When you learn music, just learn music

Continuing with one of my current obsessions, which is the teaching of improvisation and how that relates to meditation and other contemplative disciplines, here is a great quote from Ken Zuckerman, medieval lute and Indian sarod virtuoso who teaches medieval music and Indian music at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. In considering models for medieval improvisation, Zuckerman cites North Indian classical music as a model for “how an extensive unwritten repertoire can evolve.” That phrase and the following passage are quoted from Zuckerman’s article “Improvisation in medieval music” (full citation footnoted at the end of the post.) I can’t help but observe that one could substitute “Dharma” for “medieval music improvisation” as the subject being discussed here, and the same lesson would apply. In fact, Zuckerman quotes his Indian music teacher as saying “When you eat, you eat. When you sleep, you sleep. So – when you learn music, learn music! Why talk?” Sounds like Zen to me.

“…there is a general tendency for us in the western world to over-analyze and to attempt to understand aspects of music making with the intellect which must be first understood at other levels, such as the motor centers and emotions. It is a curious contradiction. On the one hand, we don’t seem to mind at all giving a child all the time he or she needs to learn to walk and run without any intellectual instructions, nor does the child ask for any. On the other hand, when it comes to a beginner in music, whatever his or her age, we insist on explaining many things which can only be understood and executed after much practice. Not only does this intellectual approach actually slow the more important process of intuitive and automatic learning, but it interferes with the students’ developing higher levels of listening and observation. Especially at more advanced levels of learning, it is precisely the moment of not understanding which should sharpen the students’ power of listening and observation – and not simply the impulse to formulate another question.” [italics mine]

Kenneth Zuckerman, “Improvisation in medieval music,” in Improvisation II. Internationale Tagung für Improvisation, edited by Walter Fähndrich (Lucerne: Amadeus, 1993),134-142.

Improvisation-Meditation

There is a misconception that musical improvisation is a sort of spontaneous flowing-forth of music out of thin air, or as the saying goes, out of “whole cloth.” In fact, improvisation in jazz, traditional music, early music, or just about any music I can think of requires that the improviser be deeply familiar with that particular music’s idiomatic and delimited language of scales, harmonies, melodic gestures, phrase-shapes, structures, and even modes of communication among multiple players. When the different components of that language are extremely well-integrated, the listener may perceive the actual improvised performance as “effortless” and thoroughly spontaneous. The analogy to language is actually quite useful; in order to be fluent and spontaneous in a spoken language, you must also have a working knowledge of the grammar, structure, and idioms of that language, and communication is usually a two-way street (at least.)

There is another aspect of improvisation, however, that I think is often overlooked. To be an effective improviser you have to cultivate a certain level of one-pointed attention and mindfulness. This is true whether you are interacting with other musicians or improvising in a solo context for an extended period of time. That level of one-pointedness is what keeps the player simultaneously engaged with the musical language and all its components, and able to choose from among the myriad elements of that language to create a kind of musical rhetorical discourse with shape and sense, with emotion and expression, with direction and movement and return. It is the lack of that one-pointedness that creates what musicians often refer to as “noodling” – improvisation that just sounds like “random stuff” that doesn’t really go anywhere.

In mantra-based meditation, you focus your mind’s attention on a repeated sound. Ideally, this helps the meditator focus the mind and the attention on one thing, that being the mantra. (Mantras are also believed to have different qualities and benefits; that’s another subject.) Truth be told, most of us are not particularly good at maintaining a one-pointed focus on the mantra; therefore, the mantra becomes a kind of background- constant against which our thoughts do a lot of “noodling.” As we persevere in practicing meditation, we increase the number of times we can get to that “focused” place (although even the most experienced meditators still produce a lot of mental noodling.)

It has occurred to me that improvisation is a rather similar process. For example, if you’re playing medieval music or music from a number of traditional world cultures, you’re holding the sound of the mode and its “final” in your mind (among other things). If you’re playing blues or bebop, in addition to the scale or key you’re also holding a set of idiomatic chord changes; or in the case of bebop, lightning-fast changes and chord substitutions. This is in addition to all that idiomatic language stuff I mentioned before.

It makes sense, then, that if you want to be a good improviser, it might not be a bad idea to place your butt on a cushion and sit some kind of “shamatha” meditation or zazen. It doesn’t really matter whether you use a mantra, or watch your breath, or focus on a visualized object; as long as you keep bringing your mind back to the object of your focus everytime it starts “noodling.” The two processes seem incredibly compatible to me, and it seems to me that for musicians, the one activity cannot but help support the other.