Tuning Slide 4.15- Mastery 5 & 6- Passion and Tolerance

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love— love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.
— Pablo Casals

I am looking this week at numbers 5 & 6 of the pathways for mastery of music from Barry Green’s book by the same name.

First:

Passion- The Power of Love

Apart from the other ideas, Green talks about three kinds of passion that relates to the theme:

✓ Passion for Life
Green shares the quote from Pablo Casals at the top of this post. It says it all. While it is not directly connected to music, without a passion for life, the learning from love, we don’t truly experience the passions involved in music. How does my passion for life infect and grow my music?

✓ Passion for Music
Am I “in love” with music? One of the reasons that music can often inspire others is that the musician has a passion for it. It can be an expression of our own souls. Passion compels us, moves us, helps us do what we are “passionate” about. In that we grow- and, reflecting Casals, it is how we learn best. With passion like that, music can even define who we are. There are groups of excellent musicians who play mechanically, and there are those who play passionately. When the two come together it is a moment of grace.
That may be the reason why a “live” performance sounds more alive than a recording from a studio session. It may explain why the remarkable Miles Davis album, Kind of Blue, is so alive. It was done in few takes and continues to be an expression of the passion in that studio.

✓ Passion Within the Music
Music itself touches feelings that words alone cannot. Some music is so passionate that a simple phrase or measure from the piece can cause goosebumps. Others can make us get up and move. The music triggers things that go beyond simply emotions to the heart of who we are as humans. I know my soul is grabbed and moved, even when I don’t understand why. When that happens I am participating in the music I am hearing. Green says:

As musicians we get to put our lives down, set our personalities aside, and jump into the middle…, to join with others in recreating [the] great moments in musical history. This is way beyond fun. At its best it is a spiritual experience, an act of human passion and skill that can be as beautiful as a crystal, a rainbow, or a brilliant sunset.

What an honor!

While our passion can and does come from all kinds of experiences and places, it must be alive within our imagination, says Green, when we first look at the piece. This is part of what I said last week about learning the piece before playing it. It should start, he says with imagination, not the technical. What is the best sound of the piece? Then organize it. Make it into art. He quotes a soloist who points out that you can throw a bucket of paint on the floor in a fit of anger. It will express anger, but it won’t be art. Art takes discipline along with the imagination.

In my mind that is why practice involves discovering the passion in my soul that is touched by the passion of the music.

In the end, says Green, passion is love. That, he says, is what

brought most of us into the wonderful world of music in the first place. One of the greatest challenges, whether in life, work, or relationships, is to keep that love alive.

The seventh pathway Green talks about is

Tolerance: The View from the Middle

This is the “quietist” and least self-assertive of the ten pathways. Yet it is a critical component for achieving “interpersonal and musical harmony in any ensemble.” Management needs to have this in any ensemble, and the people who exhibit it become the glue holding the orchestra, band, or ensemble together. The support they give, the work they do both within the music and the group as a whole, is what gets people to work together. You all know the “solid” group member, the musician who, while not flashy or out-front, is the one we all count on to keep the group focused and moving.

Green calls this tolerance. It is an attitude. It is not about convincing or changing others. It is about maintaining our own personal balance even in the midst of uncertainty. Tolerance comes from being comfortable in one’s own skin. It recognizes that none of us is essential to the group as individuals. No one of us can be an ensemble. Music is made in community where hostility and tension must be addressed and defused or the music will not happen. Flexibility and collaboration enter in.

We can all share a part in this. When we develop our own “tolerance” and openness to the group as a whole, we are providing a safe place for taking chances and a space for each to grow. Green says that this even includes support and tolerance even for your competitors. A musical performance is not a competition among the musicians. It is a common experience where we discover what happens when our passion is woven together with the passion of others.

Then we are an ensemble- a working, organic group, not just an assembly of individual musicians. This is more difficult than it sounds, but each musician can help make it happen. It is a quiet, but essential pathway to making better music.

The Tuning Slide: 2.11- Staying Mental

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Aware that it may be nothing more than beating the same drum over and over, let’s take one more look at “deliberate practice.” Here again are the standards required of practice to be deliberate:

• Deliberate practice is focused. Students must give it their full attention.
• Deliberate practice involves feedback. Immediate, specific feedback on where students are falling short is vital.
• Deliberate practice requires a teacher
• Deliberate practice requires leaving one’s comfort zone. If students aren’t pushing themselves beyond what is comfortable and familiar, they will not advance.
• Deliberate practice requires specific goals aimed at target performances
• Deliberate practice builds on mental representations.

One of the most interesting to me is the last one:

• Mental representations.

I had never thought of that as part of what practice does. Now I realize that it is something that happens fairly unconsciously. We do build a mental picture of what we are doing. We do look for patterns in the music and, if we are more visually oriented may even construct some mental framework. I noticed myself doing that recently in working on one of our quintet pieces. At one spot in my part, there is a repeating 8th note “D” followed by 3 other 8th notes, then back up to the “D”. It repeats this pattern several times. I found myself circling the repeating “D” that gave the section a clear, almost physical structure. It also helped me see that whether notated or not, those “D”s work better with a slight accent so they stand out. After I did it I realized two things:

1. It was now easier to play in time and flow because
2. I now had a mental image in both sound and visual that described the section.

Unless you are already years into being an established and advanced trumpet player, chances are you wouldn’t notice that for a while, if ever. All you would have are the notes on the page. Think now of all those Arban or Clarke exercises that repeat the same pattern across a scale or across the whole set of 12 scales. They build a mental representation. They instill an aural pattern into our subconscious that eventually becomes a natural way of doing the scale. We can all probably play our basic concert Bb scale without even thinking. The fingers just move. But now try to play the concert B scale (our C#/Db). No way can I do that. That physical- and aural- representation isn’t there yet. But I keep working at it.

But I am not sure that the best way to keep working at it is by simply reading the notes off the page. This would have sounded like I was thinking crazy not that long ago. "I will never be able to remember those scales without having it in front of me." I felt it was absolutely necessary to learn them from the Arban series in exercise 46 on pp. 20-21. It repeats a pattern (visual on the page, aural from the horn) or mental representation, around the circle of 4ths. I got the basics and then closed the book and started working on it by “ear.” I still have some difficulty with Db and Gb but it went much faster when I internalized the pattern- a mental representation- and learned it that way. I discovered that also worked well with Clarke #2, the classic exercise that is one of those essentials of trumpet playing. So it does appear that when we work toward those mental representations and visualizations, things improve- and often more quickly and effectively than otherwise.

No matter how you do this, though, you are always working on those three “greats”:

• Great sound,
• Great rhythm,
• Great listening

Tempo keeps these 3 greats in order. When you get to a difficult place and miss the note, slow it down- it means the tempo was too fast. That also allows those mental representations to catch up to what you are playing. It takes a long time to play as fast as Charlie Parker or Dizzy Gillespie- and do it well. Build the mental representations always, always paying attention to the three greats.
One more quick thought I heard: There is no better motivation for more practice than what happens when you practice more. You won’t ever say, “Gee, I wish I hadn’t practiced today.”

Staying motivated: See this link on the Learning Jazz Standards website for another way of describing all this.

I had said last week that I would talk some about “Grit”- the rest of the Peak and deliberate practice story. I think I will hold off on that until sometime in the new year. We’ve covered a lot of territory on deliberate practice in these three posts. It may be better to work on incorporating these into our own practice time. Grit will then become a refresher and expansion after we get a little more comfortable with being deliberate.

Tuning Slide: Logic vs Emotions

Weekly Reflections on Life and Music

Music is the shorthand of emotion.

― Leo Tolstoy

Yeah, but what did Tolstoy know? The music that is arguably the most amazing in western history is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach- and it is some of the most logical music ever written. Mathematically precise; ordered in almost uncanny exactness. No wonder that when Wendy Carlos (under her birth name of Walter Carlos) wanted to show the amazing use of the Moog Synthesizer, she used the music of Bach. (Switched on Bach. 1968.) There should be no emotion in a computer-generated song; no human input to play it other than the 1s and 0s of computer/digital coding.

Yet it was an amazing album that touched people deeply, and not just because of the newness and uniqueness of it. For many of us who first heard it in 1968, the album, for example, captured the emotion of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring with amazing clarity.

Logic will get you from A to B.
Imagination will take you everywhere.
- Albert Einstein

As much as mathematical precision, Bach also used imagination that allowed him to place layer upon layer of things never before seen or heard. The imagination of Wendy Carlos added another layer which grabbed us like nothing ever seen or heard before. Yet it was all there in Bach's logic combined with his musical imagination.

Then we have Miles Davis on Kind of Blue or John Coltrane on A Love Supreme. At one moment their solos can sound as precise as Bach's mathematical journeys. The next moment, then, is filled with an emotion that sweeps in and takes over, surrounding us with things that are like nothing ever seen or heard before. All of us who work with music from the rank amateur to the amazing heights of Davis or Coltrane know that everything they do is based on all the logical manipulations of music theory. They may twist those theories and make up a few new ones of their own, but they are acutely aware of the logic behind what they are doing.

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade.

It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

- Rabindranath Tagore

It is no doubt obvious where I am going with this. We are not dealing with an either/or situation when we deal with logic and emotion. It must be a both/and for it to go beyond just the notes on the page or in our heads. In human thinking it used to be that we believed that if only we humans would be "logical," then we would always make the right decisions. When faced with choices, we should be able to use the coolness and precision of logic to make the good choices.

Without going into all the details, science, medicine, and psychology were all shocked when this proved to be an incorrect theory. There were examples where a person, through an injury or surgery, lost the ability to connect emotions to decision making. All their decisions were based on good old-fashioned rational thinking. "Just the facts!" The old theory would say that their decisions post-trauma should have been better decisions- emotions weren't in the picture.

That is not what happened. In essence, they actually lost some of the critical ability to make any decisions in the first place. Neuroscience had to be rewritten. Cold, impersonal logic does not make good decisions alone. To disconnect emotion is to take away what makes us human- and what makes human decision-making human in the first place.

Which is why I think music has played such an essential and foundational role in human culture and development. Daniel Levitan, neuroscientist, session musician, sound engineer, and record producer, captured this idea in his two seminal works, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession and The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. Somewhere in our brain, music, I think, brings together emotion and logic in ways very few things do.

Music expresses that which cannot be put into words
and that which cannot remain silent.
― Victor Hugo

So, let's get back to you and me and how this is important to us. Actually, in some ways it is another way of reminding us of things already discussed and beginning to put them into a "logical", effective, and helpful place.For example, we have talked about being able to be aware of, and able to share, "your story" in your music. How do you know your story? By your feelings, among other things, and then applying logic and thinking to it. We discussed the importance of the "groove" in music. Well, first we have to have the "logical" ability to play the notes correctly. Then we add the feeling, the emotion we are sensing in the notes. That becomes the groove.

That's why we practice. First to find the notes- the specifics of this song in this place. Then we find the groove- the story, the emotions, the nuances. These are built on the logic of knowing the fundamentals as well as how we are feeling. We may be able to play a piece with clockwork precision, but does it "feel?" It is in the feeling that we connect with the music.

Am I just repeating the same thing over and over, driving it into the ground until you say, "Enough already! We get it."? Perhaps, but I have found over the past year that I forget these things on a regular basis. I get bogged down in the notes on the page or the dynamic markings. I forget to listen to the music as I am playing it in my practice room. I rush through the notes instead of listening to them; I try to get the piece down cold in one or two attempts; I don't savor the world found in each note. Or, in performance, I can ignore the other musicians I am playing with. Sometimes I get so emotionally involved in a song that, without me realizing it I get sloppy and the technique can get lost.

I have to be constantly reminded of the interaction of logic and emotion- unless the emotion I want to drag out of the horn, myself, or the listener is disgust. It is in the balance of our logic and emotion that practice turns into performance, that we discover how a particular song can express our own story.

We will look a little more at this in another post in a few weeks on some ways to work with the Inner Game in new ways. For now, don't let your logic close out your emotions- or your feelings dismiss logic. Together they make quite a duet.