Seven Cookies

I recently published a blog post that the Thesaurus called abstruse, recondite, and can-of-worms. I’m offering you, the reader, these cookies as a digestive.

1. Not everything is simple. It’s helpful to accept the nature of a situation, idea, person, or action: If it’s simple, accept it as simple; if it’s complex, don’t you start hoping that it be anything other than complex.

2. To a listener in a state of great agitation, your simple words don’t necessarily come across as simple. Talking reason to craziness is crazy!

3. Between a dumb answer and an intelligent question, what would you choose?

4. Knowledge is like a serpent in soap. It “slithers.”

5. Too much light is blinding. The juxtaposition of light and shadow makes things easier to see.

6. To sense that you’re confused is more useful than to blame the confusion all around you.

7. It’s costly to be sure, if you happen to be sure and wrong.

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Three Lifestyles

Grammar is dangerous, and grammar is helpful. To put it differently, grammar determines who you are. You have to watch out for its traps, and also seek its benefits.

A coffee mug is a noun, which we can also call a thing or an objet. It wants to exist as an objective reality; or, rather, we like to believe that the thing or object is, you know, objective. A coffee mug is a thing, unchangeable until you break it.

But love too is grammatically a noun, as are “beauty,” “idea,” “fear,” “performance,” and “confusion.” This is tricky, because you might really start thinking of love as an object or a thing with its hoped-for objective dimension.

A concert is coming up. You need to “give a performance.” Then you put yourself in an object-oriented frame of mind, where the performance—a noun—becomes a thing with an apparent objective reality. This is the “noun frame of mind,” with its own practicalities. It tends to make performers very nervous and frustrated.

How about you put yourself in the “verb frame of mind”? Instead of “giving a performance,” you “perform.” This, too, has its own practicalities.

Become a verb, and you’ll heal yourself from being a noun.

Action happens in time and space. It expands and contracts. It changes, sometimes unpredictably. The thing called “a performance” has measurable parameters: “I want my performance to be like this, and like this, and like that.” The action of performance is less easily measured. “I performed, and—wow. I can’t tell you what happened. In the act of performing I became transformed, and so did the public. Not everyone enjoyed it, but—wow.” Unlike a fixed object, action evolves, so to speak.

Noun: “My love for you is a coffee mug.” Verb: “I love you like flowing steam pressing against tightly packed freshly ground coffee in a De’Longhi Magnifica, no milk, no sugar, thank you. And keep the change.”

It’s not the same love, is it?

It’s a big deal to pass from being noun-oriented to verb-oriented, from thing-oriented to action-oriented, from object-objective oriented to subject-subjective oriented. I’m dying to Google-translate this last sentence into German and credit it to Freud or Goethe, but instead I’ll translate it into Fridge Magnet and credit it to Siddhartha: “Love is an action, not an object.”

Ah, irresistible.

Freud image by Evgeny Parfenov.

Believe it or not, this post isn’t about the difference between object and action, noun and verb, coffee mug and caffeine jolt. Everything so far was just the olives before the tajine (“die Oliven vor der Tajine“), the anesthetics before the surgery (“die Anästhesie vor der Operation“), the cartoon before the feature (“die Micky Maus vor den Sieben Samurai”).

I like reading, studying, and learning. It’s probably the main aspect of my existence, a constant, a defining trait. An example: for the past few years I’ve been learning Spanish, thanks to books, newspapers, films, documentaries, meetings, encounters, and also lessons with a marvelous teacher. Another example: most days I visit Wikipedia and read up on stuff. Some of it is pretty straightforward: biographies of musicians, the rise and fall of the Holy Roman Empire, mating habits of extinct insects. (Liar.) I read about Johannes Brahms, I add information to my knowledge of the great composer, and I check YouTube for works of his that I wasn’t previously familiar with.

And then I try—oh, I try!—reading up on German philosophers. Schopenhauer, for instance. Or Kant or Nietzsche or Kakadu, Graf von Käsespätzle. And by the second paragraph of Kakadu’s page I don’t know what on earth Wikipedia is talking about. However many times I masticate it, the Quietscheentchen Conjecture won’t go down. I spit it out, or as Nietzsche would say, “Ich spucke es aus.”

Another ignominious defeat comes when I tackle quantum mechanics. It doesn’t matter if I approach it in English or in Sanskrit. (1) I don’t understand it. (2) Nobody does! Mathematicians and physicians. Werner Heisenberg. Ernst Schrödinger. Marlene Dietrich. But—and this is what this blog post is about—the fact that we don’t understand the probability fields of quantum mechanics doesn’t have to stop us from embracing it as a life principle.

I went onto the Marvel Fandom website (home of 250,000+ fan wikis). I don’t know Kakadu about Marvel characters and stories, but the website had something helpful to say about the probability field. Abridged:

The probability field is the fifth unifying force in the Grand Unification Theory (along with gravity, electromagnetic, and the strong and weak nuclear forces). As it governs reality, its manipulation allows various super-powered individuals to alter reality on a microscopic or even macroscopic level. The term was first applied to that which mediates between space-time and consciousness by neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles (1903-1997, Nobel Prize 1963). . . . The whole universe is enfolded in everything and each thing is enfolded in the whole; and it is the probability field that controls and connects all things.

Some Marvel characters who have the superpower to manipulate the probability field include Black Cat, Longshot, and Scarlet Witch. And, no, I have no idea who they are.

Let’s pick a score by Johannes Brahms—the “Deutsches Requiem” will do. It’s tempting to consider it as an object, a thing, a well-delineated entity that you can see, touch, and read. But its object-like dimension is secondary to your subjective action of reading it, and also interpreting it in rehearsal and performance. Brahms becomes a verb: “I’m Brahmsizing all week. It feels good.”

According to my newly acquired Marvel wisdom, the “Deutsches Requiem” isn’t an object or an action at all. It’s a probability field. It “mediates between space-time and consciousness,” that is, it offers you a labyrinth of vibrational meaning in which you, Brahms, and the rest of the whole universe become folded-in-one like a lawn chair in a hurricane. Longshot sings “Der Gerechten Seelen sind in Gottes Hand” in G-flat major. Scarlet Witch plays first horn, and Black Cat plays the triangle. The Fridge Magnet says, “Love is an action, not an object.” Marvel says, “Love isn’t an action nor an object. Love is a probability field.” The field is intrinsically uncertain. It looks and behaves differently according to who occupies it. To explore the field is to transform it. You pay attention, and the field lights up and moves. You stop paying attention, and the field dissipates and vanishes. The field is a version of you, and you’re a version of the field.

Love is just an illustration. Everything can be seen as (1) an object, (2) an action, or (3) a probability field. Each of these dimensions comes with its practicalities.

It’s good to be verb-oriented and subject-subjective-oriented. It really is wonderful. But the ultimate psychic transformation lies in going from object to action to probability field. Action implies intention and agency, choosing this path over this other path. The probability field implies infinite complexity and deep connection, all paths walked at the same time, excluding nothing and embracing everything. As Freud once said to Goethe, “Der dumme Brasilianer weiß nicht, wovon er redet, Kakadu!” Translated to Fridge Magnet: “Don’t worry, be happy.”

It’s a superpower.

Read this short blog post if you didn’t understand this long one!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

How to become perfect

Recently I led a music workshop in Paris—or, more exactly, a workshop on thinking, feeling, doing, sensing, talking, listening, sharing, enjoying, giving, receiving, analyzing, and celebrating, some of it related to making music. And some of it related to life.

Imagine a musician playing for someone else: a lover, a family member, a teacher; a colleague, a conservatory director, a competition jury; a dozen distracted listeners in a bar, a thousand attentive listeners in a concert hall. These situations are all manifestations of the same principle, which we might call “from the composer to you, via me.” A musician playing by herself, to herself is also manifesting the principle, because . . . because the walls have ears, and what will the walls say?

And the musician gets a little nervous. Very nervous. Windmill-in-a-storm-nervous. H-bomb-nervous. I’d-rather-slit-my-wrists-than-play-for-the-walls-nervous.

I think this is a central feature of music-making, and a central feature of life for everyone. If you’re not a musician, read on and mentally translate the post to suit your needs. Vast subject, brief discussion, we scratch the surface, the surface scratches us back.

Audiences (“other people”) have expectations (“problems”). By wanting or hoping to fulfill other people’s expectations, you (1) usurp their role and (2) sabotage your priorities. To begin with, you can’t really know what is in another guy’s mind and heart; the other guy probably doesn’t know himself. You make assumptions about expectations. More precisely, you make unwarranted assumptions about other people’s mysterious and contradictory expectations, or as Sigmund Freud used to say, “oy vey ¡ay caramba! oh la la.” To meet another guy’s expectations is an impossible job, and it’s not even your job. It’s the other guy’s job to marinate his own expectations, slow-roast them, and eat them with salsa picante.

What to do? “My job is to show you my growth, my change, as it happens in this room, in this workshop, in this rehearsal, in this performance. I show you ‘my today,’ and if you’re curious about ‘my tomorrow’ please come back tomorrow. Do you know how painful it’d be for me to show you not ‘my today’ but ‘someone else’s yesterday’?”

A colleague and friend of mine once told me that one of her students was very disappointed with me—a student I’ve never met. “He admired you a lot because of your book, but then he went on YouTube and saw what you were doing these days.” This made me laugh. A stranger used to love me, and now he hates me. Should I have cherished his anonymous and undeclared love, and should I now fear his hatred, just as anonymous and only declared through a third party? His love and hatred aren’t my business. My business is to live, breathe, sense, react, make a choice, take an initiative, and perhaps grow and change. You may witness some of it: through a book, a blog post, a YouTube video clip, a greeting, a lesson, a joke funny or unfunny, a moment of impatience or thoughtlessness, my quirks and flaws (or, as Freud famously wrote, “Meine Warts-und-Farts”) (in his 1910 treatise Der Die Das, Des Den Dem, Dada Mama) (which he didn’t write but actually dictated) (to his nanny) (who was called Cigar) (but let’s not go there).

Everything you do today is a preparation for everything that you’ll do tomorrow. If this isn’t the case, “there is no tomorrow.” Baby to toddler, child to adolescent, 15 to 16, 16 to 17, and onward evermore. There have been a few cases in which a toddler went straight to old age, skipping the in-between stages. These cases are generally considered tragic. Intermediate steps are necessary, obligatory, inevitable, desirable, usually fun, occasionally a pain in the—wait. What am I saying?

Everything is an intermediate step to something else.

It’s an absolute law, from which there are no exceptions.

Practicing, performing, passing an audition, entering a competition, winning, losing, anything that a musician does is an intermediate step. To deny the intermediateness of life is an existential illness as grave as the Seelenjucken, the Angstsuppe, the Mutterkomplex. Freud couldn’t stand it when his patients Denied the Intermediateness, and he delighted in labeling different shades of the disease according to the physiognomy (nose, chin, earlobes, Koiffure) of the sufferer. If you don’t believe me, look up his posthumous monograph Telefunken im Volkswagen.

How many intermediate steps? Dozens, hundreds, thousands—depending on the task and the person. How long? Seconds, minutes, centuries—depending on the task and the person. But it goes much faster if you embrace the intermediateness.

Everything, every last thing is intermediate and in flux. Books get revised and rewritten. The Bible is three thousand years old but it’s still being tweaked, in translations and interpretations. Also, the Catholic, the Protestant, and the Jewish bibles are quite distinct. There doesn’t exist “one Bible, fixed and objective.” A musician might record the same piece multiple times in his or her career. The pioneering cellist Anner Bylsma, for instance, recorded two complete sets of the solo suites by Johann Sebastian Bach, in 1979 and 1992. Does the later recording invalidate the earlier one? Should Bylsma be punished for having at his disposal more than one way of playing the same piece? There doesn’t exist “one performance, one recording, fixed and objective.”

Compositions, too, get revised and transformed. Johannes Brahms published two versions of his Piano Trio in B major, in 1854 and 1889. The two versions are significantly different, and some people would consider them different pieces as opposed to two versions of the same piece. Mahler and Brückner kept revising their symphonies long after their premieres and long after they had been published in print. Mozart kept composing some of his masterpieces in the very act of performing them: the composition was partly born of the performance. A composition isn’t a “thing,” but a field of possibilities, some of which are crystallized more readily than others.

Logically enough, when you embrace the intermediateness of everything you solve many problems (though usually not the Mutterkomplex). You practice more gladly, you perform more willingly, you think of yourself more tenderly. “I’m intermediating between yesterday and tomorrow, yay! Come to my party!”

Okay, I talked too much and told too many Freud jokes (or “Freud’s rhoids”). In repentance, I offer you a numbered list with constructive advice.

1. Play the same composition or snippet multiple times in a public setting, like a workshop or in that bar with the Inattentive Dozen Listeners. Play and enjoy, play and tweak, play and exaggerate, play and vary, play and play.

2. Practice out of pleasure, not out of obligation. When asked why he continued to practice the cello three hours a day at the age of 93, the cellist, conductor, and composer Pablo Casals answered, "I'm beginning to notice some improvement.”

3. When you get really good at something, become a beginner in something else. Got the hang of playing the cello? Take up the French horn. Zen mind, beginner’s mind. And share your beginnerness. If you embrace intermediateness, your beginnerness is more lovely than the expertness of someone who refuses intermediateness.

4. On the eve of his foretold death, Socrates received a visitor. The visitor was surprised to find Socrates studying the rudiments of Persian. “Why, if you’re going to die tomorrow?” “I’ve always wanted to learn Persian,” Socrates answered. “It’s a beautiful language.”

5. Perfection is the acceptance of imperfection.

6. Learn the Ultimate Question; to it, give the Ultimate Answer. The learning is immediate, as long as you sync your breath and your heartbeat. “Do you love being perfect?” “Yes, totally! Thank you!”

7. Language is strange and revealing. “This blog post is now finished.” “This blogger is now finished!” No! I have finished, but I’m not finished! I am famished, but I’m not Finnish! I am famous, but I’m not fishy! The famous famished Finnish fish is finished. Or, to put it differently: let’s be careful about using the word “finished” as regards our artistic processes.

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Other Helicopter

A little while ago I posted a paragraph on LinkedIn. It was part of a weekly series I’ve been doing this year, using photos that I’ve taken in the Place des Vosges to illustrate the symbolic dimensions of life, with a little metaphysics and some humor thrown into the mix.

A friendly connection on LinkedIn reached out to me. He was puzzled by my post. “What does all of this refer to, Pedro?”

Ah. Yes. Right.

Thanks to my friendly connection, I got thinking about the nature of communication, about ways of seeing the world and ways of talking about it, about potentially incomprehensible things that—that, well, we don’t comprehend and that leave us baffled, puzzled, or worse.

Here’s the photo that illustrates my post.

 And here’s my original post.

 52 Mondays #31: August 2, Levitation
 
We can fly. Perhaps not very high and not for very long, but we leave the ground and we move up and away. We fly! No planes needed, no air traffic controllers, no airports, no duty free; just legs and life. Some of us get really good at it—Cristiano Ronaldo, for instance, can fly more than seven meters aboveground and hover for as long as five minutes. And some of us get so good, but so good at it that we fly to the moon and back, at the speed of light, without leaving our armchairs. This technique, which is called “esplodere in testa,” was developed by Leonardo da Vinci in 1519, building on Dante’s “elicottero dell'anima” from around 1321. Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!

Your feet literally leave the ground when you run, jump, or skip. It’s what my photo shows: a boy running, his feet not touching the ground. The boy isn’t flying the same way that a Boeing 787 flies from Charles de Gaulle to JFK. But, look! His feet aren’t touching the ground! So, he’s kinda flying, just a little bit, don’t you see! I’m using my snapshot to trigger a sort of head trip. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could fly without wings, with the power of our feet and legs and mind . . .”

The post starts with a brief affirmative statement: We can fly. Sure: using planes, gliders, helicopters, rockets, maybe a jetpack, a parachute, a trampoline. Or by jumping from a burning building to a safe net provided by the firemen below. There are many actual technical ways for humans to fly. My affirmative statement, however, risks creating confusion, because I’m not talking primarily about physical flight. I’m talking about the feeling of flying that we get from dreams, or from surprising experiences in daily life when the excitement of a discovery (or a breakthrough, or some good news, or the solution to a longstanding problem) gives you a high. If you’re high, you’re symbolically flying!

I have a deep dislike of airport duty-free shops. I consider them toxic and perverse. Airport design forces you to walk through the shops and breathe in the allergy-inducing odors of perfume. Shady billionaires who stay out of public view profit mightily from their grip on duty-free shopping. In my post I made a passing reference to duty free as a way of saying that “ideal flying” is different from “habitual flying.” Ideally, you’d “fly free” instead of “duty free.” In this context, duty free becomes a representation of all that’s wrong with commercialism, greed, tobacco pushers, profiteers, tax cheaters, and—“Pedro, calm down. Fly free instead of duty free. We get it!”

Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese soccer player, is one of the greatest athletes of all time. Among other things, he can jump quite high. On YouTube his jumps are often depicted in slow motion, and then it looks as if he's jumping super-high and staying aloft for a long time: he’s flying! In my LinkedIn post I take his ability and exaggerate it: seven meters high, five minutes long, wow. Exaggeration is a lie, but the lie hints at the symbolic truth of perception, imagination, and possibility. Subsequently I took one of Ronaldo’s jumping goals and created a little remix, with my own soundtrack. Now we have exaggeration and distortion in a multimedia setting, at the service of metaphysics. The soundtrack hypnotizes you, the images beguile you, and you become a true believer: “Human flying, with no jetpack, no nothing! I’ve seen it with these very eyes!”

Cristiano Ronaldo is a brilliant innate talent, and he works extremely hard at maintaining and improving his athletic skills. In his own way, he flies admirably. But what about us, average men and women with the character defect of being disembodied introverted intellectuals, unfit and lazy and—hey, we can fly too! Because the kind of flying we’re talking about is an activity of the imagination. And the imagination is the most powerful of all human attributes. We imagine problems (we’re really good at it!) and we imagine solutions (we’re pretty decent at it!). We imagine fears, situations, conversations, relationships, theories, friends, enemies, gods, and devils; we imagine a whole universe. And if we imagine our own flight, up we go: to the moon and back, at the speed of light.

The Leonardo and Dante remarks are jokes that also play the role of “labyrinth entry points.” Leonardo was supremely creative. And a creative spark sometimes feels like an explosion in your head. I Google-translated the expression “explode in the head” into Italian, and "esplodere in testa" was born. I added the date of Leonardo’s death, 1521, which possibly is another joke—maybe Leonardo died from his exploding testa. Or maybe he was already dead when he invented this remarkable creative technique.

Leonardo worked as a military engineer for one of his patrons. It appears that he also designed a sort of pioneering theoretical helicopter, which centuries later would inspire aspects of modern aeronautics. Through a process of free association, the expression "helicopter of the soul" came to my mind while I was day-dreaming about Leonardo. I Google-translated it, and now we have the famous “elicottero dell'anima,” which didn’t exist until I imagined it.

But I decided to assign this invention not to the Leonardo of my imagination, but to the Dante of my imagination. Dante’s La Divina Commedia leads the reader through the passage or ascent from hell to heaven, perhaps the ultimate flight. As with my Leonardo joke, I chose to refer to the year of Dante’s death, 1321. Thanks to it a metaphysically inclined person might get thinking about death, eternity, and all that. Also, isn’t 1321 a lovely number in itself? Say it out loud: one-three-two-ONE! Numerology. Gematria. The Kabbalah. Numbers are wonderful triggers of symbolic speculation, or “labyrinth entry points.” You know . . . the labyrinth of the imagination. The Labyrinth of Life.

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Incidentally, I know very little about Leonardo and Dante (or the Kabbalah or gematria). My jokes don’t demonstrate that I’m erudite; they demonstrate that I’m silly. But Wikipedia is there for you to visit and explore. All you need is a first step: “Dante,” for instance. His Wikipedia page has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which has dozens of hyperlinks to other pages, each of which . . . You’ll esplodere in testa, mamma mia! You can also attempt to read Divina Commedia, in the original or in translation. Life is short, though Dante is eternal. “La vita è breve, ma Dante è eterno.”

I concluded my LinkedIn paragraph with a brief statement. Paraphrasing and plagiarizing George Bernard Shaw, let me quote myself, to spice up the conversation: “Ultimately, it’s very simple: sit, close your eyes, and fly, fly, fly!” This is an abbreviated affirmation of the power of the imagination.

My original paragraph has less than 150 words. My explanation of what I tried to pack into it is ten times longer. The German word for “poet” is Dichter, which comes from Dichte, “density.” The poet condenses language and makes a few words say a lot of things. The language of the symbolic dimension, of metaphor and metaphysics, is necessarily distinct from the language of the material world, of technique and physical facts.

A helicopter manual reads very differently from La Divina Commedia.

To the materially inclined, metaphor seems incomprehensible (and probably reprehensible too). But We The Imaginatively Inclined, we need, we need—we need!—exaggeration, distortion, lies, jokes, allusions, ambiguity, neologisms, fake erudition, uncredited paraphrases, free association, non sequiturs, ad hoc, pro bono, and lies. And jokes. It’s our attempt at grasping the ungraspable, which according to Dante “è la cosa più importante nella vita.”

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Baby Drives a Stick Shift!

Impossible, difficult, easy. This is the archetypal road in life, bumpy but exciting.

Can the baby drive a stick shift? An automatic, maybe—an outside chance. A stick shift, no. The pedal work is out of reach. Actually, some automobile models are designed for very little drivers. But difficulties remain.

via GIPHY

What’s easy is “physically easy.” The baby driving the stick shift along Route 66 is relaxed and happy, from head to toes. Do you know how relaxed are the toes of a relaxed baby? Wonder of wonders. But the easeful state only exists because the baby “doesn’t think difficult.” No doubts, no fears, no suppositions, no preconceived ideas, no excuses, no questions, no pretzels-in-the-pysche (or as Sigmund Freud used to say, “keine Brezeln in der Psyche”).

Easy brain, easy driving. It’s in the Highway Code.

via GIPHY

A situation requires that you do something. Let’s say you’re taking language classes and your teacher asks you to translate a certain phrase from your mother tongue to the foreign one, the alien, the different, the unknown. Your very first reaction might be to think, to feel, and to say out loud: “This is difficult.” Or it might be your second reaction, after you make a feeble half-assed attempt (“halber Arsch,” sagt Sigmund) at a translation. If you try once, twice, ten times, a thousand times and you can’t manage the task, perhaps you may be right in saying that it’s difficult. But if you try zero times or maybe a single buttock (“halber Arsch”), then you don’t really mean, “This task requires quite a lot of expertise, which I lack.” You mean, “I’m being asked to leave my comfort zone. I have emotions, a history, an ingrained fear; very irrational to you, but very real to me, thank you very much! Your request pushes a button, triggers a trigger, triggers a Tiger. This is difficult!”

I’ve witnessed this dozens of times in my teaching career. The amazing thing is that, immediately after saying “This is difficult,” the student goes on to perform the task pretty well, flawlessly even. To my way of thinking, it proves that the statement wasn’t about “the thing itself,” the task, the objective situation. And, also to my way of thinking, it proves that “to acknowledge is to evacuate.”

To share your discomfort with a friendly witness lessens or dissipates the discomfort.

In Sigmund-lingo: Anerkennen heißt evakuieren, und ich spreche kein Deutsch, das ist alles aus dem Internet.

Chicas Malas Hit And Run GIF from Chicasmalas GIFs

There’s the thing, and there’s our perspective on the thing. Our perspective feels so concrete, so embodied in us that we confuse it with the thing. We become sure, sure, sure that we’re thinking and talking about the thing, when in fact we’re thinking and talking about our own selves. We sometimes have a flash of clarity by proxy. “This tax form is impossible to fill,” someone says. “Idiotic bureaucracy!” And we look at the damn form, and it’s pretty straightforward, and the instructions are clear, and all you have to do is to write in a number and check a box. And we understand that our friend has amalgamated his or her deep-seated and long-held emotions with the form, the task, the appliance, the musical instrument, the medical procedure, the social obligation, the—well, you know what I’m talking about.

The thing doesn’t have to be you, and you don’t have to be the thing.

Sigmund, sing your song!

“Das Ding muss nicht du sein,

und du musst nicht das Ding sein.”

via GIPHY

I’ll do a numbered list for you: “The Seven Habits of Highly Confusing Geminis.”

1. Your mind plays a role.

2. Some things are “literally impossible.” Don’t confuse them with things that are “not-literally impossible.”

3. Man or woman not yet born for whom EVERYTHING IS EASY.

4. “Things change.” “You change.” “Your relationship with things change.”

5. Not every numbered list is useful.

6. Just because it’s easy for you it doesn’t mean that “it” is easy.

7. Pedrito, you’ve made it to the end of another blog post! Auf Wiedersehn!

Kid Driving GIF from Kid GIFs

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Rooted

The other day I tested a hypothesis: What is it like to plant myself in a fixed spot, and take as many photos as possible from that spot? The rules of the game are simple. Choose the spot. Plant your feet. Move any way you want, as long as you do not—do not!—move your feet. Twist your trunk, turn your head and neck 270 degrees, do the Pretzel, do the Möbius Strip, do the Camel’s Hump, the Crab, and the Wheelbarrow. Just don’t take a step, okay?

Okay!

I went to the Place des Vosges and stood by one of the entrances on the northern side of the square. It was 10:30 in the morning on a sunny day. My plan was to stay rooted for 60 minutes, keeping the camera settings on automatic and without zooming in or out, everything fixed except for heart and brain (and upper body). I ended up taking 282 snapshots. Few qualify as good photographs. But, boy, was it fun!

My spot was liminal—a frontier or portal through which people entered and exited the Place des Vosges. I could see the Place and also the main street that runs along it, plus another street that runs into it at a 90-degree angle.

It’s pretty normal for a guy to just stand by the entrance of the Place and do nothing. This means that “nobody saw me” even though “I saw everyone.”

Children coming in with their minders. Visitors from various countries, talking animatedly in languages I didn’t speak. Harried workers rushing through, going from A to B with an obligation to perform or deliver. Joggers, some passing by my spot multiple times while I stood there.

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I achieved a minor victory: For years I’ve been noticing a groundskeeper at the Place, gruff and disinclined to talk to you or even acknowledge your existence. While I stood at my spot he came around on one of his errands and he asked me, “Comment ça va?” That’s French for “How ya doin’?” He walked away quickly, having sensed that I could have hugged him.

I had a good line of sight of much of the Place, except for the narrow blind spot behind me which I couldn’t see however I turned and twisted. I could see the big trees in the middle of the square, which I’ve always called the Broccoli. I could see the sky, the pure unimpeded blueness faraway. Up close I could see the spiked ironworks that surround the square. Lamp posts and pigeons I could see, also many façades. I could stare at the sun.

I could see so much, and I could look at things really closely, and I could let me eyes linger and marvel at the beauty of it all.

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Traffic was light on the street north of the Place des Vosges, but I saw trucks, pedestrians, cyclists, little kids in “locomotive contraptions,” to use a generic term for scooters and prams and suchlike.

A troupe of professionals came in to do a fashion photo shoot. It was a large team more than ten strong, everyone carrying walkie talkies (which the French call “talkie walkies”). After a while a friendly member from the troupe approached me. “You’re standing in the way of our shot,” he said. Oh the tragedy! I had been at my spot for 55 minutes, and ideally I’d stay another five, just for the sake of cosmogonics. But I took his hint and abandoned my spot. Truth be told, my right foot had fallen asleep and I was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Back home I went.

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Jean de la Fontaine, that fabulous fabulist, would have said it well, had he said it. “Enracine-toi sur place et tu verras le monde.” Root yourself to a spot, and you’ll see the World.

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Integrated Practice: Good Health is a Creative Act RSS

The Stone and the Stoned

Dumb guy, never changes his mind.

Silly guy, changes his mind all the time.

Hello, my name is Pedro!

One way of understanding a human being is to get a sense of how much he or she changes opinions, over what subjects, with what intensity, how quickly or slowly, how often. We all know someone who seems never, ever to change opinions, attitudes, and habits . . . stone brain in a granite body. And we all know someone whose opinions and attitudes are like fruit flies over a pile of compost. Flit, flit, flit, flitz blitz I’m at the end of my wits I call it quits!

I moved to Paris in 1990, and I’ve lived here since. During my first few years, I busied myself researching and drafting my book Indirect Procedures: A Musician’s Guide to the Alexander Technique. Circumstances favored me, and the book was nicely published by Oxford University Press in 1997. In 1994, my French colleague Annie Moteï was contacted by a French publisher who wanted to add a book on the Alexander Technique to his catalogue. Annie wasn’t interested, but knowing that I was happily absorbed in the process of writing she recommended me to the publisher.

The guy, Monsieur Dangles, sent me a letter and a proposal.

As Jimmy Stewart would have said, “Wait a minute!” I mean, my French was rudimentary. Prepositions! Conjugations! Vocabulary! Idiomatic expressions that didn’t make any sense! I think some Parisians would have considered my French back then as nothing but “lingerie de foie gras.”

via GIPHY

I accepted M. Dangles’s proposal.

What did I have to lose, other than sleep, my reputation, and the good will of the Gallic nation? I put a book together, writing it in quasi-French. A polyglot student of mine generously helped me translate it into quasi-actual-French, and the resulting book, La Technique Alexander: Principes et Pratiques, was published in 1997 and has stayed in print ever since, liberté, égalité, fraternité.

I then set to rewrite the book in English. Not simply translate it from the quasi-almost-give-or-take-a-fromage-or-three French, but re-think it, write it differently, change my mind about it. The resulting book, The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life, was published by Crowood Press in 1999, and it also stayed in print continuously until just about now.

Two very different books, representing two very different attitudes. Thanks to the Warm-Hearted Doorman Above (“le mec qui habite au Pôle Nord, quoi”), I had grown a little while grappling with the French book, and I managed to write a somewhat better book in English (quasi).

Some years later, a Japanese colleague who appreciated my writing wanted to translate A Skill for Life into Japanese. “Wait a minute!” I decided to re-read Skill and revise it before the colleague translated it. Ay ay ay ouch! I had changed my mind a fair amount over time, and I now found Skill awkward, to use a euphemism, or awk-awk-awk, to use an onomatopoeia. Let’s not use an expletive. I revised it, my colleague translated it, and the book came out in 2011 thanks to the handiwork of Hitomi Ono, Fumiko Katagiri, and Yoshi Kazami. Soon after, colleagues from Estonia also wanted to translate it, and so they did, using the newly revised text. Alexanderi Tehnika: Oskus Kogu Eluks came out in 2012. I owe this pleasure to Conrad Brown, Karen Brown, and Kristel Kaljund.

Estonian is a non-Indo-European language. It doesn’t share much (or anything at all) with French, English, Portuguese, German, or—well, it shares a little with Finnish. To make a long story short, when I read my own book in Estonian I don’t understand a word of it, analphabète diplômé, Bachi-bouzouk de tonnerre de Brest!

About 18 months ago, my friendly friends at Crowood Press reached out to me and said, “Wait a minute!” They said, “Hey Pedro wanna rewrite A Skill for Life? Because, Pedro, this book of yours is more than 20 years old, and, Pedro, perhaps you have changed a little over the decades? Or so we hope? To be or not to be?”

I was very grateful for their initiative and support. I rewrote the thing. I kept some stuff and burned the rest in a symbolic pyre. The new book is now out. It’s titled The Alexander Technique: A Skill for Life, completely rewritten and revised and the fellow changed his mind, not that he’s become perfect by any means. Far from it. 144 pages, 50 illustrations.

This book and any other book probably should exist in an oral version only, where every day the writer, having learned and grown, tells it differently, tells it more wisely and more entertainingly, tells it with a little uncertainty and a little distance: “Today it’s like this. Tomorrow, who knows! Qui sait, bougre d'extrait de cornichon!” (This last expression is Estonian for “bougre de zouave d'anthropopithèque.”)

In the absence of the metamorphic oral version, you might be interested in ordering the print version, or the Kindle version which you can download IMMEDIATELY. But hurry! I’m at the risk of changing my mind and writing some other book!!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Universe and the Yamaha

The other day I finished writing my piano method, and I sent it off to my editor at Oxford University Press: 450 pages, about 150 compositions, 45 video clips, three jokes. If all goes well, the book will go into production and be published in—nobody knows when. Editing and publishing take time. Placeholder publication date (I mean, I’m just making this up): December 24, 2022.

What’s the method’s philosophy?

It’s a quaternity—that is, a group of four principles.

1. Acknowledge the Universe. It doesn’t take much; it’s enough to listen to the rain, or smile at a passerby, or eat a banana. A supply chain involving dozens of steps and hundreds of people made sure that the banana would arrive in my hands at the exact moment when I’d be hungry and looking for something delicious, nutritious, and fun to eat. That’s the Universe at work, and I’m terribly grateful to it, or It. Capitalize The Important Stuff, Okay?

Suppose you sit at a piano, an upright Yamaha. Designed in Japan, built in Indonesia, shipped to France, delivered to your living room in your second-floor walk-up in Paris. Supply chain, right? But the piano embodies more than that. With only a few hyperlinks, you can go from your Yamaha to anywhere in the world and in the history of humanity, or Humanity. Japan, Indonesia, engineering, math, music, piano, pianists, Beethoven, Liberace. Or Yamaha, motorbike, Hell’s Angels, angels, hell. Or Japan, sushi, the first time I ate sushi, age 17, back in Brazil where my then cello teacher-mentor and now favorite adoptive older brother Barney took me to a perfect hole-in-the-wall sushi bar at the heart of Liberdade, the Japanese neighborhood in downtown São Paulo.

From Wikipedia:

Liberdade was known as Campo da Forca (Field of the Gallows) until the late 19th century, and was an area reserved for the execution of slaves and convicts. Death was considered the only path to liberty (liberdade) for slaves. The condemned were led to the Igreja Nossa Senhora da Boa Morte (Church of Our Lady of Good Death) to perform a final prayer for a rapid and painless death. The church remains on Rua do Carmo at the corner of Rua Tabatinguera. Slaves and other convicts were executed in the Largo da Forca (Gallows Square), the public square now known as Praça da Liberdade. Cemitério dos Aflitos (Cemetery of the Afflicted) was created in 1774 to bury executed slaves, those who had committed suicide, and others who could not be interred elsewhere.

This story lives in my Yamaha upright, together with all stories ever told. Play one note at the piano, one single note, and you’ll tell all stories, if only you’re alert to the workings of the Universe and grateful to It.

2. It’s your own self sitting at the piano, your own sweet self, your childhood and adolescence and adulthood sweet self, your butt self, your brain self. A Unique Human Being who, as it happens, represents All Humans in the Universe, because a simple chain of cause and effect connects you to everyone else, living, dead, and yet unborn. You’re sitting at the piano with your needs and wants, your strengths and weaknesses, your hopes and fears, your Inner Monkey and your Inner Banana From The Martinique Of The Imagination. You can’t play any one note at your Yamaha without Peeling the Banana. Have you ever listened to a pianist in Banana Denial? It’s painful. My method doesn’t explicitly talk about the Banana per se, but it invites you to be constantly alert to the workings of your inner self as you play The One Note That Tells All Stories.

3. Your butt and your brain, which are The Center Of The (Known) Universe, are confronted with a creative situation. Play a note. Play this specific note. Play this chord. Now invent the next chord. Play these eight bars. Now transpose them to a different key. Play loud, play soft. Play without looking at your hands. Play faster, play slower. Play All Stories, andante moderato. The creative stimulation may come from my method, from pieces written by other composers, from your own imagination. It doesn’t matter; what matters is that you’re being presented, again and again, with a creative situation that invites a creative response. Peeling The Banana Is a Creative Undertaking.

4. And now that you’ve said hello to the Universe, and hello to your Sweet Self, and hello to the Creative Situation, you can start fashioning your response. Orientation in space, timing, direction, meaning, reactions, choices, decisions, thoughts, emotions, thumbs and pinkies. Thumbs And Pinkies Are The Squiggly Bits That The Universe Uses To Peel the Banana With, or what most musicians call “technique.”

 Let’s Post-It-fy the quaternity at the core of my method.

1. The Universe.

2. You.

3. The creative situation.

4. Your creative response, fashioned.

Incidentally, this is a life principle. It applies to every endeavor, not just playing the piano. Uh-oh—I feel a surge of capitalizing coming on. Life Is You, At The Center Of The Universe, Responding To A Creative Situation And Fashioning Your Destiny, Banana!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Project Management for Babies

My wife knows me. That makes sense, right? I mean, she can tell when I’m squirming, or floundering, or squiggling, or threshing, or prevaricating, or gerrymandering, even if I’m sitting still and looking relatively normal. The other day she saw that something was afloat, or sinking, or—Pedro, leave the Thesaurus alone and tell me what’s going on.

I’ve been working on a piano method for four years, and it’s now under contract, with a deadline. Concepts, exercises, compositions, video clips. Did I tell you that the project is big? I explained to my wife that, besides everything else, I couldn’t choose among a number of solutions for a structural problem deep inside the project. I tried to describe the problem and some of its solutions, and my wife bypassed the intricacies and diagnosed my condition: “You’re suffering labor pains.”

The light bulb went on, the penny dropped, and the dog wagged its tail. Thanks to my wife I had understood the biological and symbolic dimension of project management. It’s called “conception, gestation, delivery.”

Before you become attuned to the possibility of a project, it exists on an immaterial plane out of reach of your intellectual grasp. Let’s call it “God’s imagination,” which of course is eternal and infinite. It encompasses all projects, including—for instance—performing the entire Bible as a one-man Kabuki show, or floating a horizontal Empire State Building along the Suez Canal, or eating five kilos of chocolate in one sitting just to see what happens (“apotheosis”). From that database, a project “comes to you,” often when you least expect it, sometimes catching you in a bad moment. On Saturday, May 14 2017, I was practicing the piano at Studio Bleu in central Paris, struggling to get the brain and the fingers to make friends, when I heard a voice. (I swear I did.) “Pablo, why don’t you write a piano method?” “My name is Pedro.” “Of course, my apologies. Pedro, why don’t you write a piano method?”

Conception! The project had passed from the immaterial to the brains-and-fingers, from the universal to the individual, from unimaginable to imagined. I was elated. “Thanks, Joe!” “My name is G-d.” “Of course, my apologies!”

Photo by Mônica Marcondes Machado

Like in the baby-generating domain, project conception is an amazing and incomprehensible wonder. I immediately started getting ideas and insights about the creative processes of playing the piano. It was a revolution in my music work. I’m not saying that I suddenly started playing the piano well, only that I had found a new path to explore. I’ll be pretentious and name it “the true path.”

Then came the gestation period, the appetites (five kilos of chocolate), the morning sickness, the growth of that stranger inside you, the deep meditation. Gestation meant studying, practicing, reading, watching, practicing, sharing, teaching, learning, practicing, performing, writing, editing, revising, discarding, despairing, and marveling. If a project needs two months, it’ll take two months; if it needs four years, it’ll take four years. Mosquitos and elephants don’t have the same gestation period.

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“When is it due?” According to my contract with Oxford University Press, the baby is due on April 1st (this April 1st, not next year’s; today; TODAY!). That means delivery of the final manuscript, plus supporting materials, plus blood and guts. The baby will be late. The baby is lingering and malingering inside the cocoon. The baby has structural problems that need intrauterine laser surgery. The baby enjoys inflicting labor pains upon its hapless famother (you know—the amalgamation of father and mother, Isis and Osiris, tomato and mozzarella). The baby—

I love my baby. Do I really have to let go of it?

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

The Problem Expert

We all know Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) as a poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, critic, amateur artist, oboist, mime, short-order cook, and inventor of the Heimlich Maneuver. A hidden facet of this towering genius is a little book he published anonymously, and which survives in bootleg (“samizdat”) form. Titled Das Imaginäre Kleine Buch, Das es Nicht Gibt, the book is informally called Nichts by the connoisseurs, the cognoscenti, and the cognitively dissonant.

It’s long been a favorite of mine. I have a mimeographed copy from my days growing up under a military dictatorship in Brazil in the 60’s and 70’s. My copy is faded, smudged, torn, and illegible, but since the book is “imaginäre” the fact that I can’t read it doesn’t bother me overmuch (“zu viel,” as we say in Teutonics).

Nichts means everything to all people, but today I’d like to highlight one of its dimensions: Goethe’s wonderful way of talking about problematics and solucionatics (or “Fanatiks und Lunatiks,” as he calls them).

Abridged and loosely translated:

1. A problem is easier to solve if you agree to solve it (“natürlich”).

2. Self-solve a self-created problem. While at it, self-prevent a self-problem from coming into self-existence (“Selbstachtung”).

3. If you don’t have a problem, it’s a problem to think that you have a problem. Then the solution is to stop thinking that you have a problem. Goethe put it very elegantly: “Kein Problem.”

4. What do you like better, the problem or the solution? It isn’t a trick question (“nein, nein!”).

5. A deity comes to you and offers you a deal. “Pedrito mein Schnuckelschneke, mein Igelschnäuzchen, mein Honigkuchenpferd, mein Schnuckiputzihasimausierdbeertörtchen! I give you two options: I can make all your problems disappear, or I can help you become able to solve problems, one by one and in batches, using intelligence and creativity. What’s your choice?” (“¡Olé!”)

6. You have a problem, and you feel bad that you have this problem. Then you have two problems: the thing, and your emotions about the thing—or rather, your self-judgments and self-punishments regarding the thing. Getting rid of the extra problem often solves the core problem (“das Wiener Schnitzel Paradox”).

7. Some problems exist in the material realm, and some problems only exist in the psychic realm (“in deinem Kopf,” as Goethe used to say). That, too, is a problem!

This is the gist of Nichts. To end this post, I’d like to pay homage to Goethe by quoting from one of his beloved poems. You don’t need any German to understand it.

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

Keep Track, or Lose Face!

Life is tantamount to “keeping track.” It’s a skill to be practiced and an art to be cherished.

Keep track of the days of the week. This is relatively easy. Monday ain’t Sunday. Keep track of the days of the month. A bit more difficult. I can usually tell if the month is in the tens or the twenties. But the difference between January 17 and 18, for instance, takes a finer degree of discernment when your head is busy with stuff, or as the Dutch put it, when your hoofd is bezig met dingen.

Keep track of the members of a group. Two adults take twelve children on an excursion to a museum: six boys, six girls. You know how easy it is to forget who’s where? Distractions, excitement, queues, and now we’re down to, like, four girls and five boys. Mrs. de Alcantara, we don’t know where Pedrito is anymore. We think he sneaked out and took a Greyhound bus to Kalamazoo. He’s impossible, Mrs. de Alcantara! And he convinced two girls to flee with him!

To distract means “to draw in different directions.” To dis-tract, to dis-track, right?

Keep track of moolah, dinero, plata, dough, and spondoolics. Bank statements, receipts, subscriptions that you forgot you signed up for, automated bill payments “so convenient” that the bailiff is now inconveniently knocking on your door.

Keep track of your belongings. At the airport with no passport? ¡Ay caramba! Some years ago I took to wearing a pouch hanging from my neck when I travel: passport, debit card, a pen, earplugs. It doesn’t guarantee anything, but it lessens the likelihood that I’ll forget or misplace my passport.

Keep track of your books on your bookshelf. The other day I was able to locate my copy of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, the wonderful little volume by Shunryū Suzuki. It was exactly where it was supposed to be, in the section titled “Zen Supposes, Man Disposes.”

Keep track of where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going. On a material level, it’s very useful—for instance, when you’re navigating a complicated public-transport system. Have you ever taken a bus from Port Authority in New York City to the boondocks upstate? And you don’t have a ticket yet? And you’re running behind schedule? And you’re a little hypoglycemic and your acuity is leaching out of your brain and spilling all over the grungy floor? Cry, baby, cry!

But keeping track of where you are (and where you’ve been and where you’re going) also works on a metaphysical or symbolic dimension. There’s a huge difference between “being somewhere” and “going somewhere.” Keep track of “being” and “going,” and you’ll “become” in due course. You might “become Grand Central.” (Metaphysics uses a lot of quote marks. Or, as Schopenhauer often said, „Kant konnte und ich kann nicht, canuck!“*)

Keep track of your tasks and commitments. “Honey, I forgot! I just plain forgot!” Sure, sure. One more instance of your forgetfulness and this kitchen knife here will teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.

Keep track of your arguments and anecdotes as you try to convince someone—your banker, for instance, or your blog readers—of something important to you. If you lose track, you lose the banker and the life-saving loan, and you lose the blog subscribers and your “face,” ouch.

Keep track of elements in a sequence. This is memory and understanding, born of attention and commitment. It could be the dance steps in a choreography, or the numbers of flats and sharps in the tonalities of the Circle of Fifths, or every word in the Illiad, which you’ll perform by heart in a forthcoming festival. It’s only 15,693 lines in dactylic hexameter. Perfectly doable if you train yourself in the art of keeping track!

By Watchduck (a.k.a. Tilman Piesk), CC0, via Wikimedia Commons. With thanks!

©2021, Pedro de Alcantara

*That’s German for the Samoan proverb, ”E le mafai Kant, ae mafai, canuck!"

"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

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."

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 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."

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.

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?

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.

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.