The feeling of disruption as a possibility.
In an interview, clarinetist Christine Carter recounts:
“In my training I was taught to avoid mistakes. Perhaps the most common version is this: play something perfectly ten times, make a mistake… and feel like that erases all the work. Then you start from scratch and repeat all ten without making a mistake.”
Although I know similar attitudes -those that try to accumulate repetitions without mistakes-, I was fortunate to hear again and again, from one of my teachers in Buenos Aires, Andrés Aciar, the following maxim:
“Don’t repeat it, Gabriela, recreate it.”
He had options to recreate. From many aspects that I did not know then.
Repetition without recreation has a cost: it pushes attention towards the control of one aspect or gesture, and takes away, for long periods, other facets of the musical experience.
When practice is focused on not failing, the body learns to contain, to protect rather than to develop the ability to respond, to react.
Musical precision that moves needs an available and reactive body, able to communicate with the instrument, the acoustics, the other musicians and, through genuine sound, reach the audience.
For the nervous system, there is a lot to coordinate at the same time.
In the ideal concert we don’t want to think about how to avoid mistakes, or how we breathe, move our jaw or fingers: we want it to flow, without the parsimony that analytical control demands.
And, while we need the ability to analyze during solo or classroom study, fluency wants to be taken into account, because it is the “mode” we need on stage.
And here it helps to remember something key: the brain does not think, the brain predicts.
It predicts from stored experiences.
That is, every situation presented to us will be recognized by its similarity to a past experience, and automatic reactions will occur accordingly.
That does not mean collecting “perfect practices”.
Efficient practices -those that refresh rather than obfuscate- articulate, process and frame what is experienced and felt, at different levels, so that these predictions are flexible.
Learning and transforming (for the brain, learning is transforming neural networks) is, from the beginning, a disturbance for the brain and the nervous system.
Every time a musician tries to learn something new or reinterpret a work, he gives his teacher -or himself- an implicit permission to be disturbed.
I allow you to provoke a disorder in me.
Learning needs consensus with disruption
The new elements that we learn come into play in the brain, in the body, in the nervous system. At first they are foreign elements, both to the body and to the senses and the whole brain.
As the new creates connections with the old, access to what has been learned becomes easier.
That is why we need to provide ourselves with learning environments – in class, in rehearsals or in solitude – where we can feel, experience, question, show and reflect on that new foreign element, that new difficulty that brings disturbance.
Repeating while hiding the effects of the disturbance – the questions, the doubts, the discomforts – only consumes energy.
Recreating involves perceiving the disturbing experience as I experience it, sustaining it and offering it different contexts where I can find more clarity and fluidity:
- From body balance.
- From the rhythmic impulse.
- From the integrated technical movement.
- From breathing.
- From acoustic orientation.
- From proprioception.
- From the internal sensations of the body.
- From attentive listening.
You can continue to complete the list that recreates the experience and turns it into a musical expression.
Disturbing acoustics
Disruption can occur for many reasons.
There are always “new” elements in the spontaneous act of making music: from learning a challenging piece to adapting to changing conditions such as new musicians, new orchestras, new tempi….
The most challenging for the nervous system are, par excellence, the acoustics of the different practice, rehearsal and concert halls.
Adaptability can be trained from practice, enriching the musical experience in different aspects through concepts and strategies that organize it to flow with ease -disturbwhat disturbs 😅.
Musical precision on stage is a sensitive and spontaneous craft: it is not repeated.
It is recreated, over and over again.
It is a residual product of experience tuned by the nervous system.
Summarizing
To disrupt is not to break or to err: it is to mobilize.
Each recreation reorganizes the body, the ears, the balance, the sound, the emotions, the sensations… the brain.
And in this movement, musical precision ceases to be a goal and becomes a by-product of a living, flexible and disruptive practice.
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