Gestures in the Context of Musicianship

I am being completely blown away working with a guzheng player. Lately I’ve felt the urge to put into words simple breakdowns of what musicianship is, and this powerful musician demonstrates it so clearly in her playing. If you’re curious, her name is 蘇暢 (Su Chang), but the videos and recordings that I found of hers don’t even remotely do justice to her live playing and presence. They give a glimpse though. (Such a persuasive example of the importance of going to live performances. Easier said than done though for people, like myself, whose anti-social and introverted streak creates more than a bit of resistance.)

Besides her flawless control and her incredibly layered and compelling story-telling, there’s a unique quality in her movement that’s almost dance-like that’s all part and parcel to her music-making. It shows such a perfect union of intellectual understanding of the writing of the music, a thorough understanding of how to translate that to tell a story, and a nuanced and deep communication of feelings without any note of extraneousness or falsity. It’s thrilling to see how much her gestures are completely part of the sound, part of the drama that makes the music feel more unimaginably vast and living and capturing — a whole richer level of 3D. I am not sure if I remember having ever seen such an all-encompassing powerful physical and aural embodiment of the drama in music (instead of superfluous theatrics). And oh her sense of time: the flawless control in integration of the rhythms between her gestures and musical pulses amplifies the effect of both to degrees I had not known possible. While a part of how much I’m awestruck could be from the novelty of this style of music for me. (it’s not even so much to my taste, but I am in awe of the way it’s done). It’s why I think we all need to not stay stuck in our own lanes. I love being inspired by different-same, and how wide that net could cast is only limited by one’s imagination or capacity, or lack thereof (I feel this breadth of capacity determines the quality of a mind. It’s not what I can/cannot do that I know are my limits ultimately, but where I feel resistance/blockages — whether due to intellectual limitations or emotional restrictions or all sorts of reasons — to stretch how far I can connect the dots). In this case, it’s not even very wide at all, and yet so often people see no relevance between the so-called expertise in different instruments, or genres of music, let alone music and other fields.

Anyway, so happy to be playing with this highest level of artistry. A part of me would rather just be watching and listening to fully absorb that way though!

This brings to mind another musician who feels like they ARE music to me in the most naturally all-encompassing way. The accordionist Richard Galliano. Though I don’t find the movement element in his playing to be defining as in how I feel in Su Chang’s. This quality of hers is unique in my experience. I adore many, many great western classical musicians. But I think because of the nature of the music, it’s much harder for classical instrumentalists to find that same level of physical movement to contribute to their expression. Or rather, maybe it’s not even a matter of difficulty, but that is simply not as essentially part of the makeup of western classical instrumental music? Now I’m left with more questions about what it is we play/do. Opera singers certainly need to have a marriage between their gestures (acting) and singing—look at Maria Callas. But in instrumental music, I feel like this was the first time I’ve experienced this level of unity in the drama of gestures and music that elevates the entire experience in such a way. 

What Makes a Genius?

At work we’ll be playing with someone who is apparently sometimes described as a genius - a discussion about what makes one ensued - which compelled me to put down some thoughts. 

Genius being un-ordinary, it’d be arrogant of me to try to slap on a definition from my place of ordinariness. This is of course subjective as well, but I find it meaningful to at least try to put into words some qualities around it. In our conversation the other day, someone said a genius is when a person can do things that nobody else can. But then the human race is eternally evolving - Paganini’s supposed technical wizardry” is probably nothing special nowadays. People are running faster, doing more difficult things as time passes. There are many particularly talented individuals marking the natural progress of the human race, but genius has got to be more singular than that.

A point was made that genius is having distinct voices. How Mozart created his own language, Schubert always sounds like Schubert, and Mendelssohn likewise. I  feel that is certainly a mark of genius. You can’t fake having an individual voice - what is unrecognizable will stay unrecognizable. Worse yet when something sounds like a copy-and-paste amalgamation of so many different personalities, dotted with self-conscious gestures of what the composer believes to make others think they’re brilliant, too—something “clever”. A pretense of sophistication and a convolution of non-expression. I ask, what’s the point? 

It’s the same with any other form of expression. Writers who use big words that feel hollow, who construct complicated sentences to try to sound more intellectual, muddying actual communication and obliterating any possibility of a signature in the pretension. 

Does having a distinct voice alone make genius? After all, if one tries hard enough at being outrageous, one could indeed be plenty distinct. (You write clunkily in a pretentious way often enough, that can be self-identifying.) Instead, I feel that genius lies in where this distinct voice comes from: a profound INNER VISION that is somehow linked to a quality of CONNECTEDNESS, in infinite multitudes of ways. A genius uniquely sees more possibilities of what being human is, of what being human could mean, that few others have seen, through the lens of what they do. Einstein (I feel) is a genius not because of his, albeit revolutionary, scientific achievement; but because of his vision about the much grander humanity - without which he would not have been able to achieve what he did. His genius lies not in cleverness and innovation, but in the vision behind said innovation. Innovation alone improves; but innovation stemming from sincerely lofty visions that’s also singularly insightful inspires (besides taking the innovation to a whole different level).

In the end, genius and its effects evade strict definition precisely due to its infinite nature. It wouldn’t be genius if it were a pre-conceived notion, anything predictable, or had bounds. Therein lies why it offers hope and elevates, because it offers visions of humanity beyond the utilitarian. It births possibilities beyond ordinary sights. 

Building a Sandcastle

There are so many aspects in learning music. There’s the obvious mechanics and techniques. And then there’s the understanding of music itself. What are you trying to convey with your technique? Are you re-iterating in sound the 2D score or actually transforming it into 3D reality? And then there’s the profound skill of listening, where it needs to expand past the contextual (listening for wrong notes, or intonation, etc.). Moreover, it is a somewhat intangible skill that could be easily lost if not being worked on constantly. (Sensitivity - about anything- requires continual cultivation.)

The following videos are an example of the multitudes of factors involved in learning how to play (even just something this simple) that involve both the broad and the deep. The cognitive work that helps a 6 year-old understand what they’re doing, and to learn discernment (that’s a BIG one in my belief). The very demanding and even tedious intonation work. An element of play in the process where they are also allowed the freedom to be expressive and, hopefully the teacher being able to recognize or learn about what they need precisely from said expression. We were working on the movement of the feet when he started to play-sway, against my instructions. I stopped him at first, but immediately realized that his was a great idea and in fact probably what he needed. So we incorporated that into what we were doing and it was made 10 times more effective! (As you can see in the first video-this natural slight swaying with the music and movement of playing.)

And to to do all of this work while helping students develop the intrinsic motivation to learn, to improve. So it’s also play. So it’s fun. FUN. I often have a hard time with the word “fun” in music, because so often having fun is used in a way as in we don’t have to be so serious about something. Like it’s not a “serious” concert or occasion, that we could get away with stuff. (I don’t mean that I feel we should be harshly perfectionistic all the time. I like a casual chamber music reading party as much as the next person… it’s a nuanced thing.)

You know how some people have a handful of self-defining stories where our whole system of values rests on. Here’s one of mine:

Many years ago I took a day trip to this lake with my friend Jennifer and her son Camillo. He was building a sandcastle by himself when a boy he didn’t know came to join him. It was fascinating to see the whole interaction between the two boys. There were no big introductions - it was almost an implicit agreement that they would now play together. They were playing mostly silently, only talking when they needed to discuss the task at hand, and I was struck by just how serious they looked! They could’ve been two adults at work on a project. Watching them, it occurred to me that those boys basically exemplified everything I believed what work and play to be. The total immersion, the intrinsic motivation, the reward in the doing itself. And probably no judgment involved in the outcome. (Now that one is rather difficult for many of us when the playing is also our job, but it still doesn’t make it any less true.) And their utter seriousness in the doing of the fun. I’d imagine that if someone had told them that they could just take it down a notch and not be so serious about it, they would’ve looked at them like they were an alien. What would’ve been the point? Think about any kid playing any game, the seriousness IS the fun. Whether looking dead serious like these two or vivacious and cheery - the fun is in the total engagement. And watching them work together too, it was simply about making the version of a sandcastle that they wanted to make together, and everything was geared towards that goal. Talk about a simple and clear illustration of serving the greater good. The self while not being in the center, also doesn’t lose its distinctness and its unique consequential contribution in serving the bigger purpose. That thing that everyone says about “serving the music”? The sandcastle-building shows clearly what it means at its heart. The essence of their simplicity and innocence being something very different from the agendas of the ego and hypocrisy hidden behind lofty-sounding ideals-such a great peril in the arts, and similarly in the world of the learned, the intellectuals, the academic elites. This is partly why I value working with kids, too. They help to keep one honest, among other things, if one chooses to learn from them. (It wasn’t so long ago that these beings were practically a foreign species to me, but that’s a whole other story.)

I normally have the memory of a goldfish. My brain cells are probably not even designed to retain memory, but this sandcastle vignette has been forever etched in my mind as what I believe to be the essence of so many things. Work, play, fun. Partnership, friendship, collaboration, companionship, how to teach. Presence. That scene serves as a reminder to myself when I get overwhelmed by the clutter of complication.

While no one taught Camillo how to improve his sandcastle-building skills, my point is that I believe how he and his playmate built the sandcastle that day can be the guiding spirit for how we teach, learn, and work. Studying music while cultivating a love for it (and a love for learning itself), can be fun and serious at the same time. Serious is not just furrowed brows and grind. Serious can be fun, and fun can be serious. Work is play and play is work. 

Telling a Musical Story

Whether it is Chinese vs western music; “classical” vs other genres; Schubert vs Beethoven; or even two Adagios from the same composer, there will be different nuances. Recently had a conversation with my friend @jessicang about mood and emotions in music-making. Sometimes music isn’t even about emotion, but states. This applies especially to performers, I believe. We’re often told to “express”. But what does that even mean? As interpretive performers, we tell stories written by someone else. But I’d argue that even for first-hand creators (composers, writers), they don’t express as much as construct the reality of a story. And the expression naturally takes a backseat to this story-telling process. 

But, expression does come, though in spite of. The alchemy of the entire work process which makes it inspite of, instead of deliberate, is the music, the art. I feel it is in the despite of that true “expression” becomes authentic and honest. (And therefore having the malleability to be spontaneous and dynamic.) The true artist to me is not the one who repeats every performance in exactly the same way (freakishly impressive accuracy!), but one who brings to life the unique essence of any given moment in time in a performance. 

I believe one way to get into these states is to find in our whole being in notes, intervals, phrases, and pieces as physical states that include moods and feelings and everything else (that is “unsayable”, as Rilke often wrote). The state of playing in the string section the most sublime pianissimo passage in a Mahler symphony, and a violin duet that needs to fill the hall-it’s not about loud and soft but the state and presence of how we feel our presence in a space. And a part of it can be a very tangibly PHYSICAL process. 

A lot is said about how to use the body to play “well”. But if music was just that, it wouldn’t be an art. We are musicians, but we need to feel what it means to embody expression and moods like dancers and actors, while also having the acuity of a stage/film director to understand the technique to transform a story from one medium to another. So that whether we’re transitioning between genres or phrases or movements in a piece, the body can seamlessly and fluidly move from one state to another, in congruity with our moods and feeling, and in congruity with movement we need to play. Everything-physical, intellectual, emotional, aural, and all senses integrated as one dynamic process. Some particularly gifted musicians are so tapped into this that they don’t need help at all to get there, but that’s not the majority. There are so many young professionals that I’ve coach who shy from singing and moving their body with music, or some people who feel us pros should be above doing this sort of thing. But if one feels inhibited doing that, how do you find that state of being to play “with expression”? These are not separate, discrete processes, and this cognitive dissonance needs to be addressed. To learn to play well also means that one needs to let go of such inhibitions that prevent one from finding that fully-embodying state to really play. 

I love being able to do different things from time to time. Getting into different sound worlds sensitizes one further to what one is used to normally in contrast. Even if it’s music I wouldn’t necessarily listen to myself, there is always a distinct physical pleasure to find my way into something that I don’t normally do. In this case with Chinese music, it’s another distinct experience to play something that I really already “know” in my blood even if I was never trained in it, but which also somehow feels like a completely novel language for me. 

By the way, these pieces are written by the HK composer Doming Lam. I love the imaginativeness in the string quartet-I wish I’d gotten to meet him.

On "Holistic", and the Process of Honing

One word that got thrown around a lot in the music world in the early 2000’s was “holistic”. The official definition of “holistic” is “characterized by the belief that the parts of something are interconnected and can be explained only by reference to the whole.” The trend was very much about doing things that were supposed to help with the music, e.g., practicing meditation for performance anxiety, exercising or doing yoga to “strengthen”. “Stretching” for playing, etc… I’ve done all of that, too (some of which have landed me in the ER, or at least often in worse states). I appreciate holistic’s acknowledgment of interconnectedness. After all, the broad view is important. In order to develop a wide enough scope of perspective to deepen understanding of any subject, it requires having a curiosity on much more than said subject alone. While “holistic” has breadth, it lacks the other essential part to any kind of growth or learning: depth. It takes a commitment which shows itself as a doggedly stubborn examination of the subject deep in itself. Depth gives precision. I say “doggedly-stubborn”, because I feel that’s what it takes. Even when you think you’ve got it, no matter how experienced you are, you’re still bullheadedly trying to find all possible blind spots in your own belief: I consider that to be an essential first-principle practice. 

Let’s take the example of the study of rhythm. We are told to “feel” rhythm in our body a lot, but how? One way to conceptualize and feel it is to use load (weights). Lifting something heavy (e.g., a kettlebell) on an upbeat, for instance, often makes tangible a feeling of physical momentum that is hard to explain in music-making. It makes the intellectually abstract immediately experiential and clearly physical. Or, having to coordinate the lifting and the dropping of the weight with the timing of notes in a rhythmic figure gives the person an actual visceral sense and feeling of the musical pulse, rather than simply trying to match bow motions with clicks from the metronome. (3D vs 2D) This sounds like out-of-the-box thinking: using a kettlebell to work on rhythm(!), but I see it as being totally IN the box, in that rhythm was never about lining notes with beats to begin with. Rhythm is a rich sensory and feeling experience of gravity, mass, density, flight, placement, impulse, velocity, movement, and even feelings and mood. Fast and slow need to be felt along with resistance and impetus (e.g., how much a sense of resistance is applied to an accelerando determines how exciting, or what kind of exciting, the passage is.) An accelerando without any sense of resistance at all might feel as dull and mundane as a ball rolling downhill. Yes, it sure is fast. But where’s the drama?

The beat plays an important role, yes, but it is in and of itself no more than a unit of measurement in the much, much bigger picture of the Universe of Rhythm. But sadly it is often used as the ultimate arbiter of many classical musicians’ sense of time instead. Even more unfortunately, a blind adherence to the beat is often viewed as a mark of accuracy or excellence.

This is an example of trying to examine everything by their first principles, to see what something really is at its core. When one sees rhythm as what it is-so much more than the beat- as many ways to hone one’s rhythmic sense become available to them. The precision in understanding the what anything is allows creativity to flourish. I always feel that the way to cultivate creativity isn’t about trying to be different. The trying to be different itself already warps the lens, and it is never truly authentic. For me it is about, again, truly knowing and understanding the subject at hand. You will probably end up being quite different, as a deep understanding will give you insights into complexity, and will give you originality. But it’ll not be from your trying to be different. 

The word “hone”: It is what the process is about to me. It’s not to achieve, certainly not to nail; but to continually hone, and honing a sensitivity to be precise. The sensitivity makes one more discerning, more capable of both nuance and simplicity. More able to find colors and ever finer impulses of beats and between-beats and movements and shapes and arcs, to get as close to natural and true as possible. And honing the awareness and sensitivity of the body so it’s more able to operate to such fine details that match the (also ever-developing) vision of how any musical story can be told. (I feel like I’m the rare violinist who studied with Galamian-school teachers in NYC who never went to Meadowmount except to visit a friend. But the (in)famous Meadowmount proctors who’d patrol the practice room hallways to ensure that there’s always sound of playing coming out? Maybe they no longer do this, one would hope, but that kind of mind-numbing blind chase of a definition of excellence embodied almost the polar opposite of what I believe this process to be.)

For me, the process of honing includes everything from practicing on the instrument, studying to decipher a score, learning about movement and the body, reading and writing, working with students and other musicians; to trying to get my mental health in better equilibrium, understanding what proper rest is for me specifically, etc.. (Mental health is a huge one, but I won’t elaborate on that right now.) Different people will need different things, and/or more emphasis on some of these elements (That certain people may not even have to consciously consider some of these doesn’t negate its importance to another person.). It takes awareness, and the permission we give to take care of ourselves this way for us to bloom, and grow, as serious musicians and artists. 

Tag: #rhythm #cultivate #hone #holistic #outofthebox

A Nod to Julius Levine’s Performance Class

Recently a student asked me if there’s a name to all the movements that we do in his lessons to help with his violin-playing. I told him no, that I’d describe those as just a first-principle approach to technique. To me, a first-principle approach consists of an ever-deepening examination of the WHAT it is that we need to do, and an exploration of the very source of the HOW to do it. For instance, if I were a baker and ran into problems with a chemical reaction between two ingredients, I would go to the very source of the where the problem might have occurred-chemistry-to look for answers, rather than in the culinary field. (Which is not to say the collective experience in the culinary field would not be helpful, but that would not be the first place I’d look.)

The other point I made to him was to not get too hung up on specialties. That while applications are different for different things, to just focus on the first-principles of the what’s and how’s, regardless of what he’s doing.

Here are a few examples of my working with musicians of different instruments. They can all benefit from the specialized knowledge of someone in their own area, but true musicianship cuts across all instruments and genres. The teacher who’s formed the most elemental kernel of my musicianship is the late double bassist Julius Levine. He used to teach a performance class at Mannes that’s open to all graduate students. I was not enrolled since I was an undergrad-but he told me I was the only student who was there every single week. (And trust me, I was terrible with attendance for every other class). He was not just an instrumentalist but a true musician, and his influence is formative for me, to this day.

There’s musicianship: what music is. But how to actualize it-the mechanics to operate the body to maneuver an instrument. I like to think of technique as mechanics fitted into musicianship. But understanding movement mechanics requires going to the appropriate source for education. Much like a baker going to a chemist for answers, I’ve been looking for mine in people who understand movement and the body. And I also learn from them to sharpen my eye to understand the individual needs of different bodies.

Many of the concepts I’ve used here I’ve learned and adapted from Adarian Barr. I’m grateful for his continual inspiration.

You can also see the videos here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/CwQKi7YSnLv/?img_index=1

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Thoughts After A Movement Lesson

I take weekly movement lessons with Adarian Barr. Today I learned about ipsilateral movement patterns, e.g., how the same side limbs work together by bending or straightening at the same time.

(Here’s where we worked on my playing. I’d forgotten to turn on original sound on zoom so you can’t hear most of my playing, but how my body was playing and moving much more smoothly at the end of the clip compared to the beginning should be clear as day.)

He explained to me how walking is actually ipsilateral even though it looks contralateral (and commonly thought as being contralateral). That it is only due to the longer duration of the arm swing (than leg movement) that the ipsilateral movement looks contralateral. I won’t take the time to go into the details that he went into to help me understand and experience this concept, but it was a mind-blowing ah-ha moment when I did. I love (and trust) when I’m enlightened to what something really IS-the first principle of all first principles. (I still leave room for alternate explanations. But the what it IS needs to make sense, otherwise, there’s no point in listening to any further conjectures when the foundational belief is faulty. But I always leave room for the possibility that there might be other ways to interpret what anything IS.)

When the understanding of movement is that thorough, you can apply it to anything that requires movement. Adarian then coached me as I played the violin (not being a musician himself!), finding the relationship between a bent knee and a bent arm, flexed wrists and flexed ankles, moving fingers and moving toes. I’m no longer surprised by getting dramatic improvement from things he teaches me. But what was particularly striking about today’s lesson was this: I had been trying to get to the bottom of the movement relationship between the many fulcrums of the body for playing-where the instrument comes into contact with the neck, the L thumb, the L foot, the L shoulder blade, and how all of those are local axis points but also creating a big global leverage system where everything between them needs to rotate (like a towel) in concert with one another. It’s complex, and I’ve been stuck on zooming in on the most obvious problematic spots-my mid-section. I’ve often talked about my “twisties”, where my ligaments are twisted in the wrong ways, inhibiting the most simple movements. And here’s the amazing thing about today: Adarian never asked me to think about the problematic areas, but all of a sudden I was able to sense my mid-section in ways I’d never felt before as I was paying attention to rotate my toes/fingers as he instructed. It made me able to move things that I could not previously, and also helped me discern how they were twisted and gave me ideas as to how to correct. In other words, he helped me find solutions to problems while doing something seemingly completely unrelated. And I know that this deepening of my self-knowledge about my body will open up a whole new avenue for myself to further improve.

A few months ago, I went to a concert given by a violinist without a right hand. He used a specially-designed prosthetic to help him hold the bow. It’s impressive what he could do with his physical limitations, and he’s an expressive musician, too. But I could not help but notice that his mechanics in playing was very much about compensating for what he lacked (no right hand and a shortened right arm), forcing rotations his physicality did not allow, which in turn limited his execution and expression. He’s had an impressive list of teachers. These violinists who taught him, while being great players, probably only instructed him from the point of view of their relative whole to his relative lack. And that central facet was apparent to me watching him play. Realistically, I feel he’ll always be limited without a hand and fingers, but I feel he’s far from playing at his best. (I showed Adarian a video of his. First thing he pointed out was that the shape of his prosthetic was not facilitating how the arm needs to rotate with the bow. The most simple thing-he showed me how if it’s simply angled differently it would have made a world of difference for him.) Imagine if this violinist were to be able to get help where he could learn through the lens of what the movement IS, rather than filtered through other bodies of entirely different structure. When anything is truly understood as what it really is at its most fundamental core, you can operate from the kernel of truth without the distortion of subjectivity. (Again, and again, first principles.)

But that got me thinking about playing in general, missing limbs or not. Traditional pedagogy is filled with concepts that try to compensate for supposed weaknesses. Strengthening the pinky, developing a “strong” bow arm (always implying weakness). While there’s an isolated element of truth in these descriptions, trying to look for solutions within said descriptions is, to say the least, short-sighted, if even accurate at all. Learning from a place of lack is essentially not being able to see what you have. And this is not some positive-thinking BS (in case I haven’t said enough-I positively hate that stuff), but simply that if you can’t truly see the objective truth of what you have, or don’t have, it’d quite simply be impossible to form a complete picture of your situation for a fair assessment. To go even a level deeper, conventional views often approach common playing movement as something one has to stretch or strengthen or muscle their way into, lacking the true knowledge of how the body and natural movement work. Yes, training is required, but it looks drastically different from “I need to strengthen muscle X as X is seemingly the only moving part.” (I stress “seemingly”.)

Many traditional concepts instruct one to move in ways that are not even correct for the violin-they move on the wrong planes and at the wrong angles. Many don’t factor in the diagonal/oblique directions that playing requires, and how certain movements are impossible to execute based on the actual shape of our joints. (Simplest examples: the idea of elbow height solely dictating string crossing, and often vibrato exercises that train one to move in ways that do not even correspond with the direction of how the finger vibrates.) I often tell my students to imagine building a robot or model from the ground up to move in ways that playing requires. How would you do that? What would the model look like? But of course we could never build as intricate a model as the human body-which is why we can do things that robots can’t, and why we can’t say in order to do this, just move that. There are too many joints working together in infinite possibilities to do what we do. That’s also why we need to make logical sense of our physiology while understanding that we can’t be limited by this 1+1=2 kind of thinking. And that is also my point about my lesson today. Adarian’s formula defies 1+1=2 and yet it makes perfect sense. It is quite simply, logical. (This is probably what I aim for in life in perhaps too many ways: that 1+1=🤯🥳, or at the very least, 2.1. It’s how I see musical partnerships, music-making, human connections, learning, any act of performance, teaching. 1+1=1.5 is obviously problematic, but 1+1=2 is not just underwhelming, but worse, more often than not incorrect, due to its lack of vision and narrowness. Having even just the extra 0.1, no matter how ordinary a moment, makes something worthwhile. Admittedly, life can sometimes be on the disappointing side with these expectations… And maybe also why I’d not passed math since the age of 14!)

In music in particular, sometimes what’s missing is outside of the movement and the mechanics, but lies in the understanding of the music itself, its gestures and momentum. The what it is. And how that fits logically with the movement and execution itself. To me, that’s the entirety of technique, the integration of the mechanics with the musicianship. But that’s another topic for another post. 

On the opposite spectrum of being traditional, sometimes people place importance on trying to be different, on being able to think out of the box. But I don’t think being different is something to strive for. The way Adarian sees past the way timing masks a movement’s true nature makes his conclusion seem different and contrarian. But that doesn’t come from him trying to be different. It comes from his ability to see things for what they are. While the extent of his acuity is not a gift bestowed to many - everybody can learn, and should strive to, see things for what they are. I believe that’s the only way to achieve any kind of original thinking, true understanding, intelligence, and creativity - to see things as what they are. (To be different for its own sake only distorts). I find that many of the traditional learning mindsets (in any field) not only do not place any importance on this, they sometimes entirely ignore it (the medical field, for example, is egregiously guilty of that, which in the business of saving lives… I wish someone would address that). To truly understand what something is sounds simple, but anything simple is not easy to come to. But once you get to that kernel, truly the possibilities are limitless and beyond anything you can remotely imagine.

Stage Fright And The Nervous System

Just a few thoughts on this huge topic. When it comes to stage fright, first of all I’d like to point out that what I personally find to be a key missing element from most discussions is the WHAT it is. All the following are valid elements in the cause of stage fright: needing approval or fearing disapproval, being sufficiently prepared in our material or not, physical comfort level, etc., etc.. But I find it impossible to get the full picture without acknowledging a central factor: nervous system dysregulation.

All of the elements I mentioned above could either the cause or the results of dysregulation. Not preparing and practicing in ways that facilitate natural music-making is a major cause of dysregulation as it creates and perpetuates dissonance between our natural rhythmical, physical, musical instincts with our playing. The accumulation of knowledge always has the risk of becoming clutter, and therefore hinders rather than helps understanding. This is why sometimes we sound even worse with more practicing. We’re basically adding more conflicts for the instinct and the body to fight against, and making them fight against each other, when we should be working on making things easier. To truly practice productively and intelligently, we need to distill what we learn to help create harmony between all the parts, and it takes understanding what music is at its core (subjectivity notwithstanding).

I had zero stage fright when I was a child-performing was as mundane as eating soup. (I was never excited about it either.) When I started having physical discomfort and technical difficulties that I couldn’t solve as a teenager, I began to experience performance anxiety, with a good dose of depression due to feeling hopeless about finding solutions. When I was in conservatory, I  had to take a leave of absence only after a year or so of school due to physical pain when playing. I still had no answers, but somehow being away from music made me realize that I wanted to pursue it. And when I came back, that was when my stage fright took on a whole new flavor. A whole new, desperate, flavor, that became crippling. I’d struggled with it for years, but have come to find some things to be of help.

I don’t believe that stage fright can be worked on by only looking at our professional selves. Everyone has a history of trauma to different extents. Trauma could include a whole host of things. Physical traumas like accidents or even surgeries; psychological ones like abuse - they all leave their marks on the nervous system. Understanding our own patterns of trauma and how our life experiences have affected us directly contribute to how we can work on our stage fright.

And in working with stage fright, what we’d like to create is resilience. Resilience is not gritting our teeth to push through. (My phone autocorrected stage “fright” to stage “fight” just now-and that is exactly what we don’t want!) Resilience makes something that used to be impossible possible; what was difficult easier. In resilience there’s ease. It’s finding the joy in the flow of any new-found ease. Its expanding one’s capacity. It’s not just some woo-woo mumbo jumbo. Again, real work on truly understanding what music is and what music-making entails will directly help in developing resilience. In other words, I believe that resilience is not just about character, as is often implied, but equally importantly, requires intelligence.

The idea of keeping the fire stoked has personally helped my stage fright a lot. While many things need methodical, organized repetitions in practice, I would not be able to perform well without always aiming for a new layer in anything that I’m preparing. It’s a balancing act. Finding new layers keeps things fresh, and it hones one’s focus in a way that leaves much less room for nervousness. But the newness also needs to be sufficiently incorporated into our playing so as not to distract. It takes time and experience to know where the line is between still having some new layers in your program the day before a concert, and how the body still having the comfort of a level of familiarity in how it’d have to move. My performances that have given me the most satisfaction-where I’d feel inspired and spontaneous on stage, more on fire than I’d felt in any rehearsal, where they were acts of liberation and letting go instead of strained adherences-have been ones where I was able to have the discipline and organization to prepare this way. When things don’t go as well as I like-I usually have a good sense now as to where in my preparation could have been better.

But then life isn’t perfect. Sometimes we simply don’t have the mental or physical energy, or time, to prepare in that ideal way that we’d like. Acceptance is an integral part of stage fright, but how to actually find it? It’s not a “mindset” that you can do breathing exercises or “stretches” into. Positive thinking will not get you there. It is a long game. It is the result of knowing how to practice efficiently and effectively and understanding your own reaction to concert stress. It comes from enough performance experience to have faith that you know the correspondence between your preparation level and confidence level on stage (Seek and create opportunities if they’re not being presented to you.). Being able to accept anything is a form of being at peace. As one learns to practice well, when practice actually yield results, it becomes easier to accept what improvement hadn’t happened yet. It also has everything to do with how organized we are with our preparation. There are things that are impossible to fix the day before a performance. With experience, you’ll know what they are. And if you’ve done the bulk of work sufficiently ahead of time, it becomes easier to accept that there would be no guarantee with the little bit that you had not been able to spend quite enough time on. To have acceptance is to have confidence. Confidence is not fake it till you make it, but that you can comfortably own what you present to the world at any given moment. The more you can own, the more confident you are.

(I hold different views on a concept like confidence from how it’s commonly defined. To me it is not even a quality that one needs to develop, but that it is a natural result of being on the right track of working on the right things. If you lack confidence, you don’t work on your confidence. By the same token, I find the ideas of self-esteem, even kindness to be kind of the same thing. They’re not things in and of themselves, and any work to “develop” those qualities would simply be false. Anyway, I digress!)

I cannot even tell you how often students come to me asking for a lesson right before an audition or a performance. Or this: I’ll contact you for a lesson when I’ve practiced and “learned” my piece/program. It is such a classical music world thing where all our lives, we’ve been told to go practice first before going to our lessons. But what if our practice process had blind spots or room for improvement? Of all the serious music students or young professional players I’ve worked with, every single person has had room for improvement in how to practice, to different extents. If I’m honest, most have little to no understanding about practicing. Most people want some pointers before having to play a program, but how do you make changes that would not throw you off so close to the event? But that is short-sighted anyway. People always focus on one audition, one concert. Working like that will always give you limited results. The objective for me is always to work on a)deepening and refining my understanding of what music is, and what musicianship is, and b) how well I can train my body to communicate such musicianship, and close the gap between what I know what I want and what my body is capable of producing. Each concert I play is simply a short-term goal for me on this life-long road to develop as a musician.

How comfortable are we in our bodies? If we are required to be in positions that we can’t feel strong in, imagine having to move this way as we are under pressure performing in public. There’s the movement and the ease, but again, that this would create nervous system dysregulation is a piece that cannot be ignored. Because it’s not just about using inefficient movements, but that they would  cause all kinds of havoc in your nervous system. (There’s no pushing past NS reactions, only compensations.) Stage fright for me personally, to a large extent has to do with the discomfort of being in my own body, which is why I’ve had to spend so much time on learning about movement. For many years, just standing would be difficult for me (still is, but much better), let alone standing and play. (Though what I used to think were uniquely my own weird problems -I see more and more now that they’re not as uncommon as I thought-even if some of my issues were, and some are, still more severe than most people. But in a way, I can finally see my problems as a blessing too because they have helped me identify some things that perhaps a person having the luxury to take for granted wouldn’t. It’s helped me understand technique better and has certainly made me a better teacher.) So my focus has been to train myself in movements and positions that would help the system feel safe - in essence to be able to stand and sit strong-so my NS wouldn’t try to protect me from the danger of falling (by bracing and becoming rigid, for example. A feeling that almost all musicians have experienced.) So often I’ve heard from instrumentalists and singers talking about playing or singing on stage feeling not grounded. I believe things like that need to be approached both from the movement and NS perspectives.

So what does regulating the system for stage fright look like? (And for well-being: to me the two are overlap)  It’s different for everybody. Let me use myself as an example. First of all, I am constantly exploring better, more efficient ways to practice. By that, I mean I continually try to examine what  “natural” means in music-making, which is often thinking about how to make the complex simple, which then entails a whole lot of things from listening to different kinds of music to thinking about what music is to reading about anything else really  -because everything is connected to each other.  And from there I can then try to figure out how to facilitate my technique to create in sound what music means to me at that given point in time (so much to discuss on this whole process!).

Learning about how the nervous system and movement work - these all go toward regulation. I also have external help in the form of manual myofascial therapy that corrects “hardware” issues in my body. I see a somatic therapist regularly who specializes in regulating the nervous system (if you’re curious, look up Somatic Experiencing-though she also incorporates a lot of other modalities). And of course there’s my movement teacher and many others whom I learn from regarding movement.

The  term “holistic learning” was thrown around a lot maybe ten years ago. The application in the music world was often that you’d do something like yoga, usually, and then you’d go practice your instrument in the same exact way as things had been taught for decades. Things haven’t changed that much from what I can see. There are different modalities and descriptors now but they mostly go along the lines of learning a whole different skill-set or knowledge that has weak relevance to actual playing mechanics . (Some of these modalities in fact teach entirely incorrect information on physiology and movement.)  For me, holistic learning requires connecting the dots, breaking barriers and actually finding strong cross-application between different disciplineDoes this create more work than only focusing on your dedicated field? Absolutely. And work begets work, too. It never ends. I used to get so discouraged by this Sisyphean task, but now most of the time, the work has in itself become the reward. The richness of the entire process simply doesn’t compare to any rigid methodology. And I find it so much more effective to boot.

All this is what I’m willing to do in order to find fulfillment as a musician, a performer. But one doesn’t need to do remotely close to this much work to find even significant improvement if one is willing to really examine their process, and let go of their pre-conceived notion of what improvement might look like. I think that if we can zoom out and try to trace many of the more-often discussed factors in stage fright all the way down to the state of our nervous system, we could have a much less myopic, and therefore, more insightful, view of things.

Presence And Pain

Art in essence is about cultivating deep presence in one way or another. Whether it be a piece of first-hand creation, like composing a piece of music or making a sculpture; or an interpretation (re-creation) of a work that a classical musician or ballet dancer might do. Any meaningful process that comes close to being an art demands and inspires a presence that surpasses mere focus or concentration. It’s a whole different consciousness that is vast, dynamic and all-encompassing. It’s what distincts even the highest-level craftsmanship from artistry.

The tortured artist myth will have you believe that suffering is what creates great art(ists). I believe that is a half-truth at best, and a reductive fallacy. I think loss and suffering can be the biggest lessons in teaching (forcing, really) one to be present, if one doesn’t completely turn away in denial instead. Hence, suffering doesn’t create artists, but how one digests and crystallizes pain could be powerful agents toward transformation. Transformation that changes one’s presence with the self and everything else.

I don’t presume to know artistry, but life has thrown me a few lemons, and I feel I’ve gleaned from them some lessons about presence, art, love, and life. To say pain is redemptive stinks of yet another shallow reductive fallacy of the whole positive psychology thing. But one can’t deny that there can be tremendous transcendence in pain and loss, even when, especially when, you distinctly do NOT want to be present with it. But you do anyhow, and it changes you. Then one day you find a different nuance of presence in the form of a new sense of beauty in what you make, how you see, who you are, what you feel. And underneath that beauty the remnants of the searing pain never leaves. You learn to be present with all of it. Then you play something which touches that part of you, where words can’t reach, only to realize with a start the depths of the journey you’ve gone, the vastness of space you now have within.

Stamina

This video is a clip from a recital a few days ago. Our program was short, but both pieces on there were big ones. Both the Brahms D minor Sonata and the Scherzo require an almost continuous sense of mass and gravity from the tiny violin, even in moments of relative lightness. (And I don’t mean just loud.) The writing for the piano-already much bigger than the violin-is massive for even that instrument. Not to mention I partnered with an absolute powerhouse of a pianist, so…

I’ve been reflecting on where I lost stamina in places. What stamina really is has eluded me for years, but here's my definition currently: THE ABILITY TO MAINTAIN A STRUCTURE OF SUPPORT FOR THE REQUIRED DURATION OF TIME WHILE HAVING A MULTITUDE OF RANGE IN ROTATIONS TO ALLOW FOR TOTAL FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT. I can see even more clearly now, that the way I generally lose stamina is when I tense up and lose rotational freedom, or, when I try to rotate without a good axis, i.e., when joints don’t align or rotate in angles that allow for efficient leverage.

Here’s where I feel like I’m beginning to conceptualize what it means to “strengthen” the body to play an instrument. People talk about needing to be strong to play, but what does that mean? There’s vague talk about going to the gym, working out, etc… And sometimes people talk about using the core, but how? And what is the core anyway? Commonly thought of as the abs, but the traditional “ab-strengthening exercises” have never resonated, nor have they worked for me. (I’d usually get pain before any result could occur.)

In this video below, I’m trying to rotate across the two sides of the body to create torque. I’m taking care to pay attention to all the local rotations (adjacent parts move in opposite directions) to create global rotations. And when the whole body is wringing itself like a towel, all of a sudden the idea of the core starts to materialize. I can viscerally sense in my own body what it is, and what it means to strengthen it. But it’s not an isolated thing. It’s not just this muscle or that muscle. It takes absolutely the whole body to work together for my mid-section to feel like it’s working in concert with the rest of the body-the arms, the legs, and of course, the feet.

And where I’m wobbly in the transition in this movement, is where I think this “core strength” is about, and that is also where I lose sound and support when I play. It’s when I’m in that place of lack of support that I feel the need to force my sound. Again, to “strengthen” where it feels weak is not just about making my mid-section stronger. It is about coordinating all the rotations from my toes to my head, so the middle can work efficiently. When I feel a lack of engagement in the core, or a sense of weakness there if you will, more often than, adjusting another joint’s rotational direction would immediately make it feel stronger. Now I begin to understand why the “core” as a discrete entity never resonated with me.

I’ll be working on my stamina in this type of exercises. I truly believe that this will translate directly to playing stamina, especially if one plays with different directions of pulling the band (up and down bow), and different angles, and add speed. (More about speed and stamina in another post.)

And just for fun, thought I’d share my first big brick mishap. ;) But here’s the thing: I think where I lose balance is at least partially an exaggeration, or extension, of the kind of inefficient rotational patterns that causes me to lose sound or control when I play! Because my body will move in familiar patterns whether I’m playing or not. And that’s the whole point. I am trying to correct where movement is inefficient, and make available to my body more options, so that I can both play and move better (which is what I try to do for students as well.).

The Hierarchy Of Notes

I like to stay away from describing certain notes being more important than others. To me a piece of music is like a painting. One could not leave out any patch of color or shape in the background of a painting - no matter how small. Literally every color and  shade that occupies the canvas is absolutely essential. And short of that, no serious painter would think that it’s any less important to work on the background only because it’s not the subject. 

By thinking that there’s a hierarchy in music-that certain notes are more important than others-even within the same voice, to me changes the essence of the entire thing-the what it is and what it isn’t. I teach a string ensemble where the kids who play the accompaniment would sometimes complain of being bored as they are “only” holding long notes or playing repeated eighths. (Frankly I don’t even like the word “accompaniment”, but admitted there are times material is written in a way that the word does carry some truth.) Just like the background of a painting, those long notes or repeated eighths need to carry just as much energy, shape, and nuance. The equality in a painting applies in the same way.

While different notes are all important, they all need their own distinct qualities. Just like on a canvas, some are supposed to be more in the foreground; some more in the back. Some more opaque; some more transparent. They have different kinds of weight, mass, density, texture. They can even have different altitudes: sometimes going with pitch direction, sometimes against. And all this even before considering the spaces between the notes. Music is motion. I like to feel how all the notes have their own individual, almost physical place, in this dynamic 3-dimensional aural world. 

Without hierarchy, it means that to ”follow” another line (e.g., the melody) takes on a different meaning from the literal sense of the word. I recently read an interview of Alan Alda’s. He describes an improv exercise called the mirror exercise where whatever person A does, B has to instantaneously do the same thing. One learns that the person initiating the movement will have to take responsibility to help the other person mirror you (e.g., by not going too fast); and also that the person mirroring will have to observe the initiator so carefully that they can almost predict what they’re going to do. Otherwise it would be impossible for things to happen instantaneously. To me this same principle applies to playing. “Following” will often put one ever so slightly late. And even if the timings match, that kind of togetherness creates more of a 2-dimensional stacking (like stacking legos), rather than a true collective coming together, a real unity. Stacking is two-dimensional, but true togetherness gives you mass, girth, depth, power, and infinitely more. And here’s the thing: to me the beauty and magic of music is that sometimes it is precisely the imprecision that enables the creation of the illusion of togetherness. Imagine a (good)pianist aligning all the notes together vertically at all times. It would sound robotic and just ridiculous really. Why would we aim to do that in chamber music or even in orchestra? In the video here of Annie Fischer playing, you can hear how she sometimes ever so slightly splits even just a simple third in the same hand, let alone a melodic note with the harmony.

While I’m isolating this one particular example of how she manipulates notes to create voicing and texture, I’m not trying to reduce this beautiful performance to some kind of technical analysis. This touches me so much - I almost always get tears listening to it.

Or, tell these guys in a barbershop quartet that those not singing the melody line are less important and that they might as well just phone it in… And are they really “following” the melody here? Everyone is as much the driver. In fact, it’s most likely a give and take, where certain voices do drive a bit more or less at different times because of harmonic context.

Is playing Beethoven so different from what these guys do in terms of being together? If you ask me, us classical musicians have a lot to learn from how those from other genres jam and groove together.

I watched a Carlos Kleiber rehearsal video on youtube years ago (which I can no longer find) where he instructs the violin section to make sure to only wait until they’ve heard another player come in before they creep in with their note, to need to “guess” when to come in as the mood of the music calls for hesitancy and doubt there. To play “together” is not an already defined state, but an illusion that one can only try to create by sometimes even doing the opposite. And what it means to be together in different places can be vastly different. It’s context-dependent. 

It’s like that in life, too, isn’t it? One can’t always be in step with another, metaphorically and otherwise. If only it were that easy. It takes so much more than lining things up. It takes real work. Continual work. There’s no done and you’re all good from here on. But when true togetherness happens - in music or otherwise - that’s when magic happens. I don’t think we can expect magic too often, but is that a reason to not strive for it? Or change the definition of that magical state to something more “practical” and achievable and more relatable just so we can feel more accomplished? If anything, we’re lucky as musicians this way. It is so much easier to find magic in music than in real life. Why go for mere competence or excellence (which I’d argue isn’t even the point-only a side effect), and make ourselves that much poorer by not going for the magic - for what music IS - even if it means that we won’t find it every single time. 

On Learning And Listening

I’ve come to find that learning and listening are one and the same. How one receives information determines how much one learns (or listens). Often people stop information from coming in. They hear another person say something, and they immediately convert that to what their own pre-conceived notion of what that thing is, and then proceed to accept or reject the other person’s idea based on their own interpretation. If the former, they’re “learning”, or agreeing to something that’s not even true, as they’d have already distorted it by the limit of their own experience. It’d be a misunderstanding at best. Or they reject an idea that they don’t even have any understanding about in the first place, as they can only see it through the lens of what they THINK it is. No real communication would have taken place.

When it comes to learning, what stands in the way to be open enough to receive information is often the ego. If a person already feels like they’re an expert in what they do, they tend to feel like they have established the conclusions, the answers, to all the concepts in what they do. In this way, key concepts and ideas become meaningless catch phrases and buzz words; those words always triggering the same fixed and robotic kind of thinking. Instead of a dynamic process, learning becomes this automation where in order to achieve x you must do y, and y only. Regardless of circumstances. Regardless of whether the reasoning is truly logical. 

This can happen very subtly. We ALL do it. What we gain in knowledge  automatically becomes clutter and obstacles to further understanding. There’s no avoiding it. It’s the dual nature of everything - you gain and you lose at the same time. To me this is why a constant vigilance to look out for these kinds of blindspots is crucial to the learning process. One needs to gather, but equally important, to break down and question and distill after gathering. It’s almost like too much gathering only weighs you down. (Think people who throw theory talk at you all day with no regard about how theory is only a tool to tell a story in music.) But at the end of the day, we need the lightness and freedom in order to DO what we learn for. 

It takes practice to be open. It is not just what you do or don’t do. Same with listening. It’s not just about how much you say or even what you say back. It’s impossible to pin down exactly what makes openness, you FEEL it when it’s not there. 

There are more concrete ways to help get past the abstraction, too. Start by recognizing the universality of things. Try to not get pinned down by what you think is relevant or irrelevant to what you do. Start by trying to find ANY universal concept connecting any two things. Seek out analogies. I love analogies: difficulty to find parallels can either point to faulty logic on my part, or teach me an elemental concept (the what it is or what it isn’t) of what I’m learning that would’ve stayed hidden if not viewed from the outside or via a different lens. When you come across a different take on a concept that you think you know very well, pause and really listen. Consider actively holding back on expressing your opinion sometimes. Equally important is to constantly re-examine what your own take really is, that it hadn’t become an automated rigid definition. Do you REALLY know what you mean when you say that word? Throw out all your pre-conceived notions. When it comes to conversation, a lot of people would hear an idea and then immediately jump in to agree/disagree, or offer their own take. But why assume the other person’s definition is the same as yours? This applies to both learning and social listening. The mindset of “expertise” or “I know what you mean” is the death of learning or listening (though sometimes you do know what they mean!). Try to stay away from common catchphrases if you can (so hard). Take your words seriously. Learning is communication, whether you’re learning to do something or learning about someone. So often people just talk at each other and then pat each other on the back when nobody’s even heard what anybody’s been saying.

We all want to be seen and heard, and this kind of non-communicating communication creates the biggest void of loneliness. Nobody truly feels seen, and nobody wants to expand to learn and see another. Then of course there’s the question of who’s interesting to see. Why do we find some people more interesting than others? People who are fixed to triggered automated responses to every single little idea can only be so interesting if you ask me!  

And instinct matters. All the great teachers I’ve had, I would understand nothing about what they speak of in the beginning, yet I’d feel the urgency to know what they know; and the greed to have what they have, to take what they’re willing to give me. Instinct is the only thing one has at this point to distinguish whether what they can offer might be a bunch of bs that makes no sense, or whether it’s valuable distilled wisdom that you have yet to understand. The more you invest in the time (and often money) to learn and study things that ultimately either ring true to you, or doesn’t, the more you hone your instincts to find what’s right and true. This is why there really is no wasted detour. You learn things from mistakes that are impossible to learn from the “correct” choices.

It is important to me to constantly define and understand some of the more subtle workings of learning (subtle, not less important). I have an adult student, who was always eager to learn all the repertoire but who could never tune his violin properly. Obviously if someone can’t hear when their instrument is out of tune, they also cannot play in tune. I tried to figure out where the hole was in his listening skill but that got us nowhere. And then it hit me a couple weeks later that the problem was that he couldn’t even settle down to listen properly in the first place because he’s too anxious/impatient. It was impossible to work on how to listen for intonation when he couldn’t even get to the space to listen in the first place. So we worked on that. Which means that it was important for me as a teacher to know what it actually meant to settle down and be patient to begin with, and to get clear on what that meant to me in order to convey it to him, and then from there to intuit what he needed in order to help him to get there. We got immediately unstuck after that. His intonation, and so much else, had a sudden surge of improvement. To be able to access that space where listening is possible: that’s not a “musical” topic. But in this case, without confronting this, we would have gotten nowhere with any of the musical issues.

All these are elements of the very nuanced and fluid parts of the broader subject of learning. One can only be a good teacher if one can be a good student. It’s not just a corny cliche -it takes the same kind of openness to be either.

Writing for ThinkMovement; different-same vs same-same; answering to sound in movement

I’ve been invited to be a contributor in this collective of movement people and thinkers called ThinkMovement. I was frankly surprised, but so very honored, by this invitation - as these are not only people whom I have a lot of respect for, but also from whom I’ve been learning a ton. 

There are so many lenses through which one can approach any subject, and I appreciate the diversity in this group. Diversity to me, in a pure and unpoliticized sense, is at its core about being open to learning and receiving via different-same alongside same-same. (Tolerance has nothing to do with it.) Same-same is essential too, it allows exploration in depth. But it’s limiting in terms of expansion, and it doesn’t give you enough space to identify inherent flaws in pre-conceived notions and beliefs. Different-same gives you breadth. It gives you imagination and innovation. Both depth and breadth are crucial and are not mutually exclusive. 

Writing my questionnaire for ThinkMovement got me thinking about the different perspective that I hold from most of the others over there. See, I’m not even such an active or physical person in general. I in fact think about movement more than I actually move! Getting out of my head has always been a struggle. But there’s one overarching guidance I have that is perhaps unique in that group, which is that I answer to sound. Sound always, always, tell me whether I’m moving my body efficiently (which basically translates to having good technique, which translates to the body moving well). Sometimes when I can’t tell how I’m moving, I’d know instantly as soon as I play (Same when I play other instruments). When I am lost about how to work on the body, having the instrument and making music immediately give me a focal point to at least know where to start. Same with teaching. When it is not obvious visually that there’s a kink somewhere in a student’s technique, their tone is an immediate giveaway. From there, we try to figure out where the problem lies. While making music takes a lot more than just the physical, I think the quality of tone itself is almost completely dictated by how well one moves through the ENTIRE body. It’s a whole lot more than to play “relaxed” or “tense”. As someone who can sometimes think in too-nebulous terms, who sometimes almost sees too much inter-connectedness than is good for me, having sound as a bit of an absolute to answer to is quite a comfort. 

Anyway… I’m just so happy to have my voice be a part of this mix of awesome people. Check them out here: thinkmovement.net

What Is All This Movement Stuff Anyway?

From what I’m hearing, it seems like some people think that I do rehabilitation work, or at least that a part of my work is rehabilitative, sort of like therapy combined with learning how to play the violin. I can see how that can be misconstrued, based on my Instagram posts on movement. But really what I aim to do is simply to teach violin. Though arguably, how one defines that and what that entails can vary wildly - but that’s for another post. For simplicity’s sake, let’s just leave it at that. I teach violin. (But if they feel better in their body from playing, that’s even better!)

Making music is multi-faceted. There’s technique, musicianship (the how-to of that in and of itself is multi-layered), note/score-reading, analysis, theory, development in listening and growth of musical instincts, etc, etc… On Instagram, I share mostly the technique-explored-in-movement facet of my work because I believe this lens through which I explore violin technique is quite different from conventional methods. They are also the easiest to condense into 20-second videos on Instagram. But this is by no means the only aspect of music-making that I work on with students. In fact, depending on the person’s need and all kinds of factors, there could be weeks where we might only spend time on putting bow to string to make music.

But perhaps it’s a good time to clarify: what is all the movement about anyway? At this point I’d say this exploration with violin movement is my way of dismantling any pre-conceived notion of what violin technique is, and an attempt to rebuild a picture of what technique means in terms of the actual mechanics of maneuvering the violin, in dynamic relation with the structure and shape of the body. (I’d say that dismantling, questioning, and trying to break things down to their most elemental and simple before reassembling, might be the crux of how I think about everything.) I see it as working on violin technique from the ground up. Trying to view it through all possible, relevant lenses. 

Also, in the last few decades, how much advancement have people made in movement science and neuroscience? We move our bodies to play; we use our brains to learn. Both of these fields are directly related to what we do. But classical music education for the most part is pretty stuck in the model from decades, even centuries, ago. If you look closely enough, some of the traditional instructions in terms of how to move are simply incorrect or impossible given how joints actually work. Just because great players have been produced from this system doesn’t mean that there’s nothing wrong with it. I for one believe that there could have been many more great players if things were different. Also, one could give very gifted players the wrong instruction, but they/their body would naturally move the right thing-therein lies the talent. Example: so many instructions are on moving the arms and shoulders, but these two parts have quite limited movement. The very gifted (or someone simply born with flexible scapula) might naturally use their shoulder blades, without even knowing that they’re a contributing factor to their ease in playing, thinking that they’re following instructions to use their arms/shoulders! And then they in turn give instructions to their student to use their arms to do certain things and the student fails. And then that student’s deemed to not betalented/gifted enough. And so the cycle goes. 

Having said all this, I know there are great teachers out there using the mostly “traditional” methods with great results - there are students everywhere playing very well, playing with joy. These teachers must all be doing something right. But I’m sure they have their own individual elements to add to these methods. I’m also not dismissing tradition. I am a firm believer that innovation can only be borne out of a thorough understanding and respect of tradition - I’m actually pretty traditional-minded in that sense. But I think it’s only logical to not get stuck stubbornly only looking at what we do from the perspective of decades or centuries ago. (Apply the same scenario to any other field and you’ll see how this sounds a bit ridiculous.) So for me it’s a process of constantly examining and re-examining. 

Violin Technique And Angles

I’ve come to think that so much of figuring out violin technique has to do with solving problems with angles. In my opinion, some of the traditional teaching ideas could be misguiding because of two things:

1. They operate on the idea that we move from the center of the body (middle), but playing the violin does not-it’s an asymmetrical activity. Not only do we not rotate from the middle, we also have to apply force to an object in front of us, and to our left, and to even hold and support weight on that side while having the R side lean into it. Figuring out how to do all this from the idea of moving around the spine as the axis just isn’t logical. 2. Identifying and separating L hand and R hand technique can be useful at times for clarity, but too often the ideas themselves disregard that the two sides are connected. And not only that, the hand is connected to the arm to the shoulder to the side body to the pelvis, etc…. Even the terms L hand and R hand technique feel like misnomers to me as they are too narrow to reflect what we actually need to do to play.

Think about the angles of all we do. Bow on strings doesn’t go up and down, but sideways. Depending on which string (and then where the L hand is) the angle is entirely different. We don’t press bow down on string-it’s really more oblique for the most part. And think about it. It’s easy to bear weight if something comes down on you horizontally. Tilted is much more difficult for the body to organize to receive.

Shifting is not up and down either, otherwise one jams into the rib of the violin past fourth position. Our elbow’s range of motion is limited by the fact that it’s attached to the upper arm to the shoulder. So constantly to have only the instruction to push elbow in under the violin, for example, seems to defy the structure of our anatomy.

I find it helpful to think about technique as figuring out which angle to apply to different shapes. Almost all the traditional terms we use (up bow down bow etc) in music do not reflect the actual physical motion required. I think it’s worthwhile to re-examine whether or how these might have affected the way we think about how to play.

Resonance and intonation, connecting the ear to the body and teaching this all to the nervous system

I had a bit of an exciting discovery lately: that one doesn’t need much more pressure than what we use for harmonics to play a fingered note! I’ll say it again. I can’t believe how little pressure it takes to actually play a note. And how much better it sounds to be light.

In fact, when you find the sweet spot of just-right pressure (or weight, rather, as it really isn’t much), the note rings like crazy and it helps to guide and clarify one’s sense of intonation as well. You can actually physically FEEL the string vibrate under the finger this way, which I can’t say I’d ever been aware of before.

So I got on a scale kick to explore this. I’ve written about how I like to use the arpeggio as an anchor for the ear to build the scale around, to develop a kind of intonation that’s relational and contextual: one that’s based on a sense of tonality and harmony. So that besides the intervals being relational to each other, all the notes in the scale are relational to the core of the chord tones of do, mi, so, do; relational to the key.

So here’s a few things that I feel like are of note. Many people try to match their fingered notes to the pitches of open strings, but I think it adds a whole other layer to it if you try to get out of your pre-conceived notion of what you think is “in tune”, and really try to match the timbre and the ring instead. Almost simply to imitate rather than to match. It doesn’t sound like a big difference, but re-framing that intention changes the entire experience. Let that expand your idea of what good intonation means. Go for a bell-like sound with every note (and enjoy it!). As with everything else, try to find more of a whole-body experience - how you physically approach the note, how you leave the sound, how you physically feel like you’re traversing the distances of the intervals - it all adds dimensions to what “good pitch” is.

Matching of the harmonics has been a revelation for me. I would repeat the same-pitch fingered note after playing its harmonic equivalent. But instead of just, again, matching the pitch, I’d try to bring the entire visceral experience of lightness both in sound and feeling to it. And I feel like doing things like this has not only added a whole palette of colors to my instrument, it’s also brought a lightness and pitch confidence to everything else that I play.

I am beginning to think that there’s possibly a sweet spot between L hand finger weight, bow speed and/or bow weight, for every single note. That sweet spot-the rightness depends also on which note you came from and where you’re going from there. So what’s right for the moment is fluid, and I feel like practicing like this helps me connect my inner ear and my body to create that sound. It helps one learn (in a way subconsciously) all the possibilities of sound dimensions and colors and reacting to what one can’t name. It’s like instructing the nervous system what possibilities there are, so that it can take over to react when we actually play a piece of music. So this practice is working on gaining that freedom to feel, to respond spontaneously, rather than re-hashing an exact way to play everything identically every time. (What’s the point of that??)

This work has also helped me to not get as stuck in my practice. Especially when zoomed in with such detail, outside of the context of an actual piece of music, it usually sounds more flawed than you’d like. But especially because this work does center a lot on intonation, and intonation is contextual, so it really doesn’t make sense at all to get too stuck on a note. I’d notice that some notes are not ringing quite as resonantly as I’d like them to be, but I’d just move on. I’m sure the lightness of the harmonics help me with that. And I’ve found that everything does go better then when you do zoom out, in a way that feels really good, pleasurable. Because it’s been worked through from a deep, and more sensing, instead of thinking, place.

This kind of deep work that combines all the senses: the sensual (people don’t often talk about this, but the sensual element in how we touch an instrument is such a big part of playing and its pleasures), the listening, and the feeling - really heightens one’s awareness of how we play and how we move and how we feel. It’s all a part of what makes an instrument feel like an extension of a body, which is what we want. I feel that sometimes professional players get so pressured to learn pieces and learn our “notes” for jobs and gigs that practicing can become detached, disconnected. But even just brief re-visits of really deep, slow, simple work like this can make everything else not just easier. It also furthers our joy and pleasure in what we do, and maintains our relationship to music (not the job, just music), and to our instruments. For better or worse, these are two of the most important relationships in our lives.

For the corresponding video, please visit https://www.instagram.com/p/CYu9196p4IQ/

Thoughts on Intonation and how to improve it; also 2D vs 3D

What is good intonation? To me it is when pitch clearly shows its harmonic function and role within a piece of music. It is when pitch is a completely intrinsic manifestation of key and tonality, tension and relaxation. It has a lot less to do with whether A equals 439 or 445, but where A is in relation to the key that you’re playing in, and what chord that specific A belongs to in any given moment. In other words, good intonation needs context.  

To understand a note’s context, one needs to examine chords. And to examine chords, one can’t overlook intervals. A dear pianist friend likes to say “feel the interval”, and I find that to be so true. A perfect fourth can feel harmonious but slightly vacuous, compared to the dissonant clash of a major seventh. To play those in tune requires more than matching the pitches to the exact sound frequencies. The difference in distance and tension in the two different intervals needs to be felt in order for them to sound “in tune”. On the other hand, sometimes an identical interval in two different contexts need to sound and be felt completely differently too. Take the major third C-E. Whether they are the bottom two notes of the C major triad or the top two notes of the A minor triad, they serve completely different purposes and should sound as such. 

Sometimes we take for granted that the ability to listen is a given, when this is a skill that needs to be deepened continuously. Have you ever had the experience, especially during a performance, where you notice that things are getting out of tune but you have no idea how to even begin to adjust because you feel so completely lost and disoriented in a rush of notes? Have you ever played a passage of double-stops or chords, not being able to tell exactly where you’re going out of tune but you keep playing it over and over anyway, even if it hasn’t seemed to help move you beyond a point of being stuck? I have been in both of these situations, and I’ve come to find that it’s because I was focusing on the wrong thing - the hand, when I should have been directing my attention to the ear. But how to work on listening? I’ve found the following exercise to be practical and helpful.

Exercise to train the ear for good intonation:

Pick a key, let’s say D major. First play the tonic in all different octaves. See if you can let go of what sounding in tune normally means to you, and include in your listening how all the different D’s ring, and try to match them in how they do. Expand your notion of listening. Listen to the quality of your tone, how much bow speed/pressure you’re using. Listen to how tight or how loose your sound is. Feel how much pressure you’re applying with your fingers on the fingerboard. (Or all the equivalents for your instrument.) Notice how all these factors could affect your pitch.

Now add the fifths. So in this case you’d play D, A, D, A, cycling through all the octaves up and down. Feel the resonance of the open fifth. How the A lies in the middle of the two Ds. Again, feel the DISTANCE between the notes, as if you’d need to traverse actual physical distances to reach the notes.

Add the thirds. (F#) Teach your ear to become sensitive to how the F# is not just a note that comes after D, but remember where the A is supposed to be from playing only fifths a minute ago, and how those resonant perfect fifths felt, and now place the F# between the D that you’ve already sounded and the A that you haven’t. In other words, you are listening for the major third of the D-F#, the minor third of the F#-A, the perfect fifth of the D-A, and on top of that, how the whole chord feels as a unit, as a whole. The more you can listen across different planes of interval relationships and retain memories of relating any given note to another - even if a note had already been played 5 notes ago or has not even been sounded - the more in tune you’ll be. (E.g., simultaneously listening and paying attention to how all the same pitches match across octaves and how adjacent intervals should sound as such.)

So now you have the D major arpeggio. I see this as the basic skeletal structure for the ear to anchor upon. You can then fill in the rest of the notes of the D major scale, using the D major chord as an anchor to place the other notes. You can even fill in the chromatic scale after that if you feel like it. Feel the tension/relaxation in all the intervals. I find that the more one does this, the concept of good intonation becomes wonderfully elastic and naturally undogmatic. An F# could sound deliciously high or mischievously low. (Obviously if we’re playing with other people, that would have to be factored in as well.) When the ear can take the lead in listening for and adjusting pitch this way, intonation serves what it’s meant to - as a means to an end in music-making. It also helps one find a much wider palette of colors and expression.

You can apply this exercise to any passage. Find the chord tones of the passage, practice listening to and playing them as described earlier to form a solid anchoring structure for the ear, then find the rest of the notes according to this skeleton.

When one finds this kind of innate connectivity between the notes, and this kind of listening that encompasses many layers, it’s common for other things to improve as well. I find that this can also increase one’s sense of security during playing. When you can find more tangible points of anchoring for the ear, good intonation no longer feels arbitrary (Teacher A said this note needs to be played higher but now teacher B is saying the opposite!!!). You feel much more rooted in the tonality, thus the music itself. And it usually translates to the body also feeling more anchored, more secure. Ideas about phrasing can sometimes become immediately crystallized after this intonation exercise because it is really at its heart an intimate exploration of intervals, tonality, and connections. After all, how could one truly shape a phrase without examining the connection between the smallest units of interval?

Traditionally we often practice scales before arpeggios. The scale provides more physical anchors for the hand to help play the arpeggio more in tune. But I think to flip it around this way is a practical and very effective way to arrive at pitch understanding and discernment on a deep level. It also helps train a much, much more elusive, and I believe a much more difficult, but often overlooked skill: the ability to listen deeply. I think it also helps hone the important skill of being able to react and interact instantaneously (even automatically) to sounds coming either from our own instrument or a musical partner’s.

Good intonation should feel and sound inevitable, and that doesn’t come from pitches matching the needle on a tuner. “Correct” pitches as determined by sound frequencies are merely markers on a map. They’re two-dimensional, and are in fact totally inaccurate representations of what musical notes are, what music is; just as a blue patch representing an ocean on a map does not at all reflect what an ocean is. It is simply a symbolic representation of what the real thing is. So it is with intonation, and with most other things in music, too.

On music, hope... via Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time

I'd like to christen my website with a post about Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. I think it serves as a nice curtain-raiser to my new page, as it touches on an integral, albeit small, part of the core of who I am as a musician and a person. In its own way, it explains at least one facet of what music means to me, and where my work sprung from. 

The question has always been asked whether the arts, music included, are mere luxuries, non-essentials. And most people believe that they are important solely for the purpose of entertainment or pleasure. This is a topic on which I could write endlessly about: but for now I will just start with the back story of Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time.

Messiaen was imprisoned in a Nazi German prisoner-of-war camp in Görlitz in the winter of 1941. He discovered that among his fellow prisoners were a clarinetist, a violinist, and a cellist. Messiaen wrote the piece while imprisoned with the help of a sympathetic guard who provided him with a pencil and paper, and solitude to write in. It had its première on a cold January night in an unheated barrack. The audience, including both prisoners and German guards, listened to that performance in sub-zero temperature in absolute rapt silence. Messiaen later said, "Never was I listened to with such rapt attention and comprehension."

There's another story about how the premiering cellist Etienne Pasquier got his cello. The prisoners donated 65 marks out of their earnings from chores for him to buy a cello, a bow, and a rosin. Imagine that! Imagine what dire circumstance these war prisoners were in, what piddly earnings they had. What essential, sensible items would one spend those pitiful few dollars on? Probably a precious loaf of bread in the midst of starvation? An extra shirt for the fatally brutal winter? Well, it's a cello!!! A cello not because it could be burned to make a fire for warmth, but so that music could be played from it! Pasquier said that when the German soldiers escorted him back to the camp from the music store, the prisoners were elated and begged him to play for hours. He said, "Oh! They cried for joy. In my whole life, I have never seen such enthusiasm. They made me play until the curfew." 

Art is that barest of thread which humankind hangs on to in times of total desperation. We may be lucky to not have to endure the extent of desperation and hopelessness as Messiaen and his fellow prisoners had. But we have our modern-day despair, too. And even small day-to-day setbacks and disappointments erode us at our core bit by bit - we would not survive them if it wasn't for hope. We may have the luxury, or we simply are not aware enough, to know how hope has kept us going. Or we take it for granted. But it is indeed just as essential for our survival as it was for those prisoners.