Musical Sanity

 

An Indian yogi once told me regarding knowledge, “If you’re thirsty, drink!”  Over the years, as a teacher of music and the guitar, I have had the opportunity to study first-hand the question of thirst with my students.

I have observed that all my students seem to come to music and their guitar out of a thirst for something, and that each of them characterizes that thirst in very different terms—everything from a way to be popular with their friends, to a desire to create beauty and meaning in their lives and in the world. Very different, but I have wondered if there might be a common thread that ties all these diverse ‘thirsts’ together?

And after decades of teaching hundreds of students, I have concluded that there is a common thread, and to borrow the word from the old yogi, it is a thirst for sanity in and through music, but what is this connection between sanity and music, or more broadly, between sanity and the arts? Let’s first consider sanity, and what it represents.

First, consider the opposite, insanity. Its qualities are disturbed, chaotic, painful, delusion, unhappiness, speedup, etc. Sanity, on the other hand, is represented by qualities of lucidity, peace, knowledge, happiness, understanding, clarity, etc.

When I was a child, the only thing that made sense to me was music, not the idea of music, but music itself. Music was the only thing that calmed me down; it spoke to me without words; it had the ring of truth; it was mysterious and mystical. Was I conscious of all this at the time? Could I express it in the way I am expressing it right now? Probably not, but the sense of it all was there—right from the beginning. How many times have I observed students arriving for their lessons in states that could objectively be called insane—minds sped up, dwelling on past, obsessing about the future—and yet they somehow made the effort to come for their lesson. Why? How? I must conclude that it is sanity that they are reaching out for—like a person drowning at sea and reaching out for anything floating that can save them.

I consistently do a yearly review with each of my students. We look back over their accomplishments and disappointments and set some goals and aims for the following year. After the first year of covid, the year almost everything was locked down worldwide and people were unsure of almost everything, all my lessons were conducted online. At the end of the year, I did my usual reviews, and to my surprise, I noticed that all my students had had very successful musical years, but even more surprising was that in all the reviews, not one student even mentioned Covid! Covid had not even touched their music, i.e., their music had been a real refuge for them in those difficult times.

Music can be a nearly perfect refuge; it is inherently sane, lucid, self-sustaining, and independent, but it is affected by external life and the internal baggage that we bring to it. In and of itself, musical satisfaction is very achievable given the right student, the right teacher, and the right occasion. The process itself, though difficult at times, is not all that complicated, confusing, or unreachable, and all the feelings and perceptions to the contrary are the result of the personal baggage we bring to the process.

So, what is this baggage, and can it be eliminated or at least neutralized to some extent? Simply put, some of the most common baggage one brings to their music are feelings of unworthiness, insecurity, lack of self-confidence, unproductive learning habits, and impatience, etc. Dealing with this baggage, not the music itself, is the real work of most students and the right teacher can help.

I cannot even count the number of times I’ve had this same conversation with a student—students from beginners to more advanced.

Student: “This should not be taking so long, I’m really frustrated; I’m really slow.”

Me: “What makes you say that, on what are you basing your conclusion?”

S.: “I just know…”

M: “Look, I’ve taught hundreds of students. I have a much better perspective from which to evaluate a student’s progress and I tell you; you are doing just fine; you are exactly where you need to be. Try to worry less, stay in the moment, and just stay with the work the stands right in front of you.”

 

In my book, From Silence to Sound – Richard Kyle’s Journey to Musical Competency,[1] three students are talking about their work with their teacher:

“I really enjoyed listening to you tonight,” I said to Jobe, “both your wonderful guitar and your incredible story.”

“Thank you, and I yours as well. Perhaps next time Sara will share her story too?”

“My story?” she replied, as we began moving to door. “All I can think to tell you is my relationship with Mr. Kubadi has given me the permission to do my work.”

“The permission to do your work!” Jobe and I repeated in unison as we pushed open the heavy wooden door and stepped out into the cold night air.”

 

An amazing statement when you think about it. You see, as soon as a student begins to think that they should be somewhere where they’re not, they lose the ability to be where they are—where they need to be and sometimes a teacher needs to remind them that they are where they need to be and that its okay, okay to not worry and to relax into the moment of the work, hence, the permission to do one’s work.

Of course, giving oneself permission to do the work is just a starting point. There is still the question of productive practice, i.e., knowing what to work on and how to work on it, and the ability to ask and answer the appropriate questions. Questions are important, they have all the energy, answers kill questions. But questions need to be appropriate, the better the questions, the better the thinking, and the better the thinking, the better the practice, and hence the results. But the ability to ask the right questions at the right time will be impaired by what I called the baggage one brings to the process. On all levels and in all spheres, baggage veils the truth.

This baggage consists of all the various expressions of self-doubt, feelings of unworthiness, selfishness, even guilt, and all the various shoulds and coulds, etc. that surface in one’s thoughts and feelings mechanically, like recordings that go on and on and can’t be stopped.

 In fact, these thoughts and feelings can become so painful and unpleasant as to cause a student to give up the pursuit of his or her music and the musical sanity that attracted her or him to the music in the first place. In other words, to, as is said, to throw the baby out with the bath water. I have observed this with some students. It is sad.

The seat of all thoughts and feelings is the mind. The mind is vast, powerful beyond belief, and nearly endless, and for the average person to try to control it directly is, as Gurdjieff once put it, like trying to jump over one’s own knees. But the situation is not hopeless.

Over the years I have learned a couple of things. Thoughts can’t be stopped for very long, but one can, with intention, create counter-thoughts. For example, if you tell yourself to not think about blue elephants you will automatically begin to think about blue elephants, but if you try very hard to think instead about red elephants, to the degree of your efforts, you will stop thinking about blue elephants.

The second thing I have learned is that it is possible to train oneself to not identify oneself with one’s mind and its projections. I have observed various things that suggest that I am not my mind and not everything my mind thinks and feels is necessarily true. It seems that my mind has its own agenda, and that agenda is all about power and control. Therefore, I can remind myself that I do not have to act on everything my mind tells me.

In the chapter on tuning in my book, From Silence to Sound – Richard Kyles’ Journey to Musical Competency,[2] Richard, is having a hard time getting his instrument in tune. He admits to his teacher that his mind is sped up and that he feels slightly sick. His teacher, Mr. Kubadi, responds in this way:

“I like your honesty, Richard, real music demands it and the courage to trust; for when we really look, we will sometimes see things we don’t want to see. Without trust we will turn away and miss the place where our work begins. When we underestimate the starting point, we waste time; when we overestimate the starting point, the work loses traction and goes nowhere. Tell me Richard, where does your work begin?”

Where does my work begin? This is a question we need to ask with every practice and within every practice. If we think, for example, that we are further along in a piece or an exercise then we are, our work becomes ineffective and unproductive. It evokes the feeling of a bad dream in which one is running away from something as hard as one ca and yet, is going nowhere.

Some students make the mistake of engaging their work at an earlier stage in the process. They go over things they don’t need to, out of habit and insecurity. It’s like they’re trapped in the past. As Mr. Kubadi says, this wastes time and energy.

Dig deeper into these mistakes and one will see the cause can be found in all the shoulds, coulds, desires, etc. one brings to the work, i.e., in the baggage one brings to the work. This baggage keeps one from being impartial, and impartiality is an aspect of musical sanity.

In his book, God Speaks, Meher Baba states that all that is written by way of an explanation of God is to appease the convulsions of the mind. In other words, explanations should not be mistaken for experience—and experience is the goal. Still, a mind free of convulsions is a great thing. A mind free of convulsions is inherently sane and with this sanity comes a real inner peace and happiness.

Of course, this all applies to one’s music. The freer from our baggage our music becomes, the saner it becomes, and the more joyful, fulfilling, and beautiful becomes its expression—for ourselves and others.

But musical sanity is not achieved easily. It’s much like love, maybe it is love? You can’t demand love, buy love, or intimidate love—not real love. But you can create conditions in your life that attracts and nourishes it. As in love, so in music and the pursuit of musical sanity, there are no rules, formulae, set do’s and don’ts. Nothing is set in stone. Everyone must find their own way—their own path. When music is thus won through love, it transcends technique, knowledge, and expectations.

I’ve had the opportunity in my life to attend many classical guitar concerts. I’ve heard guitar played at the highest level of the domain and I’ve noticed an interesting thing. After most concerts, as the audience is filing out of the auditorium, I’ve heard conversations regarding the ability of the performer, the interpretation, the greatness of the music, etc. But without exception, after the concerts of the great Andre Segovia, I mainly heard silence and observed smiles on the faces of the audience.

It’s a very different thing when mastery of the music is achieved by serving it. Others feel the difference—feel the silence, which is the source of all sound, the silence which is the source of lasting peace and lasting happiness, the silence which is the source of real sanity. Is it worth the effort? Does one have the choice? Perhaps for some, there is no choice.

“Please tune your instrument, Richard,” he said as he walked across the room to join me. I tried, but because of my state I was not very successful and observed myself becoming more and more agitated and confused. For ten minutes I loosened and tightened strings, but my guitar still sounded awful. It was useless! Twice I looked to my teacher for help, but he just shrugged as if he didn’t know either. I was becoming miserable and considered leaving, but in the depths of my being I knew that there was nowhere for me to go.”[3]

 

                                                                                                                                  ©copyright Michael Kovitz 2023

 

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[1] Available through me at, From Silence to Sound142@gmail.com

[2] From Silence to Sound – Richard Kyles Journey to Musical Competency, is available through me at, fromsilencetosound142@gmail.com

[3] Ibid.

Productive Practice and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 1.)

 

The desire for happiness is woven into the very fabric of our nature and left unimpeded, we will effortlessly rise to happiness like bubbles to the surface from the depths. Music can be both an incredible source of happiness as well as the means to attain it, but who can be happy practicing and playing the same old things again and again in the same old way without showing any progress? Unproductive practice impedes process—traps the bubbles and keep them from rising.

 

One’s practice should resemble a spiral—an upward spiral—not a turning around and around in the same circle. But how to transform the circle into a spiral and create a happy, healthy, and sustainable musical life? To raise the level of one’s music, the level of one’s practice must be raised. To raise the level of one’s practice, the level of one’s thinking must be raised. And to raise the level of one’s thinking, the level of the questions one asks oneself about one’s work must also be raised. These questions are more important than answers. Questions have energy. Answers kill questions. The right questions lead to a productive practice. But what constitutes a right question?

 

The question must be the right question at the right time. What kind of curtains will we hang in the living room window is a legitimate question but should not be given priority over those questions regarding the foundation of the house that is yet to be built. On the other hand, questioning the efficacy of the foundation is not an appropriate question to ask after the house has been framed. Everything must happen in its right order and its right time.

 

For example, a student wants to learn a new piece. Maybe she has heard it before, maybe she has not. She begins to read through the piece, taking care to not go too fast, to play the correct notes in the right rhythms, and to use the best fingerings for both the right and the left hands. After a few reads of the piece, she isolates and begins to work on some of the more difficult sections of the piece.

 

That’s good, but there are some fundamental questions she may have failed to ask that could facilitate her work. For example, are we looking at a piece diatonic common practice music, and, if so, what is the key?  Not all music is diatonic. Renaissance music derives from a modal system while much of the music of the 20th century may be atonal, modal, diatonic but not necessarily diatonic common practice, i.e., not written within the bounds of the compositional practices which began in the High Baroque period and evolved through the Classical Romantic Periods. If the music is diatonic common practice, then some follow-up questions might be, am I familiar with the scale that is the resource of this music? What are the chords and chord progressions I might anticipate finding in this piece? What about phrase lengths and cadences common to this kind of music?

 

Why are these questions important? Because if we are not understanding what it is that we are reading, then our reading is rote reading—essentially note by note—but if we are understanding what we are reading, then we are reading with comprehension and this comprehension facilitates both the reading and all the further work on the piece. When we do a thoughtful read, we are not only reading the notes, but we are also beginning to understand what the notes are saying. It is like the difference between reading just letters and words as opposed to learning the story that is being told.

 

Questions must be specific. For a practice to be productive we need to know not only what to do, but why we are doing it. Take the student who decides, or is asked, to play a piece that he has been working on. He begins to play the piece, but the problem is that there is no context to the playing. Without context, without knowing why I am doing something, without knowing what I am trying to accomplish, there is no purpose behind my action and without purpose there cannot be force. A dress rehearsal, for example, should be approached differently than, say, working on rhythm or tempo in a piece. In the case of the former, one would not stop in the middle of the piece to work on a mistake, while in the case of the latter, it would not be productive to just play through the piece without stopping to work on specific areas of the piece. In other words, the why of one’s work orients and shapes the work itself.

 

Another example of asking the right question at the right time is the student who just cannot seem to get a certain passage correct. She plays it over and over, sometimes slower, and sometimes in tempo, yet it just does not get any better. Working hard is not automatically working smart. Practice, in the sense of repetition, does not make perfect, it makes permanent. What she needs to do is to stop playing and ask herself if there might be a better way to execute the passage. Are there other ways to finger the piece? Both the right and the left-hand fingering should be considered. I often tell my students; good fingerings can render a difficult passage playable and musical, but awkward fingerings can render a relatively simple passage virtually unplayable. When your practice begins to feel like one of those bad dreams in which you are running as fast as you can but are going nowhere, you are being told that your practice is not productive. An unproductive practice is an unhappy practice, which is to say that the bubbles of happiness have gotten trapped in old and dysfunctional habits of thought and patterns of work. The good news is that by asking the right questions we can initiate a process that replaces these dysfunctional habits and patterns with productive ones.

 

(To be continued.)

 

Productive Practice and the Pursuit of Happiness (Part 2.)

What happens between lessons is every bit as important as what happens in the lesson itself. A student can be very sincere, really want to learn and be better, have a good teacher, practice regularly, and even a lot, but to accomplish one’s aims, goals, and dreams efficiently, productive practice* is essential.

Learning curves will always have their ups and downs, but if practice is productive, the general trend should always show an upward spiral of accomplishment over time and not just  a turning around and around in the same circle.

Unproductive practice is always uncomfortable and feels not unlike those bad dreams of running as hard as one can and yet not going anywhere. Productive practice, on the other hand, always feels lighter, and clearer, and has its own unique kind of joy.

There are no rigid formulas or mechanical methods that will automatically produce productive practice; productive practice is a very personal affair—it is a process that is written in the sand and not carved into stone, yet, there are a few simple suggestions I can offer that may help to create conditions favorable to a productive practice.

Formulate an agenda and a plan for each week. Be very specific. Don’t just say, “I’ll do technique exercises for the first ten minutes;” instead, think about what technical issues you specifically want to address and what studies or exercises you want to use to work on those technical issues.

I often remind my students that mindlessly and mechanically repeating any technical exercise or study will amount to nothing more than a total waste of their time! But those same exercises or studies become invaluable when used as an opportunity to address very specific technical and musical issues. Define your objectives as simply and specifically as possible, for example, playing more on the tip of the fourth finger of the left hand in scales and chords. Continuity is very important in productive practice—students sometimes start things with the best of intentions but don’t follow through.

Control is another important aspect of productive practice; go slow enough so that you can control the placement of the fourth finger every time you use it in the exercise or study you are working with.

In my book, From Silence to Sound, ** the teacher, Alex Kubadi says, “Two should always be present in your practice; your teacher and your student.” The teacher is the mind and the body is the student. The teacher works in the realm of concepts and ideas. The student’s intelligence is in its ability to learn and remember and reproduce specific physical positions and movements in time. An effective teacher is always very clear with regard to what it wants the student to do and how it wants the student to do it.

The job of the teacher is to translate his ideas—his vision—into the language of the body and then to create the right conditions to facilitate the learning of the student. The student—the body—learns by repeating an action a number of times, but the teacher must always keep in mind that practice, in the sense of repetition, does not make perfect, it makes permanent; and that the number of repetitions needed for the student to learn a particular action is in direct proportion to the teacher’s state of attention while guiding the actions of the student.

In the relationship between the teacher and the student, the teacher functions in the domain of the mind—and in that domain, the body is slow. For example, in my mind I can travel from my house to my friend’s house at the speed of thought—much faster than the time it takes for me to physically go to my friend’s house.

But conversely, in the domain of the body, the mind is slow. Once the body learns even a relatively simple action, the mind cannot keep up with it. Think about even the act of walking and all its components of multiple and simultaneous actions regarding the coordination of the feet and the legs and the arms and balance, etc.

Because of the discrepancies between the relative speeds of the mind and the body in the mental and the physical domains, it is essential that the mind establishes and maintains control of the process of work and must never allow the tempo of the work to get out of its control.  Therefore, if one feels that the work is going too fast for to control, that the body is allowed to make the same or random mistakes over and over again, then it is time to stop and think and ask questions that will lead to a better plan of work.

And this leads to one of those little secrets. Speed can be very impressive and its pursuit can become very compelling, but speed is never achieved by trying to go fast. The capacity for speed is acquired through perfection and refinement of positions and movements and the degree to which these positions and movements are programed into the body’s memory—what is generally called muscle memory. That is why refining and perfecting positions and movements at slower tempos, tempos that the teacher can control, leads to the capacity for speed. It could be said, to play fast later, practice slow now.

One further point on the subject; if you allow the body to learn three different ways of the doing the same thing, one of which is preferred over the others, when called upon to reproduce the action, there is only a one in three chance that the body will reproduce the preferred way.

And finally, always review your work weekly. Ask the pointed questions. Remember that being critical is not the same thing as being negative. Negativity has no place in Productive Practice. As the poet once said, “Ours is not a caravan of despair!” Ask questions like; “What progress did I make over the week? Did I meet my expectations? What could I have been better? What could I have done differently, etc.? As with the initial plan, the answers should be very specific and simple. Your review should lead to your next week’s agenda and plan. There is a saying, “A good plan is a plan that works!”

 *&**Because of the initial difficulty to objectively observe and evaluate one’s work, the guidance of an experienced teacher can be useful.  For one on one lessons in Productive Practice, or to purchase copies of the book, From Silence to Sound, please contact Michael Kovitz at FromSilencetoSound142@gmail.com