is with thoughts, emotions, breath. Thoughts and fears that were tight and worrisome recede. We manifest a steadiness of body and mind that is hard to disrupt. The relaxation response needs time to work. When we do that silent work, our capabilities expand. The natural activity of muscles is variation — holding, moving, keeping still, letting go; alternating rhythms of contract, relax, sustain, release.
Every practice incorporates this component: warming up, tuning up, stretching out, being patient while mind and body quiet down a bit and make room for concerted action and response. Musical practice often begins with playing long, slow tones, simple things, finding and saying hello to your fingertips, hands, shoulders, arms, back, legs, feet, saying hello to sound. Even in everyday conversation, we have these warm-ups: the polite introductions and recitations of formulaic dialogue — hello, how are you, fine — which seem so silly and repetitive to children. Yet people need a period of time to become present to each other through those little rituals.
Thus, some form of meditation, however we conceive of it, is profoundly useful in the practice of any art. Allow that perturbed pendulum to arrive back at the center. Take ordinary, everyday perceptions. Dial their intensity up and down. Visualize a knob, as on an electronic device, at whatever location your right hand currently occupies. Turn the dial up and down on intensity, contrast, tone, color, compression, or expansion of the difference between loud and subtle. Increase and decrease the range of sensitivity. Dial up the spectrum between fine focus and broad view. Dial in sounds or smells, the details of rooms or landscapes, and then dial out again to a larger context. Dial into touch and proprioception. Close your eyes and know where your hand is, and how it is moving. You know how much something weighs by holding it. Dial down the internal dialogue and superfluous brain buzz, like an engineer dialing down the gain, until attention floats lightly. Allow the agitated pendulum to come to rest; then set it gently swinging once more.
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To me, “good” is not how skillfully you do something you were taught, but rather discovering something within you in a way that is totally new, unexpected, surprising, and satisfyingly right.
— Rachel Rosenthal
The musician Johann van Beethoven had a talented little boy. A career in the arts was a bit dubious in the 1770s, as it always has been. There were a few superstars, but for most people music was a risky business. The elder Beethoven had in mind the recent successes of another talented child, Mozart, who traveled with his father and sister to dazzle the crowned heads of Europe. Little Ludwig van Beethoven was going to be the goose that laid the golden egg. So the father (in keeping with the pedagogical principles of the time) stood over the boy with a stick as he practiced, and whacked him on the fingers every time he made a mistake. Lest we think this abusive discipline is what made Beethoven a great musician, remember the thousands of just-average musicians who were taught in the same way. Or the thousands who might have enjoyed playing music but quit.
Nowadays we regard it as barbaric to use corporal punishment as a teaching method. But the shadow of that stick, whacking the child on his or her fingers, remains in other forms. We are taught to fear mistakes and to hide them.
I gave a series of workshops at the Juilliard School in New York, where the students were far more skilled musicians than I will ever be. One afternoon a group of students, who had never previously improvised, progressed from singing some amusing gibberish pieces to picking up their instruments and playing full-on spontaneous music. They played two exquisite improvisations — beautifully organized, emotional pieces. They were connecting with, listening to, and supporting each other. The other musicians, listening in the circle of support, could not believe that these pieces had not been composed. Then the group played a third piece, in which they were a bit out of sync and out of tune with each other. During the discussion following that third piece, the students’ faces were drawn with guilt, feeling that they had screwed up. “Mistakes” in improvisation are hard to define, but people recognize when something works and when it doesn’t.
The ghost of Beethoven’s father was stalking us with his stick, whacking those students on the fingertips for making a mistake. So I thought of prescribing an antidote. I asked them to put their instruments down and do some finger-kissing exercises. They simply walked around the room kissing their own fingers, contemplating and appreciating all ten of them. Finger-kissing is easy. Anyone can do it. In fact, I suggest you try it right now.
A student asked me why I didn’t stop the “bad” piece and say something right then. We all have the built-in expectation that a conductor or teacher will wave a baton to offer corrections. Rehearsals and lessons are usually a matter of constant starting and stopping to point out errors. With a large orchestra rehearsing an hour-long Mahler symphony, it’s hard to avoid this, though conductors vary widely in the emotional tone of their interjections. But these students, playing brief improvisations in a small group, knew quite well what they liked and didn’t like about their piece. It was there in front of everybody’s eyes, ears, and minds.
The group went on to play more pieces, which were increasingly strong, varied, and interesting. The more pieces they played, the further away they got from ideas of good and bad. Each piece became its own little world of relationship, information, and feeling. Listening to each other, stepping back from attempting to be individually excellent and pass some imaginary exam, was the key. What they needed at that moment was not assessment; it was mindfulness.
• • •
Finger-kissing is simple, but it rakes up all kinds of wounds. In our own lives, we often betray ourselves by allowing a fixed identity to be attached to us. I have run into many people who were told in the fourth grade that they couldn’t carry a tune or who tried to play the piano and were told they were making too many mistakes. They were scolded about these mistakes in a way that stuck to them, that made them want never to touch another instrument again, never to sing again. Or they may wish to sing again, but they believe that they can’t, that they lack the fixed, identifiable “quality” of musicality. Some teacher has laid a container around them, laid an identity on them as somebody who isn’t musical. Many of us carry similar stories with us, a semipermanent part of our life baggage. The entertainment industries, by pushing highly produced media before our eyes, by emphasizing the importance of superstars, do the same thing. Why try being creative when there is such a gap between what we can do and what is promoted “out there”? We carry many limitations with us, thinking they are part of our identity. If we’re lucky, we may later discover that we can step out of that characterization, that the label laid on us does not confine us.
Working together, learning together, is not always a smooth process. We experience interjections, interruptions, awkward silences. As carefully as we might listen to each other, there are places where we blurt out a thought, a feeling, a sound that pushes boundaries, that opens up old or new scars. The engines of guilt — finger-slapping, finger-whacking, finger-pointing — are endemic in our society. In school, in the workplace, we are inundated with assessments and evaluations. These assessments are backed up by threats. Students take standardized tests; teachers in public schools, and the schools themselves, are evaluated by how well their students do on these tests. Probably every student, especially students in the arts and humanities, has experienced the psychological threat of burger flipping — that you may spend the rest of your life doing menial jobs. We fear falling off the treadmill of constant assessment. That mindset doesn’t end with school. It pervades much of our society, particularly in the wake of economic recessions, when many of our institutions have been fine-tuned to present an atmosphere of permanent scarcity. And behind all this fear, deeply ingrained in our collective values, is the idea of a God who punishes our transgressions. Students often believe that if they make a mistake it is because they are bad, stupid, or unworthy. This is the cultural background that we’re trying to overcome by getting people to open up.
This is the unsettled, uncomfortable aspect of art, of theater, of teaching. This is the subtext of fear and consequence