Today I have been teaching piano classes again at the Music Conservatory in Groningen. That's high up in the North of The Netherlands. From where I live that's two hours sitting on the train to get there and two hour to get back to Utrecht. A nice opportunity for me to do some reading and to take an appreciative look at the northern countryside of The Netherlands.
One student asked me how one can practice to get in the 'flow', - how to enter 'the zone' - that magical spacious place where only enjoyment of sound resides and where no distraction from thoughts or fears appears.
This jazz piano student - as well as a lot of other music students - has read the book Effortless Mastery
After some exchanging of ideas we arrived at the question: Is the state of 'flow' always present, but do we sometimes lose touch with it? Or, does flow occasionally happen to us - like an accidental trip - but is in reality non-existent?
It seems we have a couple options, concepts and explanations about our experience with this 'flow'.
We can believe that this state of 'flow' is constantly present in our life. We can believe that life is a flowing ever-changing creative process, and that we're a part of that - and connected with the centre of it. We can allow ourselves to experience this flow effortlessly, at any time. That's very much like the 'Force' in Star Wars. At least, that is the impression that I get when I hear the wise words from Yoda, the Jedi master:
"My ally is the Force. And a powerful ally it is. Life creates it. Makes it grow. Its energy surrounds us, and binds us. Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter. You must feel the Force around you. Here between you, me, the rock, the tree, everywhere. Yes, even between land and ship."
We can compare the 'flow' - this space - or this force that connects and binds us all, with the 'Force' in Star Wars, or with the Matrix. I just watched the movie I Love huckabees
So, we can believe in a space and a force that is bigger than we are and that connects everything in and around us. Somehow though, we lose touch with this force - this flow - because we start having thoughts and worries about the future - about our future agenda. Or, we start thinking about events in the past - all the things that in our limited view 'went wrong'.
The second option; We can belief that this space - the zone, or this sensation of flow - is a temporary state of mind. But we are able to create this state of 'flow' by force of willpower - by effort.
A third option would be not to get lost in a yes or no debate, not to get carried away by either extreme, but to choose not to choose any concept of what 'flow' is and how it is achieved, and keep an open mind to accept 'flow' in any way it appears in the present moment. We don't need to freeze or label our experience in fixed explanations. We learn to appreciate flow whenever we are aware of it.
This is what Anthony de Mello, 1931 -1987 Jesuit priest, psychotherapist, writer says in his book One Minute Nonsense
"The Master persistently warned against the attempt to encompass Reality in a concept or a name. A scholar in mysticism once asked, "When you speak of BEING, sir, is it eternal, transcendent being you speak of, or transient, contingent being?" The Master closed his eyes in thought. Then he opened them, put on his most disarming expression, and said, "Yes!"
Different people have different ways of perceiving and explaining the world around them. Different people have different views about what the zone or the flow in reality is. It is comparable with love. The same questions arise. Is love always present as a creative and sustaining universal force? Or is love just something we fall into or out of when we please? Try to explain love. It can only be experienced. The same is true for the 'flow' or the 'space'. Or 'God', Creator or 'Spirit Energy', or whatever you want to call the higher force, for that matter.
More de Mello:
"A .. belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a ... belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some ... people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers."
Antony de Mello - One Minute Nonsense
Today I saw again that most students practice the piano with lots of doubts, fears and thoughts in their mind. That keeps them from getting to that 'space'. It definitely keeps them from sitting relaxed behind the instrument with an open mind and a open heart. After experimenting we noticed that it works pretty good to focus on feeling and sound with total concentration during practicing. Doing that, we practice to be in the present moment with an 'empty' mind. We're then resting our awareness - our being - in the sound of the piano and in the physical sensations of our body. Focussing on our breathing also helps to keep our attention in the present moment. When we stop thinking about 'what' to play, we discover that our body, the arms, hands and fingers, know 'how' to play. Better than we think, or dare to believe.
I guess this is easier said than done because we have been training ourselves to live in the explanation of life instead of life itself. We have trained ourselves to take the words and symbols by which we explain our human experience as hard facts of life.
Let me give you some examples. Everybody can probably experience day and night, we can see the sun rising and setting. We can witness this happen every day - that's a magnificent part of nature. But we invented the 24 hour system to create a meaningful theory of our experience of the time between two sunsets. This could also have been 26 hours or just 8. We assume that 24 must be right. We assume a lot of things. We assume that what is outside of us - the things, objects and people - are more real than what is inside of us. These are all collectively accepted agreements by which we organize our lives.
The same is true for borders between countries - we take them as hard facts, but they are invented by men. The same is true for directions in space. We have words for 'right, 'left', 'in front', 'behind', 'up', 'down', and we tend to think in these terms only. But around us is a scope of more than 360 degrees. Much wider than the few words we have for only some directions in space. The same is true for everything that we label.
The question is; at what age do we start to take these explanations - these stories that we tell ourselves and the people around us - for hard facts? And when did we lose sight of the fact that these are just inventions to help us operate in this magical ever-changing world? Who says 'tomorrow' exists? Do we really think that we can walk a thousand miles? That is a fantasy; we - our body - can only take one step. After that step we can again see whether we can take another step.
"Even a 1,000 mile journey starts with a single step". Lao Tzu – (founder of Taoism, wrote Tao Te Ching
The same is true for the piano and the art of improvisation. We put so much conceptualizing - so much words and symbols - in between ourselves and the source of pure sound and rhythm. Keith Jarrett often speaks about the art of improvisation. Jarrett speaks of the 'flame' and the 'fire' in his liner notes of his Cd Vienna Concert
The inside of liner notes read: "I have courted the fire for a very long time, and many sparks have flown in the past, but the music on this recording speaks, finally, the language of the flame itself."
The space, the zone, the flow, the flame, fire, are all names for the same creative spacious force. We put theories and explanations between us and the direct experience of this 'flow'.
"You've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings." anthony de Mello - One Minute Nonsense
We can become aware that music notes are simply symbols that indicate what note should be played when. But there are many more tones and pitches than those we are able to notate. Our notation symbols are pretty inadequate when it comes to giving us information about quarter tones and bending notes. Our music notation system is even less designed to tell us how to play a note. We have some symbols that inform us how loud or soft we should play a note. But the are many more subtle nuances of volume somewhere between f, ff, fff, f, p, and pp. We should be aware of the limitations of our music notation system and move beyond it in our awareness of dynamics and touch. We do not have to limit ourselves to the invented symbols, and can realize that we can play many more un-notatable nuances in dynamics. The fact that we cannot notate them or put them into a 'system' does not mean that we cannot play them on our music instruments.
Theory books can get in the way of us and the meaningful flowing music. Although these books have some value in helping us to organize and structure sound and rhythm, they are very limited in explaining creative flow, free play and spontaneous improvisation. They describe the 'what' of music, not the 'how'. These books are only good for reference. They give us some tools to communicate with each other about some aspects of the music. And it is important to have a certain foundation and understanding of the theory of music. But having a lot of cognitive knowledge about scales, chords, melodies does not mean that we can be creative improvisors. It just means that we have this knowledge - knowledge is not skill. But knowledge can help us to start walking the path and to get the experience we need to learn what its all about.
All the theories about what scales to use where, and the theories about chords and voicings are all somebody's personal explanation of his or her experience with sound. It is their individual system. We can get inspired by such a system and learn from it. But it is still their way. We do not have to see this explanation - these theories - as 'hard facts'.
"Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize, just as I did, there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path..." Morpheus to Neo in The Matrix
Another obstacle is our own concept of how we 'should' sound - how you 'should' play the piano. It is like having a personal PR agent inside of our heads, making sure that we create and maintain a spotless image for our friends, colleagues and audience. This agent makes sure that we show ourselves as being smart, perfect and flawless. For some reason it is not okay to show our limitations and weaknesses. Accepting ourselves how we truly are - with all our strengths and weaknesses - will create the sense of peace and freedom in us that allows us to stop thinking about how we look, sound or smell and will start to focus on the spacious present moment. In that place that we call 'now', we can find the space and the flow.
Once, I asked Herbie Hancock if he could give me a piano lesson. He told me that he had only one advice for jazz students; go to a disco or club and do some all night dancing! At the time I did not get it. I was a lousy dancer. I didn't see what that had to do with being a great pianist. I wanted him to show me all he knows about 'what' to play. I was a bit disappointed. A lesson from him would have been so good for my 'image'. Now I see that he was pointing me in the direction of 'how' to play. I guess dancing is for him a way to get in touch with the knowledge of the body. The body knows about rhythm and flow. It is born that way. When we dance we can learn about rhythm, flow and movement in ways that no book ever can. The body is a great teacher.
As infants we relate to the world with song and dance. That's all we had at that moment to communicate and learn. Bjorkvold decribes in his book The Muse Within
Stephen Nachmanovitch writes in his book Free Play
Creative musicians can operate from that spacious 'now' place - from the real non-conceptual space. Creative improvisators tell others about that place. Creative improvising musicians are the storytellers that speak of that magical place. We help others to remember that behind the conceptual place with its helpful but limiting concepts, explanations and tools, lies a limitless, spacious place full of possibilities, wonder and magic. Every soul has the natural born ability to enter that place - that zone - and start to become the creative genius that hides inside. Artists can help others to realize this. Creative improvisors visualize the magic of that place in sound, rhythm and harmony. Tell those stories. Let's play!
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your paying small doesn't serve the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." Marianne Williamson in Return to Love
I'd say that some things just can't be rushed. I'm not talking about Satori, but about just the basics of 'letting go', so to speak. Maybe some things in jazz playing fall into that cathegory. Maybe you have to learn all your chops and study your jazz harmony books through and do your tons of transcriptions just to find out (by yourself) that then it's time to get rid of all that, to un-learn all that in order to, finally, start playing by ear, purely by ear, as Jim Hall put it. Of course, many musicians get entangled within that net of "acquired skills", and, especially if they get good at them, think that THAT is it. But then all this is probably within the area of things that can be learned but can't be taught, at least not in the classical Western, teacher-to-student dialectic.
Maybe it's about the way we (I mean 'we' as Western musicians) are taught to see it, the way we see our music. We grow up in the idea that music is something that WE DO (emphasis on both WE and DO), so a good deal of ego is involved from the start. So we like to think great about ourselves, and maybe take ourselves too seriously and take too seriously that what 'we do'. We take 'what we do' so seriously that we start to define ourselves, our own nature, based on what we do (and probably that's why so many of us are so concerned about other getting people to take us -and what we do- seriously too) or our idea about waht we do, or what we like to think we do. It happens to almost any person in our society, no only jazz musicians. “I am a handy man... I am a contractor... I am a musician... I AM a doctor... Etc.” . Then of course, if I am a musician and this is what I do, then it’s my music. Anyway, probably that train of thought lies at the bottom of many misunderstandings.
Posted by: Fabian | March 15, 2006 at 03:46 AM