Spirit Garden

“Spirit Garden” is the title of an orchestral composition by Toru Takemitsu. It is also the name of one of his cds which contains an incredible collection of some of his greatest works. The following thoughts were inspired by listening to this cd.

“Little children remember, but only a few, and down they forgot as up they grew” – e.e. cummings

I think I nearly forgot—forgot that what attracted me to music in the first place was its power to alter my state (of consciousness/of awareness). The kind of music did not matter, it could have been jazz, or classical, or pop, or later, the music of the East; what did matter, was something quite intangible and subjective, it was whether the music touched something in me—opened some place—where everything was beautiful and made sense. Life has never made sense to me…

I have always known that it is the silence behind the music that gives music the power to transform my state. Music is beautiful; doing music can be a beautiful thing; but it is silence that I have always loved. What is silence? I am not speaking about merely the absence of sound; it is not the rests in music notation; nor is silence the canvas on which sounds are painted; silence is the very soul of sound—silence is sounds’ inner most dweller. Sound can be the messenger of silence when sound is aware of and experiences the silence within itself.

There is a story about a Perfect Master who favored a certain disciple—much to the consternation of His other disciples. One day they approached the Master and asked him why. He indicated that he would answer their question and promptly removed a magnificent gold ring incrusted with precious jewels from his finger. “What is the value of this ring?” he asked them. They replied that they did not know, saying that they knew nothing of such things, but, if the Master would allow them to, they would bring an expert to appraise the ring. The Master agreed, and an expert was brought, and the ring was appraised for some astronomic amount.

The Master then called the ‘favored’ disciple into the room. He had not been privy to the previous conversations. The Master gave him the ring and asked him its value. Without any hesitation he answered, “Like this, off your finger, it is worthless, on your finger, priceless!” 

Silence is the Master and music is the ring on the Master’s finger.

The music of Toru Takemitsu not only reminds me, but inspires me to experience that silence and that state of transformation that I have always found priceless. Was Toru Takemitsu aware that music can be the messenger of silence? He speaks of silence often in his writings and conversations. One of his books is titled, “Confronting Silence.”

When the casual listener listens to music it is melody and rhythm that creates a path for them to follow through the music. Toru Takemitsu’s music also has melody and rhythm, as well as harmony and dynamics. But the melodies of Takemitsu are not the tune-like melodies most listeners of classical, jazz, and pop music are familiar with, neither are his use of rhythms, harmonies, like those found in more familiar musical forms.

Without the familiar paths, many people feel at a loss to be able to follow, let alone appreciate the music of Toru Takemitsu…

Consider an artist who squirts ink into some container, then presses a piece of paper into the ink, and then pulls it away. What do think? It this art?

The best answer I ever heard to this question came from one of my students. Without hesitating he said, “I would have to see it.” Indeed…

Andre Segovia once said, “What the world does not need is another guitar player—what the world does need are musicians and artists who happen to play the guitar.” The guitar players works from the outside in. He is like a conductor that follows, rather than, leads the orchestra.

A musician works from the inside out. He is like a conductor who hears the music inside himself and finds the way to express it through the orchestra. An artist, not only creates music, he creates art—his music is art. Art has the power to transform the listener’s state, to wake the listener from his dream of life into the dream of that which is beyond life—the divine dream that ends in the experience of real silence.

Channeling the Inner Conductor

During intermission at an orchestral concert, my companion asked me about the role of the conductor. I thought this was very brave of her—most people don’t like to ask about things they think everyone else knows…

The orchestra is the biggest instrument in the world. It is like a huge living organ made up of all the instruments and the players who play them. The conductor is the musician who plays this instrument.  In concert, we see the conductor at the front of the stage facing the orchestra. We see him (or her) waving his arms around, body swaying…

But, watch his gestures carefully; notice how the gestures begin slightly before the musician’s response; notice how the musicians’ response is simultaneous with the end of the gesture. What this clearly shows is that the conductor knows what he wants to hear before he hears it. In other words, the conductor is not just gesturing along with the music, he is directing it.

A world-class conductor knows his music and its score. He has researched and studied the work and is well aware of the history of the work, its composer, and other conductor’s interpretations. He has a clear vision of the orchestration, tempo, dynamics, and nuances of acceleration and retard and crescendo and diminuendo he desires, and he has communicated all this to the members of his orchestra during a limited number of rehearsals before the performance.

Those of us who perform alone—as solo pianists, guitarists, etc. can learn a lot from studying and emulating the methods and techniques of world-class conductors. First, we should endeavor to understand all aspects of the pieces we are performing. We should know them  inside and out—their form and formal analysis, their history, the composers’ histories, and the interpretations of other world-class musicians—and we should feel totally confident in our ability to perform these pieces—like the conductor of a world-class orchestra is confident that his orchestra has the ability to follow his direction and actualize his vision.

Also, like a conductor, we have to be totally in the present of the music as we play it. This is a topic that is seldom discussed. What does a musician do when he is performing a piece of music? Does he think? And, if he does think, what does he think about?

The conductor of a world-class orchestra is focused on what he wants his musicians to do and does not concern himself about whether they have the chops to do it or not. In our case, the case of the solo performer, we have to play both roles—the player and the conductor. The player is the physical body—what is generally called the muscle memory.

Once the piece is in the body, the mind that has played the role of teacher—teacher to the body—is now free to become the conductor. The conductor plays the piece in his mind, staying in the moment—in the present—of the music as it manifests his vision in the present. It is in the present moment of the music that our inner conductor must remain. He cannot be thinking about the last measure that was played or the measure that is yet to come. He has to know the music that well.

Approximately 2,500 years ago the Buddha was explaining the mechanics of the universe and in the course of the explanation said that what is called the present lasts 1/17th of one trillionths of a second! How is it possible for a conductor or a musician to stay in the present of the music he is conducting? The answer is in the music itself—in following what is called the musical interest.

Musical interest (sometimes called melodic interest) is that place in the music where the music’s principle interest resides. Many patterns occur simultaneously in a piece of music—melodies and melodic rhythms, harmonies expressed both vertically as chords and horizontally as arpeggios, as well as the patterns of phrases, cadences, dynamics…

Examples of musical interest are delineated in the book, The Norton Scores – An Anthology for Listening. These scores are meant for listening to music and musical interest is always highlighted by a white band over parts of the score. Take for example Claude Debussy’s Prelude to “The Afternoon of a Faun.”  The piece begins with the beautiful opening melody played on the flutes. In the score, this melody is highlighted. Approximately halfway through the fourth measure the melodic interest moves to the French horns and the harp. In measures five – ten the clarinets and French horns are highlighted…

In ensemble music, musical interest most always can be seen to move from one instrument, or group of instruments, to another;  in music for solo instruments—music written to be notated in multiple line notation—the musical interest is often seen to move from one voice to another voice throughout the course of the piece. One consistency throughout all music is that there always can be found musical interest and it is always continuous from the beginning to the end of the piece. It is this musical interest that becomes the center of attention for both the conductor and the inner conductor of the solo artist. Musical interest is always in the present and being with it is the way the conductor and the inner conductor remain in the present of the music.

This can be a very subtle thing. Remember the Buddha’s description of the present as lasting 1/17th of one trillionths of a second. Now a musician can play notes very quickly, but I doubt that any musician can play a note in the time of a moment of the present. What this means is that any one note lasts longer than the time of the present and so, the present can actually be experienced as it moves through the three phases of creation – birth, life, and death. Staying in the present of the music allows us to experience these three phases of creation that exists in each and every sound. Play a note; let it ring for its full duration. First comes the birth—the articulation. Next the phase of life sustains the sound. Almost immediately, the life phase begins to give way to the death phase—the sound eventually dies away. What remains is silence, the place from where all sounds manifests and where all sounds dissolve...

As it is with every single sound, so it is with every group of sounds, and by extension, every piece of music. As the inner conductor learns to remain more and more in the present of the musical interest, more and more an interesting phenomena can be observed, the musician begins to disappear—begins to become invisible. When the musician disappears into the music he creates inspiring art. A good example of this disappearing can be felt in the recording of Paul Galbraith—especially his recording of Bach’s Partitas for Unaccompanied Violin.  There are moments when it can be felt that Mr. Galbraith is no longer there—that only the music is there. What an interesting irony, by staying more and more in the present moment of the music, the musician disappears.

Listen to this recording, see if you can hear what I’m talking about, and keep going deeper and deeper into your own music and begin to disappear—even to yourself!

(c) copyright Michael Kovitz, 2014

  

 

The Times Ther Are A-Changin'

“Come mothers and fathers throughout the land and don't criticize what you can't understand, your sons and your daughters are beyond your command your old road is rapidly agin'” – Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-changin’, 1964

My family preferred Pat Boone to Elvis and they found Dylan irreverent and annoying, but for me, Dylan gave voice to questions and possibilities when I was just a child and the first consciousness of my own deepest thoughts manifested in my mind.

Those questions and thoughts have dragged me around my life for over sixty years and have helped to keep me awake. “Little children remember, but only a few, and down they forgot as up they grew.” – e.e. cummings

Since first hearing Dylan’s song I have observed that, in fact, the times are always a-changin’ and the times are also never a-changin’, because everything changes, yet everything remains the same.

Take listening to music. In the old days, I mean the really old days—before recordings and broadcasts—there were two ways to hear music, listening to others making music or making music oneself. Now, in the brand new spiffy days, there are still only two ways to hear music, listening to others making music or making music oneself.

No, I am not forgetting recordings and ‘live’ broadcasts, but I do make a distinction between recorded music, electrically transmitted music, and music heard live with the performer and the audience together in the same place and at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not against recorded music; I listen to it and enjoy the experience, it’s just that it’s a different experience and I don’t want to lose the ability to be able to discriminate between a thing and its reproduction. Take, for example, paintings hanging in a gallery. What if one night all the paintings were replaced by photographic reproductions—very good reproductions placed in the frames of the originals?

Leaving aside the question of how many viewers would notice the difference, the question I pose is: Even for those who do not recognize the ‘paintings’ are reproductions, is there a fundamental change in the quality of their experience—a change that they may not even be aware of? My opinion is that there would be and that the experience of viewing the reproductions instead of the original would be not only different, but inferior.

Still, as I said, recordings do have their place, just not as a total replacement for the ‘live ’ music experience, but leaving aside that question for a while, I would like to address the question of how music, recorded or otherwise, is listened to, for here too, the time are a-changin’.

I ask my students; “When was the last time you sat down and listened to music and gave it your full attention—without doing anything else, not eating or drinking or reading or carrying on conversations or working…?” For some, the answer is never, or almost never. Some ask me if watching music videos count. “That depends on how you do it,” is usually my reply. Music is something that is primarily heard not ‘watched’.

 I am not arguing the irrelevancy of recorded music as background or as a component of atmosphere; but what I wish to discuss is that the pure, pristine, focused, listening experience and the knowledge and discipline necessary to really listen to music or recorded music. Knowing that if a muscle is not used it atrophies, I would like to do what I can to assure that the ability and the desire to listen to music is not lost.

Think about wine; there are many different wines and many different occasions for drinking wine, but some wines demand a special occasion—the right food, the right atmosphere, sometimes the right companion, and most important of all, the right state.

I ask my students to include as part of their musical work at least one focused listening session of ten to thirty minutes each week. I suggest that when listening to recorded music, use the best sound system that is available, sit comfortably with back straight, stay alert and relaxed—don’t try to figure things out, just stay open and let the music come in. Identifying elements of the music, i.e. melodies, chord progressions, instruments, lyrics, etc. is natural and part of the listening experience, but don’t let the mind go off on them at the expense of losing the moment of the music. Always try to stay in the moment—in the present—of the music.

Records, became tapes, tapes became cds, and cds became digital downloads and one day we will all have chips in are brains that allow us to access all that can be accessed in the world by just wishing to. Yes, the times they are a-changin’ but to create and appreciate the arts—and perhaps life itself—the need for attention, concentration, and contemplation never changes.

Art, Music, and the Guitar

I sort of fell into this blog; I knew I wanted to do a blog on music for a while and so a few weeks ago I just began and posted a short history of Western Classical Music. I followed that up with a discussion of the Incomplete, Dominant, Minor 9^th, Chord. When a friend of mine commented that the latter post might be over the heads of most readers, I told him that I hadn’t yet defined my voice or my audience. Maybe that’s a good thing? We shall see…

Musical thinking is a term I use with my students and colleagues as a replacement for the more common terms theory and harmony. Theory sounds to me too theoretical and harmony seems to exclude rhythm and melody. For a while I used the anachronistic term solfeggio, but that term was just too anachronistic. I like the term musical thinking, for music is the result of musical thinking.

Music exists first in the musical sphere and then manifests in the physical sphere. Andre Segovia was suggesting this when he said, “What the world does not need is another guitar player; what the world does need are musicians and artists who happen to play the guitar.”  A guitar player’s consciousness is absorbed in the Physical Sphere; a musician’s consciousness is absorbed in the Musical Sphere, and the artist’s consciousness is absorbed in the Artistic Sphere.

An artist may create art through music and music may be created on the guitar. It could be said that an artist is absorbed in the Artistic Sphere and then communes with the Musical and Physical spheres. A guitar player is absorbed in the Physical Sphere and, at best, communes with the Musical and Artistic Spheres. It is my experience that guitar players can be very impressive, but that after a while I start to get the feeling that they speak beautifully but really have nothing to say. I leave the concert impressed, but not changed.

I remember how it was when leaving Segovia’s concerts; people were smiling, there was a feeling of tangible joy in the group and I wondered if it had anything to do with how Segovia had become a master musician—had mastered music by serving music—by making his life the servant of music?

Indeed, Segovia was an artist who painted not with pigment and canvas, but with sound and rhythm. Segovia created art and was a great musician and was also a great guitar player. Listen to the early recordings; hear how he controlled both silence and sound and time. It is my opinion that no one who has ever played the guitar did it better.