Three Meditations on Rhythm & Flow

Three Meditations on Rhythm & Flow

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

(and you can read it too, even if you aren't a writer!)

Timing is everything. But what is timing? It's a sort of synching of body, mind, space, and time. Find your rhythm, and things will flow. Here are some ways for you to practice the art of synching . . . and feeling good in your life and in your work.

First Meditation: You’re the Task

Choose a time-consuming and attention-demanding household task: cleaning the living room and kitchen after a big party; washing, drying, ironing, and folding several laundry loads; sorting through a year’s worth of tax receipts; writing letters, postcards, and e-mails to two dozen correspondents. The aim of the game is for you to undertake the task in an even mood, clear-headed and constructive, taking as much time as you need to accomplish the whole task without doing dumb things—breaking a glass, putting a new red skirt with a load of whites, mistakenly throwing away an important bank statement, stuffing the wrong letter inside an addressed envelope.

If you rush, you make mistakes. If you drag, you lose interest. How to avoid both?

Spread your attention so that you keep many things in mind at the same time: the task itself, with its many requirements; the environment of time and space, be it kitchen, basement laundry room, or office desktop; and, most important of all, your own self, your physicality in back, legs, and arms, breath, sight, hearing, touch.

Let’s say you’re hand-washing two dozen crystal glasses which you really, really don’t want to break. Normally you take a glass, dump its contents down the drain, soap it, rinse it, put it on the rack, then dry it and put it away. In this meditation you take a glass in your hands and immediately notice the feeling of the stem against your fingers, and also the feeling of your fingers as they wrap the stem. Beyond your fingers you feel your whole hand, your wrist, your arm; you turn the glass to empty it into the sink, and you marvel at the mobility of your arm, how its parts are at the same time independent yet connected. You sense how the arm belongs together with the shoulder, the shoulder with the back, the back with the pelvis and legs; holding a glass, turning it, emptying it are all gestures of your whole body. Every little motion of your hand is a pleasure, an adventure, a discovery. Every glass you wash is a celebration of your whole self. The task becomes amazingly agreeable; you feel as if you could wash glasses for the rest of your life. And you end up accomplishing the task perfectly.

The more experienced you become in being attentive to yourself as you perform a task, the less time you’ll need to perform the task. But to get there you’ll need trust, faith and perseverance. It’s not easy to believe that taking time to be centered is the most time-saving device there is.                       

Second Meditation: More Reception, Less Acquisition

Choose a museum or art gallery to visit. Ideally you’d go to a fine museum showing a first-rate, must-see temporary exhibit: a Cézanne retrospective, a big Brancusi display, something bold and ambitious and exciting, spread over a large surface encompassing several rooms, perhaps two floors or more.

Enter the exhibit and walk through it at a steady pace, unhurried but also unhesitant. Do several rounds of the whole show, and visit an individual room again and again if you wish. But you must never stop walking, never plant yourself in front of a painting or sculpture, never study something up close or in detail. Take in the whole environment, the gallery’s architecture, the way natural and artificial light intermingle to illuminate the artworks, the smell of floor wax and turpentine. Watch the museumgoers, the couples, the bored children, the horny man stalking a young woman who obviously attends art school, the guards sitting at their stools with walkie-talkies hanging from their belts. See the paintings as well, note their shapes and colors, the way they occupy the walls. And don’t stop walking, ever. Stay a good hour inside the galleries, walking, watching, perceiving.

The object of the game is flow plus observation: taking in everything without letting yourself being drawn in by anything; developing an open mind, observant, attentive, mildly discerning but not acquisitive, dispassionate and disinterested—and therefore tremendously astute. In this game, the flow of locomotion and observation becomes more important than attachment, analysis, detail, all those traits of an acquisitive mind that wants to own something for itself by discerning and judging. Let it all be, let it all go; not through indifference, but through detachment.

Needless to say, the writer in you can then approach every writing task with the same mind. The flow of stimulation is permanent; the desire to acquire, to judge, to control is permanent; the duty to keep the mind open is permanent. But instead of acquiring, judging, and controlling, your observant and equitable mind lets everything go by.

After you finish the meditation at the museum, take a break, visit the museum’s coffee shop, have a little caffeine and sugar; then return to the exhibit and look closely at a few of the artworks. Love some, hate others, imagine what it’d be like to live in a big downtown loft full of exquisite Brancusis. Then go home and write.

Third Meditation: Organize Slowly, Execute Quickly

 Make a sizable shopping list, including a variety of items such as fresh and canned foods, paper goods, toiletries, and so on—let’s say your family’s need for a whole week. Go to a supermarket you’ve never been to, even if you have to drive out of your way. With your shopping list in hand, walk through the supermarket without a cart, not taking anything in your hands, but just finding out where everything is and making choices of brand, flavor, and quantities for every item on your list. In other words, stake out the new supermarket and get to know it, taking as much time as you need to locate and ponder every item you need. After you’ve made every single one of your shopping decisions, envision a one-way route thought the isles, without ever backtracking. Now take a shopping cart and execute every decision without hesitation, without changing your mind, without adding new items or leaving any behind: bam-bam-bam-bam-BOOM. The purpose of the exercise is to become able to make a comprehensive plan—however long it takes to make it—and to execute it unflinchingly, and as fast as you can,        

There will be plenty of times in your life, both as a writer and otherwise, when the planning/executing skill will come in handy. For instance, you’re researching a big project and you need to look at some materials at a library out of town. You can only spare two hours there, on your way to your in-laws’ for Thanksgiving dinner. If you know how to plan (which may take a long time) and how to execute (which may take no time at all) then you can make the best use of a difficult situation and optimize the resources at your disposal.

The meditation covers both strategy and tactics. (Strategy comes from the Greek strategia, meaning “generalship.” Tactics comes from the Greek taktikos, meaning “ordered, arranged.”) Strategy is all about establishing priorities and long-term goals. Tactics are the best moves to achieve your strategy. Although time is flexible and can be made to appear lengthy, in the end we all have a limited amount of time on this earth. Strategic and tactical skills create extra time to live, to work, and to enjoy your earthly existence.

Once you get good at planning and implementing a plan, you don’t have to be rigid about it. In the meditation I propose that you execute your shopping plan unflinchingly, without backtracking, without revising your decisions. It’s a good skill to develop. But in most tasks of daily life, to revise decisions is both needed and healthy. In other words, become good at being firm, become good at being flexible.

© 2015, Pedro de Alcantara

The Spinning Stool

On a recent trip to New York City, I visited the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Museum Design, up on Fifth Avenue along Central Park. The museum is a compact place featuring many delights for anyone interested in design, engineering, architecture, visual arts, communication, and information.

I started on the third (and top) floor, where I saw a temporary exhibition celebrating the creative accomplishments of Heatherwick Studio, a London-based design and architecture firm. Then I went to the second floor, the highlight of which was the Immersion Room, a sort of wraparound, room-size toolbox in which you can design and digitally display your own wallpaper. Then I descended to the first floor, where another temporary exhibition led you through a series of brilliant posters from decades past, showing you how poster artists use “principles of composition, perception and storytelling to convey ideas and construct experiences” (in the museum’s words).

By then I had already had any number of uplifting and enlightening experiences, but the basement remained to be explored. There I found a strange object, a cross between a stool and a spinning top made of hard plastic (or, to get technical, “rotationally molded polyethylene”). Created by those accomplished fellows from the Heatherwick Studio, this “spinning stool,” so to speak, is wobbly by design. You sit on it quite low, with your butt and most of your back cocooned against the stool’s inner curves. Then you lift your feet off the floor and . . . and the thing starts wobbling, with you in it. Meaning, YOU start wobbling in space, seemingly out of control, seemingly in danger of falling off and breaking your neck.

Perhaps you’re familiar with the famous five stages of loss and grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What’s interesting about these stages is how dynamic they are; they imply change, movement, and finally growth.

Riding the wobbly spinning stool, I felt myself passing through four stages. They weren’t similar to the actual stages of loss and grieving, but they were certainly dynamic—and, like the stages of loss and grieving, they involved strong emotions.

First stage: “I don’t wanna do this. It looks unsafe. I was never any good at sports. I’ll fall, people will laugh, everyone will know I’m a pathetic old fool.”

Second stage: “Okay, I’m doing it. How does it work? Wow, it’s so low. And if I take my feet off the floor . . .? Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod! Someone, stop this! Pleeease, let me out!”

Third stage: “Hey, it’s kinda nifty. It kinda feels nice. You can kinda control it with just a little sway of the hips. Hmmm . . .  groovy . . . hmmm . . . it reminds me of Woody Allen having sex with the Orb in ‘Sleeper’ . . . hmmm . . ."

“Hmmm . . . was it the Orb or the Orgasmatron? Hmmm . . .”

When I stood up from the Orgasmatron—I mean, the wobbly spinning stool—I noticed that my whole body felt loose and energized, as if I had just had a session with a skilful sacrocranial osteopath. In fact, the spinning stool had healed me from the feelings I had before I sat on it—my feelings of fear and inadequacy.

Fourth stage: “I love the spinning stool. Let me wobble again. I could wobble all day. I’m good at it, and it’s good to me! I’m so full of love I could kiss that guard standing by the door over there!”

Two Japanese women entered the room while I was enjoying my spin. One of them sat cautiously on another stool. It wobbled a little bit, and she panicked big time. She let out a heartbreaking yelp, and her friend helped her get off the stool. That was it for the two of them. Let’s get the heck out of this spinning room! Sayonara, Cooper-Hewitt!

I felt for them.

We all have our blocks, our fears, our habits and compensations, our pains, our preconceived ideas . . . our hatreds. A new tool (or a person or an idea) enters our lives. Our first perception of the tool is that it’s a threat, a danger, a horror. Then we employ the tool with our habitual fears, we respond awkwardly to the situation, and the tool seemingly confirms our perception of its dangers: it hurts us, it humiliates us, it . . . it makes us wobble uncontrollably.

When handling the tool (or person or idea) that carries potential solutions to our problems, we tend to get stuck in the first stage, where we’re so deeply triggered by our habits that we don’t even see the tool. Instead, we see in it a projection of our fears.

And yet, this tool (or person or idea) happens to be the solution to our problems; it heals our fears and dissipates our hurts, and it makes us feel really, really good.

Let’s call the four stages fear, exploration, practice, and love. The passage from one to the other requires courage and determination. Along the way, there are many possibilities for things to go not to your liking—that is, for things to go wrong according to your subjective assessment, perhaps so wrong that you’ll feel justified in quitting. But if you stick it out . . . you’ll want to kiss the guard.

Symbolically speaking, of course.

Or literally speaking. It’s your call!

[And if you’re curious about the five stages of grief and loss, here’s an infographic.]

The Game

The Game

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

I grew up in São Paulo, Brazil, one of the biggest and busiest cities in the world. It’s so big it makes New York seem like a miniature diorama of a proper city. Add the population of Los Angeles and New York together, and São Paulo is bigger still.

And badder.

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When we were in our mid-teens, my older brother Luís Eduardo and I would sometimes visit the historic downtown district and run a race along a particular obstacle course. Rua Direita, which links the cathedral to the opera house, is a pedestrian street teeming with the life of an anthill in battle. The crowd there includes shoppers, office boys in a hurry, throngs of beggars, bank cashiers running errands for the keepers of illegal games, fat women carrying enormous loads balanced on their heads, toothless and drunk black men the grandchildren of slaves, con artists, pickpockets, cardsharps, prostitutes, transvestites, and thousands upon thousands of other men and women and children and animals of dubious genetic make-up, all squeezed into a narrow street and jostling for space using as weapons everything hard and pointy: their briefcases, umbrellas, canes, shopping bags, elbows, knees, and falsies.

The game that Luís and I played consisted in racing from one end of the street to the other, as quickly as possible but without letting both feet leave the ground at the same time, and without touching anyone else in our path.

It was a riveting game. Adrenaline and testosterone made us feel like toreros in a mythical arena, both seeking danger and running away from it. Luís was bigger and stronger than I, built like a fridge with legs. He played dirty without knowing that he did; it was just his natural way of being. I was all rubbery and elastic, prone to falling down and scraping my knees or twisting an ankle or three. I played ugly, not dirty; but, unlike the warm-hearted brute that was my brother, I knew I played ugly. I did it on purpose, to spite the competition, to sully the world in revenge for being unfair to me.

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The game was a great life lesson: The individual against the crowd, brother against brother, legs against brains. To play the game you absolutely had to interact with several thousand people, in varying degrees of intimacy. You could do your very best and not get anywhere; the obstacles were unyielding, uncooperative, too many, too big, too slow. You could play fair or dirty, pretty or ugly; but you could never, ever be sure of winning, regardless of how you played.

Timing, however, improved your chances. Knowing when to stop, when to speed up, when to slow down, when to skirt a group of office boys who stood motionless right on your path, when to jump, when to skip, when to walk, when to run, when to take a longer route that might be faster—if you knew the “when” of everything, you might possibly beat the competition.

In fact, timing is everything, regardless of what game you play.

Golf? It’s all in the rhythm of your swing, the timing of your decisions to do or not to do, to lead or to follow. Tiger Wood may have amazing physical capabilities, but it’s his rhythm that got him places.

Hockey? The greatest players aren’t the strongest ones, but the ones with the best sense of timing. Wayne Gretzky was a skinny little guy who looked like a speck of humanity next to his teammates and opponents. But he took his father’s advice when he was young: “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where it has been.” And he became skillful than anyone else, superior in mind and body, more imaginative, more creative—thanks in good part to his uncanny sense of rhythm.

Neurosurgery? Here’s Malcolm Gladwell profiling the great surgeon Charlie Wilson in The New Yorker:

Once, when a new head of nursing at U.C.S.F. wanted to start rotating nursing teams in neurosurgery, instead of letting Wilson work with the same team every day, [Wilson] stopped operating for a week in protest. New nurses, he explained, would mean more mistakes—not fatal mistakes but irregularities in the flow of his operating room, such as someone's handing him the wrong instrument, or handing him an instrument with the blade up instead of down, or even just a certain hesitation, because to Wilson the perfect operation requires a particular grace and rhythm.

Writing? It’s all about Rhythm & Flow. The timing of your every decision will determine whether or not you write that book, or finish it, or get it published. Writing is a game of creativity—a game with complex rules, in which winning means transforming a dream into a reality, an idea into a book, a personal insight into a public work of art. The integrated writer is a good player who enjoys the game and who plays it with skill and joy.

Imagine we’re back in São Paulo playing the game. Let me tell you how timing affects it.

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If I wait a second too long, or if I take off a second too soon, I may find my path blocked by a busload of shoppers who suddenly stop dead on their tracks to look at a window. A second, perhaps a fraction of a second, and I’m blocked. Part of the game, then, is determined by timing: when to do something, when not to do it. This is true for everything in a writer’s life. The integrated writer knows when to write, when to write by hand or at the computer, when to write by hand with a pencil or with a pen, when to edit, when to delete, when to submit, when to do anything whatsoever—and, most importantly, when not to do anything at all.

To play the game, it’s simply not possible to keep to a single speed throughout the entire race. There are too many factors involved, too many obstacles, too many other agents and witnesses and receptors to deal with. The least event affects my rhythms of thought and movement, making them faster or slower. A drunken beggar reaches out, trying to touch my arm, and I speed up away from him. A gaggle of deliverymen spills out from nowhere, and I bring myself to a sudden stop. I never know when I’ll have to change my speed or for how long. Habit, routine, safety and predictability are all delusory. The integrated writer is alert and adaptable. You must not only have many speeds at your disposal, but you must also know how to change speeds quickly and smoothly.

Throughout the game, I play three rhythmic roles. I’m an actor, making active decisions to do something or to refrain from doing it: I decide to run, to wait, to turn to the left all of a sudden, or to sit in the middle of the road and cry. I’m a receptor:  I see, hear, smell, and sense everything around me, watching dozens of people at a time, listening to a cacophony of voices and barking dogs and music blaring from inside shops. And I’m a witness: I observe, analyze, and synthesize information as if I were "someone else" at a remove from the game. Needless to say, the witness inside an adolescent in a fight with his brother tends to be perfectly pathetic!

You can’t escape your triple role, not even if you go live alone in a hut in the Outer Hebrides. There too you’ll act, receive, and witness; there too you’ll be subject to the laws of Rhythm & Flow, one of which says your rhythm depends on the rhythms of other people, animals, and forces of nature. On Rua Direita, if someone behind me makes a decision of his own and speeds up, I suffer the consequences and get booted in the ankle; if someone decides to pickpocket an old lady a yard away from me, my game is changed in some way big or small. The same rule applies to every writer who’s ever lived: poets, novelists, screenwriters, journalists, stenographers, fortune-cookie scribes. We all must constantly deal with collaborators, editors, designers, marketers, and booksellers. The integrated writer is an individual who can do team work, and a team player full of individuality. The integrated writer yields to other players some of the time, but imposes his or her will the rest of the time. The integrated writer knows when to delegate, when to take over; when to share, when to keep things from other people’s eyes; when to engage with another player, when to disengage from another player.

St. Augustine once asked, “What is time? If you don’t ask me, I know. If you ask me, I don’t know.” Time is too difficult to define, but for our purposes we’ll say it’s a continuum of past, present, and future, every microsecond of your immediate future always becoming immediately your present, and every microsecond of your present always becoming immediately and forever your past. You can’t play the game well if you live in the past or in the future; you can only play it in the present. To do so, however, you must be permanently attuned to your past and to your future. Look back, look ahead, and look all around you—here, now!

©Pedro de Alcantara, 2015

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The Void

The Void

An excerpt from my work-in-progress The Integrated Writer

Your little child is running outside. She trips, falls, hits her face against a stone step, hurts herself badly. After a few seconds of suffocated silence, she starts screaming. She may have broken her jaw.

What do you do?

Some years ago I witnessed this very scenario. I was at Les Halles, a busy shopping mall in the heart of Paris. Inside the complex there’s a small courtyard, with stone steps leading to a terrace. The girl was about two years old. She was running at full tilt with unbound excitement, and when she rushed onto the steps she fell face down, hitting her jaw on the stone. The sound her jaw made against the stone was horrifying and indescribable.

Her father was standing right next to her. Immediately after she fell, he exclaimed, loudly enough for all to hear: “I told you not to run like that!”

We can’t know for sure what was going on through his mind. Is he that much of an insensitive father, a control freak, a monstrous disciplinarian? Perhaps; there certainly exist guys like that. Was he concerned with other people’s assessment of his ability to “educate” his child? It’s possible, but we can’t know for sure. Was he just freaking out, and voicing the dread that his beloved daughter was badly hurt? That’s possible, too.

We can’t know any of that. But we can be almost sure that his reaction did nothing to solve the problem at hand, and most likely aggravated it.

Before we deal too harshly with this hapless parent, let’s accept that when faced with many of life’s problems, big and small, we all have the potential to act pretty much the way he did. We want the problem to disappear. We want the problem never to have existed. We want to blame other people for the problem. Or we find fault with ourselves, even when we are blameless. We feel angry, frustrated, and afraid. And we don’t want those emotions to stay inside us. We vent. We rant and rave. Or we act and do something.

More often than not, this makes the problem worse. Conflicts escalate. Our ability to think through the problem and its possible solutions gets clouded. The problem itself escapes us; we lose sight of what the problem actually is.

And that becomes the problem.

The father of my example put himself in a state. As long as he stayed there, he’d be unable to do anything constructive to solve that other, more pressing, problem: his endangered child, overwhelmed and helpless.

The father’s first duty toward her daughter (and in truth also toward himself) is to do nothing that aggravates the problem. And to make sure he doesn’t aggravate the problem, he must do nothing, period—perhaps for a microsecond, perhaps longer. The void (that is, doing nothing) provides room for all good things in the world to come in; but once the void is filled with something, all other possibilities are excluded, at least until room is made for them by the creation of another void. And the void is preferable to anything negative or destructive that occupies it.

The father does absolutely nothing for a moment that may be extremely short. During the moment of doing nothing, he gets a grip on himself; check his fear, his desire to act out on the fear, his impulse to have his child be the recipient of his fear. And then he picks up his child and calls for the ambulance.

Let’s open a parenthesis and look at a less urgent situation.

We take roller coaster riders and watch horror movies and smoke dope just so we can lose our balance, our sense of habitual safety. We like it, as long as we know our balance will be restored. Children do the same thing: they turn and turn and turn until they’re so dizzy they fall on the ground, laughing all the while. A child might trip and fall accidentally, in the playground or at the beach. She might decide the fall is no big deal. She’ll get up and resume her running, as happy as only a child knows how to be. Or she might ponder the situation for a brief moment. While pondering it, she hears her mother’s voice: “Ohmigod! Are you okay? Are you okay?” The mother certainly behaves as if she herself thinks the child is in danger. The child hears it, loud and clear: “Mommy is upset. That can only mean one thing: a bad thing has just happened. I . . . I did a bad thing. I’m hurt. I’ll be punished. Bwaaaah!”

Your fear? Yes, your child reacts to it.

Anger? You bet.

Scorn and mockery? Yep.

Well-meaning concern? Of course. The child reacts to every emotion. And a parent’s well-meaning concern is a potential burden for the child to carry. I think the parent serves the child best by a tender attitude that says, “I’ll help you if you want my help. I’ll leave you alone if you want to be left alone. Cry if you want to, suppress your crying if you want to. I’ll wait for you until you’re ready.” This is different from saying, “Cry, baby, cry.” Or “Don’t cry, baby, you’re all right.”

Now we go back to our example of a child badly hurt.

Who is the ideal ambulance driver? Someone cool and collected, in full possession of his driving skills, his sense of direction, his capacity to ask for a police escort or warn an ER of his impending arrival. The ambulance driver is neutral, alert, and intelligent.

Let’s say you get your daughter to the hospital. Let’s say she has fractured her jaw and needs facial surgery. Throughout the entire ordeal—accident, ER, surgery, intensive care, recovery at home—the child reacts to your thoughts and emotions. Your duty, then, is to put yourself in the ambulance-driver state: neutral, alert, and intelligent. Your child hurts? You’re neutral, alert, and intelligent. Your child is in intensive care? You’re neutral, alert, and intelligent. Your child arrives home with her mouth wired shut? You’re neutral, alert, and intelligent, at her service in whatever capacity she requires you to be.

The human potential for self-regeneration is remarkable. I used to see a doctor who would hear my complaints, then say, “Call me again in three months if it persists.” Often the complaints dissipated, and I wouldn’t need to call the doctor back. Time helps; attitudes and their energies help, too. If you keep focusing on the problem, you’ll think “accident, pain, fear, danger, hurt, frustration, anger, guilt.” This very thought spins negative and unhealthy energies. To solve the problem, then, you have to stop thinking of it, and turn your attention instead to the solution: the intermediate steps, the indirect procedures, the side trips and tangents that eventually lead to the problem’s dissolution.

You’re going to entertain the child, keep her company, give her small gifts. But if she wants to be left alone, you’ll do that, too. She has her own powers of self-regeneration, and by doing too much for her you may be sabotaging her recovery. It’s no good to keep telling her, “You’re strong, you’ll recover; you’re strong, you’ll recover.” If she’s strong, she doesn’t need to be told it; if she needs to be told it, she isn’t strong; if you keep telling her she’s strong, she’ll suss out that you’re saying, “You’re not strong enough to recover without my telling you again and again that you’re strong.” And she’ll behave accordingly.

Give her time, space, the possibility of her taking initiatives even if some of her initiatives carry risks and dangers—as do all initiatives, without exception. Haven’t you been telling the child how she strong she is? Let her be.

The solution for every problem in your life starts with your doing nothing—every last problem, including stage fright, writer’s block, a twisted ankle, a troubled sibling, an exam, a lawsuit, anything. Within yourself, create a void: a neutral, alert, and intelligent state in which you’ll be able to stop focusing on the problem and start focusing on the solution. And don’t wait until you have a problem. Embody the void, now and always. Thanks to you, many potential problems will be preventively “voided.”

©2015, Pedro de Alcantara

"I don't know, but I have a pretty neck"

In November, 2013, I gave a two-day workshop at the Trossingen music school in Germany, thanks to an invitation from Prof. Wolfgang Guggenberger. One of the participants, the young trumpeter Fynn Müller, wrote the article below for the music school's magazine.

"I don't know, but I have a pretty neck"

An Alexander Technique Workshop with Pedro de Alcantara

A special workshop took place at the conservatory. At the invitation of the trumpet class, the internationally renowned author, Alexander teacher and cellist Pedro de Alcantara gave a seminar on the basics of the Alexander Technique.

We, the participants – in addition to the students of the trumpet class, our number included guests from the trombone and the percussion class – had little or no experience or previous knowledge. We thus brought excitement, curiosity and a small measure of skepticism to the weekend. The first day involved group and partner exercises without instruments. The objective was not only to understand the principles of the Alexander Technique but to learn and experience them with our own bodies: the connection between head, neck, shoulders, spine, pelvis and the resulting changes in our habits of movement.

For one exercise, we leaned against a wall with outstretched arms and fingers. Question: with which body part are we actually supporting ourselves? We began to sense that all body parts are connected: the finger is connected to the hand – the hand to the arm – the arm to the shoulder – the shoulder to the back – the back to the hips – the hips to the legs and the legs to the feet and the ground. All parts of this chain are connected and work together to keep us balanced and poised.

In another exercise, we were asked to apply light pressure with our hand to the lower back of our partner. The partner was instructed to resist the pressure and not to allow himself to be pushed away. His “resistance” should be neither stiff nor relaxed. The aim was to achieve a powerful yet flexible energy balance. Rather than concentrating solely on the strength in his arm, the “pusher” was able to practice executing the movement with his whole body. Exercises such as these help to develop our body awareness. And we can then use this new awareness to execute all kinds of procedures. When we move, if we focus our attention on connections throughout the whole body, the movement becomes more natural, more organic and more powerful. Through attentiveness and presence, we gain a new ease of movement.

But the Alexander Technique is about much more than “just” harmonious movements or mastering a complex sequence of motions. A human being is an inseparable alliance of body and mind; work on one cannot be separated from work on the other.

Why do we tense up when we play a difficult passage? Why do we indicate the stresses with our head when we speak a complex rhythm? Why does our body tension go awry when we feel frightened or insecure? Internal emotional states (e.g. fear, insecurity) nearly always have an external physical “echo” and vice versa. When we feel overwhelmed, we become restless, think negatively or feel paralyzed. The Alexander Technique teaches us to maintain internal and external “poise” in such situations, to observe our breathing (there were many exercises on this, too) and to stay mindful. As a result, our perception remains in the moment and we do not allow ourselves to be ruled by insecurity or fear. The disquiet, the fear are there but we are able to perceive them calmly without “losing our heads.” This helps us to cope with difficult situations and deal better with stress, such as pressure to perform and stage fright.

On the second day of the workshop, the participants had the chance to give a performance or play audition pieces or a study. Then they were able to work with Pedro de Alcantara on applying the principles of the Alexander Technique to the practical situation with their instrument. Many mental “side issues” came up that negatively affect our work irrespective of problems with playing technique: how do I deal with my mistakes? What effect do my thoughts and emotions have on my inner calm and concentration? A trumpeter misses the high “E flat” in the Haydn concerto – and curses.  The simple advice of Pedro de Alcantara is: “Don’t judge – perceive only.” Do not evaluate, do not classify with the labels “good” and “bad.” Perceive what is happening and do not deprive yourself of the power of clear thought by getting caught up in emotions. False, lacerating self-criticism, a reproachful inner judge can be damaging, too. Pedro de Alcantara’s “mantra” for such a situation is simple: “I don’t know / I can’t do – but I have a pretty neck!” This means: keep your outer and inner poise. A mistake or a failure does not make us “worse human beings” and our poised neck and head remind us of this. In this way, we gain the calmness, power and confidence to overcome our shortcomings.

Of course, experience of working on ourselves not only plays a role at the instrument. It affects our lives in general. The way we play our instrument (relaxed or tense, precise or imprecise, over-critical or superficial, etc.) reflects our personality. The Alexander Technique provides the opportunity to learn to deal with ourselves healthily – as musicians and people, in our physical movement and in our thoughts. In this respect, the course with Pedro de Alcantara was a considerable enrichment and an “integrated” course in the truest sense.               

-- Fynn Müller

Translated from the German by Annie Edwards

Photos by Pedro de Alcantara

Creativity: Roots & Twigs

Many people tend to define creativity in artistic terms—having to do with painting, music, and literature, for instance.  And many people think that creativity has “techniques and standards.” On this account, people say, “I’m not creative. I can’t draw, I can’t sing.” In truth, the flow of creativity touches every human domain: the law, mathematics, politics, business, auto repair, sexuality, and everything else. A normal life entails telling jokes, solving problems, raising kids, and cheating on your taxes—creative endeavors, one and all. If you’re alive, you’re creative.

Techniques and standards aren’t intrinsic to creativity itself. They arise after the fact, so to speak. Creativity is an unstoppable process or life force that knows no standards or judgments. You can train yourself to direct this life force toward concrete goals that require specific techniques and that will be enjoyed by other people according to shared standards. But, to begin with, all you need is to engage in the process—to ride the life force, so to speak.

I started my adult life as a cellist, playing classical music. This entailed studying and performing canonic compositions written by other people in centuries long past. In common with most classical musicians, I became so involved with goals, techniques, standards, and judgments that my music making wasn’t actually creative. Creativity is like a tree, deeply rooted and growing immensely broad and high, with numberless branches and infinite leaves. Music is a branch of creativity; classical music a sub-branch; the cello as played in classical music a smaller branch still, nothing but a twig in the huge tree; and each adult cellist playing classical music is a bud, or leaf, or flower at the tip of a twig. As long as you’re still connected to the creative roots, to blossom at the tip of a twig is wonderful. But as a cellist, I plucked myself off the creative tree and became, in a word, dead: the dry, broken-off tip of a twig.

Over the years, I worked through these issues and managed to reconnect with the creative life force. This required that I give up my identity as a “cellist” (that is, as a twig). I had to let go of my technical standards, my narrowly defined aesthetic and professional goals, my judgments, my desire to please other people, and many other things that defined me as an individual. It wasn’t easy, I can tell you. But, hey, I found my way back to the roots of creativity.

Musically, my “not being a cellist” allowed me to become an improviser, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and singer. My current music is kind of tribal, primeval and beautiful, quasi-shamanic. It takes listeners on some far-out head trips. My “not being a cellist” allowed me to become a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, publishing a new book every two or three years and getting translated into French, German, Japanese, and Estonian. My “not being a cellist” allowed me to become a teacher, coach, and (to use a big word) healer, with a practice spanning the globe. My “not being a cellist” also allowed me to explore the visual arts, in particular drawing, photography, and video. In this article I want to touch upon photography as a creative outlet.

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You get a lot done when you connect to the roots of creativity. If you’re open-minded and grounded, small efforts yield substantial results. So far, my photography has depended on a $300 compact camera, of which I use almost exclusively the automatic settings; the Mac’s photo editing program, iPhoto; an iPad Mini; and a free editing app called Snapseed. I used my iPad Mini to take all photos illustrating this article; I edited some of them with Snapseed.

Photography is a collaboration of many players: your eyes, brain, and heart; the environment around you; equipment and software; and technical knowledge. You don’t need to move to Paris to take good photos; the whole world is infinitely and permanently photogenic, there for you to enjoy and record. People have taken meaningful, touching photos of their kitchenware. And although it’s very tempting to think that technique and equipment are important, they’re secondary to your “working on yourself,” so to speak: being willing to take risks big and small, being willing to look, think, and snap the photo, without prejudging the results of the snap or worrying about what other people think of your creative efforts.

Every photo you take is a self-portrait—that is, a portrait of your own perspective, your choices and priorities. At a street corner there are so many details, so many things happening at the same time that thousands of different images could be taken in any one moment. But you take the one photo that you alone will take. Your presence in that street corner, your eyes and brain, your life experiences up to that moment determine your photo. As I see it, this is the core of photography: the “you” behind the camera.

An iPad Mini is as good as any other piece of equipment to get you going, since the one thing that matters at first is for you to be willing to be present and to shoot the image. After you take a photo, or a dozen, or a hundred, you can go home and look some more, think some more, play some more. The Snapseed app is elegantly designed. In a minute you’ll know how to use it. And in two minutes you’ll discover that your original image can transform itself in multiple ways. It’s a bit foolish to think that a photo “must be true to reality.” Reality is so multidimensional that no photo can be true to it. Every choice you make as you take a photo—the where, the what, the when, the who, the how much—filters and alters reality in some way. Post-shoot, editing an image only continues the inevitable filtering process. Paradoxically, a good photo might capture some essential corner of reality and be true to it even as it filters and alters it in multiple ways.

Technique is partly a matter of absorbing information and practicing skills—with or without the help of a teacher—and partly a matter of learning from experience. Spend a couple of hours taking photos every week, and over two years you’ll take ten thousand photos in two hundred different settings. This gives you enough of a database to start exercising your discernment and making faster, deeper choices at the very moment of taking a photo. Ultimately, awareness is the one thing that counts the most. If you define technique as “trained awareness,” the pursuit of technique will become very enriching.

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Not Flamenco

I know close to nothing about flamenco. Like many other people, I've seen bits and bobs of it on the Internet or in the movies; I've heard flamenco-inspired guitar playing, recorded and live; and I've play-acted my ignorant version of flamenco for fun, stomping my feet and clapping as I twirl around the room. But this blog post isn't about my scant knowledge of flamenco, or even about flamenco, period. It's about a voyage we all take in our lives. It starts in innocence, passes through crippling self-consciousness, and ends (for some of us) in mastery.

As young kids we dwelled in experience and sensation, not spending much psychic energy on discernment  (anything goes into the mouth!) and only occasionally on judgment (hunger not good!). Our minds were free from constraints, preconceived ideas, "shoulds" and "musts." And we were so, so very adept at learning! We learned our "mother tongue" like we learned breathing and walking--without intellectual calculation, playfully, easily, joyfully.

The toddler below is learning his "mother dance" of flamenco through a process of observation, imitation, and improvisation. He already has the spirit of it, the energy of it, the flamenco-ness of it. He "embodies flamenco."

This baby must have an old flamenco-dancing gypsy soul! He probably came out of his mother's womb in compas. His remates, llamadas, and even cante... it's all so very flamenco. I've been dancing flamenco for 14 years and I can say that bulerias por fiesta is probably one of the hardest palos out there, yet this kid does it effortlessly.

Talented children can take this native ease very far. The young fellow in the next clip embodies his native flamenco with terrific virtuosity. He's called Juan Manuel Fernandez Montoya, better known as Farruquito. To my eyes, he's focused, centered, and "invisible," by which I mean he allows us to watch "the wonder of flamenco" without getting distracted by "the particular individual who here embodies flamenco." His dancing isn't about Farruquito; it's about flamenco--something much bigger than him. Flamenco itself seems to be about the paradox of holding energies tightly within, the better to propagate them in every direction. The young Farruquito "becomes" containment and propagation, and watching him "I contain and propagate, by proxy."

farruquito un mostro desde que era chico

Farruquito will grow up and leave his child-prodigy years behind him. Tragedy will struck--real-life tragedy, in the form of a hit-and-run accident that landed Farruquito in jail; and existential tragedy, in the form of a loss of innocence, a loss of freedom . . . in short, a deep loss. The invisible dancer who let us "watch flamenco" becomes visible, and begs us to "watch him." It's not the same kind of show, and it doesn't have the same effect. Don't get me wrong; the adult Farruquito is very accomplished, and obviously he dances the flamenco a thousand times better than I dance it myself. But the clip below leaves me uncomfortable. In earlier times, Farruquito danced with a steady core that rendered him stable despite his gyrations, and watching him "I became stable, by proxy." Now Farruquito is making the periphery (arms, clothes, hair, surface) more important than the core, and watching him "I become unstable, by proxy."

oleee ese farruquito y ese antonio oleee los maestros

Farruquito is the grandson of a masterly dancer: Antonio Montoya Flores, El Farruco. In movement and in expression, El Farruco does very, very little . . . and yet he lets us know how much he's capable of doing. It's as if his flamenco were completely internalized, "not needing to come out anymore." Containment has become "it," and propagation is now only latent. El Farruco has nothing to prove, and watching him dance "I myself have nothing to prove, by proxy." I find it very healing. Perhaps Farruquito will one day pass from self-consciousness to self-forgetting again.

There you have it: innocence, loss, mastery. As I said, it's not about flamenco.

Создано в CyberLink PowerDirector Arte flamenco Baile El Farruco (Antonio Montoya) Toque: Luis Habichuela Cante: El Chocolate (Antonio Nuñez) y Martin El Revuelo Add-on Constantin Sharoudin, St.Peterbourg, Russia

Transformations

I performed a solo recital program at a beautiful little museum in Tallinn, Estonia. I played a couple of pieces by Bach for unaccompanied cello, plus a number of my own compositions employing the cello and the piano, as well as singing, whistling, and howling.

To open the program, I decided to devise an improvisation that would make me comfortable and confident, and that also concentrated the audience’s minds. So, I chose something emphatic and declamatory, and I practiced it a few times over two or three days.

Before I went to Estonia, I had a chance to record my improvisation at a studio in Paris. My recording engineer edited and mixed the improvisation. Here it is.

Then I tweaked his mix, adding a little resonance; and I tweaked my tweak, adding an echo that created the illusion of multiple instruments. Is it the same piece, or has it become something else?

A remix of my improvisation "Passage, First."

Then I added my tweaked tweak as a soundtrack to a slideshow of mine. The slideshow, too, is a transformation: I took a small section of a painting by Anselm Kiefer and I submitted it to a series of editing decisions.

Change happens permanently. Which is your true nature, what you were originally or what you have become?

My desire to connect with the cello and with the audience materialized itself in gestures and sounds. Captured by a recording device, these sounds underwent a series of transformations. Now the sounds are a string of ones and zeros, beamed into your home from a satellite high above the Earth.

You might find it interesting to listen to my sound engineer’s version of my “thoughts and emotions,” then my tweak of it, before hearing it as a soundtrack to a slideshow. You’ll have your own thoughts and emotions about these ones and zeros. Transformation is the name of the game.

Reality & Illusion, part 5: In the Sandbox

(Previous Episodes: 1. Bach at McDonald's. 2. Bach's Invisible Cello. 3. A Cellist, a Pianist, and a Composer Enter a Bar. 4. Bach, Dead and Reborn.)

The confusion we make between illusion and reality affects every last little bit of our daily existence.

We create mystical beings in our imagination, and we assign them an objective, material reality. Among these beings are our teachers, our parents, our siblings, our friends—in fact, every person in our lives. It’s hard to crack this illusion, but “my cello teacher,” for instance, was in truth “my perception of my cello teacher,” rather than a tangible being with recognizable material properties. These days “my perception of my cello teacher” has become “my memory of my perception of my cello teacher,” taking the teacher further into the realm of the illusory.

If you think Bach exists for real, you risk assigning him a sort of ultimate authority; Bach would have “the last word” as concerns his music. And you risk assigning many other people minor-deity status, with everyone conspiring to pass judgments and create constraints—Fournier, Bazelaire, Casals, Starker, Bijlsma, Rostropovich, Ma, and a thousand teachers, players, writers, listeners, family, and friends.

To give an example, when I told my cello teacher back when I was 14 that I wanted to become a professional musician, she said to me, with some sadness in her voice, “But you’ll never be a Pierre Fournier.”

Realistically, I think she was telling me that I wasn’t very good and wasn’t going to become very good either. Pierre Fournier, the blessed high priest, was a herald of the sacred texts of the fountainhead Johann Sebastian Bach. And I, unsightly adolescent, was unworthy of the priesthood. I should become an accountant, maybe. Or a mass murderer.

For a long time I struggled with the high priests inside my head, telling me that “my Bach” wasn’t “as good as Fournier’s” (or Casals’s or— whatever, whomever). I’d play Bach in my practice room, and the voices of the high priests moaned with pain about my intonation, my technique, my articulations, my haircut, you name it.

Then one day I became simple-minded, as it were. I asked myself an innocent little question. How would I play if I just decided to enjoy my own intimate relationship with the ambiguous blueprint, with all that “Bach-related information” that had come my way over the decades? How about I stop chasing Fournier’s ghost, and start chasing Bach’s ghost instead?

I went there. I ignored the musicologists, the cellists and non-cellists whom I’ve heard play over the years, my old teacher’s warnings, professional standards of technique, social standards of decency. I decided on my tempi, my dynamics, my bow strokes, my rubato, my everything. And I finally played “The Six Suites by Pedro de Alcantara and J. S. Bach,” in full ownership of my subjective half of the deal.

Did I play well? Such a question implies objective standards that point toward a thing called “reality.” Fournier probably wouldn’t have thought that I played well, but as it happens Fournier is also dead. His standards don’t count.

Did I enjoy myself? I was as happy as a barefoot three-year-old in a sandbox, playing without adult supervision. In my subjective perception I build castles, palaces, and entire cities using Bach’s blueprints, or what was left of these blueprints “after the earthquake.” I mean, the earthquake of reality and illusion clashing for supremacy.

In conclusion & in a few words: Bury reality in the sandbox and play with your illusions. No, no, sorry! Bury your illusions in the sandbox and enjoy reality in all its glory.

Reality & Illusion, part 4: Bach, Dead and Reborn

I love the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. On my list of greatest composers of all time, he shares first place with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

When I was 14 I heard the late Pierre Fournier, a great French cellist, at a concert in my hometown. He played César Franck’s sonata for cello and piano (originally composed for violin and piano) and Bach’s Sixth Suite (originally composed for the five-string violoncello piccolo da spalla), among other pieces. The morning after his recital I decided to become a professional musician. Subsequently I heard him in two other live performances, one in New York and one in London. I collected some of his recordings, including his Bach Suites.

Here's Fournier in action. 

I heard Janos Starker play the Fifth Suite in São Paulo. I heard Anner Bijlsma play several suites in a single program in New York. I heard Maurice Gendron play the Second Suite in London. (As it happens, I also took master classes with these three great cellists; I played for them and received their feedback, though not on Bach’s Suites.) I heard plenty of cellists of my own generation play movements and whole suites. My LP collection of old included the complete Casals set, the Fournier set, and the Fifth Suite played by Aldo Parisot, with whom I studied for two years in grad school. My CD collection includes two period-performance sets, one of which played wholly on the violoncello da spalla.

Bach wrote three sonatas for viola da gamba and harpsichord. I performed all three, sometimes with piano, sometimes with harpsichord. I heard Bach’s flute sonatas, both solo and accompanied, multiple times. I heard Bach’s keyboard music played on the piano, the organ, the harpsichord, and the clavichord, and I played a few of those pieces myself at the piano. I heard his orchestral pieces, and played several of them in my youth—the Brandenburg Concertos, the Suites, a violin concerto or two. I heard the Passions and learned a couple of recitatives with my first singing teacher. I heard some of the cantatas, some of the oratorios, many of the trio sonatas. I know the six sonatas and partitas for violin solo by heart. As a teacher and coach, I’ve looked closely at many of Bach’s compositions, helping pianists, violinists, and singers—among others—figure out what’s going on and how best to learn the compositions and perform them.

It's quite paradoxal. Bach seems very present in my life. Yet Bach doesn’t exist.

What exist are my perceptions of Bach; my perceptions of Fournier and Starker playing Bach; my memories of my perceptions of Fournier, playing—more than forty years ago—an ephemeral, subjective version of an incomplete and ambiguous blueprint.

It’s how it goes, inevitably, for all of us. Using tools that we manipulate subjectively—the tools of sight and sound, the tools of analytical thinking, the tools of emotion and intuition—we take some “Bach-related information” (which could be a printed score or something learned by ear or something we’ve culled from a thousand disparate experiences and encounters) and we use all that information to shape “our Bach.”

And then we go psychotic and say, “This is Bach.” Or, “This is by Bach.” Or, “Bach composed this.”

No, no, and no.

You ought to say, “This is me, fashioned in a Bach costume.” “This is by me, as the result of an ongoing process that includes Bach-related information.” “I composed this, borrowing from Bach and multiple other sources going back decades. Strangely, every note in it ‘looks and sounds’ like the notes on a printed score with Bach’s name on it. Don’t you love those extensive, unexplainable coincidences?”

When Johann Sebastian Bach played the music of J. S. Bach way back when, "Bach was Bach." When I play the music of J. S. Bach today, “Bach isn't Bach.” He's . . . a hybrid, a body-snatched 300-year-old Brazilian-Prussian undead mutant.

A thing of beauty.

I’ll bypass the impossible task of delineating reality and illusion, and I’ll say that I prefer the psychosis in which Bach doesn’t exist to the psychosis in which Bach exists.

The moral of the story? It's a story in itself. Come back soon. 

Reality & Illusion, part 3: A Cellist, a Pianist, and a Composer Enter a Bar

I've been posting about reality and illusion, using the music of J. S. Bach as my starting point, and my experiences playing Bach's cello suites as the backbone of the discussion. And I've been trying to ask a strange question. Do the Six Suites for Solo Cello exist? Does Bach himself exist?

I think all is illusion—or, rather, our subjective approach to Bach and to anything else "is" the reality. Bach’s Suites don’t exist as an absolute quantity or quality, as something forever unchanging, as something that all observers can agree upon with any degree of certainty. Like the quantum physicists who believe that the physical world doesn’t exist outside your perception of it, I believe that Bach’s Suites don’t exist outside what you make them to be—in your mind, your ears, your cello or marimba playing, your emotions, your thoughts, your family history, and everything else that forms the entity known as “you.” (BTW, quantum physicists believe that you don’t exist either, or me, or anyone or anything else. But this isn’t pertinent to this discussion.)

It is, however, exceedingly easy to fall prey to the illusion of the Suites’ reality, and to conduct your life as if they were, indeed, real.

If you believe that the Suites exist, you practice the cello in a certain way. You think long and hard about historicity, Bach’s intentions, the acoustic properties of the Baroque cello (or the viola da spalla or the violoncello da span or the . . .) and the environment where the Suites were originally performed, the manuscripts by Bach’s wife and students, what the scholars think, what the musicologists think, and a thousand other considerations.

If you believe that they’re illusory, you practice in a whole other way. You may or may not pay attention to the musicological issues. You may or may not try to find out how the Baroque cello (or the viola da spalla or the . . .) sounded like. You may or may not compare different editions. You may or may not listen to the highly regarded scholar-performers who give period-instrument performances. You may or may not listen to Casals, Ma, Rostropovich, or anyone else.

One attitude says, “You can’t start that Sarabande on an up-bow. Nobody would have done it in Bach’s time.” The other says, “How would it sound like if you started that Sarabande on an up-bow?”

One attitude says, “Certain things are nonnegotiable.” The other says, “Everything is possible.”

There are merits and demerits to both approaches. Some disciplined musicians have given a lot of thought to historical, acoustic, and aesthetic issues; shaped their techniques to follow unyielding strictures; and given marvelous performances as a result. Others who have thought many of these lofty thoughts have given terrible performances. I once attended a concert by a star pioneer of the period-instrument movement. I left in the intermission, regretting the time and money wasted. Same with the everything-is-possible crowd. Thirty-five years ago I heard an unforgettable performance of the Third Suite on the marimba, played with divine beauty by a young man at a street fair in New York City. And I’ve heard plenty of performers unconstrained by taste, technique, or any degree of self-awareness do unspeakable things to Bach.

What does it all mean, in practice? What is a musician to do with all this metaphysical information?

The reason why András Schiff got me thinking is that some people think the music of J. S. Bach shouldn’t be played on the modern piano. It wasn’t “meant” to be played on the piano. It was “meant” to be played on the clavichord, a lovely plinky-plink instrument known to have been a favorite of Bach’s. According to this view, the mechanisms of the piano are in antagonism with the notes, phrases, and musical structures as conceived by Bach, and it’s a musical, sonic, aesthetic, historical mistake to play Bach on the piano.

Well, I think Bach’s keyboard music, much like the cello suites, doesn’t exist as an absolute entity. What exists is the inevitable, necessary, deeply personal, all-too-human interaction between the player and a vaguely delineated object called “the score.”

The interaction between the score and the player is subjective, and so is the interaction between the listener and the entity now known as the-interaction-between-the-music-and-the player. I hear András Schiff do his subjective thing, and I have a subjective reaction of pleasure, even of love. It’s a love triangle: Bach, Schiff, and Alcantara, united in a single, continuous experience. Bach passed away centuries ago, and he’s really not thinking about Schiff or me or anyone else. Schiff has no idea that I exist—or perhaps he has an abstract idea of having many listeners, but he doesn’t play “for me” in person. And yet, when I listen to Schiff play Bach, we three are one. In that moment, “I am Schiff, I am Bach.”

The Zen teacher Shunryu Suzuki Roshi talks beautifully about how a certain form of listening creates a union between the sound and the listener.

Come back soon, and I'll tell you a ghost story.

Reality & Illusion, part 2: Bach's Invisible Cello

In my last blog post I remarked that listening to the pianist András Schiff playing the music of J. S. Bach got me meditating about reality and illusion.

I first studied Bach’s music as a 14-year-old cellist, growing up in São Paulo, Brazil. Bach composed six suites for solo cello. The sixth of them he wrote for a five-stringed instrument tuned like a standard cello (from the bottom up, C G D A) with an added E string. Some well-trained minds speculate that Bach never meant his pieces for the cello as we know the instrument today, but for a large viola-like instrument held from the player’s shoulder by a strap. This instrument is called by some people a violoncello da spalla . . . and by other people a violoncello piccolo da spalla or violoncello da span . . . and by some other people a viola da spalla. It’s said that Bach and other composers of the time (three centuries ago) called this instrument violoncello.

Here's a spirited violoncello da spalla performance of a movement from Bach's Sixth Suite. The performer is Sergey Malov.

Now let's go back to the 14-year-old kid in Brazil. Playing a modern cello made from materials that didn’t exist in Bach’s time, the kid buys a score for a piece composed for some other instrument; and the score is in fact a Frenchman’s heavy-handed interpretation of Bach’s wife’s dictation of the piece, and no one can be sure how she ever went about taking down that dictation in the first place. Reality or illusion? Was I really playing Bach's actual cello suites? Or was I having some sort of rather subjective head trip?

Over the centuries since their composition, these pieces went through multiple transformations in the minds and hearts of musicians. After Bach’s death most of his music “disappeared” from public awareness for a while, until (as all students in music history classes learn) the Romantic composer Felix Mendelssohn “rediscovered” Bach and advocated his music anew—some of the music anyway, which was then performed in the fashion of Mendelssohn’s time.

The cello suites stayed out of public awareness for much longer. From time to time they were used as technical studies, and very occasionally some fool would play a movement or two in performance. I say a “fool” because the suites weren’t really considered “music.” (Reality and illusion, anyone?)

Pablo Casals finally brought the suites out from oblivion, studying them in depth, performing them in public as works of art, and recording them as a complete set in 1938 and 1939. Here's the great man, performing the First Suite in 1954.

Since Casals’s time, the Suites have become an integral part of the canonic repertory. Thousands of cellists of all ages and abilities have performed the pieces hundreds of thousands of times all over the world. These cellists practiced passages from the pieces hundreds of millions of times. Some notes in some suites have been played more than a billion times. I myself made a modest contribution to these statistics, adding roughly five thousand attempts at playing some of the suites in my practice room and in public from 1972 to 2013. Or ten thousand attempts, maybe. But certainly not more than fifty thousand attempts, at most.

Besides the thousands of cellists, tens of thousands of other musicians also studied or performed the suites, in whole or in part—including violists, trombonists, flutists, guitarists, lute players, marimba players, you name it.

According to an Internet source, there are over 80 printed editions of the suites, some claiming to be as close to Bach’s intended ideas as possible, others making no claims of any sort. I don’t know how many commercially available recordings there are, but a quick search of “Bach cello suites” on Amazon.com shows 1,482 choices as of January 14, 2013, with the top two spots being the complete CD sets by Yo-Yo Ma and Mstislav Rostropovitch.

Here’s a nifty thing as regards our discussion. This is how these top spots are listed at Amazon:

The 6 Unaccompanied Cello Suites Complete by Yo-Yo Ma and J. S. Bach (2010) 

Bach: Cello Suites by Mstislav Rostropovich and Johann Sebastian Bach (1995)

The players’ names are listed before the composer’s. The Suites are as if “by Yo-Yo Ma first and foremost, and also by J. S. Bach.” It could be a simple matter of information display, or a simple matter of marketing considerations. Or it could be food for thought if you’re interested in figuring out reality from illusion. Other choices in information display are available. The #4 item on Amazon’s page, for instance, is listed as “Bach: Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach (2003)”, with the name of the performer not shown at all. (You can find out easily, of course. Click on the link for details. All right, I’ll tell you anyway: It’s Pablo Casals.)

Is it crazy for Yo-Yo Ma to be listed as a co-creator of the Bach Suites, or is it crazy for Pablo Casals not to acknowledge that he’s a co-creator of the Bach Suites?

To put it differently, do the 6 Suites for Unaccompanied Cello, by Johann Sebastian Bach (born 1685, died 1750) exist? Are they “real,” or are they “illusory”?

Does Bach himself exist?

Stay tuned.

Reality & Illusion, part 1: J. S. Bach at McDonald's

The other night I spent some time on YouTube watching the pianist András Schiff playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. I’ve never seen Schiff perform live, and until now I wasn’t that familiar with his playing. I enjoyed it tremendously. His Bach sparkles and swings; his Bach speaks, laughs, and cries. It’s quite something.

Watching and listening to him got me thinking about reality and illusion.

I first studied Bach’s Six Suites for solo cello in my adolescence. I was probably 14 when I sight-read the first suite, working from the one edition I was able to buy in my native São Paulo, in the classical-music backwater that Brazil was then (and, to a good degree, still is now). The edition was signed by Paul Bazelaire, a French cellist who was born in 1886 and died in 1958 (that's him on the cute photo). To Bach’s music, Bazelaire added dynamics, phrase markings, fingerings, metronome markings, and a thousand other indications. Later I bought several other editions of the suites. Over the decades I studied all the suites and performed several of them. I know them by heart, and like most cellists I only need to hear three notes from any excerpt to recognize which movement in which suite those three notes come from.

What is reality, what is illusion? The metaphysicians have been debating this for millennia. There are many viewpoints on the issue. A minority—a tiny minority—believes that reality is an objective situation shared by everyone. Some say that the whole of humanity is someone’s huge dream, with no objective existence. Others claim that reality is what you make of it. A guy and his girlfriend sitting quietly across each other at a Macdonald’s are in two distinct, separate, and perhaps even mutually exclusive realities. The girl is having feelings, thoughts, thoughts about her feelings, and feelings about her thoughts—some of which involve the guy, or a version of the guy she imagines day by day. The guy is communing with the salt, fat, and sugar, and he’d be surprised if the girl suddenly entered his awareness and addressed him. “Don’t interrupt me,” he’d say. And his using these many words would deplete his energies and justify his ordering another Big Mac.

The idea that the guy and his girlfriend share a single, objective reality is ludicrous.

When a performer views a score, metaphysical questions regarding illusion and reality are in fact not only pertinent but downright urgent. Three hundred years ago, a human being called Johann Sebastian Bach, living in a country that today is called Germany but that back then didn’t actually exist as a country in the modern conception of the world, composed a piece for solo cello. He seems never to have written the piece down, but his wife wrote it down for him, and so did a couple of his students. How? Did they hear Bach play it on the cello? Or did Bach play the notes on the clavichord, and the wife and the students wrote down the notes as if for the cello?

How come the scores came out a little different—in pitches, flats and sharps, slurs and articulations? If the versions differ (and remember, no version is in Bach’s hand), is one right and the others wrong? How can we tell? Is it important for us to be able to tell? How did Bach intend his piece to be played? And if he had specifics in mind, must we try to obey him? Does that mean that there’s only one way to play the piece—one legitimate, approved, sanctioned, sanctified way that renders all other ways criminal or sinful?

Nobody agrees on the questions—or on the answers. Watch this space for further developments.

A master communicator (and what a shirt!

Some months ago I blogged several times about musicians who don't move a lot when they perform. The subject merits repeated study, so let's look at something fantastic.

These two Brazilian guys here are experts on the art of improvising poetry and songs in public, in the style known as "repentista" in Portuguese. (Repentista comes from the word for "sudden.") They are both masters of the art . . . but the guy on the red shirt is exceedingly poised and well directed. You don't have to understand Portuguese to marvel at his back, his calm, his strength, and his communication skills!

Condensed energy is the name of the game.

How Musicians Can Benefit from the Alexander Technique

Robert Rickover interviewed me for his series Body Learning. Click here to listen to my interview, How Musicians Can Benefit from the Alexander Technique.

Here's how it starts!

Robert Rickover: Pedro could you begin by giving our listeners a short description or definition of the Alexander Technique?

Pedro de Alcantara: I think the Alexander Technique is a way for you to solve a problem by putting the problem aside and working on yourself instead. Focusing on yourself, centering yourself, calming down, opening up your mind. If you really do all of that, most problems tend to disappear. That's why I titled my first book for musicians INDIRECT PROCEDURES. When you're trying to solve a problem, instead of doing it directly, you go in this indirect way where the problem is less important than your own thoughts and actions. By clarifying your thoughts and actions, the problem could disappear.

One of the best musicians, ever!

I recently watched an installment of the PBS documentary The Blues. One of the musicians featured in it astounded me: the pianist, singer, and comedian Martha Davis, who died at age 42 in 1960. She’s a brilliant performer, in total command of her materials and, more important, of herself. Watch these clips and wonder at her ease, her sense of timing, the latent powers in her playing and her singing, and her wicked sense of humor.

After enjoying these clips for their tremendous entertainment value, watch them again and see what you can learn from Martha Davis in practice. For instance, it seems to me that her poise of head, neck, back, shoulders, and arms plays a role in her mastery (as it does with Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, and all the other jazz greats I’ve blogged about in recent months).

I also think that Davis has found a perfect balance between “doing things for her own pleasure” and “doing things for the pleasure of her public.” In other words, she cares a lot about her public . . . and she probably doesn’t give a hoot about other people might think of her. Suppose the public really wanted her to push her head back and down into her neck, roll her eyes, and sweat up a storm in a display of “feeling.” Would she do it? I doubt it. She shares her talent with the public in a straightforward and casual manner that is also very generous and touching. But she doesn’t make a show of herself, so to speak. With her, it’s the materials that count—the rhythms, sounds, words, and jokes—and not her emotions about those materials. She’s an extravert but not a narcissist. My theory is that she loves herself without being in love with herself.

All right, enough with the fancy theories. I’m just going to watch her clips again (and again . . . and again!).

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tagged Martha Davis, best musician, comedy, piano, the blues in Tips for Musicians

Reader Comments (2)

Pedro you site is positively inspirational. I love the Martha Davis Clip - I have seen this before, but was so glad to be reminded of it. Every time I feel a bit bogged down, I explore your site - so full of quality stuff. Thank you

February 14, 2011 | http://crpsmobility.wordpress.com

I'm glad you enjoy my site . . . Davis is quite something. She died young (42) imagine what wonders she'd have produced had she lived longer.

February 15, 2011 | Pedro

Music hath charms . . .

The playwright and poet William Congreve – no, I don’t know much about him either – included the following line in THE MOURNING BRIDE, all the way back in 1697: “Music hath charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak.”

His quote sometimes gets mangled, and people remember it as “Music hath charms to soothe a savage beast.” Either way I think we can all agree with him. Music is a wonderful, marvelous, divine, magical thing that can have the deepest effects upon all savages.

In this clip we see and hear the soothing, healing effects of music. Blood-hungry feral monsters become completely calm after listening to the mellifluous song of a Zen master. Rocks soften, knotted oaks bend, and the savage breasts become so civilized you could even let them eat dinner at your table.

Or not.

Merry Christmas!

A Model of Happiness and Joy

If you know anything about Wayne Newton at all, you probably think of a mainstream American singer who made his career mostly in Las Vegas, a big man with a big personality and a complicated personal and business life. But there’s another side to him. He was a sort of child prodigy, performing in public from a very early age. In fact Newton was a supremely talented young man—a singer of great charm and elegance, with a perfect sense of rhythm and a magnetic yet discreet presence on stage. It’s worth your while to watch this clip of a 26-year-old Wayne Newton singing one of his trademark songs, “Danke Schoen,” in 1968.

From head to toe, Newton is energized and directed. His head and neck are poised, and his shoulders relaxed. His legs and feet move only a little bit—but, oh, how intelligently, how creatively! The song gets bigger and more exciting moment by moment, but Newton doesn’t lose his cool at all. Instead he just “opens up his energy field,” so to speak. His sense of rhythm and phrasing is supremely sophisticated, every note and inflection sparkling with joie de vivre. And his voice is the very sound of happiness. If you’re a singer, instrumentalist, conductor, dancer, or actor . . . watch and learn!

The Oppositional Principle in Music, Part 7: Masters & God(s)

 The Oppositional Principle has had many adherents over the decades and centuries. Here’s how the playing of Johann Sebastian Bach was described in his lifetime.

At the clavichord Bach is virtually still. He plays effortlessly, the movements of his fingers 'hardly perceptible.' Those fingers not in action remain motionless, 'quietly in position.' The rest of his body takes even '[less] part in his playing.' His hands do not contort or register any strain even in the most difficult passages. Bach plays expressively but his body expresses nothing. (Quoted by David Yearsley in Bach and the Meaning of Counterpoint.)

The bad news is that there are no YouTube clips of Bach playing the clavichord. The good news is that there are multiple clips of someone who corresponds to the above description of Bach.

I’m going to let Chick Corea (a master of the Oppositional Principle) introduce the guy in question. There are masters and there are gods . . . most musicians would agree that Art Tatum is a god. Well, no. Art Tatum is God.

In my next post I'll make a detailed study of his playing.

The Oppositional Principle in Music, Part 6: Samer Totah and Kenneth Snelson, Masters of Balance

Recently I’ve been writing about what I call the Oppositional Principle for musicians—the idea that you may be able to play, sing, or conduct better if you keep your body relatively still, moving little beyond the needed gestures of your technique. The still body can condense and distribute energy more powerfully than the moving body.

It all depends on how you do it, of course!

Your stillness ought to be the result of many tensions brought to balance, like a Kenneth Snelson sculpture in which multiple forces in multiple dimensions all contribute to the overall stability of the structure. If you organize your forces in this way, then music will “charge you up.” The fluid energies of music will oppose your stable forces, and music itself will come through condensed and powerful.

After you visit Snelson’s beautiful website, come back here and watch Samer Totah, a great oud player who focuses his movements where they can carry the greatest power.