scientific investigators bring to their findings. Information science is the stimulating new frontier for researchers like Pert:
Information! It is the missing piece that allows us to transcend the mind-body split of the Cartesian view, because by definition, information belongs to neither mind nor body, although it touches both. We must accept that it occupies a whole new realm, one we can perhaps call the “inforealm,” which science has yet to explore. Information theory releases us from the trap of reductionism and its tenets of positivism, determinism, and objectivism. Although these basic assumptions of Western science have been ingrained in our consciousness since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, information theory constitutes such a new language—a rich language of relatedness, cooperation, interdependence, and synergy rather than simple force and response—that it helps us break out of our old patterns of thought.8
Again and again we see that to be open to helpful new information requires a release of some sort—releasing old thoughts, or rigid ego-focus, or unhealthy reliance on a teacher, or certain muscles in the arm. And after we have released, we simply observe, with keen investigatory interest, and respond to the new information. Of course this isn’t always so easy to do. When there are deadlines, like having to be ready on a certain date to perform a piece of music in public, it can be very difficult to release and much more tempting to cling to past results. This is where trust comes in—trust in ourselves and in the wisdom of healthy processes. Releasing and trusting remind me of certain Eastern philosophies which have been introduced to the West as “Zen” formulas for success, for meeting goals in business or any other field of endeavor. They advise us to form a sincere intention, release it into the universe with trust and the acknowledgment that everything can’t be controlled, and then pay ego-less attention to whatever results ensue. What better way to get used to doing this than to process our way through some wrong musical notes on the pathway to the right ones?
Philosophical and spiritual writers often turn to music as a way to crystallize human experience. Aldous Huxley, in his essay “Man and Religion.” equates the process of music mastery with another vital, selfless activity: prayer.
This attitude of the masters of prayer is in its final analysis exactly the same as that recommended by the teacher of any psychophysical skill. The man who teaches you how to play golf or tennis, your singing teacher or piano teacher, will tell you the same thing: you must somehow combine activity with relaxation, you must let go of the clutching personal self, in order to let this deeper self within you, which you interfere with, come through and perform its miracles.9
As we celebrate such miracles and the interconnectedness of music to other parts of our being, let us not forget what will always make this human activity so unique: the ineffable humanity of beautiful music itself. Sublime music is greater than any individual person, even greater (some would say) than the composer who received the inspiration to write it down in the first place. It has implications that bring mysterious tears to our eyes, it stirs and delights us, it gives us fresh understandings of our own inner life of thought and feeling and our connection with others.
Music, the most abstract and uncanny art, is an eternal river of sound moving through time. We can free ourselves from whatever may be holding us back, and join that flowing river.