The art of propagation

December 4, 2017

The most generous thing you can do for everyone around you—and, indeed, for humanity—is to feel good.

It might sound shallow, ridiculous, selfish, and pointless, but many simple truths seem perfectly ridiculous before you wrap your brain around them.

The reason why feeling good is your most urgent task is propagation. You put out your energies like a sprinkler in a garden. If you’re positive, you sprinkle positivity all around you. If you’re negative, you sprinkle it all upon the world.

The principle is universal. The sun propagates light and heat. The ocean propagates wetness and a thousand other qualities. The infinite ocean, helped by the caressing sun and the sweet breeze, propagates healing energies to everything within its reach. You take a long walk on the beach, clear your mind, settle some longstanding issues, and return to the big city to work and to spread goodness.

You live as part of an interconnected web of human relationships, some very intimate, others so indirect you might not even be aware of them. A friend of a friend of a friend—someone you’ve never met and have never even heard of—affects your life without your knowing it. The friend of the friend of the friend sleeps badly, wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, and starts the day with a thoughtless accident in the kitchen while making breakfast. If the person in question becomes upset, annoyed, impatient, or angry, he or she will propagate these emotions to everyone else. The propagation might be brutal or discrete, but it’ll inevitably happen. The emotion sprinkles itself, and the friend of the friend will get it, and the friend will get it, and you’ll get it. By the time it reaches you, the emotion might be so diffuse as to be scientifically undetectable. But we won’t let science dissuade us from our simple truths!

Feeling good is a skill that you can learn and practice. Although you receive other people’s energies incessantly, you aren’t a mere receptacle. You have agency—meaning, the power of choosing and of acting according to your choices. Standing in line at a cinema box office, you witness an agitated customer picking a fight with the hapless ticket seller. Then comes your turn. You can receive the previous customer’s agitation through the now-frustrated ticket seller, or you can give to the ticket seller a sympathetic smile and a kind word or two. You turn the tide, as it were, breaking the cycle of negative propagation.

Proportion, perspective, and distance are helpful. “Distance” is difficult to define, but I’ll say that it’s something you carry within you: a mental space; the capacity to look at yourself as if you were someone else looking at yourself; the capacity to “do” and “watch” at the same time. Most of us live safe and comfortable lives; our problems are manageable; we might be able to deal with these problems right here, right now, partly by not attaching too much importance to them. Many things in life are necessarily uncertain; looking for certainty and control will lead you astray and create frustration. Accept uncertainty and let go of control: this actually puts you in control. You’ll feel much better about yourself and about life, and you’ll end up propagating qualities of adaptability, curiosity, and gratitude.

Observe the triggers of positive and negative energy within you. Find out how much choice and leeway you have as regards your feelings and your behaviors. Become a student of propagation, sensing and understanding the eternal give-and-take between you and the world, between you and the other, between any one thing and any other thing. Then, go out and sprinkle your good feelings toward all and sundry.

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The road to mindfulness

November 2, 2017

Recently, a charming and creative Italian man came through Paris and took three lessons with me in close succession. He was intrigued by the vocal technique clips I’ve been posting all year long, and we spent our time together going through one of my simple vocal exercises. You can watch the exercise in question below.

If you don’t want to watch it, let me describe the exercise briefly. Holding a steady pitch, sing or chant these five syllables in sequence: “hi hey hew hoe who.” That’s all there is to it.

I’ll call my student “Giuseppe,” although his real name is “Martino.” Giuseppe was a good sport and played all the games I proposed during the lessons. We enjoyed each other’s company and we made a lot of progress together. At some point fairly late during the lessons, Giuseppe asked me a keen question: “What’s the purpose of this exercise?”

I confess that at first I was a little stumped, for two reasons: (1) to me, the purpose of the exercises was obvious; (2) and Giuseppe was learning so many things that I thought the purpose of the exercise was obvious to him, too. But nothing is as obvious as you assume it is, and every question has a right to be asked. Not to mention that Giuseppe was probably teasing me. All the same, I got thinking about his question, and here I am sharing what I gathered.

Any situation can be described from multiple perspectives, and my exercise is no exception. We can describe it technically: five syllables, each starting with the aitch consonant and then going on to a diphthong, except for the last syllable (which is a straight-up vowel). The first vowel sound of each syllable follows an alphabetical order: A E I O U.

Or we can describe it as if writing a poem about it.

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I met James briefly during a recent trip. You can guess where we were by sussing out the landmark reflected on his eyeglasses.

Most of the above applies to all exercises. Perhaps we can simplify it and state that our task in life is to achieve embodied mindfulness. The means we use to achieve it are relatively unimportant. Playing attention to your breath? It has worked beautifully for thousands of years. Tai chi in the park every morning? Yes! Walking around the neighborhood taking photos? Perfect. Starting conversations with strangers during your travels? Nothing better. Lengthening a little syllable and spinning out its diphthong? It makes me so happy I could cry.

To begin with, Giuseppe approached the exercise hesitantly, as if he wasn’t even sure he wanted to do it. Why? Ah, there may be many reasons. Perhaps he was shy about vocalizing in front of someone else. He told me that his mother tongue doesn’t have the aitch sound, and that he was uncomfortable making it. Giuseppe kept messing up the syllables’ order. Have you ever looked up a telephone number, and two seconds later when you start dialing it you have already forgotten it? You look at the number again, and . . . again, you forget it before you dial it. To absorb information is a tricky business. If you don't think so, try to reproduce the Chinese characters below. How many times would you have to look at the photo to get the characters right?

Giuseppe would start the exercise, and within a microsecond he’d start twisting his neck and shoulder. Why? Ah, there are always many reasons for any one thing! Giuseppe didn’t control his vocal apparatus, and he compensated by trying to do, with his neck and shoulders, what his vocal folds and pharynx and tongue wouldn’t do. By the same token, once he started getting the hang of the exercise, his neck and shoulders became totally relaxed and organized . . . showing that vocal organization is total-body organization.

Giuseppe would run out of air in the middle of sustaining a word, and he would gasp for air and “editorialize” it; I mean, he made a grimace, a joke, or a comment about running out of air. It’s as if he was underlining the very fact of gasping: “Hey, everyone! Did you hear my horrible gasp? Hey!” Then he’d start the sequence again, and for some reason he’d keep his cool and not run out of air. And this without giving any thought to his breathing. His breath was a function of his overall approach: incoherent or coherent.

It’s wonderful to watch someone calm down, enter the moment, and think clearly about something. The transformation is total; the whole person becomes different, in posture, breath, voice, and vibration. Giuseppe would just stand there, looking poised and elegant; he’d do the exercise to perfection, spinning every sound with ease and care; he wouldn’t gasp or tighten his shoulders or editorialize; he’d “be.”

If you’re interested in it all, you can practice the exercise by yourself, following the clip on YouTube. Or come work with me in Paris . . . it’s a beautiful city, did you know that?

The Lesson

October 1, 2017

For the past four years I’ve been taking piano lessons with Alexandre Mion, an old student and friend of mine. Alexandre is a first-class pianist as well as a wonderful human being: kind, patient, attentive, full of smiles, the perfect teacher. Alexandre works at a conservatoire in Clichy, a commune adjacent to Paris but administratively separate from it. The conservatoire is housed in a new building right next to the metro station “Mairie de Clichy.”

What do I learn in our lessons?

Not piano technique in and of itself; no. I learn to respond to music, and to embody my responses at the piano. Technique, in other words, is an embodied response to a musical stimulus.

If I respond freely, my embodiment is free. Getting there entails a deep psychological process. I have to become open-minded, open-hearted, open-brained, open-opened. And for me to be open-opened, I need to open to the moment, to life itself—to Life.

Riding the metro, I ready myself for my piano lessons by becoming attentive and appreciative. Corridors, tunnels, crossings, and line exchanges all take on symbolic power, as I pass through different layers of a multidimensional, otherworldly labyrinth.

The Paris metro is a whole world, often gorgeous, sometimes terrifying. The soundtrack is my piece "The Yemenite," for scordatura cello, recorded under the attentive care of Jean-charles Versari at Poptones Studio. I took all the photos.

Arriving at my destination, I exit the underground and go toward light. The first thing I see is a public-housing project. It’s a study in perspectives, proportions, lines and planes, the occupation of space. It’s a beehive for humans, strange and marvelous.

Then I cross the street and enter the conservatoire. Perspectives, proportions . . . the meditation on space and light continues. I climb the stairs to the fourth floor. The steps, landings, and windows hypnotize me, and I’m now inside a ziggurat, timeless and mysterious.

I enter Alexandre’s room. Oftentimes, the first thing I do is to take a photo of the room’s window. The sun, the clouds, the raindrops are gorgeous; plus, weather hints at astronomy, and astronomy hints at cosmology, and cosmology is unfathomable. I like it that Alexander’s room hints at the unfathomable.

And there he is, my teacher, my witness, my guide, my friend, my brother. A single human being, representing the whole of humanity.

The sun shines and creates the strangest figures on the wall, on the piano itself, on the keyboard.

I’m ready to sit down at the piano, to respond to music, and to embody my responses in gestures and movements, in fingerings, in phrasings.

Will I be free and open? I don't know. This is the lesson I've come to learn.

©Pedro de Alcantara, 2017

The Receptive Heart

September 9, 2017

George Bernard Shaw, the playwright, liked quoting from his writings—“to spice up the conversation,” he would explain. I imagine he did it with a smirk and a wave of his hand, the better to annoy his listeners.

Here’s me, smirking and quoting myself from my book The Integrated String Player, which is being published in a couple of months by Oxford University Press. In the book, I’m making a point about acquisitive and receptive awareness.

You’re acquisitive when you have a goal, the desire to capture information precisely, the need to pay attention to something or someone, or the obligation to reuse, later on, the information you’re capturing. You’re acquisitive when you use analytical capabilities, labels, comparisons, and judgments. You’re acquisitive when you want to be better than someone else at the game. It’s a wonderful ability to have at your disposal: when you’re skillfully acquisitive, you get a lot of things done. It represents the adult in you, responsible and focused.

You’re receptive when you put aside goals, desires, needs, obligations, comparisons, and judgments. Having no objectives, you might not get anything done, although you’re likely to have all sorts of rich sensorial experiences. It’s another wonderful ability to have at your disposal. It represents the child in you, innocent, curious, and open to everything.

As it happens, I blogged about this sometime ago. You can read it here if you’re interested.

Acquisitive and receptive awareness apply to all areas of human endeavor. You can listen to music acquisitively, when you want to analyze it, memorize it, and pass a music-theory test; or receptively, just to have come-what-may emotional responses. You can smell a flower (or a cup of coffee, or the nape of your beloved when she comes out of the shower) acquisitively by sniffing, or receptively by being close to the source of the fragrance and breathing normally. Believe me, coffee smells different when you sniff (which is “doing”) and when you breathe normally (which is “being”).

I had a busy summer. In Paris, I spent a lot of time correcting the proofs and creating the index for my forthcoming book. And I traveled far and wide: Oxford, Porto, Stockholm, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, São Paulo. My wife Alexis accompanied me to Porto and to Stockholm; elsewhere I traveled solo, to give lessons, workshops, and performances.

While traveling, solo or with Alexis, I practiced the art of acquisitive and receptive tourism. Balancing the two frames of mind makes for a wonderful experience. In Porto, for instance, I had two professional engagements, for which I had precise places to go at precisely appointed times. The adult needed to show up, and he did show up reliably. Outside these engagements, Alexis and I were free to do as we pleased, and that’s what we did. Get up early, or get up late? Go to the river, or go to the town? Linger, or rush? Follow the map, or meander?

Every day we had an informal plan, which we executed informally. We developed a quick intimacy with the city, absorbing its moods and enjoying its sights, sounds, and smells. Do you want to go inside this church? Not particularly. Okay, we move on. Do you want to take this alleyway? Sure. Hey, look: cats, graffiti, a hidden coffee shop. Let’s go in.

The city’s soundscapes were unique: seagulls galore, singing their hearts out; buskers, some good, some . . . no, let’s not spoil our mood by listening acquisitively to a poor soul eking out a living. He’s what he is, doing what he’s doing. Listen to him acquisitively, and his voice enters your ears and brain and stays there, poking you and spoiling your vacation. Listen to him receptively, and the sounds come and go; his busking becomes authentic because you aren’t filtering it with predetermined aesthetic values.

What should you see when you go to Porto? “Should” is an acquisitive word. Go to Porto and be there; explore and enjoy. Or sleep all day. The receptive heart welcomes whichever experience comes its way. Churches, train stations, hills, alleyways, the river and the beach, museums, restaurants, buskers, seagulls. Your receptive journey will be remarkable; “your” Porto won’t be like anyone else’s.

I won't bore you with every detail of my receptive summer. But if you're curious to see and hear how "my" Stockholm differed from "my" Porto, here's a little video clip.

Sharing some vocal ideas at the International Congress of Voice Teachers, Stockholm, August 2017. With thanks to Alexis Niki and Isabella Jeżowska.

Space

July 30, 2017

Big concepts are hard to define: love, beauty, destiny, space, time. All the same, we spend our days living these concepts, thinking about them, having feelings about them, making choices related to them, fighting them, embracing them.

Take the notion of space, for instance. Everything you do is directly or indirectly related to space. Home, city, car, bus, elevator: you pass from space to space, and the passage is always meaningful in some way. If you don't think so, go spend three hours inside an elevator. Or move house overnight. No, no, no--space isn't to be trifled with!

What you call your "body," which technically is your "person," exists in space, occupies space, moves in space. Take a breath, and you move in space. Nod in agreement with something your lover says, and you move in space. Say "hello," and you move in space.

And what you call your "mind," which coincidentally is also called your "person," is a reaction to space and a creator of space. If in your mind you're a small person, so you become in space. And if in your mind you're always growing and changing, your space too will be flexible, lively, adaptable.

Who, when, where, how are you? These are all spatial questions. Inside and outside, the space is you, and you're the space.

The Technicians

July 4, 2017

What is technique?

I suggest that technique is the shape you give to a thought, which is the shape you give to an emotion, which is the shape you give to an indescribable insight you gathered in a place far away.

Go to the place far away; experience its terrors and delights; then come back to the material world to share with us what you learned. Your technique will unfold organically.

Watch and enjoy!

Uploaded by Evan Shelley on 2013-01-28.

If there is any problem with the copyrights, tell me and I will take down this video immediately. https://www.facebook.com/ClassicalGuitarVideo

Uploaded by Gnawalux Brussels on 2015-02-04.

Kala Ramnath presented a stunning version of Raag Shuddh Kalyan as her opening piece at FEA's Gayatri Festival 2016. She was accompanied on tabla by the brilliant Pt. Yogesh Samsi whose subtle and tasteful interplay with Kala's violin virtuosity is to be seen and heard to be believed.

The Invisible Triangle

May 30, 2017

The photo above contains a tremendous amount of visual detail: buildings, windows, cranes, lights, repeated figures, extensions, colors of every hue. But your first apprehension of the photo is likely to be not of its details but of its overall shape, which triggers an entire visual, intellectual, and emotional response. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter whether you like or dislike the image; it only matters that, to begin with, you don’t see specific details but a sort of totality.

Look at some of the photo’s details. We can hardly recognize them as belonging in the original photo.

All the details in the photo interact with one another. The colors, for instance, interact among themselves; to our eyes, orange “behaves” differently if it’s next to green or next to blue. Some elements are repeated many times, others happen only once. We make something of this; we group repeated elements together and we contrast them with unrepeated ones, and by doing so we arrive at an understanding of the photo.

Traditionally, we like saying that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In truth, it’d be more precise to say that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts.” The thoughts and emotions we have about the whole are of a higher and deeper level than the thoughts and emotions we have about each little part. The image in its totality triggers a story in our minds—a story we might tell in words or just in feelings, but a story nevertheless.

In the 1920’s, a group of German psychologists studying visual perception called this totality a Gestalt, which means “shape” or “form.” They posited that our minds prefer organization to disorganization, and coherence to incoherence; looking at anything, we’ll intuitively organize its visual information so that it makes sense to us. And our minds like capturing a whole before studying its details.

The notion of Gestalt proved popular, and over time it took a life of its own, spreading beyond the field of visual perception. A type of psychotherapy arose, called Gestalt therapy and concerning itself with the whole of the human being. Then a type of lifestyle arose, calling itself Gestalt Practice and incorporating movement and meditation. People now use the word Gestalt to refer to any system or context or totality; for instance, you might refer to the overall family dynamics of your crazy in-laws as their gestalt, and you don’t even need to use a capital “G” anymore.

Believe it or not, this post isn’t about Gestalt psychology or photography or in-laws. All of this was just an introduction, to give you some context for where my next bit of information comes from.

Here’s an image of a circle with a missing slice. Perhaps it reminds you of Pac-Man, of video-game fame. Or it gets you thinking, “pie chart . . . statistics . . . budget . . .” Or it comes across as a mere geometric shape in black and white.

Put three of these circles in juxtaposition. What do you see? No pie charts anymore; now there’s an “invisible” triangle, delineated by the missing slices of each circle. The triangle isn’t fully drawn, and yet our minds—which like organization and coherence—provide the missing lines and complete the triangle. It isn’t there, and yet it’s absolutely real to us.

To me, this image has symbolic power. Suppose the Pac-Men represents the body, the mind, and the soul. The white triangle that they form is life itself, the territory in which your existence unfolds. Body, mind, and soul can’t be separated without destroying the white triangle. Indeed, once you separate these parts they revert to being pie charts, geometric forms, Pac-Men.

The task for all of us is to be fully and wholly and entirely in the white triangle; to be complete, to be total; to be harmoniously integrated. It requires that we stay away from the Pac-Men. It’s very tempting to think that some problem of yours is physical in nature—tendonitis, to give an example. And it’s tempting to think that the physical problem has a physical solution. The thing is, your existence plays itself in the white triangle, in the interaction of all parts which have become transformed by their interaction. The tendonitis of our example is inseparable from thoughts, emotions, an aesthetics and a philosophy, a story, a Gestalt. Tendonitis isn’t a physical problem, but an indication of an existential situation.

It’s relatively easy to deal with tendonitis—or any other situation— if you deal with it inside the white triangle. What’s difficult is to enter the white triangle to begin with.

What is it all about?

May 4, 2017

This blog post isn’t about the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, but let’s stay with him for a little while.

If you decide to read Stevenson’s biography on Wikipedia, you’ll marvel at what an interesting, bizarre, and marvelous life Stevenson had. Among his great achievements, Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a novella about a man with a split personality, Dr Jekyll the kind physician and Mr Hyde the psychotic murderer, health and disease inhabiting the same person. The novella is also known as The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, or simply Jekyll & Hyde. Movies, plays, adaptations, translations, and suchlike have kept Jekyll & Hyde alive and well since its publication in 1886.

The best Jekyll and Hyde transformation scene. Eat your heart out CGI. Special Effects were better 80 years ago!

Jekyll & Hyde speaks to us because it speaks about us. Inside all of us there’s a pull between two personality complexes, one aggressive and the other loving, one tidy and the other incoherent, one hopeful and the other desperate, one celebrating life and the other pointing toward death. You’re calm and intelligent as you pursue some little task at your desk, when you accidentally drop some coffee on your computer. And, ka-boom! You’re crazed with anger and resentment, and ready to murder someone.

This blog post isn’t about the sculptor Constantin Brancusi. Born in Romania in 1876, Brancusi spent most of his working life in France, where he died in 1957. His long and creative life is hard to encapsulate in a few words, but we’ll say he was a pioneer of abstract sculpture. Instead of depicting generals riding their war horses, he depicted . . . whoa! Brancusi just arose from the grave and got mad at me.

There are idiots who define my work as abstract; yet what they call "abstract" is what is most realistic. What is real is not the appearance, but the idea, the essence of things.

If you’d like to spend an hour in Brancusi’s company, watch this YouTube video.

Un film de o oră, care compilează numeroase filmări cu sculptorul român Constantin Brâncuşi. Filmul, care conţine imagini de mare valoare istorică, îl arată pe Brâncuşi la lucru, unele dintre capodoperele acestuia fiind filmate în stadiul de construcţie.

But if you only have a second, here’s one of his beautiful works.

Brancusi once said this:

Things are not difficult to make; what is difficult is putting ourselves in the state of mind to make them.

When Stevenson heard this, he smiled and agreed. This is what he said:

Things aren’t difficult to make; what is difficult is to keep your inner Hyde at bay and let your inner Jekyll help you take care of business.

The business might be learning a skill, filing your taxes, passing an exam, making dinner, or crossing the street. Hyde runs into traffic, or doesn’t see the bicycle coming at him, or trips an old lady, or rushes into a pothole and twists his ankle, and gets really pissed off about it. Jekyll crosses the street, and that’s that. It’s a whole other approach.

Let's watch the transformation in reverse: Hyde becoming Jekyll. It takes a tremendous effort of the conscious will.

To become Mr. Hyde is easy for most of us. But it takes a lot of effort to become Dr. Jekyll.

Make a distinction between “the thing” and “the thing before the thing,” or between the task and the frame of mind, or between results and processes. For instance, you don’t learn a foreign language; instead, you “learn how to learn a foreign language.” It’s relatively difficult to learn how to learn a foreign language, but once you’ve done that, learning a foreign language or three is easy!

What triggers your inner Hyde? Judgment, expectations, assumptions, suppositions, guilt and shame, “should” and “should not,” voices that you hear in your head.

What allows you to access your inner Jekyll? The absence of “should” and “should not,” be they whispered or shouted.

And this blog post isn’t about Georges Braque, the great painter who—among other accomplishments—developed Cubism with Pablo Picasso. Braque heard us talk about Stevenson and Brancusi, and he got excited.

I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them or between them and myself. When one reaches this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence. . . . Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.

What on earth does this mean? Empty your mind; silence the voices; then you’ll be in a state where you can make things, do things, learn things, enjoy things, love things. Ah, and people, too; you’ll love people.

(This blog post is about love. End of story!)

A Stranger Tells His Story

April 1, 2017

Why do we breathe? To survive, and also to express our thoughts and emotions.

Why do we tell stories? To express our thoughts and emotions, and also to survive.

Our need to tell and hear stories is universal; like breathing, it’s a deep and urgent need. Some of the themes in our stories are also universal: hope and fear, travel, adventure and discovery, death and loss, and above all love. The stories themselves, however, are not universal, but specific to a certain place and time. And our reactions to the stories we hear are also individual. Ten of us are sitting together in a room, and someone tells us a story. Listening with our personal filters, we retell the story to ourselves in real time—we transform what we hear even as it's being told, and the story that takes shape in our heads isn’t the same as the story taking shape in the head of the person sitting right next to us. The universal becomes individual; ten listeners, ten different stories.

Let’s take Orpheus and Eurydice. It can be called a story or a legend, a myth or a tale; its characters are both wholly imaginary and very, very real. Orpheus is such a fine musician that, with his lyre and his singing, he can tame beasts and make stones cry. He meets Eurydice, they fall in love, they marry. A serpent hidden in the grass bites Eurydice’s ankle, right after her wedding to Orpheus. She dies. Orpheus is heartbroken and decides to descend into the underworld to bring her back. He will have to deal with Charon, who ferries the souls of the newly dead across the river of darkness. Then Orpheus will have to deal with Cerberus, the three-headed dog who prevents souls from departing. And Orpheus will have to convince the underworld’s overlords, Hades and his wife Persephone, to let him retrieve Eurydice. He sings to each in turn, and they all fall under his spell. Hades tells Orpheus that he can take Eurydice with him, but on one condition . . . don’t look back. Walk ahead of Eurydice, and don’t look back at her until both of you are back in your world.

And Orpheus will look back, and will lose Eurydice forever, and will go mad with grief, and will die a horrible death.

The first telling of this story is more than two thousand years old. It’s an amazing thing: a story and its characters staying with humanity forever, and forever being transformed by storytellers and listeners. It can only happen because the story’s themes are universal: love and loss, death and what happens after we die. We really want to know about it. But we each want to know in our own way. So, let’s tell and retell the story, until it’s ours.

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Over the millennia, the story has been told in every language and in every artistic medium. Paintings and drawings, film and theater, poems and songs, mime, stop-motion animation, folk-rock opera, comic books, everything.

The Roman poet Ovid told of Orpheus in Metamorphoses. Let’s be silly and take Ovid’s beautiful Latin (which we don’t speak) and get Google Translate to retell the story for us.

10:1 Inde per inmensum croceo velatus amictu
10:2 aethera digreditur Ciconumque Hymenaeus ad oras
10:3 tendit et Orphea nequiquam voce vocatur.
10:4 adfuit ille quidem, sed nec sollemnia verba
10:5 nec laetos vultus nec felix attulit omen. . . .
10: 1 Then the saffron mantle
10: 2 marriage to the edges of the air unmeasured Ciconian
10: 3 tends to the voice of tuneful Orpheus.
10: 4 present indeed, but not the usual words,
10: 5 or happy faces, no happy omen. . . .

Many stories come across as incomprehensible or strange or twisted or illogical. It’s inevitable. Stories bridge the gap between the dreamworld and the world of coffee and croissants—two worlds, two mutually exclusive languages. It’s okay not to understand a story. It’s probably better not to understand it too well. It’s good that the story is told “in a foreign language,” be it Latin or Google.

The composer Claudio Monteverdi was one of the creators of opera, that peculiar mixture of theater, dance, and music. He composed an opera about Orpheus and Eurydice, first performed in 1607. Do you like strange? Watch this clip. Do you like even stranger? Watch it a second time, with the sound off!

Watch the opera in full at http://www.medici.tv/#!/l-orfeo-monteverdi-rinaldo-alessandrini-robert-wilson-teatro-alla-scala Subscribe to our channel for more videos http://ow.ly/ugONZ Claudio Monteverdi L'Orfeo Favola pastorale in un prologo e cinque atti. Libretto di Alessandro Striggio. Aria: Tu se' morta (Act II) Georg Nigl (Orfeo) Rinaldo Alessandrini, director Robert Wilson, stage director, lighting design Teatro alla Scala, 2009 Also with Roberta Invernizzi (Euridice, La Musica) and Sara Mingardo (La Messaggera, La Speranza).

Monteverdi’s opera is still being produced all over the world, 400 years after he composed it. Why? The theme of the story is universal. We really want to deal with our hopes for love and our fears of loss and death. And it’s okay if we see and hear, on newfangled YouTube, a modern-day recreation of a Baroque artifact which back then was a reinvention of a Classical Greek artifact.

The French film maker Jean Cocteau produced a trilogy of films centered on Orpheus, or a version of Orpheus, or Cocteau’s projection of his own 1950s Frenchness onto the Orpheus matrix. Cocteau’s Orpheus is a poet. Watch how he enters the underworld in this famous scene. I chose the version without subtitles, to help the non-French speakers among you to absorb it all emotionally rather than intellectually. Remember, strange is good!

occultisme de cocteau

Watch a bunch of Uruguayans do a dance-theater piece about Orpheus. It’s all strange and touching . . . hope and fear, love and death. I’m the cellist, sitting back there and strumming my cello as if it’s Orpheus’s lyre. And, no, I’m not Uruguayan. It doesn’t matter.

Orfeo vuelve mira para atrás no mires para atrás, ella está atrás Una obra de Mariana Di Paula Intérpretes creadores: Rodolfo Vidal, Bastien Saxel, Carmen Barral, Mariana Di Paula y Pedro de Alcántara (invitado) * Proyecto de Creación en Residencia de la Escuela Uruguaya de Técnica Alexander * 2016 Montevideo, Uruguay

I’ve spent the past three or four years composing a cycle of songs and instrumental pieces retelling Orpheus and Eurydice in my own way. Orpheus sings, plays the piano and the cello; to Eurydice I gave birdsong, and she whistles all her lines. Would you like to hear a scary and strange song where Charon, the ferryman, speaks for all the broken souls of the underworld? Click below. Listening with headphones would make your fear more palpable.

And would you like to watch and hear a strange and beautiful thing, hinting at the whole love story and the dread of looking back? I bet what you'll hear and see watching the clip isn't what I put in there, but what you put in there yourself.

A snippet from my cycle "Don't Look Back: Songs of Orpheus."

The waterwheel

February 27, 2017

I’ve been thinking about the flow of creativity and how best to manage it. I recently finished a big project, a book of music pedagogy titled The Integrated String Player. Besides writing the book, I wrote out many music scores using music-notation software, and I recorded 80 video clips explaining and demonstrating the book’s exercises. I spent several years on this project, which is being published later in 2017 by Oxford University Press.

Warning: I’m about to say something really strange! . . . but it's the secret of creativity and its flow.

I’m not proud that I finished the project, and that it was accepted for publication.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a happy man.

The waterwheel might explain my thinking. A brook runs in the middle of a farm. The farmer builds a waterwheel and installs it along the brook. As tall as a human being, the wheel contains a large number of blades strategically designed to capture the flow of the brook, turn the wheel, and create energy for running a flour mill. And the flour from the mill will in due course become nourishment for many people.

Individual events in your life are like the blades in the waterwheel, capturing the flow from running water and creating energy. Although every blade plays a role, no blade is more important than any other blade. And the blades are part of a larger mechanism that includes the wheel, the mill, the farm, and above all the brook or creek or river—without which the waterwheel wouldn’t work at all. Flow, energy, and their transformative power are more important than the blades.

My book project took several years of thought and effort. At the same time that I worked on it, I taught hundreds of lessons and workshops, traveled to many destinations, wrote monthly blog posts, gave recitals, improvised and composed new pieces, recorded a CD, recorded and posted multiple video clips, went out on hundreds of little dates with my wife . . . the list could go on indefinitely. The waterwheel was forever turning, and “new water” was forever pushing “old water” out of the way.

Your life is unlike mine in its practical details, but it’s like mine in that it encompasses dozens and hundreds and thousands of individual events, taking place day by day and week by week. A professional or academic commitment unfolds with its own rhythms, and at the same time you raise your children or go the dentist or write emails or make phone calls or . . . the list could go on indefinitely. Old water, new water; it never stops.

On the week I made my final submission to Oxford University Press, I gave lessons to some amazingly talented and dedicated individuals: Eli, a singer with a big heart and a brilliant mind; Skylin, a delightful, disciplined singer whose voice is so sweet that to hear a single note from her makes you forget all your worries; Florence, Stéphane, Andranik, Elisabeth, Mechthilde, Serge, each one bringing a world of wonders into my life. I took a piano lesson with my beloved teacher Alexandre, and for ninety minutes we delved into the intricacies of J. S. Bach’s Two-part Invention in B-flat major, a short composition that happens to be divinely perfect.

I recorded one of my little voice clips and posted it on YouTube. I went to Studio Campus (my music home, about which I wrote a blog post a couple of months ago) and practiced the cello, playing pizz and arco, singing, improvising, using the metronome, whistling, and seriously having fun. And every day I had marvelous friendly moments with my wife Alexis. Ah, I also flew from Paris to Minneapolis, where I’m now sitting at my friends’ kitchen table and writing this piece.

If the big project looms too big in my mind, it’ll interfere with all these happenings, all these explorations and discoveries.

It’s paradoxical, but the deepest pleasures come when you have a little distance from the very event that’s bringing you so many pleasures. There you are, listening to a student sing a gorgeous few notes that make you want to cry—and you’re a little detached from it, otherwise you won’t hear the next gorgeous few notes she’s about to sing. There you are, in the presence of J. S. Bach and his stunning music—and you’re a little detached from it, otherwise you’ll be too stunned to play the piano. There you are, receiving some great good news about a big project—and you’re a little detached from it, because you’re busily taking care of a thousand things. Pride, or any other strong emotion, might put a spanner in the works and prevent you from staying with the flow and, indeed, from accomplishing the project.

Plus, the whole thing isn’t about you. Ideally, the book is about concepts and tools and techniques that may be useful to your readers. Nobody wants a book’s author breathing down their necks when they’re trying to understand the ideas on the page; a book is good only if “the writer isn’t in the book,” so to speak. My readers will study The Integrated String Player when it comes out and decide for themselves whether or not I managed to disappear from its pages, but that was my goal. Life is all about “managing your disappearing act,” by which I mean dissipating your ego:

Farewell, little blade; hello, big river! Thank you for being so much bigger than me!

Video by Hikeart, https://www.youtube.com/user/hikeart -- with thanks. The soundtrack is a composition of mine for cello solo, using pizzicato.

The double-helix staircase

February 1, 2017

Look at this wonderful photo of a wonderful object. It’s the DNA Tower in Kings Park, Western Australia, celebrating life in the form of the double-spiral arrangement of our DNA structure. Some people would prefer to call this a “double-helix” staircase, considering that a spiral is two-dimensional and a helix, three-dimensional. But we won’t get bogged down in words. Instead, we’ll admire the object’s structure and construction, and we’ll respond to its symbolic power.

Two fellows stand atop the tower. To get there, they each took one of the helical paths that intertwine to make the double-helix staircase. Racing upward, they crossed paths at every landing, laughing and cursing, one trying to trip up the other. But they reached the summit safely, and now they are “in seventh heaven.” That’s the story I like telling, anyway.

Opposing energies live inside us. We can call them intuition and intellect, masculine and feminine principles, private and public behaviors, yin and yang . . . the list is long. Integration depends on these opposites getting along and complementing one another. The double-helix staircase stands as a symbol of the travel that each of us must undertake to achieve integration.

Intuition is free-ranging, uncontrolled, unhinged. The word “intellect” comes from “intelligence,” which comes from a root meaning “to choose.” Intuition creates, intellect edits; intuition expands your mind, intellect organizes your insights. Intuition rises up along one of the helices, while intellect rises up on the opposite one. They meet at the landing, and there “they make love.” Then, they resume their path upward, seemingly as separate entities but ever connected each to the other, thanks to the double helix.

Your private self is known to no one, but you. It’s made of dreams, memories, aspirations, hopes, pains, images, and a thousand facets that you polish by yourself—alone in the house, sometimes asleep, sometimes at the computer, sometimes in the company of other people and yet reserved and hidden. Your public self is seen, heard, touched, and smelled by the world at large. It’s the embodiment of communication, the root of which comes from “to share.” You stew private thoughts and insights for a while, then you make them public: you share them. Your private self rises up along one of the helices, while your private self rises up along the opposite one. But at the landing, they meet and interact; they help each other, they inform each other. Your private experiences feed your public ones, and vice-versa. It’s essential for everyone to know how to be alone, and to know how to be with others; to know “how to keep” and to know “how to share.”

I’m lying in bed in the afternoon, having idle thoughts, feeling sleepy . . . After a while I get up, shower and shave, put a clean shirt on, and go out to give a performance. Then I go back home, lie in bed, and digest the performance, whether I’m asleep or awake all night long. My private self is inevitably shaken, stirred, and stimulated by the public exposure. And my next public event will be inevitably informed by the shaken and stirred private self.

At a studio space that I rent, I talk to myself, sing a few notes, test an idea regarding the voice or the breath or the vowels or . . . something. I weave a narrative about my vocal idea, then I stand in front of a camera and “talk and sing to the camera,” which is very different from talking and singing to myself. Later on, I edit whatever I recorded into a five-minute clip, and I’ll put it on the Internet, where total strangers will watch me and listen to me and respond to me in unfathomable ways. And I go back to the studio space and resume talking to myself, or pacing the room in silence, or just sitting in the semi-dark, by myself, alone, privately.

Or I practice the cello for hours or days on end, then I share a technique or insight with a student, then I write a few paragraphs about the insight. After many intermediate steps, I publish a book about it all. (“To publish” is “to make public.”) My book THE INTEGRATED STRING PLAYER will come out later in 2017, exposing my innermost feelings about the cello to the scrutiny of friends, colleagues, strangers, critics, and humanity at large. And the fact of going public with these innermost feelings will inform and guide my private experiences for years to come.

Intuition, intellect, intuition, intellect, forever climbing up and meeting at the landing.
Private, public, private, public, forever climbing up that double-helix staircase.
Solo, in a team, solo, in a team, forever climbing up and reinforcing each other.
Masculine, feminine, masculine, feminine, forever.
Yin, yang . . .

The idea, then, is to nourish each opposite and get them to collaborate. Put your shoes on -- and take your shoes off! -- and go climb up those stairs.

The Team

January 1, 2017

When Monsieur Borie told me he was retiring, I was so upset I almost started crying.

A bow maker and repairman, he had taken care of my cello bows for ten years or so. And by taking care of my bows he took care of some of my needs—that is, he took care of me. He was competent and friendly, a big teddy-bear of a guy with a thick beard and a slight stutter, working out of a sun-filled office in a beautiful brick building in central Paris. I’d call him and make an appointment, and when I rang his bell he'd open his door, take my hand, and gently pull me into his office. Then we’d chat briefly, and I’d hand him my bow in complete trust. Two days later I’d go back and pick it up, and the bow would be re-haired perfectly, clean as a whistle, and ready for music.

The bow is an extension of the cellist, a fifth limb, the channel for the cellist’s voice. A good bow makes such a difference to a string player that he or she is prepared to pay huge sums for it. A cellist friend of mine once bought a bow for nearly a hundred thousand dollars. It's worth it.

But this story isn’t about cello bows or even about Monsieur Borie. It’s about The Team, a way of looking at all the people in your life and their role in helping you, challenging you, and connecting you to something bigger than yourself. Monsieur Borie was part of my Team; I was upset at the news of his retirement because, in a word, I loved him and loved having him in my life. He made my life “bigger.” And his departure risked making my life “smaller.”

Each human being is the center of his or her universe. I consider this is a fact—I mean, a technical reality rather than psychological speculation. Your universe is you, plus all your thoughts, emotions, wishes, desires, dreams, and fears, plus everything you do throughout the day, plus all the people you know and deal with: the cobbler who fixes your shoes, your doctor, your colleagues, your family, your Facebook friends, dozens and hundreds and thousands of people, some of whom you spend hours with every day, others whom you see once a year. You’re the only person in the whole world whose life includes this particular group of people; in fact, you’re the one who brings them together, in a sort of dynamic network of direct and indirect relationships.

Your network is your Team. The idea merits attention. The more attentive you're to the Team, the happier and healthier you’ll be. There are several things you can do in practice, but it all starts with how you conceive of it all.

Simply deciding that you’re at the core of a Team has an impact. You can organize your mental concept of the Team, perhaps supposing that the Team is made of loosely drawn concentric circles with you at the center. Sometimes the Team’s concentric circles are labeled “you, your family, your community, the world.” And if this works for you, why not?

I use a more elaborate concept. I like playing with numbers, which I consider to have some sort of energetic power. I’m at the center. Right near me, there are seven Team members currently exercising their beneficial power upon me. A little further away, there are 49 members also looking after me. Yep, 49 is seven times seven, or seven squared, or seven to the power of two. Beyond the 49, there are 343 members (seven cubed), and beyond them there are 2401 (seven etc.!) members, and not far behind there are 16.807 members, and 117.649, and 823.543, and . . . and the whole of humanity. The whole of It, seven to the power of infinite.

And I choose—perhaps arbitrarily and subjectively, perhaps with a method with sacred hidden rules—who to place in my first circle, my second, my third . . .

My closest Team member is my wife Alexis, oh what a great collaborator and friend! And within the first circle I put my piano teacher, friend, elective brother, and student Alexandre; also my friend, former teacher, and elective brother Barney; my GP, the thoughtful and resourceful Dr. S., whose own team includes a gaggle of experienced colleagues in every medical specialty, each and every one of them ready to attend to my needs; Madame St., threshold guardian to the world of dreams, symbols, myths, stories, etymologies, and numbers; Debby, a friend and elective sister; and Ed, a friend and elective brother. I can hardly catalogue all the helpful things these men and women have done for me over the decades. Debby and I go back forty years, to our adolescence in Brazil. Barney and I also go back forty years. He's the guy who helped me leave Brazil to go study music in New York City, and who subsequently showered me with endless immaterial gifts. Ed and I go back twenty-five years. He’s experienced in the ways of the world, astute, and a wonderful listener. He’s younger than me, but since he's smarter, bigger, better-looking, and richer than me I consider him an older brother. And so on with my team members: each an elective brother, sister, cousin, uncle, nephew, or niece.

Meet my Team member and brother, Alexandre. This is where I go for my piano lessons.

Next to my closest Team members there’s a whole bunch of friendly colleagues who cherish my work and who provide me with the means to thrive in New York, Minneapolis, Alaska, Glasgow, Oxford, London, Montevideo, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, Melbourne, Sydney, and elsewhere. There are my students, some long-term, others new, all of them motivated and talented, teaching me new things day after day, week after week. There’s my editor at Oxford University Press, the wonderful Suzanne, she of the steel-trap mind. There’s Nicolas, Charles, Jean-charles, everyone at Studio Campus where I like to practice, everyone at Studio Bleu where I also like to practice and perform . . .

On Thursdays and Sundays, my wife and I frequent a street market on the boulevard Richard Lenoir, near our home in central Paris. The stall keepers come from France, but also Algeria, Morocco, Lebanon, Portugal, Martinique, and all points in between. From them we buy the most delicious fruits, vegetables, cheese, fish, olive oil, honey, dips and spreads, eggs, you name it. To be a market seller you need discipline and dedication. Wake up every day at 4 AM, rain or shine; fill the van with heavy boxes and cartons and vats of goods; drive to central Paris, set up your stall, and be there at people’s disposal from 7 AM to 2 PM, serving friends and strangers with the same generous smile.

Everyone at the market belongs to my Team, in varying degrees of intimacy. One of the fruit sellers, Mouhcine, is particularly attentive. He’s been to several of my concerts, often taking exquisite photos.

Well, you got the idea. Everyone a friend and family member, everyone for you—and you, for them. You have no foes, only "friends from the shadows."

Your Team members don’t need to know that you think of them in this manner. Teamship (to coin a word) is implicit in every human interaction anyway; you can make it explicit to your heart only. Or not; perhaps your Team members like being celebrated!

Be attentive to your members. Stay in touch with them, talk to them, let them know you’re thinking of them, attend their concerts and vernissages and parties, send them emails and postcards, buy their fruits and vegetables, hug them if they like being hugged and give them space if they prefer it.

As your Team manager, keep up with the Team tasks—including moving members closer to the core or away from it. Since the whole of humanity belongs in your Team, you can’t really fire anyone. But you can decide to lessen certain bonds when needed.

People retire, move away, pass on to higher spheres. Guess what? Monsieur Ryder, a cherished colleague of Monsieur Borie's, now takes loving care of my bows. He works in an exquisite office in an exquisite neighborhood of the exquisite city of Paris. I make an appointment to see him . . . I ring his bell . . . he opens his door and greets me with a smile . . .