John Cage's Ten Rules for Teachers and Students

This is attributed to John Cage.  Right on!

RULE 1: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for a while.

RULE 2:  GENERAL DUTIES AS A STUDENT
              Pull everything out of your teacher.
              Pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE 3:  GENERAL DUTY AS A TEACHER
              Pull everything out of your students.

RULE 4:  Consider everything an experiment.

RULE 5: Be self disciplined.
             This means finding someone smart or wise and choosing to follow
             them.
             To be disciplined is to follow in a good way.
             To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE 6:  Follow the leader.
              Nothing is a mistake.
              There is no win and no fail.
              There is only make.

RULE 7:  The only rule is work.
              If you work it will lead to something.
              It is the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually
              catch onto things.
              You can fool the fans - but not the players.

RULE 8:  Do not try to create and analyze at the same time.
              They are different processes.

RULE 9:  Be happy whenever you can manage it. 
              Enjoy yourself. 
              It is lighter than you think.

RULE 10: We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules
               and how do we do that?
               By leaving plenty of room for 'x' qualities.

HELPFUL HINTS:
                Always be around.  Come or go to everything.  Always go to classes.
                Read everything you can get your hands on. 
                Look at movies carefully and often.
                Save everything.  It may come in handy later.

Lessons from the pool hall (how to be mediocre forever)

It's a dream come true.  I own a pool table.  In fact, I've owned it for years.  I've made it!  But man, I am no pool player.  I own a pool table, but I stink up the room.  Why?

I don't get to use the pool table nearly as often as I would like, but when my son wants to play, or when I have friends over, we rack 'em up!  Awesome.  The problem is that we just play.  It is absolutely fun, but I really haven't improved my game much.  All play and no work makes for a nice hobby, but not a profession.  Maybe this isn't even a hobby, but just a social activity, or a time-killer.

A few summers ago, I got exceptionally motivated to learn how to take a target ball that is against the rail, to hit the cue ball beside it with some inside spin, and to push the target ball sideways into the corner pocket.  I watched some clips on the internet, made some notes, and lined up balls around all the corners.  I took the shot over and over again, learning to cut the angle closer to the target ball, compensating for deflection. I practiced this shot, again and again, for weeks.  No surprise, I have become quite good at this particular shot.  I practiced it.

I love to play, whether it's Bach or a good game of nine ball.  Play is important, but we can't expect any amount of play to ever equal real practice.  We make decisions about how hard we are willing to work, and how much skill we need to enjoy an activity.  If you intend to make a living as a musician (or a pool player), you will need those 10,000 hours of skill building before you can return to the joy of playing.  This is the secret of the virtuoso, and the way the seemingly impossible is made to appear easy, and even fun.

Shake the Hive

I've been working on an unaccompanied tenor saxophone composition for an upcoming performance.  There are literally no constraints, except that it must be for solo tenor and it must clock in around 7 minutes.  Given the considerable freedom that comes with a project like this,  I had several ideas, none of which panned out.

I had been thinking about writing two different pieces for a long time, both of which I have toyed around with, but I never got beyond the basic concept.  Over time, these ideas hardened in my mind, to the point that I couldn't do anything with them.  Each of them turned out to be dead ends.

To clear my head (and ears), I tried improvising on completely different material during my writing/practicing sessions.  At one point, I reversed my hands on the saxophone and tried to play with my hands in the wrong places.  When I found an interesting sound, I wrote down the fingering, and learned to play it with my hands in the correct place.  With a few new-to-me fingering combinations, and a new set of sounds, an idea quickly started to form into its own piece.

Fearful of locking myself into yet another dead end, I put the horn down and went to work on something else (non-musical).  I read a book, took a warm shower, met with a former student, cooked dinner . . . anything to keep the idea out of my head.  Later in the evening, I went back to work, reviewing what I had played that morning and making some notes - no more than 20 minutes.  It struck me that the piece sounds like a swarm of bees, which gave me a story to go with the music.  My brain surged with insight!

This morning, I made a leisurely breakfast, listened to the radio, and fueled up with a strong cup of coffee.  In a few hours of work, the piece poured out of my head in a swarm of creativity.  Armed with a still-malleable idea, an interesting story, and a little caffeine, the entire piece came to be in just a few days.  All that is left is to write it all down (the least fun part of the process for me, given all the non-traditional notation required for the multiphonics and strange fingerings).

The piece depicts someone shaking a bee hive, and you might guess what happens next.  From a personal standpoint, it is interesting that the creativity poured out much like the bees, disturbed from their hive.  The lesson here is that there is a danger in ruminating too long on a single idea.  We can become too attached, and ultimately unable to complete the project.  We need to work while the clay is still wet!

I'll premiere Shake the Hive at the World Saxophone Congress in Scotland this July.  Now, to write the darned thing down.

What really moves the listener?

To continue discussion, I have taken the liberty of transferring the following commentary regarding the last blog entry from my FB page:


<<
Do you think Ma, in his anecdote, was fearful of making mistakes?" ? Seems like it was boredom with his high achievement ("perfection") that caused him to feel like he was letting his audience (and himself) down. But I wonder if his audience felt what he was feeling, or if, in fact, one of the reasons that we love to listen to folks like him is precisely his precision. He says you should make people feel something. OK, how do you do that? Miss a note or rhythm every now and again? Flap your elbows? Does accuracy not move people? (I know it moves me!) You can say, 'sure, you have to know your notes and rhythms, but there's a certain "I-don't-know-what" that's what REALLY moves the listener.' What is it? Can you teach it? Seems to me like the best thing you can do for yourself as a performer is let those feelings of whether or not you are moving the listener go. (Blow not intensely, but from the heart, someone once told me.) Like tonglen, if you feel like you've done well for the world, breathe it out; if not, breathe it in. And keep on smashing, for god's sake. (In potentially-related news, you ever checked out Carolyn Abbate's paper, "Music—Drastic or Gnostic?"? http://goo.gl/dCEzq <-- It's here.)


From the Abbate paper: "There are differences between listening and performing that should not be ignored; the former hardly involves the same responsibilities and anxieties as the latter. One can more readily depart mentally from hearing music than from performing it, though mulling over the bank balance while your hands continue the sonata by themselves is not unheard of. But that, perhaps, is the point: to reflect, must one in some sense depart? Split a drastic self from a gnostic self?"]
>>


There are broad questions here, worthy of a long discussion.  For starters, let's look at some research.


Jonah Lehrer references a study by Limb and Braun that used functional MRI to peek inside the brain of improvisors, and significantly, to compare these results with scans of the same performers playing prepared pieces.  You can view the original study here:


http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0001679


Limb and Braun discovered that improvisation involves the deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  This is a part of the brain that regulates self-consciousness.  There is even some indication that this part of the brain regulates truth-telling (or lying).  Check out this abstract on a study using magnetic stimulation of the DLPFC:


http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0166432811005468


I am willing to speculate (I know, shame on me) that there is a connection between pure improvisation and spontaneous interpretation.  (This would be difficult to prove for two reasons:  the difficulty in creating such a situation while the musician is in the MRI machine, and the further challenge in quantifying genuinely spontaneous interpretations.)  If the musician could perform the neural trick of the improvisor and willfully shut down the DLPFC, effectively dampening social inhibition, the resulting performance might be significantly less cautious, and more personal.  If there is a transcendent self, the DLPFC seems to be protecting it, or at least keeping it on a leash.


I believe that Yo-Yo Ma wasn't talking about playing perfectly, but rather he was talking about worrying about playing perfectly.  This is the critical self being too active, and at the wrong time.  There needs to be a balance of reflective, feedback-controlled performance and being in the moment.  The internal world of the performer is quite different from that of the listener, and while precision can certainly be impressive, and even expressive, what else is going on?  What really moves the listener?


I have serious doubts that anyone could move an audience by purposefully making mistakes.  Accuracy is certainly important, especially in European-style, classical music.  I also think that most audiences can tell the difference between feigned affectation ("flapping elbows") and an uninhibited performance.  What I'm getting at here is that it would be difficult to act as though the DLPFC is turned off, and that bad acting is fairly easy to spot.  Just as in a play or movie, bad acting draws the audience out of the experience; suspension of disbelief collapses.  Clearly, the affectations of the performer must be believable, or better yet, completely genuine.


A listener could be moved by sympathy for the performer.  We feel a connection to the tortured artist, or the brave hero.  The virtuoso has a certain superhero quality that we love.  Of course, listeners also have their own internal experience (i.e., baggage), and a great performance can allow a listener, through introspection, to access emotions that are purely their own.  A combination of external sympathy and internal emotions would be a satisfying concert indeed!


Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), we do not have the technology for biofeedback-based practice in the technique of turning off the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.  Perhaps the best advice really is to "let go," especially as it relates to concerns about what the audience is experiencing.  This is easier said than done, and best achieved through disciplined development of technique and interpretation.  When skill and experience converge, the performer might gain access to higher levels of expression.  While the discipline itself can certainly be taught, the performer must experience these higher levels on their own.

The Hidden Art of the Master

I'm currently reading the newest book by Jonah Lehrer, Imagine.  Although I haven't finished it yet, I can already heartily recommended it.  It is beautifully researched and deeply insightful.  Buy it here:

Imagine: How Creativity Works, by Jonah Lehrer

Among the book's many topics that are connected to the subject of this blog, the following excerpt from a Yo-Yo Ma interview (from The New Yorker, with David Blum in 1989) appears on pp. 86-87:

    "I knew the music inside and out.  While sitting there at the concert, playing all the notes correctly, I started to wonder, 'Why am I here?  What's at stake?  Nothing.  Not only is the audience bored but I myself am bored.'  Perfection is not very communicative . . .  If you are only worried about not making a mistake, then you will communicate nothing . . .  You will have missed the point of making music, which is to make people feel something."

It is this realization that allows us to get on with uncovering the hidden art of the master musician.  We must free ourselves from fear and allow mistakes to happen without disturbing the creative flow.  Of course, this is only possible with a prerequisite level of high achievement, but there comes a point for letting go.

Practice Monster Injuries

Musicians often suffer injuries at the hand of Practice Monster.  Over the years, I've struggled with tendon issues, particularly in my wrists.  Here are some thoughts about how I've dealt with injury.

* Please, I am not a doctor!  This is not medical advice, and I strongly advise anyone in pain to be evaluated by a professional.  This is simply what has worked for me.  If you are in pain, seek professional help!!!*

1.  The cycle of injury, swelling, and pain cannot be stopped without rest.  Rest is key.  Without rest, things only get worse.

2.  Ice is the bomb of all healers for me.  I fill a pitcher with ice water and dip my hand, including the wrist, for 10 seconds.  I do this every 5-10 minutes until the ice has melted.  Once a day, for a week, while making every effort to rest.  This website helped me:  tendonitisexpert.com

3.  Tight muscles slow down the healing.  I take a hot bath, soaking my arm until the muscles are released.  Better yet, I go straight from there to the ice dip treatment.  If a hot water soak isn't practical, a percussion massager will help loosen things up.

4.  Never practice with cold hands!  Take the time to warm up (literally) and get the circulation going.

5.  Recent studies indicate that stretching might not be the best idea.  Some experts recommend slowly easing yourself into the activity instead, as stretching cold muscles could actually encourage injury.  Read this:  msnbc.com

6.  Evaluate what you are doing to cause injury, and modify that behavior.  I rarely hurt myself playing the saxophone anymore, but I do a job on my wrists working around the house.  Painting, scraping, and using the drill or the power driver are all killers, and I don't even think about using a manual screwdriver for anything but small jobs.

To sum up:

When you have pain, rest.  Use heat to release tense muscles, and ice to encourage healing.  Most importantly, eliminate the behavior that caused the injury in the first place.  Reliance on braces and Advil will only send you down the spiral of perpetual injury, and re-injury.

Managing a Busy Schedule

Please, forgive me for the relatively long hiatus.  I've been extremely busy with performances.  In fact, I don't think I've ever been this busy.  That is a very good thing!  We all like to have our calendars filled with gigs, but we should also be careful what we wish for.  It only takes one or two extra commitments to go from feeling good to being totally overwhelmed.  Practice Monster can help, but only if we train for success under pressure.

Have a Schedule

Mark down all your concerts and rehearsals on the calendar - that should be obvious.  From there, assess how much music you have to learn, and divide it up.  Literally assign yourself a page a week, or 2 lines per day; get out your calculator, and split things up into manageable chunks that have hard deadlines.  Block out your practice for each and every day, and set very specific goals.  Get excited about attacking the music for the day, and keep on schedule.

Keep the Beast in Blinders

Practice Monster has a way of freaking out when he feels overwhelmed.  Use the schedule to distract him.  Focus intensely on learning the new material on your schedule, and on reviewing what you have already learned.  As long as your schedule is reasonable, and you allow extra time at the end to synthesize everything into a finished product, there is no need to fret about the looming performances.  Get yourself organized at the beginning, and then try not to look to far ahead.  Focus on the work at hand, and on the short-term deadline.

No Rest for the Weary

I recently played a concert at a major venue.  The preparation was long and intense.  It would have been very easy to take a few days off.  I started the very next day by forcing myself to practice for the next project at 8:30AM.  I was aiming for 8AM, but I'm only human!  Excellence is habit forming, but so is lounging about.  When you have work to do, go do it.  The sooner, the better.

Just Say Yes - Unless . . .

It is very important to say yes (read Bill Shatner's new book).  I can't count the number of times I reluctantly agreed to do something, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience.  At different times in our careers, the stipulations for what we are willing to do will change.  (I don't play very many weddings anymore, and performing gratis is rare.)  While it is important to seize opportunities, we must also be cautious not to go overboard.  There are limits to what an individual can do, and it sometimes isn't worth the stress and strain to do "just one more gig."  Always lean towards saying yes, but respect your schedule, and try to have a life outside of work.

There is a time to put Practice Monster to bed.  And with that, I say goodnight!