Musical performance begins with a musical intention, which is translated into a series of movements involving weight, speed, orientation in space, and relationship to gravity. For the music to soar freely, without causing injuries, you, the musician, need to experience the joy of efficient, elegant movement in gravity. This experience will not only protect you from injuries, it will inform and influence your phrasing, your rhythm, and your palette of sound.
Properties of sound – time, space, weight, rhythmical impulse, gesture, momentum towards an action (a leap against gravity), process of speeding gradually and slowing down gradually – are all properties of movement. When, for a musician, these properties are not experienced in their movement, two things happen – the brain does not have the appropriate image of the action needed for the musical gesture, and it cannot send the right impulses to the muscles. The action is then clumsy and can result in injuries.
I believe we become musicians because of a vision we have of what we could do – of the music we could make. We might have fallen in love with the sound of the instrument as played by a teacher or on a recording, or we might have been drawn to the simple idea of being a musician. This vision, whatever it is, sustains us through those difficult first steps of learning to make a sound – any sound at all at first, and then a (let’s face it) tolerable sound, and eventually, we hope, a sound which we find satisfying. As we master our art, our sense of what’s possible evolves, the vision evolves, and we can always see a ‘next step’ for our skill.
What’s preventing you right now from realizing your vision? What’s preventing you from reaching your next step?
Injury? Tension? Posture? Anxiety? A lack of flow and ease? Lack of inspiration, of connection to the vision, to the music itself?
All of these impediments to your art are bound up in your most basic habitual movement patterns: from the habits you use to hold yourself up and move around, to those you use to interact with other people, to the very patterns you use to make music….
A friend of mine in conservatory once asked me, in all honesty: “how can I expect to get better without the voice that tells me I suck pushing me to work hard to improve?”
And, in all honesty, it’s a bit of challenge to argue with that. Who among us does not know that voice, and does not, at least at some level, listen to it and appreciate the motivation it provides?
I don’t mean something you’d like to have happen to you, like ‘win a million dollars.’ I’m thinking about something in the realm of action – a desire that you might actively pursue. What do you really want out of life?
If you’re like me, you’re probably getting ready to roll your eyes right now. Is this going to be one of those motivational messages, “law of attraction” nonsense? Fear not. I’m not interested in spiritual ideas unless they hold some tangible reality for me. And the truth is, we all have strong desires, which affect our lives in a variety of ways (not all of them beneficial), and it’s worth your while to pay attention to your desires and how they affect you.
Desire is the origin of creativity. This feeling of wanting to do something. This is chesed, the first of the seven mystical atributes which I am taking on (in a hopefully demistifying way) in this series of blog-posts. Usually translated as “lovingkindness,” for my purposes here it is perhaps better described as the outpouring of passion.
